Judge Charges HUD With Fair Housing Violation

In a 322-page decision, U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis ruled that the "U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development violated fair housing law by failing to take a regional approach to the desegregation of public housing." He "said HUD officials had been 'effectively wearing blinders' that kept them from looking beyond Baltimore for ways to disperse the concentration of public housing residents." Public housing tenants and the ACLU filed the suit in 1995, arguing "that city and federal officials had failed to dismantle the segregated system of public housing put in place in the 1930s and 1940s, thereby consigning poor black residents to the city's most distressed neighborhoods." The judge plans to hold a press conference soon to discuss possible solutions to the problem.