Marlene Peralta
A recent protests against the cuts at Staten Island's borough hall.
We are the co-chairpersons of Castleton Park, a state and federally subsidized Mitchell-Lama housing development in Staten Island. Over the years, thousands of tenants have lived in our development and created communities, all because of the programs that kept our housing affordable. Our tenant association has fought back against threats from our own landlord, Larry Gluck of Stellar Management, a notorious predatory private equity developer who bought our development with the sole purpose of privatizing our homes and displacing the tenants. He wasn’t able to do it because we organized successfully and fought back, and that is why we continue to have a thriving community today.
Yet today, tenants like me are finding themselves under attack again. This time the threat is coming from Washington. President Trump has proposed a $7.4 billion budget cut to U.S. Department of Housing Development, HUD. This means New York will bear the brunt of this attack because so many neighborhoods across the city rely on HUD funding for their survival. We depend on HUD funding to subsidize our rent and ensure our community’s stability. Millions of other New Yorkers rely on HUD for basic necessities, too. Public housing residents rely on HUD for critical funding to continue to operate housing developments that have been falling into disrepair. Seniors rely on the rental assistance program Section 202 to continue to have safe and habitable developments to live in. For tenants who receive enhanced vouchers (because their Mitchell-Lama or project-based Section 8 development left their program), those enhanced vouchers mean the difference between them being displaced and being able to stay in their home.
New York City’s housing agency, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), is mostly funded through HUD. All tenants across New York City rely on calling 311 to get the HPD Code Enforcement program to inspect and improve the conditions in their apartments. With Trump’s proposed budget cuts, those critical programs will be virtually eliminated for vulnerable New Yorkers. Trump’s budget cuts are a homelessness plan not a housing plan, and it comes at a time when New York City has already seen an exploding homelessness crisis.
On July 6th, we rallied with our tenants and activists across Staten Island at Borough Hall to call on our Congressional Representative, Dan Donovan, to act and organize against Trump’s budget cuts. And on July 12th we took our fight to Washington DC, and joined the first ever tenant march with over 1,000 people from across the nation. In District 11, HUD provides nearly $200 million annually to help his constituents, like us, be able to stay in our homes and access needed services. The area Donovan represents relies on more HUD funding than any other Republican district in New York. We are asking him to show leadership, challenge Trump’s budget cuts and call for full funding for HUD.
We saw our development threatened by a predatory equity landlord. Trump’s track record has been to work closely with private equity firms to design his housing policy, and we have seen how predatory equity has targeted and decimated affordable housing. We are a part of the resistance against predatory equity landlords, and we are calling on the Trump administration and all elected federal representatives to not privatize and hand over the keys to the same landlords who caused our affordability crisis in the first place.
This week we are also joining the national housing week of action to bring more attention to the affordable housing crisis nationwide.
We are calling on Trump and Donovan to fully fund HUD and stop handing our housing over to private equity. This is a critical moment for all of our communities and we need Congress to vote against these proposed disastrous budget cuts.
Judy Montanez and Sharon Valentin are Co-Chairpersons of Castleton Park, a state and federally subsidized Mitchell-Lama housing development.
3 thoughts on “CityViews: Trump’s Budget Cuts to HUD are a Homelessness Plan, not a Housing Plan”
Thank you for your article, for the information and inspiring steps of action your organization is taking. I live in michigan, and have a section 8 voucher, and until I found your article I’d been unable to find anything on people taking steps to fight proposed housing budget changes. Can you publish more information on agencies people can get in touch with to fight proposed housing cuts? Again, thank you.
Well done written beautifully.
If the New York Housing Authority had been operated with integrity and financial responsibility all of these decades, I would feel more empthy towards this issue. But alas it has not. In fact it one of the most mismanaged and corrupt agencies in entire state.
Billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars have been given to the NYC Housing Authority and millions of it ends up in the pockets of union bosses, corrupt political hacks, housing authority personal and their friends, the corruption goes on and on.
The NYC Housing Authority is responsible for the complete failure of its staff to keep their properties functioning, I have seen some of these bozos they call “maintenance staff” They don’t know what a screw driver is let alone how to use one.
The city and the NYC Housing Authority has for decades had its collective heads in the sand, I guess believing that things would just go along as they always do and they the money from DC would just keep pouring in, well now we have a President and Congress saying enough is enough.
I don’t think Trump will get his 8 billion dollar cut but I bet he will get something between 3 to 5 billion. Whatever it is, it will be alot and people need to prepare for that, they should have been preparing long ago, they should have moved on long ago. There are people who have been in these projects for decades, they have utilized hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece over those decades in housing subsidies and they want more!
The reality is that DC has wanted out of the housing business for decades, ever since good ole Ronnie R and budgets have been cut almost every year since 1980. Even during the Clinton and Obama years the budget was cut, it was cut again this year. As much as NYC likes to consider itself the center of the universe, other major cities have already had to do what NYC will be doing soon, rescinding vouchers already in use. Dallas and Houston have already rescinded over 1,500 vouchers, so this is not just a NYC problem.
What will probably happen is that seniors, the disabled and vets will be spared, but able bodied working people with or without kids will be on the chopping block, I suspect the people who have been on the dole the longest will be the first one’s cut, and the will be at the discretion of the NYC Housing Authority, DC will leave the street level dirty work to them.
A lot of people are going to have some hard choices to make, I would be making a plan now! so you know what you are going to do if they take your voucher, don’t wait and foolishly think it won’t happen to you, make a plan and then hope.