India-West reporter Sunita Sohrabji writes that a housing discrimination lawsuit in California has been settled for $100,000. According to the non-Indian plaintiffs, Indian tenants were allegedly steered away from better apartments because the owner of the Sunnyvale apartment complex felt Indian cooking "stinks up the place."
From the article:
The suit, which was settled out of court last month, alleged that Steve Pavlina, owner of Remington Grove, and manager Maria Arias refused to rent the more desirable cathedral ceiling apartments to Indian American tenants, and steered them instead towards low-ceiling apartments, in areas with high concentrations of Indian American residents.
“This practice of making certain units ‘off limits’ to tenants because of their national origin clearly violates California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act,” Phyllis Cheng, director of the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, told India-West.
“The department found compelling evidence that the landlord rented only less desirable apartments to tenants of Indian national origin,” she said.
Further down:
The suit was brought on by a former manager for the complex, Martin Perez, and Project Sentinel, a non-profit tenant-landlord mediation organization. According to the suit, Perez said he was directed by Pavlina and Arias not to rent apartments with cathedral ceilings to prospective Indian American tenants because when “they cook food it stinks up the place,” and that cathedral ceiling apartments were harder to clean when Indian tenants left.
Perez said he was directed to tell Indian American tenants that the cathedral ceiling apartments had applications pending and were not available.
Project Sentinel sent out three groups of testers in 2005. In each case, the Indian testers were steered away from cathedral ceiling apartments, while Caucasians were offered lease applications for those units. Perez was subsequently fired in August 2005, apparently after renting a cathedral ceiling apartment to an Indian American tenant.
Pavlina denied discriminating against any tenants.
“The Remington Grove apartments always maintain fair and non-discriminatory housing practices, and treat everyone the same,” he told India-West, adding, “Anything to the contrary has never been proven in court and we admit no wrongdoing.”
Asked whether he empirically noticed clusters of Indian Americans living in certain areas of his property, Pavlina said the complex had a very diverse population, but statistics on race or ethnicity were not kept.
My only question is, who receives the settlement money here? I'll update if I find out. [Update from the reporter: Project Sentinel and Martin Perez get the money]
More on the issue at this site.
Read Sunita's entire article here, with permission from India-West: Download indian_tenants_lawsuit.doc
