Judge criticizes pooling poor in city

Court says HUD violated housing law by failing to take a regional approach; Ruling in 1995 federal civil-rights lawsuit. Hey, bussing is back! I guess the 'Judge' was feeling nostalgic over those school bussing days. Now its moving the poor from the cities to the burbs. How about taking the poor and bussing them to suburban homes...oh, just for the night of course. One giant slumber party...More to follow//JW sends

Declaring that Baltimore "should not be viewed as an island reservation for use as a container" for all of the area's poor, a federal judge ruled yesterday 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.

In a lengthy and strongly worded decision in a 10-year-old civil rights case that shone a spotlight on the city's racial as well as housing history, U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis 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.

The decision was a victory for public housing tenants and the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit in 1995. They charged 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.