Bulldozing homes and civil rights in Mount Holly, NJ

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MOUNT HOLLY, New Jersey – It felt like an earthquake. Nancy Lopez was making breakfast when machines starting tearing into the semi-attached house next door, ripping it to pieces and rattling the tiles off her bathroom wall.

“I thought that my house wasn’t gonna stay up,” Lopez said. “That was the worst day of my life.”

Lopez, who moved here in 1987, is one of the few remaining residents of Mount Holly Gardens, a neighborhood that no longer really exists but could fundamentally reshape civil rights law.

In 2003, leaders of this small township decided that crime in the Gardens had made the neighborhood–home to many black and Latino families–irredeemable. They devised a plan to buy the aging homes, raze them and replace them with higher-end housing the residents couldn’t afford.

Neighbors resisted, banded together as Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action and sued.

In court, they challenged the township’s designation of the neighborhood as blighted and accused Mount Holly of discriminating against residents on the basis of race.

Even if the discrimination wasn’t intentional, they said, the redevelopment project would have a disparate impact on the township’s only neighborhood where blacks and Latinos are the majority, destroying their hard earned homes.

The township denies that race had anything to do with the decision, saying that it was a last ditch effort to rid Mount Holly of crime and improve its economy. More than that, they say, the redevelopment was in the best interest of Gardens residents themselves, even if they didn’t realize it.

“We had to do something to save the people from that neighborhood,” said a former township official who would only talk on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing litigation. “That’s the reason we did it. It would have been discrimination not to do anything.”

Ten years and 18 million dollars of debt later, there is no redevelopment project in the Gardens. Between the litigation, paying the developers, the crash of the housing market and leveling empty homes, what’s left is a half-bulldozed ghost town.

But the dispute has more at stake than the fate of the few dozen remaining residents. On Dec. 4th, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Mount Holly Citizens in Action vs Township of Mount Holly and then decide whether or not the Fair Housing Act bars discrimination on the basis of disparate impact.

If Mount Holly residents lose, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts will have collapsed yet another pillar of civil rights law. If they win, that pillar stands, unlike the neighborhood they will never get back.

There’s one more possibility: Settlement. After a decade of litigation, sources involved in negotiations between the township and residents say they’re close to an 11th hour breathrough. A settlement would close a long, sad chapter for the township and deprive conservatives on the Supreme Court of an opportunity to gut the Fair Housing Act.

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