James Orr was in his apartment in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side one Wednesday morning in 2013 when he heard his phone buzz. “James, you have 30 days to move,” an Illinois state police officer on the other end told him. The 62-year-old, who had moved into the apartment with his wife in 2006 after finishing a three-year prison sentence, was incredulous. “What do you mean I have to move?” he asked. He had lived there for seven years.

As part of a previous conviction, Illinois required Orr to appear on the sex offense registry, one of five public conviction registries in the state. The sentence came with a litany of other restrictions that will follow him for the rest of his life. Orr can’t visit parks, forest reserves, schools or playgrounds and must pay a yearly $100 registration fee. He’s also prohibited from living within 500 feet of any school, playground, day care or childcare facility. 

That’s why state police came calling in 2013. “You have to move, sir,” the officer repeated. “A day care moved [within] 500 feet.” Orr says he panicked and started calling around, trying to find a place to go. But each time he found an available apartment, police shot down the address saying it wasn’t compliant with Illinois’s dense web of housing restrictions. 

Orr estimates he checked on more than 20 places but still couldn’t find a legal place to live by the time his month-long window to move drew to a close. He could continue to stay at an illegal address. But if he were caught, he’d be sent back to prison. He and his wife packed their belongings into a storage unit and moved in with his sister, but when he called police to update his address, they told him it was too close to a school. His only other option was to register as homeless—but in all his interactions with police, he says no one told him he could.

It often plays out like this: A person can’t report their address because it’s not legal. Without a legal address, they can’t register. When they don’t register, police pick them up and charge them with a new crime.

It took police another year to come knocking after Orr failed to find a legal address or register as homeless. A judge ultimately convicted him of failure to report a change of address, a class 3 felony, and sentenced him to seven years in state prison. It was the second time he’d been imprisoned solely because he couldn’t find legal housing; police once arrested him in his home during an address check after determining his apartment was in a banishment zone, despite them previously allowing him to register the address.

“How do you get out of it? How do you get out of the cycle unless you build you a house on a dirt road somewhere?” Orr told Bolts.

The expansive nature of so-called housing banishment laws in Illinois, in addition to a laundry list of other restrictions, make it nearly impossible for people with past sex offense convictions to find a place to live. Few available housing units exist that aren’t within 500 feet of playgrounds, schools, and day cares. As a result, Orr and more than 1,400 other people like him, predominantly Black men, are forced into indefinite homelessness across the state, cycled in and out of prison and relegated to an underclass with lifelong stigma.

Orr and hundreds of other unhoused Chicagoans with sex offense convictions have spent years organizing against housing banishment laws and registry requirements with the Chicago 400 Alliance, a coalition of housing, reentry and victim advocates as well as social service agencies. The group’s most ambitious challenge to date is a bill pending in the Illinois legislature that would ease residency restrictions and expand housing options. The legislative session, which begins this week, ends in late May.

The bill would shrink banishment zones around schools and playgrounds from 500 to 250 feet and remove home day cares from the list of residency restrictions. Once a person finds stable housing, under the proposal, they also couldn’t be forced to move if their home later becomes part of an exclusion zone.

“The reality is that our current policies are not working,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, who is the bill’s chief sponsor, told Bolts. “They’re not serving who they should serve. It’s creating a crisis of homelessness and it does not make our communities safer.” 

As an employee at the state department of corrections in the 1990s, Lightford helped create Illinois’s sex offense registry. But now, after years of enhanced penalties and restrictions, she said, “What we’ve done is disenfranchised a whole population of people.”

Orr still didn’t have housing the last time he got out of prison in 2017. His wife’s apartment wasn’t compliant with state residency restrictions, so at first he tried a shelter a few blocks from a police station. But when he stopped by the station to update his address on the registry, he heard a familiar refrain—no good, it turned out the shelter was too close to a playground.

With no other options, Orr opted to sleep in his wife’s car while he saved for one of his own. Within a few months, he’d scraped together enough to bounce from one hotel room to another. Seven years later, he says it’s an endless cycle. “I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when I first got out in 2017—sleeping in my car, staying in a hotel.” 

Orr stays with his wife just two nights a year. He can’t stay anywhere for longer than two days a year, or else it’s legally considered a secondary residence. Orr and others who register as homeless must check in with local law enforcement on a weekly basis. Even if a person on a registry manages to find legal housing, exclusion zones are constantly in flux. People can be forced out at any time, regardless of whether they own or rent their home. Ubiquitous and often impossible to identify from outside, home day cares pose a particular challenge. 

If a person’s housing becomes illegal, police generally offer a 30-day window to find a new place within the scope of the law—though that’s a courtesy, not a legal right. Two options exist for people still without housing at the end of that period: live homeless or return to prison.

Steven, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation, finished his prison sentence in 2007 and moved to Riverdale, a Chicago suburb south of the city. Housing was easier to come by there, since it’s less densely populated than the city. For years, he managed to find a legal place to stay with relative ease. 

That all changed in 2019. He and his wife had been living in their apartment for five years. The pair dated in sixth grade, reconnected years later, and have been married for more than a decade. One mid-July day, police arrived to measure the distance between their apartment and a new day care that was opening up down the block. Steven says they told him his apartment was 28 inches too close. “It just got harder, and harder, and harder to find a place where I could stay. So I became homeless,” he told Bolts.

Every afternoon, after he finishes work as a peer counselor at an addiction treatment center on the city’s west side, Steven visits his family’s home. Each evening, after he says goodnight, he leaves again. Sometimes he stays with his mother, sometimes his sister, sometimes a friend—always couch surfing and never staying anywhere longer than two days. When his grandchildren ask why he leaves at night, he tells them he works the night shift.

“It hurts. I want to lay next to my wife,” Steven said. “I want to play with my grandchildren. I want to have fun with my children not just part of the day but, sometimes, all day. I want to wake up to them. I want to hear the noises, and the arguments, and the fussing. That’s what I miss most.”

The impact of Illinois’s housing banishment law extends far beyond people with convictions and shapes generations of families in lasting ways. 

As the primary caregiver to an adult son with an intellectual disability who must comply with the abundance of housing restrictions and residency requirements, Cheri worries what will happen when she can no longer look after him. Those rules, coupled with a dearth of skilled nursing facilities with beds available for people with sex offense convictions, leaves her with virtually no viable options.

“It definitely puts pressure on the family,” said Cheri, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her family. “What are we going to do with these people? Just throw them away when their families are no longer able to take care of them? I mean, it kind of feels like they’re throwing all of us away.”

Cheri says the judge in her son’s case gave him three days to move after he was convicted and sentenced to probation, community service, and ten years on the sex offense registry. Her house was 11 feet too close to a home day care, so the family put it up for sale and spent the next ten months searching for a place to live. She says she lives every day “in constant fear that someone’s going to open up a day care, someone’s going to put in a park, wherever you live.”

The conviction, and the stigma that comes with it, creates instability in nearly every aspect of their lives, Cheri says. The punishment is lifelong. “We can’t go to museums. We can’t go to forest reserves, we can’t go to parks. There are family reunions that we can’t attend because he can’t be present.” It creates, she said, “a class of people who, no matter how hard they try to do the right thing, are just pushed down constantly.”

Over the past four decades, Congress ushered in a series of federal mandates that pressured states to vastly expand policies targeting people with sex offense convictions. This includes the Wetterling Act, named for an 11-year-old boy from Minnesota who was abducted in 1989. The measure, part of the infamous 1994 crime bill, required states to establish a registry for people convicted of sex offenses and other crimes against children. Megan’s Law, which followed the murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey, mandated that states make their sex offense registries public. 

Illinois lawmakers, for their part, passed into law a cavalcade of measures targeting people convicted of sex offenses. In 1986, the state began requiring people convicted of two or more sex offenses against children to record their information in a private law enforcement database. Lawmakers expanded the registry to include people convicted of any sex offense against a child in 1993, then again to include anyone convicted of any sex offense in 1996. Later that year, lawmakers made the registry public. 

Each year, as legislators returned to Springfield, they tacked on new conditions. By 2013, people on the registries were prohibited from living within 500 feet of any facility “providing programs or services exclusively directed toward persons under 18 years of age,” working at businesses that photograph children, or participating in holiday activities with children outside their families, like handing out Halloween candy.

Every state maintains some form of public conviction registry and 27 have residency restrictions of some kind. But another 23 states have resisted such housing restrictions, which are not recommended by federal agencies and are opposed by numerous advocacy organizations, like the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, the professional organization for researchers and treatment providers in the field.  

A large body of evidence shows these measures do little to prevent—or even respond to—sexual violence.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, eight out of every ten perpetrators of sexual violence know the person they harm. In cases with children, that proportion climbs to 93 percent—and the perpetrators themselves are often children. A 2009 U.S. Department of Justice bulletin states that youth under 18 comprise more than a quarter of all people who carry out sexual violence, and more than one-third of perpetrators when the person harmed is also a child. Four of ten survivors under age six are targeted by another child, according to a 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics study. The report also finds that the most common age of sexual assault perpetrators is 14. 

Yet survivors report sexual assaults to police in fewer than one-third of all cases. Police make an arrest in just 5 percent of assaults, and fewer than 3 percent result in a felony conviction. Cases that do make it to trial—and result in a lifetime of punishment—represent only a small fraction of the perpetrators of sexual violence and, reflective of the legal system at large, disproportionately target Black men. In Illinois, roughly one out of every 139 men is on a public conviction registry—which include sex offenses, murder, gun convictions and crimes involving violence against youth. When accounting for race, the divide is even starker: one out of every 39 Black men in the state is on a registry. 

Madeleine Behr, policy director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, says politicians have long weaponized survivors in order to appear “tough on crime,” all while pushing registries and increasingly restrictive policies that create more harm than they address. “Survivors and victims know who harmed them. It’s something that I think gets so lost in this conversation,” Behr told Bolts. 

Studies have consistently shown housing restrictions and exclusion zones don’t make communities safer—and, in fact, can even weaken public safety. When the Minnesota Department of Corrections studied cases in which someone was reincarcerated for a new sex offense after being released from prison during a 16-year period, researchers couldn’t identify a single case in which residency restrictions would have prevented a new crime. A 2012 study from Connecticut’s Office of Policy and Management found that only 20 of the nearly 750 people released from prison in 2005 with sex offense convictions were convicted of a new sex offense. That’s in line with research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that found people with prior sex offense convictions were far less likely than people convicted of other offenses to be rearrested or to go back to prison.

Even an Illinois task force created to study registration and residency requirements and composed of state lawmakers, law enforcement, policy advocates and state prison officials found that housing banishment laws were ineffective. In a 2017 report, the group said the homelessness and loss of family support caused by housing banishment policies put people at a higher risk of recidivism. “In sum, residency restrictions do not decrease sexual reoffending or the sex crime rates in the areas where they are used,” the task force concluded.

Patty Casey, a retired Chicago police commander who oversaw her department’s registration unit, calls the status quo a “lose-lose situation” for both police and people who have to register. Officers, she says, are tied up verifying the legality of place after place, while people with sex offenses are trapped in an endless loop of homelessness.

Casey singles out the restriction against living within 500 feet of home day cares as “absolutely ludicrous.” Home day cares can pop up practically anywhere—licenses are free and require little more than a background check, an inspection, 15 hours of training and a medical exam. “It creates a large number of homeless registrants,” Casey said. “They’re restricted [from living] almost everywhere.” 

Casey told Bolts she plans to testify in support of the bill to ease residency restrictions and expand housing options during the upcoming legislative session. If signed into law, she said, “we would have so many less homeless persons, and it would be easier on law enforcement and easier on the registrants.”

It remains to be seen whether the support from folks like Casey and Lightford, the Senate majority leader, will be enough to muster the legislature to shirk decades of sensationalized, “tough-on-crime” policies. Four other legislators, including two more in Senate leadership, have signed on as bill sponsors and numerous others have committed to voting for it. While supporters expect some GOP opposition, a previous version of the bill even had a Republican sponsor in the House.

Notably absent from the conversation so far is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is rumored to have presidential ambitions and has touted the state’s efforts to make Illinois a national leader in criminal legal reforms. Advocates with the Chicago 400 Alliance have questioned the governor’s silence on the issue. (Pritzker’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.) 

“Why aren’t they telling the lawmakers they should pass this bill?” said Adele Nicholas, a civil rights attorney and director of Illinois Voices for Reform, one of the groups advocating for the bill. “I guarantee you that if they did, it would become law.” Nicholas has challenged numerous state sex offense policies in federal courts and before the Illinois Supreme Court, leading to three separate injunctions against the state.

The state’s “own commission looked at the evidence several years ago and concluded that these laws are counterproductive,” she said, referring to the 2017 task force. “The evidence is out there, but they’re not taking any action to stand up for evidence-based policy.”

Chicago 400 members have for months visited Springfield to educate legislators and build support for the bill. Steven says he’s confident they’ll ultimately prevail, but he’s often shocked by how little policymakers know about current law and its impacts on people with sex offense convictions. “You’ve made laws because people are uneducated; they’re afraid,” he said. 

For the time being, hundreds of people with sex offense convictions continue to live in precarity, forced into homelessness by a system of the state’s design. “There really is no way of knowing the degree of punishment until you’ve lived it,” said Cheri, the mother of someone on the registry. “There’s no end. You just can’t ever get past it.”

Orr says he’s still trying to rebuild from the last time he went to prison because he couldn’t find a home. His sister died about a week before he was released in 2017. Orr remembers going to her home and finding the freezer brimming with containers of catfish, his favorite meal. “She was gonna throw me a surprise homecoming,” Orr said. “That was like another broken heart.”

The instability, fear and stigma lived day in and day out take a toll. “It can be so scary and shameful at the same time,” Orr said. “There’s so much politics in this particular crime. They break up a lot of families. A lot of people couldn’t survive this.”

“It’s very disappointing and hurtful,” he added. “I try to tell myself it’s gonna get better.”

The post How Illinois Housing Banishment Laws Push People into Homelessness and Prison  appeared first on Bolts.

Their goal was to end the criminal prosecution of children under age 13 in Colorado, where, The Denver Post has reported, close to 1,000 kids that young are arrested annually. Colorado children as young as 10 are liable to face criminal charges—and then, often, plunge into prolonged cycles of contact with the court system—sometimes for minor actions like snapping a classmate’s bra strap or getting into a schoolyard tussle.

Three lawmakers—all women of color representing Denver—tried last year to shield preteens from prosecution and divert them to community programs outside the carceral system. Their proposal derailed amid law enforcement opposition and what its proponents saw as an unwillingness to hear out communities of color where children are most vulnerable to arrest. Heading into 2023, the coalition amended its approach: Two of the women who sponsored last year’s version stepped back, and in their place the group recruited three new male sponsors, two of them white Republicans. 

“We kind of had this idea that we can’t have only women of color dying on these hills again,” says Representative Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, the only lawmaker who stayed on as a prime sponsor both years. “We think that led to not being able to get it across the finish line, us having to validate our experience.”

Senator Cleave Simpson, one of the new Republican sponsors, says he was initially hesitant but was convinced to push for alternatives to criminal punishment for children that young. “To think about 10-, 11-, 12-year-old kids ending up in handcuffs,” he told Bolts, “I haven’t been touched like that by a policy conversation before.”

As the backers’ strategy changed, so did Colorado’s political landscape. Defying expectations of a red wave, voters in November instead strengthened Democrats’ control of Colorado’s state government, re-electing Governor Jared Polis in a blowout, expanding his party’s margins in both houses of the legislature, and further undercutting a diminished GOP’s ability to block progressive change. Heading into the 2023 session, the state’s Black and Latino legislative caucuses each identified the youth prosecution bill as formal priorities, more than 60 organizations signed on in support, and the coalition backing the bill held more than 100 meetings with people and groups invested in the topic, Gonzales-Gutierrez told Bolts. 

Despite these favorable conditions, HB 1249 sputtered once more. It was gutted in the last days of the session and rewritten without most of its teeth. Lawmakers again declined to raise the minimum prosecution age, this time replacing the heart of the proposal with provisions for more funding to local social service providers and more data collection on post-arrest outcomes for children. 

The neutered bill was sent to the governor’s desk, where it still sits. Even its sponsors don’t see that as much of a win. 

“We’d checked all the boxes,” Gonzales-Gutierrez told Bolts. “We made it bipartisan. We had hundreds of stakeholding meetings. We met with DAs, who weren’t willing to give us substantial feedback. They said, ‘We don’t want to do this.’ From pretty early on, the governor’s office was in opposition; they wouldn’t even provide technical feedback. Everything was just a no.”

Dafna Gozani, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law who helped advocate for the Colorado bill, echoed the disappointment. “Everybody forgets we’re talking about fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders,” she said. “It’s perplexing, particularly when you have a Democratic Party that runs on a platform of social justice.” 

The record of the 2023 legislative session in Colorado, which ended May 8, has led to profound frustration—boiling into public view—from more progressive-leaning lawmakers and state advocates who regret missed opportunities to pass headlining liberal policies.

Democratic legislation to allow cities to establish safe drug-use sites or rent control programs failed, as did proposals to ban assault weapons and install new protections for gig economy workers. Earlier this month, in the session’s final days, a pro-tenant bill meant to thwart evictions in which landlords haven’t proved cause to evict withered alongside a bill to study the idea of moving Colorado to single-payer health care system. 

Even when a bill makes it past the legislature, Polis’ pen can loom as an uncertain hurdle. The governor vetoed a bill last week that would have offered more transparency to people applying for executive clemency, helping them navigate the process even without attorneys.

Liberals did have reasons to celebrate as the legislature adopted some noteworthy policies they’d championed, including bills to strengthen protections for abortion and gender-affirming care, plus four gun-control policies. Criminal justice reformers also won passage of a law intended to help protect children from being tricked by law enforcement in police interrogations. 

Still, Representative Javier Mabrey, a newly-elected progressive, faults his party for doing less with more. “I think people know what they’re getting when they’re voting for Democrats: They’re going to do things for renters, do things to help working people, to fight for communities of color,” he told Bolts. He regrets that his party chose instead to frequently preserve the status quo. 

Gonzales-Gutierrez concurs: “It’s just a lot of the same.”

For reform bills this year, the Senate was the primary graveyard. Democrats there have many votes to spare, having expanded their majority since the last session by three seats to 23-12, but some of their senators resisted progressive priorities.

The youth prosecution bill passed the House but, in the frenzy of session’s end, its sponsors learned that they had lost too many Democrats to push it through the Senate; only one Senate Republican, Simpson, was willing to cross over in support. Several Capitol sources told Bolts that the governor was quietly threatening a veto while the bill was still intact. Simpson said he believes this made several lawmakers nervous they would “stick out their necks for nothing.” 

A Polis spokesperson told Bolts that the governor is still reviewing the bill before signing it, but that his concerns “were shared during the legislative process and were largely addressed by the sponsors and proponents.” The spokesperson declined to answer questions about Polis’ specific concerns. Opponents of the bill argued that diverting to social service providers would not be appropriate for serious offenses—ahead of the session, sponsors amended it to carve out homicide cases—and that the juvenile system is already equipped to provide services to preteens.

In another instance, HB 1202, which would have allowed the opening of Colorado’s first safe drug-use site, passed the House before dying in a Senate committee. Following that vote, progressive Senator Julie Gonzales said it was “incredibly disappointing” to see a public health response to overdoses falter despite “the broadest majorities that this state has seen in a generation.” 

Most Republicans opposed those reforms, but the GOP was largely relegated to spectatorship this session, watching intra-Democratic strife settle the fate of key legislation. Republicans are just one Senate seat away from superminority status in both chambers. “It’s always darkest before the dawn, but the problem is you don’t know when the dawn is going to come,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen told Bolts. 

And many progressives believe that Democratic leaders followed their November romp by building infrastructure within the legislature to thwart progressive change. They cried foul on committee design weeks before lawmaking ever began.

In one instance, Dylan Roberts, a former prosecutor with a lengthy record of siding with law enforcement and Republicans to oppose bold criminal justice reforms, was named as one of the three Democrats on the state Senate’s Judiciary committee. With no vote to spare on any legislation opposed by the panel’s two Republicans, this arrangement seemed to virtually doom key legislation that Roberts did not support and alarmed reformers from the session’s outset, as Bolts reported in January.

On that committee, Roberts helped weaken, through amendments, bills to limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and to examine the cost of policing and incarcerating drug activity in Colorado, among other legislation. Roberts played a decisive role in sinking the rent control bill when he sided with Republicans in committee.

And Judiciary was not the only chokehold, Mabrey says. He complains that the design of numerous Senate committees, including Appropriations and Finance, forced Democratic lawmakers to repeatedly cut into their own bills based on the opposition of centrists.

Steve Fenberg, the Senate’s Democratic president and a close ally to Polis, told Bolts there was no concerted effort by party leaders to thwart progressive policy. 

“Nothing was done to set up roadblocks,” he said. “Why would I do that? I’m a Democrat. I consider myself a progressive. I’m the leader of my caucus. Why would I do something that inherently tries to block my members’ priorities?”

Committee design came organically, he said, adding that members requested assignments based on their own backgrounds and interests, and that leadership did its best to accommodate them.

Fenberg said it’s irresponsible to read very far into the size of Democrats’ majorities. “I think people assume there’s 23 [Democrats in the Senate] and therefore they can pass anything they want,” he said. “We forget this sometimes, but people make decisions based on policy, and some of these bills didn’t have the support from what I would call progressive members of our caucus.  

“It shouldn’t just be, ‘Oh, we have this many Democrats, therefore any Democrat bill gets passed.’ I actually think that would be bad.”

Speaker Julie McCluskie, a moderate Democrat who leads the state House, echoes Fenberg’s assessment and says Democrats must continue at least trying to work with Republicans.

“We were each elected from our districts, and while the Democrats have a supermajority [in the House], I believe to my core that if we are going to craft lasting policy for this state we have an obligation and responsibility to hear from our own caucus, our Republican colleagues and from our districts,” McCluskie told Bolts. “I know that there were many Republicans that worked in a bipartisan way.” 

Steph Vigil, a Democrat who flipped a Colorado Springs House seat in November to become the first queer lawmaker from the red bastion of El Paso County, disagrees with legislative leaders and hopes they change their approach. “I respect the love for the institution to want it to be that way, but I think we’re dealing with some truly genocidal people,” said Vigil, pointing to racist and transphobic rhetoric and legislation from the GOP. 

“People asked us for something, they asked for us to be bold,” Vigil added. “You’re not here to make friends with people who wish you harm.”

But Fenberg cautions against his party going too far, too quickly. “Don’t underestimate what infighting and controversies within our own party can do,” he said. “If the Republicans want to get control, they have to get their shit together. … If we don’t get our shit together and we go down a path of polarization in our own party, that speeds up the process for Republicans.”

As lawmakers tried to keep the youth prosecution bill intact in the session’s final weeks, they were also pushing for HB 1042, a related bill meant to prevent police from lying to children during interrogations in order to secure information or guilty pleas. Deceitful interrogations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country, including in Colorado, the National Registry of Exonerations has found. 

When a previous version of HB 1042 derailed last year, Roberts was a rare Democrat to oppose it. So when he was promoted ahead of the session to being the swing vote on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, reformers immediately sweated their proposal, and Roberts confirmed their fears in January when he told Bolts that he would oppose it again barring substantial amendments. From January to April, its sponsors agreed to a slew of changes that loosened the bill; they reluctantly signed off an amendment allowing for information or confessions obtained through deceitful interrogations to still be used against children in certain court settings, like hearings to determine bond or whether a child should be removed from their home. 

The bill’s backers also tried to make their effort seem less adversarial toward law enforcement, no longer using words like “lying” or “deception” in their marketing of the bill.

The changes were ultimately sufficient for the District Attorneys’ Council, a historically influential body that lobbies on behalf of state prosecutors, to drop its opposition, and for Roberts to support the bill. HB 1042 passed the legislature in April, and Polis—who, lawmakers say, was earlier quietly threatening a veto—signed it into law last week.

Progressive lawmakers have cheered passage of this bill, as the amended version remains closer to their original intent, in contrast to the youth prosecution bill. Still, they say even this victory came with more concessions than it should have, given the nature of the issue and Democrats’ enormous structural advantage, weakening the bill’s potential to shield kids from duplicitous tactics. 

Gozani, the youth justice attorney, was incarcerated in Colorado as a child. She says the experience was “traumatizing and incredibly damaging” and regrets that in the two decades since then, Colorado’s approach to youth has remained largely similar, and punitive. 

She hoped that HB 1249, the preteen prosecution bill, would chip into that system. After its clipping, Gozani isn’t sure if the coalition behind it will run their proposal again next year. With no legislative election this fall and the same Capitol leadership structure expected in 2024, it’s hard for reformers in this and other policy spaces to envision how exactly they achieve victory. 

Gozani has found that, regardless of partisanship, it’s difficult to convince people who never have experienced the juvenile system, or whose children never have, of the need to make that system less punishing. 

“A lot of folks have the luxury of never having to interact with the justice system,” she said. “For them, it’s very comfortable to continue a status quo that is extremely damaging.”

The post ‘Everything Was Just a No’: Progressives Frustrated After Colorado Legislative Session appeared first on Bolts.

The result was pandemonium. Police helicopters hovered overhead long into the night. On the ground, LAPD surrounded and kettled protestors and journalists alike and commenced with mass arrests, including at least 16 members of the press; an officer broke one protestor’s arm with his baton. A year later, a UCLA report would confirm the protestors’ worst suspicions about the approach: vanishingly few of the unhoused residents of Echo Park Lake had been placed in long term housing, the whereabouts of many were unknown, and at least six people had died since being evicted from the encampment.  

To Hugo Soto-Martinez, then a union organizer, Echo Park Lake evinced everything wrong with his representative’s approach to homelessness. “This was, without a doubt, the most egregious abuse of power that I’ve ever seen, exhibited by a council member to the most vulnerable community of our city,” he told Bolts. Soto-Martinez decided to challenge O’Farrell, casting the incumbent’s actions as a symbol of the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the city’s response to its ever-growing unhoused population. He won his election decisively last month, beating O’Farrell by 16 percentage points, and was sworn in as city council member on Sunday.

Soto-Martinez joins a new, three-member bloc of progressives on city council who vocally oppose criminalizing homelessness and support expanding tenant protections and deeply affordable housing. Nithya Raman, a former urban planner who joined the council two years ago, has been defending such an approach since then. And Eunisses Hernandez, an abolitionist organizer, won this year against sitting council member Gil Cedillo, who had deployed a similar strategy of encampment sweeps at his district’s MacArthur Park. Raman and Hernandez both supported Soto-Martinez’s campaign, and all three beat incumbents to secure their seat, a rare feat in LA politics; Raman’s win in 2020 marked the first time it had happened on the council in 17 years.

This week, in their first council session, Soto-Martinez and Hernandez quickly paired up to try to extend the city’s eviction moratorium. And Raman’s team is hopeful there will be strength in numbers going forward. “We’re hoping with some of these new friends in the city council, we can work with them to create a more citywide approach to the issue,” Josh Scarcella, Raman’s homelessness deputy, told Bolts.

These council members are coming to power in a city context that has been transformed by the election of Karen Bass as LA mayor and by the recent passage of Measure ULA, a high-value property sale tax that will fund tenant protections, affordable housing, and homelessness support to the tune of nearly a billion dollars per year. “This is a very unprecedented amount of funding that will enable the city to address the housing crisis at its roots—by both providing housing as well as preventing homelessness in the first place,” said Laura Raymond, the co-chair of the committee behind the measure. Its implementation will be overseen by a 15-person committee, and Raymond said that the coalition that fought for Measure ULA is recommending candidates like housing organizers, formerly homeless people, and tenants who have lived in affordable housing units. 

Meanwhile, Bass, who had made housing affordability and humane solutions to homelessness a cornerstone of her campaign, declared a state of emergency on homelessness this week as her first official act as mayor, a move that allows the city to expedite affordable housing and homeless housing projects, among other things. She committed to getting 17,000 people off the street in her first year, saying the city would “make sure we are using every resource possible at the scale that is needed to save lives and restore our neighborhoods.” The progressive council members have expressed support for Bass’s approach, though some local organizers warn that it may put too much emphasis on speedy solutions rather than the long-term planning that may be needed.

With this sea change, Angelenos are facing an extraordinary opportunity to implement alternative models on housing and homelessness—and with that comes intense pressure to prove that their approach carries a better chance of getting more people off the street, humanely, than the city’s current methods of criminalizing homelessness. 

Eric Ares, Hernandez’s incoming director of housing and homelessness, wants to undo what he sees as the prevailing framework by which people conceive of the city’s homelessness crisis. “There’s this false choice: either you accept the status quo, which is the tents as they are in our streets, or you criminalize,” he said. “The people that got voted on to join city council, many of them got voted on to explicitly explore the things that weren’t being addressed:Increasing tenant protections, building more housing intentionally at all affordability levels, especially for those who need it most, non-law enforcement crisis response.”

For much of the past two years, the city council’s work on homelessness has been consumed by fierce debate over the existence and expansion of anti-camping ordinance 41.18, which outlaws the presence of encampments near shelters, parks, schools, bridges, and other infrastructure. (An analysis by the recently elected left-leaning city controller, Kenneth Mejia, estimates it now stretches to include 20 percent of the city’s territory.) Only Raman and now-former councilmember Mike Bonin have consistently voted against 41.18. Council members can also propose individual 41.18 locations within their district, which must be approved by council. 

In one meeting, Hernandez’s predecessor Cedillo successfully lobbied for 28 new enforcement zones in his district; meanwhile, Raman has never proposed a 41.18 zone in her district.

“In the past year, it’s a little bit of ‘every council district for themselves’ when it comes to homelessness,” said Scarcella. Within her district, Raman has established a homeless outreach team, including staff who work on legislation, liaise with service providers, and do direct outreach to encampments. 

The council’s three left-leaning members met regularly in advance of the new session, which began December 13, and both Hernandez and Soto-Martinez are taking cues from Raman’s approach: hiring staff dedicated to homelessness and housing, establishing direct connections to homeless constituents and encampments, and expanding access to public restrooms, a stunning privation for most unhoused people in LA. 

Both newcomers also denounced 41.18 on the campaign trail, and their offices told Bolts that they will not establish new 41.18 zones in their districts. “It just simply doesn’t work,” Soto-Martinez told Bolts. He also is advocating to stop using armed officers in encounters with unhoused people as a matter of course, and for the establishment of an unarmed response team, similar to Denver’s STAR program. 

But both offices will have to quickly figure out how to respond to the daily displacement to which homeless people in LA are subject. During his campaign, Soto-Martinez promised to end the practice of comprehensive sanitation cleanings, often called “sweeps,” which regularly dislocate unhoused people, lead to the destruction of their belongings, and often involve police. But on December 13, Soto-Martinez’s first week in office, the mutual aid group LA Street Care noted on Twitter that the new council member had not acted to cancel a number of sweeps that were scheduled to take place in his district the following day, despite dangerously low temperatures. Within hours, Soto-Martinez’s office had downgraded the sweeps to a so-called “spot-cleaning,” according to LA Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray, a designation that means that nobody is moved and that the LAPD is not involved. 

Kris Rehl, an organizer with LA Street Care, went to all three sites, and was heartened to discover that the office had kept its word. “All three were just cleanings, what was reported,” Rehl said. “The fact that he was so responsive so quickly has made us really optimistic.”

Things get murkier when it comes to the 41.18 zones that Soto-Martinez and Hernandez’s predecessors have already established in the two districts. Scarcella said that the council office doesn’t control whether police enforce the anti-camping zones that exist in Raman’s district owing to the city-wide elements of the ordinance; the office is still trying to determine the best way to handle these situations. “Our goal is to work diligently with the individuals, provide outreach, and try to get them indoors,” he told Bolts, noting that LAPD is more likely to hold off on enforcement “if they see that there’s work being done, and there’s outreach being conducted.” Ares echoed that view. “The plan is to work with all the different partners that we have to ensure that whenever possible, we are leading with care and with services,” he said. 

For all three council members, the end goal is to craft policy for the entire city based on the care-centered models they implement within their own districts. 

The most critical element will likely be proving that they can get people off the streets and into housing.

Raman’s office has prioritized non-congregate housing like motel rooms, rather than shelter beds, in its efforts to get people into the pipeline to long term shelter. Her office was the only one to open a temporary housing site in 2021 called Project Roomkey, a former hotel with nearly 100 rooms, and residents were both allowed to stay as long as they needed and offered assistance on-site in seeking permanent housing. They have successfully rehoused 55 people through the site, which is temporarily closed pending a funding extension, are currently converting a recently purchased site for their permanent housing initiative, Homekey. “Her office has made tremendous improvements in connecting people with housing,” said Rehl. 

Roomkey shut down in late 2022, which Soto-Martinez has criticized, calling it “LA’s most effective sheltering program” and arguing for it to be extended and improved. Bass wants to extend the program, which was federally funded. 

Soto-Martinez also hopes to implement adaptive reuse (renovating existing infrastructure) as a quicker solution alongside building permanent housing—and eventually, social housing. He has his sights set on St. Vincent Medical Center, a massive, vacant hospital complex in his district. “We can refurbish these buildings much faster,” he told Bolts. 

Hernandez told Bolts in February that she would fight to ensure that new developments in her district contained more units for low-income tenants. Ares spoke of the importance of having a joint strategy: speeding up the process of building new affordable housing while preserving the many existing affordable units in danger of expiring, using public land to build social housing, expanding access to temporary shelter, and keeping people in their homes in the first place. “We have to do all those things at once or else we’re not going to see the changes that everyone wants,” he said, invoking Measure ULA’s comprehensive approach to the city’s housing crisis. The measure devotes the bulk of its funds to affordable housing, including construction, adaptive reuse, and preservation, but also covers emergency rent relief and other tenant protections. 

To make citywide changes, they will have to convince other council members of their approach. 

Bonin, who was for some time the lone voice against criminalization on council, declined to seek reelection this year; the district’s new councilmember, Traci Park, is a firm supporter of 41.18, along with several colleagues. But there are a number of other council members who could side with the bloc on issues of housing and homelessness. And the balance of power could shift more fundamentally as well: in the wake of a leaked conversation filled with racist comments between three members of the LA city council and a union leader, Nury Martinez resigned as council president, leaving her seat up for grabs; Kevin de León, meanwhile, is desperately clinging to power amidst universal calls to resign and a recall attempt. 

On the first day of the new session, that tenuous state of play was succinctly illustrated by Soto-Martinez’s first motion in council, which Hernandez co-presented, to remove the Jan. 31 end date from the ongoing pandemic emergency that has protected renters from eviction. They needed eight votes for it to pass, and three other council members joined with Raman to support the motion. With de León absent and Martinez’s seat lying vacant, though, they fell short by just two votes. 

With the outgoing council having voted to end the city’s eviction moratorium on Jan. 31, thousands of tenants who are behind on their rent could lose their apartments. “We definitely know that the increase in homelessness in LA is very much directly tied to the need for expanded tenant protections,” Ares said. Raymound said Measure ULA will allocate enough money to fully fund access to a lawyer for tenants facing eviction; such counsel can greatly increase the chances of people being able to stay in their homes but is not currently mandated in LA the way the right to a public defender in criminal law cases is. Both Soto-Martinez and Ares told Bolts that their offices want to codify a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction this session. 

Jacob Woocher, a tenant lawyer who organizes with the LA Tenants Union, says the council needs to go even farther to support tenants. He pointed to Raman’s touting of a universal just cause ordinance passed in October. “Just cause without rent increase protections—I don’t want to say it’s meaningless, but it’s much weaker,” he said. “If the landlord can’t get you out for any ‘just cause,’ what they can do is give you an $1,000 rent increase, wait 90 days for that to take effect, and then when that takes effect, and you can’t pay your rent—then you’re kind of screwed.”

Woocher said that he wanted to see the new city council members prioritize the needs of rent-burdened tenants and the homeless community over their relationships with their counterparts on council. “I just hope that they are willing to rely on the communities that put them in office and not be afraid to challenge their colleagues—and know that if they do go out on a limb, for tenants and for unhoused people, that the communities and organizations that have been organizing around these issues will have their back.” 

The post New Progressive Bloc on LA Council Wants to Reshape How City Responds to Homelessness appeared first on Bolts.

In November, Sacramento residents will be faced with a weighty decision not usually left up to voters: whether to broadly criminalize homelessness within the city. Measure O, a ballot measure brought by a group called Sacramentans for Safe and Clean Streets and Parks and supported by local business interests, would outlaw camping on public property, and allow individual residents frustrated by encampments to initiate abatement proceedings, effectively forcing the city to act on complaints. The city will also create new shelter spaces, but only a few hundred of them—a small fraction of the number of homeless people who will likely be displaced if the measure goes into effect.

Measure O is merely one of a series of recent efforts to crack down on homelessness in Sacramento. In late August, the city and county passed three separate ordinances to forbid camping in a wide variety of public places, including on sidewalks, in front of businesses, near “infrastructure,” and along the American River Parkway, a wooded riverside area where many unhoused people camp.

By now, it’s a familiar story across the state: cities vacillate between trying to offer unhoused people shelter and criminalizing them for lacking it—and increasingly, they do both at the same time. This push-pull dynamic is a result of cities attempting to comply with the letter of a 2018 appeals court decision holding that municipalities can only enforce anti-camping ordinances if they have shelter beds available—while doing as much as possible to bulldoze over the spirit of it. “The rhetoric is like, oh, it’s not as bad as you think it is. Or we’re gonna apply this in a really humane way, so don’t worry about it,” said Bob Erlenbusch, the founder of Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. “But that belies the reality on the streets, you know?”

The cyclicality of the homelessness conversation in Sacramento has produced a profound feeling of déjà vu. Advocates decry the futility of trying to enact any policy that’s guided by the demands of housed people rather than the needs of unhoused people, involves criminalization, and lacks longer term solutions—condemning people to an endless cycle between streets, shelters, and jail. They fear that Measure O will only keep the wheel spinning. “The only thing you’re doing is finding ways to shuffle people through the hospital system, through the shelter system, through the prison system—and that shit costs a lot of money. A lot of money,” said Asantewaa Boykin, the co-founder of Mental Health First Sacramento, a civilian crisis response team that aims to get police out of mental health calls and works with many unhoused individuals. “We keep funding police to do Band-Aid work instead of finding solutions. I feel like I’m screaming at a wall.”

To Chris Herring, a professor of sociology at UCLA who has done extensive field research on homelessness in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, the “shelters vs. criminalization” debate is a false dichotomy between two things that have become fundamentally contingent on one another. This dynamic is on starkest display in San Diego, where Mayor Todd Gloria’s “progressive enforcement” campaign has directed police to arrest anyone who refuses shelter, which has produced an eightfold increase in arrests (the city’s shelter system generally hovers around a 93 percent occupancy rate). But it exists in some form in nearly every municipality across the state.

To fully understand why, you have to look back to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2018 Martin v. City of Boise ruling. The decision, which affected nine western states, should have been a victory for anti-criminalization advocates. Instead, it created a series of perverse incentives for cities trying to manage their homeless population and avoid getting sued. Rather than interpreting the ruling as a moral and practical call for the state to stop penalizing people who sleep on the street if it cannot even temporarily shelter them, many cities instead have conceived of shelter availability as a pretext for criminalization and engaged in legal gymnastics to technically comply with that requirement.

Herring has observed law enforcement setting aside shelter beds—keeping them empty despite the presence of people who are ready and willing to accept them—in order to have enough on hand to make enforcement legally justifiable. In San Francisco, he studied a new crop of shelters that opened throughout the city with the intent to offer lodging with no limits on duration of stay, better conditions, and fewer strings attached; the goal was to get people housed long term. But, as Herring recounts in his research paper “Complaint-oriented ‘services’: shelters as tools for criminalizing homelessness,” Martin v. Boise gave police more control over shelter referrals and ramped up turnover, causing the city to strategically worsen shelter conditions. “As they were tied increasingly to policing after Martin v. Boise, a number of them rolled back those offers,” he told Bolts. “So some of these places that opened up initially offering the ability for people to bring their pets [or] partners can no longer allow that.”  

Municipalities have also seized on a single footnote in Martin v. Boise, which suggests that it may still be constitutional to forbid “the obstruction of public rights of way” regardless of available shelter,” to justify new enforcement methods. In Los Angeles, the city council implemented an ordinance, 41.18, that outlaws camping near schools, parks, and other public spaces, and has since expanded it; City Controller candidate Kenneth Mejia has estimated that the new restrictions make being homeless illegal in a full 20 percent of the city’s terrain. The legality of the recent Sacramento ordinances also hinges on that footnote. “Now they’re defining infrastructure really, really broadly, which includes schools and basically any building that the government owns,” said Erlenbusch

Just last August, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg was boldly declaring a right to housing and introducing a comprehensive siting plan that would have designated 20 new locations across the city where homeless people could stay, ranging from emergency shelters to motel rooms to safe parking and camping grounds. Now, he’s endorsing Measure O. How did the city get from there to where it is now in just over a year? 

“I think the mayor’s proposal for a comprehensive siting plan was a genuine effort to expand options, especially during a pandemic where it was obvious that congregate shelter was not the way to go,” said Erlenbusch. “Out of the eight city council members, only a handful took him up on it. But in the meantime, homelessness has doubled…Businesses are upset. Residents are upset. Advocates are upset. Homeless people are upset—because nothing’s happened.”

To Erlenbusch, it’s impossible to understate the role that angry constituents have played in the city council’s flip-flop from housing to criminalization. “They all have had tremendous pushback from business groups, community groups, especially neighborhood associations, and you know, the mantra is almost universal: ‘Well, we’re not against homeless people. But not here,’” he said. “I don’t even call it NIMBY anymore. I call it BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.”

Katie Valenzuela is a Sacramento city council member who has repeatedly resisted efforts to ramp up enforcement. She described the backlash from constituents that led many of her colleagues to vote against a vehicle camping proposal seen as an early test of Steinberg’s ambitious proposal. Two of the safe camping and parking locations she identified for the siting plan failed, in large part because of community pressure, and she’s since weathered two recall attempts by constituents angry about her approach to homelessness (a third attempt is already underway). “I think some people hate the solutions almost as much as they hate the crisis,” she said, laughing ruefully.

Enter Daniel Conway, the former chief of staff to a previous Sacramento mayor, who approached city hall with an initiative that would have required the city to come up with around 6,400 shelter beds within 60 days of the measure passing. “Immediately when we saw the text, the word bankruptcy flashed across all of our faces because there’s no way we’d be able to do that that quickly,” said Valenzuela. “We don’t have that much land and we definitely don’t have any money.” A flurry of negotiations and modifications ensued. Under the significantly revised version that will be put to voters, the city must only create up to 600 new shelter spaces, and is only required to spend up to $5 million of its own money doing so,  according to reporting by the Sacramento Bee. The enforcement aspect of the measure, however, stands.  

“It’s not even shelter, it’s shelter spaces, which we’re interpreting as tents on a parking lot somewhere,” Erlenbusch told Bolts. “There’s no requirement that the shelter spaces be evenly dispersed throughout the city. So you’re going to see the same thing that we’ve seen: it will be in disenfranchised communities, low-income communities. It’s not going to be in East Sacramento. It’d be like putting shelters in Beverly Hills in LA.” (Conway did not respond to a request for comment for this piece).

The fracas also reveals profound disagreements between Sacramento city and county on homelessness policy. In August, the council amended Measure O to make its enforcement contingent on the completion of an agreement that would clarify each body’s duties and financial responsibility—meaning that if the measure does pass, which seems likely, there’s a high possibility that it won’t go into effect. “The only possible positive outcome, at least from the no side, is that it won’t become effective because the city and the county can’t get it together to come up with any kind of agreement,” said Erlenbusch. 

While the city’s hand may be forced by Conway’s ballot measure, it’s entirely responsible for the recent ordinance that elevates blocking the sidewalk to a misdemeanor. At the last minute, Mayor Steinberg added a companion resolution stipulating that homeless people who violate it will not be jailed or fined “to the fullest extent practical.” 

Boykin told Bolts she was skeptical of how the mayor’s attempt to restrict incarceration or fines to “extraordinary cases” would play out in practice. “Nothing leads me to believe that if someone’s tent is taken, and there’s some paraphernalia found, that the police won’t charge them for that. They might not catch the misdemeanor, but they’ll definitely catch the substance use charges,” she told Bolts. “It just continues to funnel people through systems so that they’re off the street for a minute, which pleases a lot of their constituents.”

Parallel battles around homelessness are happening all over California—and sometimes, it’s the same people writing the playbook. Conway, the architect of Measure O, is on the board of the LA Alliance for Human Rights, which in 2020 brought a lawsuit against Los Angeles County demanding that the county expand shelter and services—and require homeless people to accept them under penalty of criminalization. Groups that work on homelessness in LA are adamant that the alliance doesn’t represent them or their interests. “This settlement may be trumpeted as a win by Skid Row property owners and politicians who are looking no further than the next elections, but it’s the same failed approach the City has been investing in for decades,” the Skid Row community group Los Angeles Community Action Network said in a statement following the lawsuit’s settlement in April 2022.

A number of groups supporting Measure O also oppose stronger tenant protections and affordable housing expansion in Sacramento, which Valenzuela sees as evidence of bad faith. “Our 2,400 shelter beds county wide are full of people, a lot of whom are ready to move on to the next step but can’t find one because we have no housing or permanent supportive housing available for them,” the councilmember said. “I can call any of these shelters and ask any of these residents why they’re still there. And they’re all gonna say the same thing. I got the job at the restaurant or I got all my benefits and I can’t find any place. There’s no room for me.”

But building housing takes time, political will, and a lot of money. Ultimately, for Boykin, the most tragic and rage-inducing thing about the endless, circular homelessness debate is not that that money doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s tied up in the large percentage of the city and county’s budget that goes towards the Sacramento sheriff and police departments. “It’s extortion. I don’t know any other way to put it,” she said. “And then we go, but where are the resources?”

The post Sacramento Ballot Measure Pushes Policing to Address Housing Crisis appeared first on Bolts.

On April 1, Mayra Molina didn’t have the $2700 she needed to pay rent. When the novel coronavirus started spreading in Boston, the families that employ her as a housekeeper called one after another to tell her not to come to work. Her two sons, with whom she shares her East Boston apartment, had their construction jobs canceled, too. 

When Molina heard that the city was launching a rent assistance program, she hoped it would help her cover next month’s rent, at least. But she has gotten no response since she applied weeks ago. Because she’s undocumented, she’s not eligible for the stimulus check, nor for unemployment benefits. The situation is causing her insomnia and severe anxiety, which spikes her blood pressure, she told the Appeal: Political Report. When she went to a clinic, a counselor told her  not to worry about the rent, she said. “Well, that’s what worries us all, I think.”

Molina is one of the 31 percent of Americans who couldn’t pay rent at the beginning of this month. With more than 22 million having lost their jobs in the last four weeks, that number is likely to be even higher on May 1. 

The stimulus money that is now arriving in people’s bank accounts will do little to quell the crisis. With the median monthly rent in the nation hovering at just over $1,600, $1,200 government checks won’t cut it for many renters. 

Cities across the country have taken quick action to try to fill the gap. From Louisville to Albuquerque to New Orleans, they have quickly shuffled around their budgets to pool funds for renters in need during the COVID-19 crisis. 

According to a list compiled by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), more than 20 municipalities and counties are now rolling out some form of emergency rental assistance. A handful of states are setting up relief programs as well. These initiatives, which are either wholly new programs or expansions of existing ones, have tended to take the form of cash for renters who can show that they’ve been economically impacted by the shutdowns. 

Thousands are already benefiting, or will soon. But insufficient funding and a lack of tenant protections have housing advocates worried that these initiatives are falling short in addressing the magnitude of the present housing crisis, especially as long as the federal government fails to step up. 

In nearly every case, temporary rental assistance programs have been immediately overwhelmed. In Orange County, Florida (Orlando), a $1.8 million renters fund meant to aid 1,500 was flooded with more than 20,000 applications within 10 days. The online application portal in Santa Clara County (San Jose) collapsed after receiving more than 1,500 applications in three hours. And in Boston, the city’s emergency rental assistance program received 5,500 applications from people it verified as city residents, but only 800 residents will be able to receive a slice of a new $3 million fund. 

“We all realize that it’s just a tiny drop in the bucket,” said Steve Meacham, organizing coordinator at City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots community organization in Boston. “Really tiny.”

**

Boston’s city council announced its emergency initiative in early April by expanding an existing program designed to assist families at risk of evictions. Bostonians who demonstrate financial need can apply for a one-time payment of up to $4,000 to be used for rent. The city will send a check directly to landlords, said Katie Forde, operations manager for Boston’s Office of Housing Stability. Forde added that the program is restricted to people ineligible for the newly extended federal unemployment benefits so as to gear support toward undocumented people and people with informal employment cut off from those federal funds. Elsewhere, similar programs are open either to anyone, or to anyone who can show a documented loss of income.

In Boston, the rush of applications immediately after the system opened proved just how much more was needed. 

Given the huge demand, the city converted the program into a lottery system within a couple of days, confirming that many people who fit its criteria would not get assistance.

Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards, chair of the Housing and Community Development Committee, told the Political Report that even the lottery system plays favorites. Landlords who own more property, and so have more tenants entering the lottery, are likelier to end up recouping the rents they are owed and benefiting from the program. “Why weren’t landlords who live in their units prioritized because we’re also saving them from foreclosure?”, she asked.

San Jose has one of the largest pots of rental assistance funds in the country, after it received millions from private companies like Cisco, Facebook, and Zoom. The fund of more than $11 million was distributed among 4,000 families. Still, even here, more than 9,000 families remain on the waiting list, and calls keep flowing in, said Matt King, an organizer with Sacred Heart Community Service, a nonprofit that administers the fund.

The vast numbers of tenants who lack assistance show, advocates say, that any rental assistance program strong enough to keep families in their homes will require significant federal intervention. 

The NLIHC estimates that it would cost approximately $76.1 billion over the next 12 months to provide relief to the 11.5 million people who are or will become severely burdened by the costs of housing, which it defines as spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent. If relief were extended to renters experiencing less severe burdens—defined as spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent—the cost could reach $99.5 billion.

The CARES Act added $3 billion to federal housing programs such as Section 8 vouchers, which help the lowest-income Americans. But these funds are insufficient to meet even pre-COVID demand, and millions who are newly unable to pay rent will be ineligible to apply. Congressional Democrats proposed allocating $100 billion to short-term rental assistance, but that did not make it into the CARES Act. Groups like NLIHC are pushing for such funding to be included in future stimulus packages. 

The CARES Act also provided $5 billion in supplemental Community Development Block Grant funding, which are federal grants that localities can use for housing or economic development projects. Some have said they will use it towards rent assistance. But there’s no requirement to do so, and no guidance for cities in how to administer such assistance should they choose to. 

“We’re kind of in this difficult place of trying to fit some square pegs into round holes,” said Greg Payne, director of the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, which worked with the state to develop a $5 million assistance program.

**

Even if an influx of federal funding materializes in later federal stimulus bills, it would still leave some housing advocates’ biggest questions about temporary rental assistance unanswered.

Tenants with the greatest needs for immediate relief may be the least able to access them, for one. Many of the emerging assistance programs require proof of COVID-related loss of income, which many low-income workers cannot provide. 

“For undocumented families or people working informally under the table, … it’s really hard to show that you’ve suffered a loss of income,” said Michael Trujillo, staff attorney at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, referring to San Jose’s temporary rental assistance program. “So any kind of documentation requirement is really creating a barrier.” King, the Sacred Heart organizer, said they are conducting outreach to undocumented people to help them apply for future rounds of assistance. 

Edwards, the Boston councilor, also worries that if relief funding is not tied to strong renter protections, it will function as a handout to landlords, without minimizing risks for tenants. “The check goes to the landlord,” she noted. “And if the landlord takes that check and still can evict somebody or raise their rent, I have a problem.” 

Housing advocates agree that rental assistance programs could backfire, paying landlords to keep tenants in their homes for a month or two, only to evict them a couple of months later for non-payment of back rent or future rent. 

Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed a long-awaited bill this week establishing a statewide eviction moratorium, which would stop evictions for 120 days or for 45 days after the state of emergency is lifted, whichever comes first. Dozens of states and cities now have similar moratoriums in place, in addition to a national moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages. 

But most of these policies extend only through April or May, and some landlords are violating them or preparing to rush future evictions, which has left renters at continued risk. The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute estimated earlier in the month that more than 500 eviction cases had been filed since the state’s Housing Court closed to nonessential business; the same is true in other states. “It would be an utter embarrassment if we found out that despite giving out all of this money evictions still go higher,” Edwards said. 

Amy Schur, campaign director of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a housing justice organization, wants measures that ensure that those distributing rental assistance “get a commitment from the landlord to not move to immediately evict the tenant after the rental assistance ends. Or else it is half a Band-Aid, not even a Band-Aid.”

**

Such concerns are pushing some advocates to demand something unprecedented: canceling rent altogether. 

“It’s unconscionable to expect people to pay for things when you’re not allowing them to work, when the greater good of the public health relies on people staying in their homes,” said Dianne Enriquez, who directs housing campaign work at the Center for Popular Democracy. She argues that even broad rental assistance programs would leave too many without assistance, and set up mass evictions. 

She said, “the solution is to completely alleviate the burden, to completely take off the need to pay anything at this moment.” 

The idea of cancelling rents is gaining traction in some of the most rent-burdened parts of the country. In San Jose, councilmembers introduced a proposal to waive rent for three months. With monthly rent in San Jose averaging $3,941, tenants unable to pay rent for three months will likely owe nearly $16,000 in back payments, the councilors argue. Lawmakers in New York and Pennsylvania are now championing legislation to cancel rent payment responsibilities during the crisis; New York’s efforts are backed by prominent Democrats such as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. 

“If our solutions in this moment just include temporary rental assistance of the kind that we already had to get us back to normal, that’s insufficient,” said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator at Housing Justice for All, a New York-based coalition that is pushing for rent suspensions. 

The coalition was fighting to promote affordable housing in the state well before COVID-19, and Weaver hopes that public authorities seize the moment as an opportunity to tackle longstanding challenges. “The housing problems that we have today existed before coronavirus and will exist after coronavirus, and we have an obligation in this moment to be demanding different things,” she said.

Housing Justice for All is also pushing lawmakers to include an option for landlords who are struggling financially to sell their building to the state government or else to turn them over to community land trusts, which are nonprofit local organizations that develop and maintain land for affordable housing. They enter long-term leases with homeowners to stabilize prices. 

This type of trust has been widely embraced by housing advocates in recent years as a way to take units out of the increasingly hostile private market and ensure affordability. In the present crisis, where mass foreclosures loom, the proposal has taken on a new urgency for those who wish to avoid a repeat of the 2008 crisis, when Wall Street took over such distressed properties. U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, has also introduced it in Congress. 

Edwards agreed that policies adopted today cannot just be reduced to temporary measures for an exceptional time. “We had a housing crisis before COVID and all COVID did was pour gasoline on a very hot fire,” she said of Boston. “That’s all it did.” 

The post Cities Roll Out Rent Assistance. Advocates Demand Bigger and Bolder Help. appeared first on Bolts.