We had a very good gathering on Tuesday to discuss a National Day of Action around the end of the eviction moratorium set for October 20. We actually expanded the scope of the demonstrations to include the push to keep the housing funding in the Build Back Better $3 trillion infrastructure bill. Josh gave us a good overview of the days’ action here:
Congress, you put billions of dollars into Emergency Rental Assistance to prevent many evictions. Most of these funds were received by states. Governors, these desperately needed rental assistance dollars are not reaching households and landlords fast enough. You must streamline processes, and stop making struggling people and families jump through hoops to prove we need to keep our homes. You need to empower local organizations to get the money out fast enough to prevent the trauma of eviction and homelessness for as many households as possible. Congress, we thank you for allocating ERA funds, but putting funds into preventing many of us from losing our homes in the middle of a global pandemic is the least you could do. Lack of affordable housing and homelessness existed well before the COVID-19 pandemic. To end homelessness, we need affordable housing. Stop talking about cutting affordable housing from the infrastructure bill. Instead, increase funding for affordable housing in the infrastructure bill. Everything starts with a stable, healthy, affordable home. Bring America Home NOW!
We seem to have some pretty solid plans in place for demonstrations in Cleveland, Cincinnati, DC, Indianapolis, and New York City. There was talk about plans for Minnesota, and Atlanta with a possible virtual presentation in Seattle. We want to keep you updated about all of these local demonstrations so please send me flyers, press releases, or anything else you have to distribute for your local event. Then after certainly send along pictures so that we can post them on social media. Also, if you were not able to make the call, but would like to host action on October 20 around the area of evictions or infrastructure or both let us know. I have included the graphic from the national day of action.
Here is a link to the Cleveland sign up https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IcrJeh5BOGvLF2hbQo-KOdwfhYyQmxSY8Ir03JGqXPs/viewform?chromeless=1&edit_requested=true
Here is the flyer for the DC-specific event. DC Flyer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rL1SnjqYhml_Xa71Sjxm-csEeeEKCGNF/view?usp=sharing
There was an NYC flyer as well, but I am not sure it was complete. We will send it out as soon as we get a final version.
We also had a nice discussion about the Leadership Conference and we went over the agenda for the day. We will have a revised version out to you shortly, but here is a link to the sign-up for the event. We hope that you will all be able to attend one or both of the days. https://nationalhomeless.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpd-CsrjopGNXEo0dhUngLhNGG8SelDAKo