After years of harassment, residents of Lancaster and Palmdale who are part of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program won a settlement victory Tuesday from the L.A. County Board of Supervisors that must now be approved by a federal court.

The settlement comes in the wake of a racial discrimination lawsuit filed in June 2011 against both cities. According to Neighborhood Housing Legal Services lawyer Maria Palomares, the county was not initially named in the litigation, but will now be added to enable the judge to oversee the settlement. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs expect that the judge overseeing the case will approve the settlement, and if that happens the county will be immediately dismissed, leaving Lancaster and Palmdale facing the legal challenge.

Once court approval is granted, the settlement will go into effect immediately and remain valid for three years.

Under the settlement crafted between L.A. County, two complainants, two ex-tenants, TCAL, the NAACP and their respective lawyers, one of the key actions was creation of a new set of guidelines for the Section 8 inspections.

 According to Ron Hasson, Southwest Area director of the California State Conference of the NAACP, Sheriff deputies would often question groups of Black and Latino youngsters walking on the street, and if they lived in Section 8 housing, go to their homes and search them.

Additionally, he said deputies sometimes accompanied the Section 8 housing inspectors as they visited individual residents.

“. . . this creates a hostile atmosphere for families. The mayor (of Lancaster) had made some statements that we’re going to rid the city of Section 8, which made people feel unwelcome,” Hasson explained.

Among the changes negotiated:

• Stop use of city taxpayer funds to pay for harassment of Antelope Valley residents in the Section 8 program. Hasson said this means a change in the guidelines that requires residents to give their approval of sheriff ride-alongs with housing inspectors; additionally, according to Palomares the housing authority will no longer take money from Lancaster or Palmdale to pay for additional housing inspectors. Research presented in the case has found that Section 8 participants in Lancaster were 2.6 times more likely to be subject to an investigation and 3.2 times more likely in Palmdale.

• Stop targeting of African American and Latino families and the landlords who rent to them. Palomares said the county will no longer provide a list of Section 8 residents in the respective cities which identify where they live and who are seniors versus families. (She said seniors tend to be White, which enables officials to more easily pinpoint Black and Latino families.

• Prevent unwarranted involvement of sheriffs’ personnel in Housing Authority compliance checks anywhere in L.A. County;

• Create new policies (such as having a sheriff ride along only if an inspector can provide adequate proof of fear for their safety; if this is accepted by the Housing Authority and the sheriff watch commandeer, only one deputy (instead of 20) will accompany inspectors.

• Promote education about Section 8 participants’ rights under federal law.

It has taken more than six months to hammer out the agreement between the two parties, now Hasson says similar agreements must be reached with the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale to prevent the lawsuit from moving forward.

“The county has taken a big stand to say they are not to be used as a tool. This is a really, really great victory,” said Palomares, who notes that the message is also speaking to a national audience because a number of other cities, including Antioch, Calif. and Cincinnati, Ohio, have used the same tactics to target their Section 8 residents.