North Hills Housing-Bias Suit Called a Rarity : Courts: Anti-discrimination groups applaud the federal action against the landlord, but say budget cuts have weakened state efforts.
Elias Mengistu said he got an unexpected lesson in racism while hunting for an apartment in North Hills.
Mengistu, a 33-year-old Ethiopian man, had considered relocating his Los Angeles auto repair shop in the San Fernando Valley and was checking for vacancies at the Parthenia Terrace, an 80-unit brick-and-stucco building in the 15100 block of Parthenia Street in North Hills.
“I called in the morning and was told the apartment was available, and when I arrived in the afternoon the landlord told me it had been rented,” Mengistu recalled. “He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, you couldn’t afford it anyway.’ ”
Mengistu said he was at first confused. “When we left, my friend told me, ‘This guy doesn’t like blacks, it’s that simple,’ ” he said.
Using evidence of similar incidents, the U.S. Justice Department this month filed a lawsuit against the landlord and managers of the Parthenia Terrace apartment complex for allegedly violating federal laws that prohibit housing discrimination. The suit is the first in California under a 2-year-old nationwide program of random testing.
An amendment to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 gives federal officials the power to recover monetary damages from landlords who discriminate.
The Parthenia Terrace lawsuit alleges that the apartment manager, Yung-Chung Shen, and the complex owners, Ming Yuan Huang and Mei Ling Huang, tried to discourage prospective black renters by telling them units were not available when in fact they were.
Shen did not return telephone calls and the Huangs could not be reached for comment.
A similar case filed by the federal agency last June in Michigan resulted in a $350,000 settlement paid by the owners of two apartments who refused to rent to blacks.
While local anti-discrimination groups applaud the North Hills lawsuit, they say the majority of housing complaints do not get the attention needed to pursue such litigation.
California, once a leader in the fight against housing discrimination, has lost much of its clout because of budget cuts in the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the agency charged with fair housing enforcement, say local housing officials.
That has prompted local housing councils--private, nonprofit groups--to now pursue cases through civil lawsuits and complaints to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The number of complaints filed with the state housing agency has dropped from 800 in the 1991-92 fiscal year to 600 in 1992-93, said Mercedes Paz-Slimp, a department spokeswoman.
At the same time, HUD’s Region IX office in San Francisco expects its caseload to grow from 1,283 in 1991 to about 1,700 cases this year, said John Phillips, a HUD spokesman.
But the cases in which the federal government takes an interest, although highly publicized, are few and far between, said Michelle White, executive director of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California.
As a result, fair housing groups must rely on attorneys willing to donate their time to pursue civil lawsuits or refer their clients to HUD, which handles only a small percentage of cases.
“We don’t refer anyone to DFEH (Department of Fair Employment and Housing), and people who can’t afford lawyers and don’t have those resources available, they go to HUD, which has its own resource problems,” White said.
For years, the state and federal agencies had shared the housing discrimination caseload. But last January, the California agency, in addition to budget cuts, lost $500,000 in federal funds because state law had not been upgraded to meet new requirements that include protections for handicapped people and families with children. California is one of 25 states that have not yet complied with federal laws, Paz-Slimp said.
A bill by Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) to bring the state into compliance with federal standards is now under discussion in the Legislature.
Because HUD used to share its caseload with the state agency, its backlog of cases--which typically take an average of four months to investigate--continues to grow, officials said.
About 40% of the cases received at the HUD office are settled before reaching an administrative hearing or a court hearing, Phillips said.
Most complaints in Los Angeles County originate from one of the four area housing councils, which are responsible for an area stretching from the Valley south to Long Beach, east to the San Gabriel Valley and west to West Los Angeles.
Recently, a new housing council has been established for complaints filed in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, White said.
“We have come to rely on the housing councils to discover the discrimination and investigate it,” said Kevin Reed, a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Because of its size--four full-time attorneys and one part-timer in the Los Angeles office--the organization focuses its efforts on landlords who own several apartment buildings in the Southland, Reed said.
Reed said the organization receives a housing discrimination complaint every other week, with many being referred to private attorneys willing to handle such cases. Fair housing councils also draw from a small pool of attorneys who volunteer their time.
“We are an impact litigation association,” Reed said. “There’s no way we can take all the cases we receive, so we look for the biggest bang we can make when we take a case.”
In the Valley, the number of complaints filed against landlords is slightly higher than numbers in other areas of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, according to housing council statistics.
In the 1992-93 fiscal year, 363 complaints of housing discrimination were filed with the housing councils in the Hollywood-mid Los Angeles, South Central-Long Beach, Westside and San Fernando Valley offices.
Of those, 106, or nearly one-third, were filed in the Valley, said Janet Sohm, program compliance officer for the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California. About 46 complaints were made by African-Americans who felt they were the target of race-based discrimination, said Steve Sturla, assistant housing director in the Van Nuys office. The second-highest number were made by families with children, he said.
There were no race-based claims filed by Asians or whites in the Valley in 1992, Sturla said. But the office has investigated complaints that Latino landlords have denied housing to black applicants and to other Latinos from countries other than their own, he said.
In addition, more subtle forms of discrimination are being reported, such as landlords quoting different move-in costs and rental rates to African-American and white applicants. Those types of complaints increased slightly between 1991 and 1992 in Los Angeles County, HUD records show.
“Asians are the minority of choice these days, and African-Americans are the least favored minority group in this country and it has remained that way for many years,” White said.
Mostly, the fair housing councils try to mediate disagreements between prospective tenants and landlords rather than take the matter to court. They also are asked to teach officials in local cities about housing discrimination. The Valley office, for example, has such agreements with Los Angeles, Burbank and Santa Clarita, Sturla said.
