March 29, 2004 1:53 PM

Gentleman, start your whining....

Hispanic leaders see 'imbalance': Housing aid mostly going to blacks, they complain

I suppose this could be another "This Week's Example Of Why The Apocalypse Is Upon Us". Now we have a Latino complaining that African-Americans are getting a bigger share of the handout pie. Can it get any sillier than this sorry episode?

Long-simmering resentments over which minority group gets a bigger share of public money boiled over last week as Hispanics protested the departure of housing board member D.V. "Sonny" Flores.

The backlash was most evident Thursday, when three prominent Hispanic leaders showed up at a meeting of the normally low-profile board and accused members of shorting Hispanics in federal aid and shooting the messenger who dared to say so.

"The unfair distribution of vouchers must be stopped, and an equitable solution must be worked out for the coexistence of our community at large," Edgardo Colon, chairman-elect of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told the board.

"The Hispanic chamber calls for the Harris County Commissioners Court and this board to thoroughly investigate the obvious imbalance in the distribution of (housing) vouchers and restore taxpayer confidence in the system that allocates these services. Failing to do so, we will request that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate."

The two black and two Anglo board members listened silently. But Chairman Odysseus Lanier, who is black, said race should not be injected into the operation of the authority.

"Frankly, blacks and browns have done a lot to peacefully coexist. We don't need issues to come up that are race based," Lanier said.

The furor stemmed from Harris County commissioners' recent decision not to reappoint Flores to the five-member board. The decision came after Flores noted at a board retreat that the majority of clients on the federally funded housing voucher rolls were black, and a heated exchange ensued between Flores and a black staff member.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for giving people who need it a leg up. That, to my way of thinking, should be one of the primary functions of local governments. Still, the problem with "entitlements" is that some folks eventually come to view them as exactly that. Somehow, public assistance morphs from "a leg up" to a birthright. Then you have idiots like Sonny Flores who try to save their own flagging political fortunes by trying to sow racial tension.

I do believe that this is an issue that warrants discussion, because you never want there to be a real or percieved inequity in the way that public funds are dispensed. Race relations in this town are tenuous enough as it is without people like Flores pouring gasoline on the fire.

Later in the Chronicle's argument, there actually is a rational and reasoned presentation of why many Hispanics might legitimately feel slighted. These are questions that need to be examined, discussed, and, if need be, resolved. People like Sonny Flores are hardly doing race relations in Houston any favors by their petulant immaturity and ham-handed self-interest.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on March 29, 2004 1:53 PM.

America gets it up again was the previous entry in this blog.

Day 4: Things look a bit different these days is the next entry in this blog.

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