Non-profit hosts poetry slam for equal housing

Ryan McGinnis

The Fair Housing Partnership Fifth Annual Poetry… The Fair Housing Partnership Fifth Annual Poetry Slam

Thursday, April 21, at 8 p.m.

Kelly-Strayhorn Theater

5941 Penn Ave.$5 suggested donation

www.pittsburghfairhousing.org

The Fair Housing Project has been passing on its message to stop discrimination in housing in a different way than many organizations: with a poetry slam.

For the past five years, the Fair Housing Partnership of Greater Pittsburgh — a non-profit dedicated to promoting equal housing in the greater Pittsburgh area — has invited local, socially-conscious poets to compete in a poetry slam for cash prizes of $500, $250 and $100. The organizers aim to raise awareness about housing discrimination. The event includes a suggested $5 donation.

Terrance Hayes, recent National Book Award winner, Pitt alumnus and this year’s master of ceremonies emphasized in an email that, in slam poetry, “Elements of performance and delivery are as important as the poem itself. Audience engagement is essential.”

In other words, slam as a genre is suited to the Fair Housing Partnership’s larger project of raising awareness of discrimination and generating conversation.

Peter Harvey, executive director of the nonprofit organization hosting the slam, said the timing isn’t random: “April is Fair Housing Month. In April of 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the Fair Housing Act was signed into law. We do something every year to commemorate that.”

“We have poets talk about issues related to housing, housing choice, diverse communities, inclusive communities and so on. The object is to get people in the community to come talk about fair housing and express themselves. Our job is just to give people a forum,” Harvey said.

The question is what local, nonprofessional artists can contribute to the solution. Pitt student Nashid Ali doesn’t think poets can always make a direct impact on the issue of unfair treatment in housing.

“The problem is, poets often stay just poets. Baseball players for example can afford their own buildings and not have them be their main source of income, so they can create affordable housing and not worry so much about making a profit, whereas a private corporation only cares about its bottom line,” Ali said.

But until artists have accrued enough capital to implement the kinds of programs Ali discussed, he’d like to see them “prophesize where the best avenues are to go.”

Events like this Thursday’s slam provide a space for exactly that sort of discussion. Hayes said in an e-mail that he’d like to see the competing poets “take the flatness and cliche out of ‘political discourse’ and replace it with a more human and personal discourse about the ways politics impact individual lives.”

When discussing the decision to make the event a slam, Jay Dworin, program director of the partnership’s Enforcement Division, which helps enfore the Fair Housing Act,, said the event invokes “the spirit of the griot,” the West African poet-historians who act as keepers and performers of oral tradition.

Dworin said that the conversation needs to continue, and he stressed that discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, disability status, familial status or sexual orientation happens regularly.

As an example of housing unfairness, Harvey cited Tim Grant’s April 8 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which published the results of 200 recent Fair Housing Partnership tests concerning discrimination against the deaf. According to the article, “researchers found 28 percent of landlords contacted by deaf people either hung up the phone, gave false information or used some other illegal means to deny the deaf person a place to live.”

He said that he also fields call from people reporting housing discrimination. “I get about 150 cases a year, so basically every other day someone is calling with a legitimate complaint of discrimination,” he said.

Another example Harvey gave was mortgage lending, saying that when the group checked out mortgage lending, it found that the level of sevice — how long an agent talked with a person, the kind of information she provided, and the interest rate quoted — varied between races.

Dworin added that the student population is not immune to discrimination. “We get Pitt students here every year who have been victimized,” he said.

Harvey would like to see more of these students come to participate adding that the event is open to anyone and everyone, first-timers included.

“We’ve always been puzzled as to why there weren’t more students. Also, we’d like to see more people from the disabled community and from different ethnic communities, for example. We’ve certainly made outreach efforts to those communities,” he said.