Homelessness Law Blog

Yesterday, the Senate passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, sweeping legislation that covers a broad range of financial and housing policy issues. The House had already passed the same bill on June 29. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation into law during the week of July 19. The Act contains several key provisions of importance to homeless and low income Americans.

Of particular note is an extension and clarification of the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act (PTFA), which ensures that renters whose properties go into foreclosure – through no fault of their own – receive adequate notice so they can find new homes. The Law Center helped spur the passage of PTFA last year and has since been advocating for its extension past the original sunset date of 2012. Dodd-Frank extends it to 2014.

To read more about PTFA, see our commentary in the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity.

The bill also provides new funding for foreclosure prevention measures and efforts to help rebuild housing in blighted communities. Read more about these provisions here.

Today we celebrate these significant victories for housing advocates and the American people!

Photo credit: carlossg

This morning, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness announced the release of Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. The plan, which will be the Obama Administration’s official policy position on homelessness, will give direction to the federal agencies and guidance to state and local governments. 

The plan does a great job of outlining the issues.  It’s comprehensive, covers all populations, and acknowledges different federal definitions of homelessness and their importance — as opposed to the Council’s past tendency to recognize only the HUD definition of homelessness.  The goals are also good; this is the first federal government document to explicitly call for preventing and ending family homelessness in ten years. (more…)

Amid the hand wringing attending most conversations about the soaring national deficit, one word tends to surface with particular urgency: transformation.  At a moment of dwindling federal resources, many argue, nothing short of a dramatic overhaul of traditional government services is necessary in order to replenish public coffers.  As often as not, moreover, the private market has been identified as the necessary catalyst to trigger such alchemy.

The concept of galvanizing an established approach to social service delivery certainly underlies the Preservation, Enhancement, and Transformation of Rental Assistance (PETRA) Act, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development recently proposed as a means of channeling additional funding into the country’s cash-starved public housing system.  By inviting private investment—and, some would add, the potential for private ownership—into the domain of public rental housing, HUD has prompted a conversation about the relative merits of security and experimentation in social policy.

A similar debate has emerged with respect to public education, long a breeding ground for market-driven reform proposals. In addition to promoting the expansion of privately administered charter schools, the U.S. Department of Education continues to condition federal funding on such quantifiable measures as standardized test data, an approach that all but ignores the social and economic factors behind educational achievement.  As one analyst has noted, the U.S. has shifted “from a focus on providing equality in the ‘inputs’ of education—family environment, community conditions, and so on… to a focus on providing equality in the ‘outputs.’” (more…)

For the past two days, I’ve been in Chicago, participating in one of the final government consultations with community groups in preparation for the U.S. review by the UN Human Rights Council under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) (see earlier posts on consultations in DC and NYC).

The government brought a full delegation of representatives from the Departments of State, Justice and Housing & Urban Development, which recognizes the key point that this conversation, even though it’s taking place as part of an international review, is inherently about how domestic policy protects – or fails to protect – human rights.

Speaker after speaker shared stories of one of the most acute failures in recent history: the ongoing housing crisis.  At best, the government turned a blind eye to the consequences of deregulating the housing market so lenders could make huge profits off predatory loans. At worst, the government actively participated in creating segregated communities and destroying affordable housing with no plan to recreate it.

Though many stories were shared, I want to focus in on one that shows the intersection of the housing and justice systems, and where a simple change could make a huge difference.  (more…)

Last Friday, senior members of five government agencies held a meeting with about 2 dozen domestic human rights organizations to gather their input as part of the government’s preparation to submit its report for the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on how the U.S. is meeting its human rights obligations.  Just one of hundreds of meetings of advocates and government officials that happen every day in Washington, DC.  But as I rode the train home from the UPR consultation, I really started to think about this meeting and what it meant to me personally.

For the past six years, since I graduated from law school, one of my main professional goals has been to generate a real domestic human rights dialogue in this country using these UN human rights treaty processes and mechanisms as a point for beginning the conversation.  For five of those years, under the Bush Administration, we met with officials in the State Department who were responsible for dealing with these human rights treaties. But as domestic advocates, we knew that the State Department wasn’t who we really needed to talk to – it was HUD, or the DOJ, or the Education Department – the agencies who make policy that affects the people whose rights we work to protect.  We demanded that these agencies be brought into the process, not just for the State Department to gather information from, but for State to send the recommendations of the human rights monitoring bodies to, so they could implement them.  And we demanded that these agencies be brought into a conversation with advocates so we could talk directly to them about their human rights obligations.For five years, we made incremental progress, but not much in terms of tangible change.  This was tremendously frustrating, but as advocates, we knew that we couldn’t give up.  And even though we couldn’t see it immediately, our message that we were serious and weren’t going away was sinking in, especially with career staff in the State Dept.

At this meeting on Friday, and in the meetings that have happened in New Orleans and Chicago, and are scheduled in NYC, Albuquerque, Dearborn, Birmingham, and San Francisco, we have finally begun to get what we’ve been asking for.  We have seen several meetings with senior governmental staff, not just in State, but in Justice, Education, Labor, Housing & Urban Development, Homeland Security, OMB, etc., where domestic government agencies have engaged in a dialogue based on the assumption that they do have human rights obligations, and that they may have to do something to address them.

I know that dialogue is just dialogue – it’s still a far way from policy change and even further from change on the ground.  And to date, many of the recommendations of these human rights bodies – for a stop to the demolitions of public housing, for one-for-one replacement of subsidized housing units, for a concrete plan and actions to remedy the disparate racial impact of homelessness on African Americans – have not happened, even under the Obama Administration.  But I do think this is the beginning of the conversation we’ve been asking for; at least now there are people in these agencies who will know what we’re talking about when we talk about their human rights obligations.

After a while of wondering if what we’re doing is making a difference, I’ve got hope again that we’re beginning to see a fundamental shift in the effectiveness of our advocacy as human rights advocates.  And that’s something worth celebrating even on a grey, snowy day.

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director