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Community works if we get out of the way and let it operate. People themselves directly impacted know exactly what they need and want. HUD has now become so top heavy that it's falling down with a thud. People who live in subsidized housing are people too. People who live in subsidized housing may move on from their subsidies in every instance that they possibly can. We are grateful for the subsidization but will graduate from that stage in life if we are able to. Many of us are active insightful fair and balanced community contributors even in the deepest poverty with extremely low income. To protect my tenancy somewhere that I live with subsidized housing is the least that you would think that the government could do. How is the common good impacted by landlords who don't even keep a social contract with a public trust to the common good? If greed is what drives the owners, landlords, property managers and master renovators then how will renters and tenants ever come to the same tables with those designers and profit makers. If they're in it for profit-monging, then their maniacally giant mindsets will continue to gouge community. It should not matter to an owner whatsoever what my source of income is as long as it is steady and adequate. Whether I'm a senior or a soldier or school-age child if I have a subsidy or military benefits or a voucher due to being an emancipated foster child or a survivor of domestic abuse and trafficking it should not matter my resources. In fact one protection we could offer tenants is a central repository of information on who are the evictors. And who are the repetitive predatory landlords. We should be able to look them up just as they would like to look up our histories. That comes up a lot in meetings. Both parties should be able to reference each other and we should know who are landlords who kick people out after 90 days having charge them three times the rent and deposit and calling those renters high risk. We should know who the high-risk landlords are. And if we do happen to have a past eviction or bankruptcy or low credit score on our record and even a decades-old felony these should not be impediments to our ability to rent in subsidized housing. After 3 years any of those records should Fall away because people generally speaking go on the up and up and do better when they are able to do better. Another thing that comes up a lot in meetings is the idea that instead of having every tenant every year run around to every agency proving up every venue whether that be for food stamps, energy assistance, renters rebate, medicaid, HUD housing, or the Social Security administration we know that all that information is easily accessible by all the agents amongst each other but they make us run around and collect it all when that's not necessary anymore because we can send pictures of those by cell phone. If we have a cell phone. And we need not inspect the housing every 12 months any longer if it passed nicely 24 months ago. If that were the case then that should be adequate to let two years go by. We learned that during covid but now we're not acting like it. This is torturous to the poor and disproportionately arduous for us while the owners whine and carry on about their administrative burden. Even the mitigation funds that are set aside for them don't get used on the whole because they're so busy turning the units and in that churn continuing their profit. They can't be bothered to apply for any mitigation funds because they just fix the punch marks in the walls or repaint the place. The proportion of units that may have had a violent action in it is far lower than the repute of the subsidized programs. And in fact it could be an autistic child or a youth with learning disabilities who might have taken markers and drawn On The Wall etc. To say that section 8 housing choice voucher residence trash the joint is language I've heard from very classy workshop providers and I've had to raise my hand and say could we please not talk about our families that way. Another program called Supportive Housing in my state I've heard referred to as eats and sheets and that was really very upsetting and derogatory. People should have respect for each other's humanity and know that they themselves could end up homeless a couple of paychecks from now if they happen to need a new muffler or have to take their whole family on the Greyhound bus to a family funeral or had exceptional dental bills to pay and were torn between the rent and the bad debt. There needs to be emergency rental assistance that will help people to stay put where they are and that can only be good for school age children from kindergarten through sixth grade who deserve to have a cohort and a place they can call home in a 6-year period where they can learn from when they leave preschool all the way through to when they entered Junior High in the same district, in the same neighborhood, with their same siblings and their buddy pals from down the block. The teachers get to know them as a presence in the school buildings too, instead of bouncing around in a constant way. That has to be impacting the brains of our future leaders for now in the K to sixth cohort. It has to be impacting their hopes and dreams. And it's our responsibility to stabilize our renters and people directly impacted. The hmis system, coordinated entry, the Continuum of care, and the point in time count are all extremely underrepresenting of how people are doubled and tripled up in the community and truly need to be abolished and reinvented from the ground up. HUD is not enforcing or reachable regards its own rules and probably should be smashed and rebuilt as well. The fact that people in our nation who are governmentally subsidized are living with mold, radon, lead pipes, lead paint, asbestos, and other toxins in their neighborhoods or nearby their homes including traffic and diesel in the air only marks us as that much more uncaring. We take the poorest of the poor and give them the worst of the worst housing sites. That says a lot about how much we care. The fact that we come in and flip properties and hundreds of people are out on their ear is also highly insulting when families and individuals need to be able to move about in community at the time and place of their own choosing not so some Richie Rich guy can get richer quicker. In order to protect tenants if a building is to be bought or turned into condos or cooperative anyone who's been there over a year should always have at least a year to hunt for a new place to go and be provided relocation funds as well as counseling guidance and navigation for same. If HUD does not meet with the residents themselves but keeps talking about us without us HUD is going to continue to fail as it has in the past well into the future. HUD is required to have resident councils in all of its housing authorities but it's been my experience that if you call and say "good morning I'd like to be on your Resident Council ," I am told ~oh sorry not enough people were interested but if you have any new good ideas always free feel free to call us~. And then later I'll meet two or three or more other section 8 voucher holders who will say *hey I wanted to be on that advisory myself but they told me there was not enough interest*. Well it turns out anecdotally we find each other and it proves there was enough interest but the Housing Authority wants to keep us separated and the Housing Authority is therefore not in compliance. Last year a pilot was tried where more than 50 vouchers went to families through the Head Start program who is not typically a housing vendor. This is the kind of thing that should be going on for vouchers on demand based upon income and those don't need to be reassessed every year but every 5 years is often enough. That way if a family does better for a period That could set that money aside and be ready to buy a home at the earliest possible convenience. But instead we like to keep the poor people down and apart from each other and without homeownership because it serves the purpose of having a department like HUD with many employees in perpetuity. Those many employees like their salary and their benefits and their retirement and they're really not thinking with compassion about eliminating their own positions and getting worked out of a job because there no longer would be homelessness or insecure and unstable housing. The supply is lacking of actual housing units when created will be a protection for tenants as well. Tenants need protection that that deeply affordable housing supply be provided here and now. We've been waiting long enough. The people in greatest need the longest time are using their voices and as the missing middle starts to be encroached upon and feels what the poor have been saying for quite some time there's going to be an uprising and HUD better get more woke to it or HUD'S going to be made to look very silly and very backward.
Let's show some decency and dignity and respect for our poor. In fact let's take people from homelessness to homeowning and leave out the middleman. HUD is really not doing its job. If buildings are being sold off and 45% of the people who lived in them are being displaced or if complexes have broken windows and no heat or a lack of security at the outer doors or vermin or other infestation then how does not doing its job whatsoever. To allow the residents themselves to own the properties in cooperatives or condominiums would be a much smarter way to go because it would have local control and people know themselves what they need and want because they themselves need to be at the designing table and to help evaluate as well as to make the changes in a flexible way. HUD is too top heavy and to rule burdened to be effective or impactful in a good way. Hud's impact is mostly negative, slow, distant, detached and ineffective. Just listening to town hall meetings that HUD runs and has the elective questions already mapped out is not the same as a listening session. An actual listening session starts from scratch and comes up from what the people in the room want to talk about that day. HUD needs to listen to people like me right here and right now. HUD needs to be dismantled and redesigned into something that works for the current day and age. The 60 days to lose your voucher after you've been waiting 5 years to get it is one of the more archaic rules ever invented and is still in place 50 years later. That's for a rule that's not working. And HUD has been told that hundreds of times but does nothing about it or sits up in their offices and talks to each other about how handy that rule is for clipping people off the program. That devastates hope. That hurts families. That depresses individuals. And each individual at HUD who reads every syllable of this please know I am not angry or bitter. I am hurt. I am spent. I am tired. I am all used up. I am mis-abused. You have used my volunteer voice for going on a decade now and I've been saying these same identical things that entire time since 2015. You listen and you might even cheerlead a little or clap your hands as HUD but you don't change. And if you think that our most deeply poor Americans are going to own their own homes easily in upcoming days without HUD changing you've got another thing coming. HUD needs to change not the poor folks. Poor folks know exactly what they need want and desire and can be the creator of their own destiny but HUD needs to get out of the way because Community works if we do just get out of the way and let it