Suit: Texas housing program segregates

DALLAS, April 25 (UPI) -- A civil rights group claims in a lawsuit against the largest rental housing program in Texas that the agency promotes racial segregation.

The Inclusive Communities Project Inc., based in Dallas, claims in its suit that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs has awarded housing tax credits primarily to apartment complexes in minority-dominated urban areas with high rates of crime and poverty, The Dallas Morning News reported Friday. The group claims the practice perpetuates racial segregation.

"Tax-credit housing is now the largest program for providing affordable housing in the country, the state and in this area," Mike Daniel, an attorney for the Inclusive Communities Project, told the Morning News. "Like all the other affordable housing programs, it is still marked by racial segregation which reduces its value to many of the people it's supposed to serve by subjecting them to conditions of slum and blight in order to get the housing."

The project is asking the court to force the Housing and Community Affairs Department to approve equal amounts of tax-credit projects in minority and non-minority census tracts.