Metropolitan St Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council

"In late June, in a video on the news site Unicorn Riot, the activist Jennifer Bennetch was standing around, waiting to announce an occupation. The video showed her in front of the headquarters for the Philadelphia Housing Authority, wearing a fanny pack and a colorful print hijab, bouncing anxiously on her heels, then glancing over her shoulder as if to make sure the coast was clear. Yet once she began, she spoke calmly and deliberately, proceeding almost without pause. The ...housing authority, she explained, owns hundreds of row houses in North Philadelphia. Over the past decade, some of the houses had been boarded up and some sold off to developers. She had a list. A number of the boarded-up houses, she revealed, weren’t empty: Families had been living in them since March. The video caused a sensation. News outlets called Bennetch and asked, dumbfounded, how she’d done it. The Philadelphia Housing Authority sent her a cease and desist letter. Over the ensuing months, a raft of stories were written about the occupied homes, and by the end of the fall, in a surprising victory, the city agreed to turn over 50 houses to a community land trust that Bennetch would help run."

"Tyeicha Scott, 38, moved into a home in Cahokia nearly four years ago next to a broken lift station and was never told about the issues. She spent nearly $1,500 replacing her plumbing without knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. She and her fiancé have two young children, ages 4 and 6. They can’t use their sinks. They have to buy water for drinking and cooking. Like many residents, she must keep the cap off the cleanout pipe in her backyard so that sewage spills out onto the grass instead of her toilet. 'My backyard be full of nothing but sewage water, and it stink so bad, we can’t even stand in the kitchen and cook our meal,' Scott said. 'I feel so bad for my babies. They are scared if you flush the toilet while they are in the tub because feces going to come up through it.'"

"The year-old federal moratorium which has now been extended through June 30 has probably kept hundreds of thousands or millions of people from being evicted from their apartments and homes. More than 10 million Americans are behind on rent, according to Moody’s, easily topping the 7 million who lost their homes to foreclosure in the 2008 housing bust. Despite the unprecedented federal effort to protect tenants, landlords have been chipping away at the moratorium in court. Six lawsuits have made their way before federal judges with three ruling in support of the ban and three calling it illegal."

"Invitation Homes, the largest provider of single-family homes for rent in the U.S., reported that 2020 was its most profitable year ever, despite the coronavirus pandemic. The company, which was founded in 2012, worked to collect and rent out tens of thousands of homes that were emptied after the 2008 financial crisis. Last year, Invitation Homes raked in $50 million more in rent on those houses than it did in 2019, CBS News reported. In total, the company's profits rose by 30 percent during the pandemic, up from nearly $150 million in 2019 to almost $200 million in 2020. Additionally, shares of the company grew in the past year to 64 percent, and dropped just one dollar from their all-time high."

#FYI #TheMoreYouKnow #HousingIsHealthcare #COVID19 #STL

"As shocking as this may seem today, discrimination against women seeking housing and mortgages was rampant until the mid-1970s, manifesting in a variety of punishing, even invasive, indignities. Lenders commonly refused to count a young woman’s full income when determining whether to make a mortgage. Some loan officers asked for 'baby letters,' written promises that a woman would continue working if she had a child. It also wasn’t unheard of for lenders to require letters from a woman’s doctor stating she was on birth control."

"In the past year, the housing market has laid bare the harms these rules have done. As mortgage rates bottomed out, would-be homeowners flooded the market only to find they were fighting over scraps. Tales abound of these people desperately shoving all-cash offers well over the asking price to sellers and increasingly making offers on homes sight unseen. Middle- and low-income renters watched from the sidelines, their hopes of homeownership dashed as they shell out dangerously high proportions of their income to rent. This frenzy leads many to a simple question: Where are all the homes? While the pandemic and low interest rates certainly played a large role, America’s housing supply problem is long-running."

"Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed dual crises. More than 542,000 Americans lives were lost and continue to increase. At the same time, the rippling effects of a massive economic downturn have caused the nation to lose 9.5 million jobs more losses than even those of the Great Recession, finds the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. Although many officials have called for a 'return to normal,' millions of small businesses and communities need something new instead. In Black America especially, the old normal never delivered equitable access to wealth-building opportunities as those that well-served served much of white America. Instead, a lengthy history of public policies designed to create and sustain a burgeoning middle class systemically excluded Blacks and other people of color."

"The Illinois Supreme Court issued an order this week creating stronger safeguards for tenants seeking rent relief under the governor’s eviction moratorium. The court’s revised order makes clear that landlords challenging a tenant’s eviction moratorium protections have to state the legal and factual basis for such a challenge, said Chief Judge Eugene G. Doherty, of the 17th Judicial Circuit, which spans Boone and Winnebago counties. Doherty is vice chair of the Illinois Supreme Court’s Court Operations During COVID-19 Task Force, which was created in June 2020 and makes recommendations to the Illinois Supreme Court."

"Over the past year, Abacus customers have weathered not only the pandemic which started earlier in Chinatown due to xenophobia and loss of foot traffic but also fear of the rising wave of violent attacks against people of Asian descent in the U.S. In Chinatown and other Chinese immigrant neighborhoods across New York City, businesses that have barely survived their toughest year yet are now opening later in the day or closing earlier just so that workers feel safer commuting. And Chinatown has always been a larger draw, with people living all over the region coming every weekend to go out to eat or shop weekly visitors now concerned about violent attacks against Asian Americans."

"Opening April 5th, 2021, the COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) will provide back rent and temporary rental assistance to low- and moderate-income households that have had a loss of income, have qualified for unemployment benefits, faced significant costs, or experienced financial hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nan McKay & Associates has been authorized by the St. Louis County to assist in the administration of ERAP and to communicate with applicants and landlords."

"For most Americans, the third stimulus payment, like the first two, arrived as if by magic, landing unprompted in the bank or in the mail. Imagine not having a bank account or a mailing address. Or a phone. Or identification. Charlie Velez, sitting on a milk crate outside the Grand Street subway station on the Lower East Side last month clinking 65 cents in a paper cup, is 0 for 3 on stimulus checks. 'I didn’t know the process,' he said."

In response to COVID-19, I wanted to share what EHOC is doing to ensure the health and well-being of our clients, staff, volunteers, partners, and the larger community. Please know that our number one priority is to continue to provide vital client services in a safe and responsible way. We want to ensure our clients, staff, volunteers and community partners will not suffer loss of service, or be placed at-risk of exposure. Beginning Monday, March 16, staff and interns will b...e working remotely. Fortunately, many of our systems and procedures are already in place to ensure that EHOC remains functional. However, we will not be accepting walk-in clients at this time. Our telephones and voicemails will be forwarded and checked regularly. Please continue to contact us at 314-534-5800. You can reach staff and interns at the appropriate extension, as well as the Landlord Tenant hotline and the Discrimination hotline. We will be utilizing conference calls and videoconferencing options to hold meetings. You can also reach staff over email. Our email addresses are always our first initial last name @ehoc-stl.org. For example, [email protected], [email protected]. We are not scheduling any fair housing trainings, presentations, or events. We will defer to partner organizations policies and procedures for any existing trainings that may go on or be cancelled. We are closely monitoring the situation to determine if EHOC’s annual fair housing conference will continue on April 24. We are in communication with the Missouri History Museum and our speakers and hope to make a decision in the next few weeks. We will update you on our decision as soon as possible over social media and email. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you for working with us as we navigate this time. I hope you and your family stay safe and healthy. - Will Jordan, EHOC Executive Director

"A group of researchers wanted to access the truth of what people value and remember most about St. Louis, without assuming publicly acknowledged symbols of the city like the World’s Fair Pavilion, or the historic district, or even the city’s famous Gateway Arch mean anything to them. So they began by letting residents decide what’s on the map."

"Fair-housing advocates have long pointed to evidence of persistent racial discrimination in housing. Decades of research have revealed bias in mortgage lending, including the harmful legacy of redlining. Undercover investigations have exposed pervasive discrimination by some real estate brokers, with agents being accused of steering Black home buyers away from White areas or denying them basic information to make a home purchase easier."

EHOC is currently seeking multilingual volunteers to help in our mission to identify Fair Housing Act violations in the #STL rental market. We will be holding a volunteer training (over Zoom) on Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 10 AM- 12 PM. To register for the training, please contact Katina Combs at [email protected] or(314) 534-5800 ext. 7015. Check out the flyer for more information!

"'It's a great start,' Andre Perry, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, where he studies race and housing, said in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition. But Perry, the author of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities, added, 'The problem with it is that housing entails so many different regulatory agencies, so many different jurisdictions that HUD may not be able to reach many of the issues that hurt Black, brown and Asian people.'"

"The Biden administration intends to promote fair housing in a country where the cost of housing is continuously slipping out of reach for millions of people. On Tuesday, Biden signed a memorandum directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to take steps to promote equitable housing politics, according to a senior administration official. Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said every year about 4 million people face discrimination when they are trying to purchase or rent homes, or while getting home loans and insurance for their houses or apartments."

"Homeownership was, and remains, the beating heart of wealth accumulation for the American middle class. Our society privileges homeowners in everything from the tax code to the availability of home equity lines to membership requirements for neighborhood associations. You buy a place, that place grows in value, and either you trade up to a bigger place or you keep it until you can pass it down to your kids or your kids get the money from its sale. Stability gives birth to ev...en more stability. That’s not what happened with Dee’s family. 'My grandparents were bludgeoned every time the economy took a downturn,' Dee recalls, in part because of the legacy of redlining and the devaluation of property in Black neighborhoods. 'They ended up losing their house. They had enough to live on, but no wealth.' The same happened to her parents. She says they were 'destroyed' by the 2008 housing crisis, which disproportionately affected Black homeowners, many of whom, because of longstanding discriminatory lending practices, believed subprime mortgages were the best financing option available to them. Dee’s grandparents managed to make ends meet, but their retirement savings were drastically diminished, and they’ll eventually require some subsidization from Dee."