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Sanders case sought desegregation of Public Housing

A little more than 10 years ago, a federal judge approved a sweeping settlement to a housing discrimination lawsuit that was designed to desegregate Allegheny County's public and private housing and to provide millions of dollars for improvements in seven distressed communities.It was nearly 17 years ago when six black women who lived in the Talbot Towers public housing development in Braddock sued the county, its housing authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, accusing the agencies of engaging in discriminatory housing practices for more than 50 years. The case has been known ever since as the Sanders case, after lead plaintiff Cheryl Sanders. The plaintiffs contended the county and HUD placed public housing developments in particular communities and shifted poor blacks to those developments for decades, and that the discriminatory housing system helped cause economic decay in those communities -- Braddock, Clairton, Duquesne, Homestead, McKees Rocks, Rankin and Wilkinsburg. The lawsuit was later certified as a class action to include all blacks in public and subsidized housing. The settlement was supposed to reverse the pattern that clustered blacks in the county's public housing, while a panel approved projects to disperse funds to the distressed communities for economic development around the public housing developments. But a decade later, the county's public housing communities are more segregated -- 81 percent of the residents are black, compared to 66 percent in 1994 -- and the agency's vacancy rate is higher than before the settlement was established. [more]

Pictured above: Frances Carter was president of the tenants' council at the old McKees Rocks Terrace before it was demolished, rebuilt and renamed Meyers Ridge. Now, she is president of the residents' council there.