On April 11, 1968, seven days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and Title VIII of the Act is known as the Fair Housing Act. For this reason, the month of April is National Fair Housing Month, and during April of this year, Housing Opportunities Project for Excellence (HOPE), Inc. continued the battle against discrimination.

The struggle for equality pushed on with HOPE’s federal lawsuit against Miami’s Creek Club Apartments, Inc. and Opa-locka’s Nile Gardens, LLC for discrimination. HOPE’s investigations showed that these housing providers specifically made units unavailable to African-Americans. This lawsuit is HOPE’s seventh in under three years, and discrimination against African-Americans was the subject of five of these lawsuits.

The properties in question are the Creek Club Apartments at 1441 NW 19th Street in Miami near Jackson Hospital, and Nile Gardens Apartments at 12750 NW 27th Avenue in Opa-locka, just North of Miami Dade College’s North Campus. HOPE conducted a series of

investigations (or “tests”), where multiple representatives (or “testers”) from HOPE visited each of the apartments to inquire about prices and availability. In the tests of these apartments, African-American testers were consistently told that units were not available while their Hispanic counterparts, on the very same day, were told that units were available.

These tests demonstrate that the housing discrimination, in this case, was not an isolated event or just some misunderstanding, but a clear series of snapshots of the business practices by the housing providers. These are practices that the average housing seeker might not be alerted to, as many discriminatory housing providers are cordial and polite when they are illegally denying people. So HOPE, with funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), conducts these tests to bring awareness to the ever-persistent existence of housing discrimination.

The lawsuit was filed by civil rights attorneys at the Florida Justice Institute in Miami – Randall C. Berg, Jr., Executive Director, and Dante Trevisani. If you suspect housing discrimination, even on a hunch, please call HOPE right away; our services are totally free. Discrimination is a real issue that is affecting people in our local neighborhoods every day.