Housing Campaign Achievements
In the past two years, leaders of our Housing Committee:
- ♥ Moved Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to back us in developing and executing a historic count of empty buildings and vacant lots in Manhattan. This successful initiative led to widespread public acknowledgement of the extent of the problem of building vacancies.
- ♥ Exposed the absence of participation of homeless New Yorkers in the Mayor’s newly released 5 Year Plan to End Homelessness, forcing high-level officials from the Department of Homeless Services to meet with us on July 1st, 2004, to discuss our involvement in the planning process. The pressure we brought moved the Department of Homeless Services to convene workgroups to oversee implementation of the Mayor’s 5-Year Action Plan—and secured homeless involvement in those workgroups.
- ♥ Developed a legislative platform to address the tens of thousands of units of housing currently lying empty and abandoned in poor neighborhoods. We also secured a commitment from a City Councilmember to introduce anti-warehousing legislation based on this platform, and pressured the Commissioner of DHS to back this plan as “a good long-term goal.”
- ♥ Convened representatives from 27 NYC community groups that work on issues pertaining to housing and homelessness to plan an advocacy agenda to fight the federal government’s proposal to destroy funding for Section 8 housing vouchers. Our informal NYC “Save Section 8” group carried out an exciting demonstration at the local offices of HUD, which garnered favorable coverage in a major New York daily paper. As part of a dynamic nation-wide network of advocacy and activism, our work resulted in the threatened cuts being removed from HUD’s budget proposal.
- ♥ Moved shelter staff to support the organizing agenda of homeless families when the Bloomberg Administration announced they were cutting the homeless priority for access to Section 8 housing vouchers (which happened as soon as we won the fight to keep the federal government from slashing Section 8)!
- ♥ Served as consultants in the development of effective “Client Advisory Boards” (CABs) at several city soup kitchens. CABS are a powerful potential vehicle for homeless people to have substantive involvement and real power in the operation of the facilities that serve them.
- ♥ Built our internal capacity to the point where our committee could hold two simultaneous actions with great success—a week before the 2004 Presidential Elections, we protested the campaign offices of both major candidates, demanding the inclusion of a housing and homelessness agenda in their party platforms.
- ♥ Produced a powerful short film, “Picture the Homeless Here,” about abandoned buildings and New York City’s housing crisis. This film was selected for the first-ever Organizing Film Festival here in NYC.
- ♥ Won election of two housing leaders to the Steering Committee of the NYC Continuum of Care planning process, which determines how $84 Million of HUD funding for services and housing is allocated every year.
- ♥ Attended a conference on Supportive Housing at the invitation of the Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in June of 2004; also, we were invited in May of 2005 by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty to participate in a national conference on the Human Right to Housing, in Washington D.C. A leader of our housing committee was the only homeless person to speak at the conference.
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