St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans, has the distinction in Louisiana of taking the most direct hit from Hurricane Katrina four years ago this week.

In the slow, painful rebuilding that followed, the parish has gone out of its way to keep low-income, working black families from living there. A federal court ruled twice this year—once in March and again last week—that St. Bernard’s attempts at deciding who could move in and who had to stay out were violations of the Fair Housing Act. According to the ruling, the parish’s ordinances were shown to have both a disparate racial impact and discriminatory intent. They wanted to keep black people from living there. A federal judge described the parish’s efforts as “camouflaged racial expressions.”

The St. Bernard debate has resurrected housing segregation concerns and highlighted the ongoing difficulty of trying to implement and prove the benefits of integration in terms of race and class. One commenter on the New Orleans Times-Picayune Web site recently wrote of the St. Bernard court ruling: “Everybody knows that St. Bernard is a white community. I just don’t understand why African Americans would want to move there.”

In the 2000 census, St. Bernard Parish was listed as being 88.29 percent white and only 7.62 percent black. The direct hit from Hurricane Katrina destroyed virtually all of the houses, buildings and other structures in the parish. Among the destruction was Village Square, a cluster of over 100 buildings inhabited mostly by low-income, African-American renters. Parish officials would like to keep Village Square, or anything that resembles it, from ever being built again.

Since Katrina, many residents and the elected leadership of St. Bernard have fought to exclude development of rental properties and multi-family housing units in the parish. After the storm, Craig Taffaro Jr., president of the St. Bernard Parish Council, introduced a “blood-relative ordinance,” which decreed that only immediate family members of local landowners could rent property there—and only from their relatives. With an 88 percent white population which owned 93 percent of the housing stock before the storm, it was pretty clear at whom that ordinance targeted: black people, particularly those dislocated from their homes, and especially those who lived in the demolished public housing projects.

Add to that the moratorium on multi-family housing development that the parish council imposed right after the storm, and you have a pretty clear policy for racial segregation, affirmed by the recent federal court rulings.

The parish had already been under a consent order since February 2008, which obligated them not to block the development of rental or affordable housing units. But that did not stop the parish from thwarting a plan by Provident Realty Advisors Inc. to build four apartment buildings, which were to include affordable rates for 70 percent of its 288 units. The parish council voted last September to impose a moratorium on all multi-family housing construction for 12 months—a clear middle finger to the consent order.