Buffalo has been a very long time without a municipal fair housing law.
What New York and Philadelphia managed to do in the 1950s, what Niagara Falls and West Seneca did in the 1970s, what Hamburg did in 1986, the “City of Good Neighbors” still has not managed to do five years into the 21st Century. It was not for want to trying.
It was 1968 when the late Horace “Billy” Johnson, then Masten District Councilman, first proposed a Buffalo fair housing law. Despite the support of Mayor Frank A. Sedita, Councilman Johnson’s bill went down to defeat.
Another fair housing bill (prepared the Buffalo Area Metropolitan Ministries, Catholic Charities’ Division of Housing, and HOME) went down to defeat early in 1980. A reengineered bill was passed by the Common later that same year by a vote of 9-6, before being voted by Mayor James D. Griffin. The over-ride effort fell one vote short.
Then in 1988 HOME organized a city-wide coalition of agencies to support a new fair housing bill, introduced by Councilmembers Gene Fahey, James Pitts and David Rutecki. Although by 1988 these three intellectual leaders of the Council agreed on very little, they came together to sponsor passage of this civil rights law.
However opponents of the ordinance mustered a potent combination of misinformation and fear. Weeks of intensive newspaper coverage and television reports helped to generate a fusillade of public pressure before which the sponsors’ veto-proof majority crumbled. In a remarkable example of political theatre, Mayor Griffin staged a public hearing in his office (packed with senior citizens bused in from predominantly white areas of the city) to help him decide whether he should sign or veto the legislation for which he had already declared his inalterable opposition.
After the veto was cast, the idea of a Buffalo fair housing ordinance was dead. In the mayoral contest that followed later that year, all three challengers (an African-American judge, a liberal assemblyman and a former councilmember who had voted in favor of the 1980 legislation) backed away from the concept. Mayor Griffin had not only gotten his way but succeeded in making fair housing into a “third rail” of Buffalo politics.
Continuing need
Nearly a decade later, the Economic Consultants Organization conducted a study of impediments to fair housing for Buffalo, which concluded that the City needed to enact a fair housing law. A 2004 HOME study of impediments to fair housing noted the lack of progress on the 1995 recommendation and again called for passage of a municipal fair housing ordinance.
At a meeting on July 28, 2005 also attended by Fair Housing Officer Francisco Perez, another Masten District Councilmember, Antoine M. Thompson, asked HOME’s assistance in preparing a fair housing ordinance. Within three weeks, HOME presented a first draft, which, after review, Councilmember Thompson intends to introduce at the Common Council’s first meeting in September.
If past experience is any guide, fair housing will still face an uphill battle. Over the course of nearly four decades, some of Buffalo’s most distinguished political leaders—Mitchell, Johnson, Sedita, Arthur, Pitts and Fahey—have invested their political capital in unsuccessful efforts to pass a municipal fair housing law.
But this is a different time—quite literally a different century—and perhaps we will have a different outcome.
