Cleveland's Housing Segregation:
An Interview with Diane Citrino

Aired April 28, 1999

David C. Barnett–Joining us in the studio this morning, Studio B, is Diane Citrino, who is a senior attorney with the local group Housing Advocates, Incorporated. Welcome.

Diane Citrino–Thank you.

DCB–Charles Bromly ended off that story just now bringing up the issue of race. To what extent is that a problem in Cleveland?

DC–That is a major problem in the Cleveland area. Cleveland is one of the most segregated housing markets in the country. We're consistently ranked in the top five. We're so bad that they've coined the term "hyper-segregated" for our housing market. It is a major problem.

DCB–We've heard stories of that since the '50s. Have measures been taken to change that?

DC–Yes, one of the most effective measures was the Fair Housing Act, passed eleven days after the death of Martin Luther King, and that was in 1968. It was amended in 1988 to include protection for families with children and for handicapped individuals, and that law, which relies a lot on private enforcement, has been the major tool to try and end racial segregation and also segregation based on other protected classes, such as sex, handicaps, familial status, national origin, religion.

DCB–Has the private enforcement been part of the problem, part of the solution, or what do you think?

DC–I think private enforcement is the solution, but it's a very tough way to go, along with education and outreach. There are a lot of groups in the area seeking to have conversations about integration, seeking to educate people, but I think you also need to have good enforcement of this law.

DCB–You were saying that - we were talking about how Cleveland is "hyper-segregated." Are there examples, are there good examples we can look at in the greater Cleveland area or in the nearby suburbs?

DC–Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights are consistently held up as models of integration, but even in those communities, there is discrimination occurring. There's an excellent fair housing group, Heights Community Congress, that has worked for years-it's one of the oldest fair housing organizations in the country-in the Heights area to assist in doing that, and Shaker Heights has achieved what's called substantial equivalence with the Ohio and federal fair housing laws, and they have their own fair housing department that tries to investigate complaints of housing discrimination.

DCB–How does this housing discrimination manifest itself?

DC–It manifests itself in many ways. There's the overt racial discrimination that still unfortunately does go on today, where people use racial epithets, slam the doors in people's face . . .

DCB–Something as overt as that.

DC–Spitting on somebody, yes, they're very overt examples, and the other-many times what Mr. Bromly's group, Metropolitan Strategy Group, was mentioning was home mortgage discrimination and insurance discrimination has also been well-documented in our area, and those are often more subtle kinds of discriminatory practices.

DCB–So what does your group do to prevent incidents like that?

DC–What we do is many times groups come to us, for example, a fair housing group came to us when they had done an investigation based on a telephone call they got from a homeless shelter, and a landlord, a Section 8 landlord, was calling up the shelter and was asking women to describe themselves over the phone, and he was taking women that he thought would-in my opinion, he was taking women who he thought would be victims for him, and that led to a very large case being filed. So there are many kinds of discrimination, many times we have individuals who come to us, sometimes they've gone to an organization like Heights Community Congress, when they think they might have been discriminated against, and that organization may send out some kind of tester, and a tester would be somebody who's matched in characteristics with that person, with the exception that they don't have that protected characteristic, so if it were a black individual who thought they were being rejected because of race, usually the testing organization would send out a black tester and then a white control tester, and compare then how those two people were treated, and what we found many times is that the black person might be told the apartment's been rented, whereas, five minutes later, the white person is told it's available.

DCB–So now we have it documented that this is what happened and what, that can be taken to court or . . .

DC–Yes, then my job, and what we do at the Housing Advocates, is we're the lawyers for those individuals or those groups and we litigate those cases.

DCB–Diane Citrino is senior attorney with the local group Housing Advocates, Inc. Thank you very much for joining us this morning.

DC–Thank you.