Westchester’s Desegregation Battle - NYTimes.com: The struggle for racial integration is neither bygone nor exclusively Southern. In Westchester, north of New York City, county leaders are stonewalling federal authorities over a longstanding housing desegregation case. Led by County Executive Rob Astorino, they are defending an ultrawhite status quo against the federal government’s effort to upend decades of housing discrimination.
In 2007, the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, a nonprofit advocacy and litigation group, sued Westchester, saying it had violated the False Claims Act by taking federal housing grants while falsely certifying that it was living up to its legal requirement to provide affordable housing without reinforcing racial segregation. In 2009 a federal judge ruled that the county had indeed “utterly failed” to meet its obligations and had misrepresented its desegregation efforts when it applied for more than $50 million in grants. It is still failing.
