Fair Housing Center stopped by with details on upcoming fundraiser

George Thomas, the CEO and general counsel of the fair housing centers here. He brought along. Emily is his backup. She's the director of communications. Thanks a lot for coming in, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you for having us. You're very interested in all the buttons, aren't you? I am. We were just talking around that it looks like the cockpit of a jet in here. There's a lot going on. You should see this side, okay? Because besides all of this, what you're looking at, I've got three screens that are full of pages that are wide open, including the page that you're going to want to follow while you listen to this conversation. Toledo FHC. dot org. Toledo phc.org. The FHC, of course, is for the Fair Housing Center. I mentioned early this morning about you guys having a big party coming up on the 18th, actually. So you've still got time to get your tickets and stuff. And that it's kind of themed for the Wizard of Oz. Who wants to tell me about that? I'll go ahead and take that one. All right. All right. So we do have, there's no place like home coming up on August 18th at the Pinnacle from 5 to 8 p.m. And it is Wizard of Oz themed. And we're asking people to bring their best red shoes, their favorite red shoes. Oh, I thought you had to dress. So I don't have to dress up like Wizard of Oz character. It's just the shoes mostly. You can dress however you want. Is there a prize? There are prizes. Okay. I just want to make sure if I come like the scarecrow, but I don't have red shoes on. You're not going to get a prize for them. All right. So it is about the red shoes. It's all about the red shoes. Come on, Emily. So what is it with the shoes? It's just a fun fashion thing. Just something different. Yeah. People love to get dressed up. True. So we thought we'd make it fun with the red shoe. And since that's... also related to the Wizard of Oz. It works. All right. Now, how much are tickets? 20 right now, 25 at the door. All right. 20 right now, 25 at the door. And I can get tickets on the website I just gave. Toledo phc.org? Correct. All right. And your Facebook page also probably has a link. You can find it there as well. All right. Where does George, where does all this money go? George is the CEO, so he would know. Where's all this money going? Right. So we're a small nonprofit. We're a 5-1c3. So donations to us are taxed luck. deductible. And the Fair Housing Center is primarily a civil rights agency. So we help people with civil rights issues that they're facing in the housing market. And like Emily was saying, part of the theme of this event is Wizard of Oz. Well, what happened? What did we remember that phrase when people tap their red shoes together? There's no place like home. Yeah. Right? So we're focused on helping people with housing issues. We do study housing issues. We're out in the community working on housing issues. trying to get people access to housing, create a fair housing market. And so this is just a fun event. A lot of what we do is very serious, you know, helping people, but this is more laid back and it's very accessible. Tickets are only $20, so it should be a lot of fun. How long have you been with the organization? I started in 2020 there, but I've really been doing fair housing-related work for a very long time. All right. I know the mission hasn't changed, but...

Has the fight changed over the years because, you know, 50s, 60s, we were dealing with redlining of certain neighborhoods and things like that? Has that... gotten better and are we dealing with different issues then when it comes to getting people in homes? Thank you for that question. I'm the host. I come up with the best questions. That's why you're here. You're the talent here. So actually, if you don't mind, I'm going to back up just a little bit more to answer your question. So go back really to the beginning of this country. It was a demand for civil rights, right? The Declaration of Independence was a demand for civil rights. And then every major juncture of our history. Revolutionary War, Civil War was a fight for civil rights. Then we had World War II was a fight against fascism and for civil rights. Civil rights movement was a chapter of that, right? In the late 60s, early 70s. And yes, certainly things have changed since then. I think that one thing to get to answer your question is discrimination is a lot more hidden now or requires more investigation to uncover. That's part of what we do is the investigation part of things. But that's certainly not to say it has gone away. It's maybe changed. It's kind of adapted over time. But part of what we have to do is uncover that and help people who are experiencing discrimination. And we do other things certainly along the way, like these events and changing hearts and minds kinds of events to try to bring the message. Well, and it used to be more overt. I mean, at one point, because we lived in the suburbs. My folks moved out to the suburbs, 1951, the year I was born. And I know somewhere in the 60s. There were African-American families, Mexican families that wanted to move in the neighborhood. And it was, there wasn't a movement to stop them, but there was that underlying talk about, man, we got to do something. And in fact, a lot of Catholic churches for a long time. acted as real estate agents for local neighborhoods because they didn't want a certain type of people moving in. So you would go to the church and say, hey, are there any homes for sale in this area? And they would know that the parishioners had homes for sale. Are we still dealing with that kind of stuff on a regular basis? I think what here, let me give you kind of a contemporary example. Okay. I think instead what we see are problems with technology, so it's harder for people. navigating the internet to figure out how to even apply for a home. Okay. And then the criteria for how to get either the mortgage or maybe it's the apartment that they need, those are hidden behind walls of information, right? Like you have to provide some level of information to even get through your application and it's unclear how or why you are denied. So it's a little bit harder to uncover in that way.

We've also seen issues with artificial intelligence sometimes. Already? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, at the national level, there's been investigations into... how AI learns from us, right? It learns from browsing the internet. It learns from information that's already available out there. And if that is directing it in a certain way, it can kind of become discriminatory in its own way. So I think that's one theme that you see now. Like I said, like the issues have adapted over time, which kind of change over time. But the struggle is still very much. here today. We're going to talk a little bit more about the event, which is coming up on the 18th. You can get your tickets right now. You can go to Toledo. FHC.org and a little bit more about what the Fair Housing Center has to say and what they do, what their mission statement is. If you want to reach out, you can get on the phone right now. 419-214-1370. 21. We've got about nine minutes before the bottom-of-the-hour news headlines. Weather traffic, George Thomas, who's the CEO and the General Counsel for the Fair Housing Center, and Emily Desmond, who's the director of Kearman. Communications are in the studio with us. They have an event coming up Tuesday, the 18th. It's a happy hour style fundraiser. For those of you in Bono, that means you're going to get drunk. From 5 until 8 p.m. At the pinnacle, tickets are just 20 bucks in advance, 25 bucks at the door, 50-50 raffle, cash bar, appetizers. Oh, Judge Curry's Arctic clam. We'll be performing. Well, that's worth the 20 bucks right there. And a Wizard of Oz themed artwork by Brian Lowe. What is that? So Brian's a local artist who, he's a painter. Okay. And he's created a series of artwork, paintings that he's going to install, temporarily install at the event. And people will have a chance to buy those paintings. Oh, sweet. Okay. And you've got raffles going on and all kinds of other stuff, including the best red shoes. And that's open to men and women. Men and women. All right. So that actually sounds like a lot of fun. And the money stays right here because the Fair Housing Center is a 501c3. In fact, if you want to donate, you can actually go to their website and donate Toledo phc.org. There's a donate button right at the tops. And as George said, the money stays here and goes to...

I guess the fight to make sure that people have, what, the ability to get into housing? How tough is that? Is it getting worse because we keep hearing stories. We've done stories here on the news about the corporations coming from out of town and buying up all the apartment complexes and all the homes that have been abandoned and stuff from the land bank and everything else. How are you guys able to fight all of that with all the out of town influence that we have now? That's a really great question. And we definitely see that as a fair housing issue, to be clear, because it definitely does disparately impact the most vulnerable residents in our community to begin with the neighborhoods that maybe historically were left behind are the ones most hurt by this latest trend. They're also the same neighborhoods that were most hurt by the foreclosure crisis. We kind of see a line. from the 2008 financial crisis up to now investors coming in and buying up a lot of those properties for very cheap. Some investors have a perfectly fine model. They invest in the property, bringing it up to code. Everything's great. Sadly, a lot, though, just buy cheap and they don't want to put anything into the property and extract as much money as they can from our neighborhood. That's a very real problem. So. When do you get involved? Do you keep track of like the real estate purchases so that you know, you know, this house over on Josh Hawley is up for grabs and that this guy just bought it. We know he's an out-of-town guy. He's not going to do anything. Are you aware of all of that while it's going on? Or do you only get involved once somebody calls and says, hey, the house on Josh Hawley, I'm trying to rent and they won't let me in? I think this is such an important issue for our community, and we get so many of these kind of calls that we actually had to create a new program. Historically, we've... Worked in housing discrimination cases, meaning you have to prove that there was discrimination based on race, disability, military status, one of the protected classes. Okay. But we get so many calls about really bad housing conditions in our community. It's so common, just like you were describing. We now have a program where attorneys will provide free legal assistance to those folks who are calling from those homes that are deteriorated over time. And they do have rights. It's on their own. It's hard to enforce their rights, right? If you don't have an attorney, if you have somebody, an attorney assisting you, you could maybe file a rent escrow action in court or just have an attorney go over your lease with you, talk about what options you have. Some things can be filed in court. Some things are just a negotiation with the landlord. Sometimes the hard part, though, Fred, like you were saying, is actually tracking down the landlord, figuring out where is the right person of contact because so many people sadly are. somewhere far away. Yeah, and a lot of those are LLCs, and they don't always have to identify every individual member of the LLC, right? True. It's sometimes hard to get behind who's the real owner. They are required to have a local manager, though, that we can contact and where the tenant can. He doesn't give a crap.

He's the local manager. He gets paid to tell the tenants no. That's my job. Right. And just a quip of educational information is that Ohio's Landlord Tenet Act defines landlord to include the manager. So the manager is also responsible as the landlord. But that's where we come in, to your point, then. Somebody has a question for me on Facebook. Is the Fair Housing Center in Toledo nonpartisan? Absolutely. Absolutely. We're a non-partisan. I don't know how you... I don't know how you could be partisan. It's about fair housing. That's right. It's about fair housing. And I should maybe even take a step further and say we have historically always gotten broad bipartisan support. All parties really support the mission of helping our veterans, helping people with disabilities, helping people facing racial discrimination. It's really something that everyone supports. So do you do anything other than once the problem happens? Is there any action that you take? beforehand to avoid getting into those problems in the first place. Oh, yeah, absolutely. A lot of times it's driven by the client, like let's say the person who experienced the issue, maybe they're denied a mortgage or denied an apartment or they're living in very difficult housing conditions for that new program that we have. If they would prefer that we reach out to the landlord and just negotiate or reach out to the bank who denied their mortgage and say, Hey, we found a problem here. Can we just work this out? Absolutely, that's what we'll do. Sometimes the Fair Housing Center on its own, this is not as frequently, but we will just come across. Maybe someone gives us a tip of some kind. We just see an issue in the community. A lot of times in those cases, we will reach out and try to educate, certainly, before we try to litigate them. Now, we've seen in the news over the last year a lot of problems at some of, well, the government-owned housing centers. Do you get involved in that at all, or do you stay separate from what they're doing and only deal in private homes? We will be involved with anything in the housing market. And the housing market is very broad. So zoning of issues before even not. Something is even belts will be involved with zoning issues all the way down to someone being evicted from housing. If they're doing that for a discriminatory reason. Absolutely, we are the main contact for our housing conditions program. We're focused mostly on those historically disinvested areas where we see the most problems. So we kind of have to be targeted about that because the need is so huge. We could receive so many calls about that. But anything to do with housing discrimination anywhere at any point in the housing market, we are your primary contact. What's the best way to get a hold of you guys if people have questions or if they're actually experiencing a problem and need a little bit of help? Generally, I suggest they start with Toledo phc.org. That's our website. We do have a contact us forum there. We will contact the person back right away. Definitely don't hesitate to call. A lot of people just prefer the call. We will try to answer every call immediately as much as we can at 419-243-6163. We receive so many calls that some folks may have to leave a voicemail, but we will return the call within one business day.

All right. Use the Facebook page or the website, Toledofc.org. Don't forget, tickets are available right now. 20 bucks in advance. Emily, can people buy like a whole table if they want and stuff? And do you need sponsors and volunteers for this? You can buy multiple tickets, but we don't have like seated tables. It's going to just be. We're just going to be standing? We're going to be dancing. I can't stand that long. And there's going to be. There will be chairs. There will be chairs. There will be a heart attack in case you didn't hear. There's going to be cocktail tables, but we want you out dancing. Okay. Well, Fred, can I say how much everybody loves Arctic clam? Can we just like pause? Oh, God. Are you kidding? Holy crap. Judge Curry and Scott Hayes and the rest of the group. They're going to kick it out. That band is just terrific. And that's the performance for the night. So you're going to have a good time. If you need tickets, get them now. They're 20 bucks in advance, 25 at the door, cash bar, 50-50 raffle, appetizers, live music. Don't forget to wear your red shoes Tuesday, August 18th, at the pinnacle. Guys, thanks a lot for coming in. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Thank you.