Street roots
May 25, 2012
Fed up with housing policy
BY PAUL BODEN
Paul Boden is the executive director o f WRAP,
the Western Regional Advocacy Project. W RAP is
ore than 1.46 million households
a consortium of organization along the West
Coast, including Street Roots, working to expose
are currently living on less than $2
and eliminate the root causes o f civil and human
a day per person in the wealthiest
country in the world, more than double rights abuses o f people experiencing poverty and
homelessness in our communities.
CONTRIBUTING CO LU M NIST
M
what it was in 1996. This shameful fact has
had an especially harmful effect on children,
whose numbers in these households
ballooned from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.
Two dollars a day is the figure the World
Bank uses to measure global poverty.
For people scraping by on $2 a day,
public housing, Housing Choice vouchers,
and Section 8 project-based rental
assistance, Section 202, Section 811, and
Section 236 programs are lifelines, very thin
lifelines. For hundreds of thousands of
households, these HUD programs make the
difference between having a home and being
homeless. And yet both Congress and the
White House are now proposing significantly
raising rents in these programs.
Right now, tenants pay a minimum of
$25 to $50 a month. The increases
proposed in Representative Biggert’s
ironically named “Affordable Housing and
Self-Sufficiency Improvement Act” would
raise the minimum to $69.45; the increase
proposed in the President’s 2013 budget
would raise it to $75. For families with
children who live on less than $250 a month
and food stamps, such increases could mean
as much as a 200 percent rise in rent.
Families would have to make excruciating
choices between shelter, food, and
medicine.
Both Representative Biggert and the
White House argue that raising rents will
increase revenues, lower the overall costs of
the programs, and allow more people to
receive assistance. These claims are
w orst^w fiattir^^revear
is a political establishm ent far removed from
s p e c io u s
or indifferent to the daily sufferings of those
left behind by the new economic order.
According to an analysis by the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, the proposed
hikes could expose nearly 500,000
households - which include 700,000
children and 40,000 elderly or disabled
people - to extreme poverty and even
homelessness.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama
administration’s 2013 budget request for
public housing, Housing Choice vouchers,
and Section 8 project-based rental
assistance is $1.7 billion below 2012’s
grossly underfunded spending bill. The
automatic cuts to discretionary programs
authorized by the Budget Control Act
beginning in January 2013 will tighten the
noose even more. Newly rising rents
coupled with even deeper cuts signal that
the nation’s most affordable housing is in
peril at a time when millions of people can
least afford it.
Housing advocates are requesting that
Senators on the Appropriations
Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing
and Urban Development and related
agencies fully fund the HUD programs that
were underfunded in the president’s budget.
Advocates are also calling on policymakers
to give housing authorities discretion to not
raise rent on their most vulnerable tenants
and increasing hardship exemptions.
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let’s not lose track of the bigger picture as
M eet Your Local Branch Manager:
“C om m unities a ren t just streets a n d build
ings, C om m unities are thriving places
where cultures, commerce a n d souls grow
stronger together. ”
- M a ry
*
Mary Edmeades
Social impact Banking
503,446.2155
medmeades@aibinabank.com
1=5 I
At Albina Community Bank the most ordinary
financial transaction can have an extraordinary
impact on our iocal community.
we get dragged from one crisis to the next.
It is not poor people who are responsible
for the country’s fiscal woes; it is
Washington, D.C., and Wall Street. And yet
it is poor people who are being targeted to
suffer the most.
Over the last several decades,
Republicans and Democrats alike have
dismantled affordable housing programs,
deregulated housing finance, and passed
legislation enabling the privatization of
public housing. These policies are part of a
larger political agenda that ensures benefits
flow to. the top 10 percent while people at
the bottom, especially people of color,
immigrants, and the unhoused, are
controlled through private charity, workfare
programs, and the criminal justice system.
We can’t put our hope in politicians and
organizations that attempt to smooth out
the edges of terrible legislation while people
lose their homes and programs are gutted.
In communities across the country, groups
are joining hands to build a movement for
the human right to housing. We’ve all seen
what can happen when a community
defends a homeless encampment because
no other shelter exists, keeps a family from
losing their home, and stops an a single-
resident-occupancy building from being
turned into luxury condominiums or a
public housing development from being
bulldozed.
The organizers behind these victories are
beginning to connect their local housing
struggles to one another. They are also
doing the difficult work of organizing across
issues to link housing to education, health
care, dignified work, immigrant rights, and
economic security. Together we will reclaim
our communities from the greed and willful
Additional source material:
www.offthechartsblog.org
Higher Rents for Poorest Housing
Recipients a Bad Idea
www.cbpp.org
President’s Budget Not Sufficient to
Renew Rental Assistance Fully for
Low-Income Households
http://www.ritholtz.com/
FHFA Lawsuit vs Bank of America,
Merrill & Countrywide
www.indybay.org
Federal voucher reform bill targets
the poorest of the poor for rent
increases
www.nytimes.com
Keeping the Poorest in Housing
www.chicagonow.com
Obama’s proposed hike to minimum
rent for HUD-assisted families could
put poorest in the street
www.commondreams.org
Makers, Takers and $2-a-dayers
www.ncsha.org
www.saveourhomes.org
http://www.nytimes.com
Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as
Recession Hit
n e l e c t ^ e m a n a t i n g f r o m t h e n a tio n Y T c a p ito l
and create a society based on social justice.
F R ITZ
PO R TLAN D C ITY C O U N C IL
S pending tax dollars w ise ly
to serve all P ortlanders
You’re going to bank somewhere,
why not let your banking make a difference in
the places where you live and work?
equal hovssms
LENDER
to $5~$50 per person
Portland
www.portlandhearingvoices.net
www.Amanda2012.com
503-960-3720
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