Last year, the DC Housing Authority (DCHA) released an alarming report that nearly one-third of the city’s public housing stock was “nearly uninhabitable.” Since then, we’ve been hard at work with other advocates in the city to figure out what to do next.
This spring, we won an important battle, when the City Council allocated $30 million for public housing repairs. While that’s an important victory, we knew we still had a long way to go in our fight for affordable housing and the preservation of our public housing stock.
DCHA recently released a 20-year transformation plan, which we submitted comments for. The good news about the plan: DCHA is using money appropriated by the City Council to repair or renovate 503 units in Judiciary House, Langston Additions, LeDroit Apartments, and Kelly Miller Townhomes. These much-needed repairs take them off the table for potential demolition.
Along with the Washington Legal Clinic, Empower DC, DC Fiscal Policy Institute, Legal Aid Society for the District of Columbia, Legal Counsel for the Elderly, Neighborhood Legal Services Program, and Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, we submitted our comments and recommendations on DCHA’s Transformation Plan.
To put it simply, we’ve got concerns.
We raised issues with DCHA’s plan to relocate more than 2,500 families through the voucher process while taking on a host of unregulated private partnerships. We want to ensure that any families moved from public housing are moved into comparable units without issue and can return to their previous neighborhoods after redevelopment.
We also recommend that DCHA:
In the past, we’ve seen public housing demolition contribute to the displacement of the city’s Black residents living on low-income. We will not allow this to happen again. And we need your help to make it happen.
You can take action right now in three important ways:
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