National Housing Trust Fund

Please Call Congress National Housing Trust to Get Money Pass This Message on to Others. Let’s Get NHTF Money Before Congress Adjourns for Holidays. Please call your representative and both of your senators on December 1 or 2. Please ask your networks to do the same. Tell them you want at least $1 billion for the National Housing Trust Fund before Congress adjourns later in December. Urge them to support any bill moving through the House or Senate that contains money for the NHTF. Let them know that providing money for the NHTF will create needed jobs. Every $1 billion investment in the NHTF, at $100,000 per unit of housing, will create 15,100 construction jobs and 3,800 jobs in ongoing operations. Also, the NHTF will support local economies as low income families can afford to spend more money on goods and services when they are not spending half or more of their income on housing. Our goal is to create an early-December blizzard of phone calls from all over the country in a compressed period of time to demonstrate strong and urgent support for an initial infusion of money for the NHTF. Please pass this message on to your networks. 877-210-5351 is the toll free number for the congressional switchboard. Ask to be connected to the housing staffer for your representative's and senators' offices. Questions? Contact NEOCH at 216/432-0540 or see the National Low Income Housing Coalition website at www.nlihc.org

The day of Action was Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. We missed posting it, because of other deadlines. You can still call your Congressman especially Senators Brown and Voinovich to urge them to support the creation and preservation of affordable housing.

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

Good Article in the Washington Post

Sexually Based Offender Law Encourages Homelessness

When I started working 14 years ago, everyone who showed up at the door had the possibility of finding housing. Many were not very good candidates for housing because of debt or criminal background, but there was nothing that was an insurmountable barriers to housing homeless individuals. Now, with the ill-conceived sexually based offender laws, there are many people sleeping in our shelters or on the streets that we have no chance of housing. There was a nice article in the Washington Post about this new issue that effects every community in the country.

There are now a group of men and a few woman who have no possibility of getting into housing. Being labeled a "Sexual Predator" for life and all the hassles associated with that make these individuals un-houseable. We can work all day, but the reality is that they cannot work or live near a child care facility, which turns out to be most of the City and County. Then there are the majority of the landlords who do not want the community notification, and so they bar these individuals from renting a place. Almost all the subsidized properties in the community exclude sexually based offenders. So, these men serve their time, and then they are stuck when they get out. In most of the big cities in Ohio, they cannot even sleep in the shelters. We have one facility in Cleveland that still allows homeless people with a sexually based offense to sleep inside. But in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton there are no shelters for the sexually based offenders, and so the men sleep on the streets.

How stupid a system have we designed here? Men who violently attack women or children are released to sleep on the street. How safe is that for the community? It is one thing to punish people, but to force them to live on the streets seems like torture to me. The reality is that a large majority of the people who abuse children have a relationship with the children (family, friends or acquiantences) they abuse. It is rare that a total stranger kidnaps and abuses a child. These cases make the news and terrify parents, but it is not the norm. At this point, the law probably has the opposite affect in that it encourages the death of the child in order to reduce the number of witnesses. The lifetime punishment is so horrible that the offender might as well go all the way in order to avoid life as an outcast. For many death or life in prison is better than life living on the streets. Legislators throughout the United States need to rethink this community notification and bans on where sexually based offenders can live. If we want to go for a life time punishment then we need to set up some special housing for these individuals that they can be monitored. Forcing the shelters/outreach workers to be the lifetime babysitters for those designated as sexually predators is bad public policy.

Brian Davis
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.