The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

"We wanted to take a ground-up approach, not a top-down approach," said David Harris, the housing center's executive director. "We didn't want to come in from the outside acting like we had all the answers. Instead we wanted to be of assistance to people already working on fair housing. So we started with a 'listening tour.' "

Harris and the housing center's deputy director, Ginny Hamilton-Ashé, began with the premise that the best way to help was to learn. So they listened. They developed relationships. Then they began to make a difference.

By the end of Phase I of CommUNITY 2000, the housing center was becoming part of the solution in a region centered around a city with a long history of intransigent racial segregation and discord.

The Boston Housing Authority had long resisted the spirit of integration, which was the primary reason CommUNITY 2000 chose Boston as partner. The city's public housing was segregated from the time the first units were built in the 1930s until 1989. That was the year the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the NAACP won a lawsuit against the housing authority that resulted in a desegregation agreement, according to Nadine Cohen, an attorney with the Boston Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, who represented the NAACP.

Unfortunately, settlement of the desegregation suit did not end discrimination in Boston's public housing. "From 1989 through the early 1990s, as more people of color were moving into previously all-white communities in South Boston and Charlestown, the level of racial harassment and violence against them was increasing," Cohen said. "In 1996, the Lawyers' Committee brought a second lawsuit, alleging that tenants of color remained unable to live free from harassment."

The suit ultimately was settled in favor of the tenants. As part of that settlement, the federal court recommended that the Boston Housing Authority take certain steps to end segregation. One of these was participation in a program to ease community tensions. Consequently, officials at HUD felt that Boston was an ideal partner for the CommUNITY 2000 project.

In 1998, at around the same time that the idea for the project that ultimately became CommUNITY 2000 was taking shape in Washington, a steering committee of civil rights and housing professionals in the greater Boston area founded the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. Until then, the Boston Lawyers' Committee had been leading efforts to end illegal housing discrimination, and Boston was the only major metropolitan area in the United States without an independent fair housing center.

David Harris was hired as the new organization's director in March 1998. He was just beginning to make inroads into Boston's network of civil rights organizations when CommUNITY 2000 selected Boston as one of its local partners. CommUNITY 2000, which was committed to working through local fair housing centers, enhanced the work of the housing center in two important ways:

1. It gave the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston an agenda that stressed preventing community tensions as well as enforcing fair housing laws.

2. It provided the necessary funding for the housing center to make an immediate impact.

"By having the CommUNITY 2000 mission constantly before us, we took a different approach than we would have otherwise," said Ginny Hamilton-Ashé, one of the housing center's first full-time staff members. "Instead of dealing with individual situations as they came along, we took a more holistic approach, making sure that we were helping others tackle fair housing issues by expanding their capacity and dealing with systemic problems."

"We received our first funding (from CommUNITY 2000) in September 1999, and that's when we really took off," Harris said. "We were able to hire Ginny as the full-time CommUNITY 2000 program director, get office space, get a computer. It made a huge difference."

One of the first areas in which the Fair Housing Center began making inroads was South Boston, which had been a segregated, predominantly white area of the city with a history of resisting desegregation efforts. Despite past efforts — both nominal and good faith — to integrate the neighborhood, white resistance persisted through the 1990s. The end of rent control, recently escalating home values, and the region's extreme lack of affordable housing have exacerbated matters such that housing-related tensions have surfaced throughout the city. This is despite recent efforts by various agencies and organizations to prevent them.

It was in this tinderbox environment that Harris met Lea Rios early in 2000. A resident of South Boston's Old Colony project, Rios was one of the few tenants of color who was speaking out about the continual harassment she felt she and other tenants of color were subjected to. Rios, who also is a tenant organizer for the Committee for Boston Public Housing, connected with Harris at a police task force meeting designed to address community tensions. Harris was attending this meeting as part of his "listening tour."

Since then, Harris and Hamilton-Ashé have served as a resource for Rios in her efforts to reorganize Old Colony's Tenant Task Force to include legitimate minority representation.

"We're here to help her gain the confidence and the wherewithal to make a difference, but Lea is doing it," Harris said. "That's our .ground-up' approach. We don't come in from the outside to do things for people. We help them make connections for themselves."

"The Fair Housing Center can talk to the BHA and the BHA will listen," said Rios, a Nicaraguan refugee and the mother of a young son. "They have power. So through the Fair Housing Center, I feel like I have power."

Accomplishments of the housing center since the infusion of CommUNITY 2000 funding include:

Enhancing the Work of FANS

Hamilton-Ashé is on the steering committee of Families Advocating Neighborhood Strength (FANS), a South Boston community coalition working to address the needs of low-income families. As with many community groups in greater Boston, affordable housing is one of FANS' greatest concerns. "Ginny brings to us an expertise on housing issues," said Kate Flaherty, FANS chairperson. "She also keeps us focused on race relations. One of our biggest issues is getting minorities to feel that we want them to participate."

Strengthening the Capacity of Regional Civil Rights Efforts

The Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston is an active member of the Greater Boston Civil Rights Coalition, a network of civil rights organizations. David Harris is the Coalition's co-chair. Staff of the Fair Housing Center also participates regularly in the Massachusetts Association of Human Relations Commissions, a network of municipal agencies. The Fair Housing Center has developed close working relationships with the members of these groups, including the Medford Human Rights Commission, staffed by Diane McLeod, who also is chair of the association. "I am one person trying to do so many things at once, and you just can't do it alone," McLeod said. "(The housing center) offers such a complement to what we do. With them involved, it's been like having an extra arm."

By joining forces with civil rights organizations region-wide, the housing center not only is enhancing its own agenda, but is bringing a fair housing focus to the Boston region's civil rights issues.

Advocating for Fair and Affordable Housing Regionally

• On April 24, 2001, the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston released "We Don't Want Your Kind Living Here," a 30-page report on discrimination in the region's rental market. The center conducted extensive in-person and telephone testing over a five-month period in four Boston neighborhoods and 12 communities bordering the city. The results revealed that more than 50 percent of testers experienced some form of discrimination. Release of the report generated wide media coverage.

• The Fair Housing Center negotiated a court settlement in early July 2001, with The Boston Globe, which had been illegally publishing discriminatory rental advertisements. Such ads were overtly or covertly discouraging applicants with children or federal subsidies from renting. The federally-enforceable agreement now requires training, education and policy changes at the Globe.

• The Fair Housing Center is consistently performing testing in the real estate market; has established fee-for-service testing and training for the housing and real estate industry; has trained private attorneys to take pro-bono fair housing cases; and has established an effective system for investigating fair housing complaints.

• In addition, the Fair Housing Center writes and distributes a newsletter, The Bulletin; has created an informative website; and developed multi-lingual brochures.

Those who have witnessed the progress of the fledgling housing center throughout Phase I of CommUNITY 2000 seem most impressed with its sensitivity and its courage. The sensitivity to listen, the courage to act.

"People tend to gloss over issues of race all the time, even in areas of affordable housing," said Aaron Gornstein, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, Massachusetts' leading development and housing policy organization. "It's a very delicate issue, one that's often overlooked because bringing it up can make the job of siting affordable housing more difficult. But [the Fair Housing Center] has become a very public voice not only for affordable housing, but for fair housing."

"They're not wimpy," said Mae Bennett Bradley, executive director of the Committee for Boston Public Housing, which represents tenants. "They don't mind confronting issues head-on. Maybe it's because they're new and they don't have any loyalty to anyone. Their only loyalty is to the cause, and the cause is to make sure that all people have equal access to housing."

The Fair Housing Center is continuing as a CommUNITY 2000 partner for Phase II of the project, which will end in 2003, and plans to work with CommUNITY 2000's national partners during Phase II to focus on the following:

• Fostering goodwill among young people, who tend to be most likely to commit hate crimes.

• Expanding awareness of housing rights among disabled persons who live in group homes. The Fair Housing Center also will work with Access Living of Chicago to further this goal.

As they move forward, the staff of the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston will continue to operate by the guiding principles that enabled them to further the CommUNITY 2000 mission of fostering harmony, respect and understanding among neighbors. They will listen, they will learn, they will make a difference.