The following is a reflection by Kairos Center intern Lindsey Jordan on this month’s Tenant March on Washington. For more on the connections between tenant rights, healthcare, voting rights, and poverty, check out Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis’ recent interview in Truthout.
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On Wednesday, July 12, hundreds of tenants, housing advocates, and champions of human rights congregated in Washington, D.C. for a day of action to protest the proposed $7.4 billion funding cut to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
HUD provides critical aid to poor and low-income families across the United States, and the proposed cuts to federal housing programs threaten our nation’s tenants and communities. In addition to the elimination of housing vouchers for 250,000 households, the budget will increase rents for all federally assisted households from 30% to 35% of income. Rent increases will mean an average increase of over $100 per month for these households, who earn an average $21,000 a year after taxes. Rather than addressing the nation’s deep and growing crisis of affordable housing, the HUD cuts will only add to mass displacement, homelessness, and suffering.
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The march from Fannie Mae to the HUD building to the home of a Blackstone lobbyist was led by a large banner declaring that we must “Stop Trump’s War on the Poor.” In this declaration, we are reminded of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sobering warning of a society that neglects the least of these. In front of the HUD building, the hundreds of marchers laid down and staged a “die in” to demonstrate the devastating effect the cutbacks would have on poor communities. A chorus of voices singing “We Shall Overcome” was suspended above those lying defiantly on the hot concrete in a powerful display of resistance.
At the same time as our housing programs are defunded, we watch as billions of dollars in tax breaks are given to Wall Street. It is in the immoral and unjust contradictions of our nation’s spending that the hundreds of protestors found the strength to condemn the war being waged on the poor and proclaim that safe and affordable housing is a human right.
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