Public Housing, Renewable Energy, Brazilian Coup

Trump Administration Moves to Increase Rent on Millions of Poor Public Housing Tenants

Interview with Diane Yentel, president and CEO of National Low Income Housing Coalition, conducted by Scott Harris

As many as two million public housing tenants could face rent increases if Congress approves a proposal made by the Trump administration’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Dr. Carson, a former neurosurgeon, announced his plan called, “The Making Affordable Housing Work Act” on April 25. The reform package would also require households that receive federal housing subsidies to pay 35 percent of their gross income in rent, up from the current 30 percent required – and would triple the minimum monthly rent for the poorest families from $50 to $150.

The HUD proposal would also allow local public housing authorities to impose work requirements on renters. That effort is supported by President Trump, who signed an executive order mandating that federal agencies evaluate employment rules for most government welfare programs.

With this initiative and others, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans aim to restrict access to federal social safety net programs and reduce the levels of assistance allocated to low-income individuals and families who qualify. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, who takes a critical look at HUD’s effort to impose rent increases and work requirements – and the consequences for millions of poor Americans.
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DIANE YENTEL: I think what’s especially appalling about these proposed rent increases is that they target the very poorest people, including seniors and people with disabilities who are already often living on fixed incomes and are at significant risk of homelessness. The proposal would increase rents for households with high medical or high childcare expenses by eliminating income deductions for those expenses. So the greatest burdens would be felt by seniors, people with disabilities and families with young kids who who tend to have those high costs. So I think it’s appalling and it’s important to recognize that these attempts to raise those rents on the most vulnerable people are really part of a larger assault by this administration on the entire social safety net. And I think that this administration’s proposals to take away what are already very limited benefits for the healthcare, for food and for housing from struggling families just months after giving massive tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations is really an astonishing level of hypocrisy.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I wondered if you would address Ben Carson’s statement where he talked about the justification for these rent increases, trying to get away from a system that he claims has introduced perverse incentives, discouraging employment by many public housing tenants. How do you respond to the idea that somehow the federal subsidies coming from HUD are discouraging people from being gainfully employed and earning larger incomes?

DIANE YENTEL: First of all, that kind of rhetoric is really unfortunate because it’s a purposeful attempt to kind of separate out what some might consider the deserving poor from the undeserving poor. Right? And when we look at who is receiving housing assistance today, the vast majority of them are seniors. They’re people with disabilities; they are caretakers for people with disabilities or very young kids or they are working, but they’re working very low wage jobs. The kind of jobs where you can’t pay the kind of rents that are out there today and the kind of jobs where often it can be difficult to kind of cobble together enough hours in a week or in a month to make ends meet.

So, creating arbitrary work requirements where you’re setting a kind of arbitrary bar for the number of hours that needs to be worked in a week. If that family isn’t able to get that number of hours in that week or in that month and they fall below that bar, are we really proposing that that family should be evicted from their housing? I mean, who is that helping? Especially in the midst of the type of housing crisis that we’re in today.

There are programs within Secretary Carson’s purview within the Department of Housing and Urban Development that could work to help people increase their earnings – programs like something called the family self-sufficiency program. There’s another program called the Section 3 program and that requires local communities to use HUD dollars that create jobs to first offer those jobs to low-income tenants or other low-income residents in the community. That’s a regulation that’s really very loosely overseen. Secretary Carson could do much more on that. He could seek funding to take the family self-sufficiency program to scale, but he’s not doing any of those things. Instead, he’s proposing policies really that are punishing poor people for being poor.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Diane, I wanted to ask you about the impact of this increased rent and the work requirements. What’s the liable to be the outcome for some of these poorer families that will be out the other end of this policy if it goes through Congress?

DIANE YENTEL: Well, so here’s something that we’ve known about housing costs for decades and have had general agreement among housing experts and policy makers, and that is that if you’re paying more than 30 percent of your income towards rent each month, you’re considered to be cost burdened. It means that you have limited income left over for all of life’s other necessities. When you’re low income to begin with and you’re paying more than 30 percent of your very limited income, you have even less left for things like healthy food or medicine to stay healthy or saving for the future, saving for college or saving for retirement. So what HUD is actually proposing to do here is to increase the rent burdens on some of the lowest income people across the country. For most residents of HUD’s major rental programs, it would mean increasing their rent from 30 percent of their income up to 35 percent of their income and from 30 percent of adjusted where they make some adjustments for those high medical costs or childcare costs to 35 percent of gross without any deductions at all.

That’s a really significant (increase) for very low income people and for the very lowest, the poorest and the most vulnerable households that are in HUD homes today. They typically pay what’s called a minimum rent, which could be up to about $50 a month for them. HUD is proposing a mandatory minimum rent of a $150. So tripling the rent of literally the poorest and most vulnerable households. So any of this will mean that people will be at a much higher risk of not being able to pay the rent, facing possible eviction and possible homelessness.

For more information, visit National Low Income Housing Coalition at nlihc.org.

Renewable Energy and Cooperative Model Work Together to Empower Communities
Interview with Shakoor Aljuwani, Co-op Power chairman and NYC Community Energy Co-operative coordinator, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

An Albany, New York protest on April 23, dubbed “Walk the Talk” on climate leadership, drew more than 1,500 people — the city’s largest climate action ever. A broad coalition of activists from across the state gathered that day to demand New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo take action for a fossil-free world.

At a training session the day before the rally and mass non-violent civil disobedience action, one of the presenters was Shakoor Aljuwani, coordinator of the New York City Community Energy Co-operative and chairperson of Co-op Power, which is a decentralized network of community energy cooperatives. He described how different forms of renewable energy and the cooperative model can work together to empower communities with both energy independence and economic development.

Aljuwani says renewable energy can provide good-paying jobs that workers can feel satisfied about, rather than contributing to the degradation of environment. He adds that renewable energy co-ops are a way to keep money circulating through low-income communities. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus attended the training and spoke with Aljuwani after his presentation.
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SHAKOOR ALJUWANI: We’re building a multi-race, multi-class movement for sustainable energy. Part of that is being able to set up a network of cooperatives where we can make decisions about what our energy needs are in our local areas and then we will able to use our cooperative power to be able to finance those new solutions. So whether it’s building a bio-diesel plant made from recycled vegetable oil in Greenfield (Massachusetts), or a worker co-op energy efficiency installation in Holyoke with Energia or putting solar arrays on low-income housing cooperatives as we’re doing in New York City, it’s an approach where each city can decide what their focus is and then use our cooperative power as a local area and as a region to make our solutions work.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So who’s funding this?

SHAKOOR ALJUWANI: We fund it largely through our own efforts, and that’s the power of it. We’ll go out and get grants and some other things to try to supplement – like a grant to do worker training or some other thing like that – but generally, we started with our cooperative dollars and then we use new ideas like bringing strategic tax investors who are looking for a tax break and at the same time concerned about their communities and their planet and want to figure out a way to support innovative approaches. So we use those to help us finance initially on the solar array, like putting 7.9 kw on Nazareth Housing in the Lower East Side and through an approach where we will buy that investor out within 5 or 7 years and either keep it in the cooperative or sell it back at extremely good rate to the building or organization it’s part of.

BETWEEN THE LINES: It sounds like you mostly work in New York and Massachusetts now, is that right?

SHAKOOR ALJUWANI: Yes, and we’re also doing work in Burlington, Vermont. Put a solar array on top of the food co-op in Burlington.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Great, great. I’ve been to Burlington and I’ve been to the co-op. That seems like a good fit. I just wonder, in the states where you have been working, are there state policies that are helping or hindering this great-sounding project?

SHAKOOR ALJUWANI: Well, we started out a lot of activity in Massachusetts and for a good bit of time Massachusetts, along with California, has been a leader in the country for green energy. There’s been some backsliding on that, but we’ve developed a network and we have an approach where we try to connect up with folks inside those bureaucratic systems that are trying to make a difference, and they are – they’re there – and figure out how we can squeeze the most good out of whatever policies a state has.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And what about utilities? In Connecticut, we’ve been trying to get shared solar year after year at the General Assembly. There’s some hope we’ll get it this year, but every other year the utilities have opposed it so fiercely, and they’ve thrown a lot of money at it and we haven’t been able to get it through, even though it’s common in a lot of other states.

SHAKOOR ALJUWANI: Yeah, it’s a problem. The situation is slowly improving, but way too slowly. And we’ve done the same, where we try to develop a good working relationship with the folks inside – whether it’s Con Edison in New York City or Eversource or some of the others. But it’s a difficult battle, and we see now that we not only got to work to provide the positive solutions but we have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with folks that are out there fighting to open some doors so that renewable energy is really supported and given the chance it needs to make a difference. And we have to figure out a way to retrain people for jobs for the future that makes sense and to me – renewable energy – there’s no better jobs that we can create, that you’re creating jobs that can be decent jobs, good jobs, and jobs you can go home from feeling like you did something positive, you did something good – not rape and destroy the planet. Not only jobs, but we’re able to create wealth and bring monies from the sun creating energy on our roofs, that that money can stay in the community instead of going to investors in some other place.

So it’s important for us to look at the power of cooperatives and the power of solar energy and other renewables as a way of making a difference and hopefully being able to stop the aggressive growth of climate change.

For more information, visit Cuomo Walk The Talk on Climate Action at cuomowalkthetalk.org; on Facebook at facebook.com/events/310284546148736/.

‘Right-Wing Coup’ in Brazil Succeeds in Removing Workers Party Leaders from Power
Interview with Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil, conducted by Scott Harris

The imprisonment of Brazil’s popular former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva on April 7 appears to have completed what many observers charge is a successful right-wing coup undertaken against the nation’s progressive Workers Party leadership. Lula, who had been a leading presidential candidate in this October’s national election, is now serving a 12-year sentence on corruption and money-laundering charges, even as he continues to appeal his case.

Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, also of the Workers Party, succeeded Lula as president in 2011 and won a second term in office in the 2014 election. However, she was impeached from office by the Brazilian Senate in August 2016 on charges that she violated fiscal regulations by using funds from state banks to cover budget shortfalls in order to continue funding popular antipoverty programs.

The charges of corruption in the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation have eroded support for the Workers Party and other major parties and politicians across Brazil. But Lula’s and Rousseff’s policies remain popular for their success in reducing poverty by 55 percent, extreme poverty by 65 percent and an overall decrease in rampant inequality. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil and professor at the University of Rio De Janeiro’s International Relations Department. Here, Mendonça explains why she believes that a right-wing coup is responsible for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and now the imprisonment of Lula da Silva, and what the future holds for progressive political forces in Brazil.
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MARIA LUISA MENDONÇA: In 2016, there was a coup against President Dilma Rousseff. She was elected and then re-elected. And that was after Lula was elected and re-elected. So the Workers Party had been in power for four consecutive elections in Brazil and implementing a progressive agenda in the country’s social programs that were very popular. So the right-wing parties knew they could not win elections; they could not take power through a democratic process. So they orchestrated a coup – a parliamentary coup – against President Dilma Rousseff. And then they use an excuse saying that you know, she had committed some administrative crime. But the thing is her administration was doing something very common that all the previous administrations had done, which was to delay payments from the federal budget to the public banks to pay for special programs such as low income housing, for example. And most Brazilians don’t even understand the reason for the impeachment because people think that she was accused of corruption, but it had no case of corruption against her.

So the main reason for the impeachment was for the right-wing powers to take over the government and to command a conservative agenda to cut social programs, you know, to privatize public companies, to implement austerity measures in Brazil that were not popular. And then this year, former President Lula was leading the polls for the presidential elections that will happen in October – are supposed to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen because it’s such political instability in the country now. And they also orchestrated a case against him saying that he received an apartment as a bribe. But there is no proof that he owns – he doesn’t own the apartment. He never spent any time in the apartment, so all the case was based on one testimony of a company executive or construction company executive that was in prison and had his sentence reduced from like 15 years to 3 years in exchange for accusing Lula. So, you know, now he’s in prison and he’s still very popular even after his arrest. If elections were today, he would win in all types of cases, of scenarios.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Lula is in prison. I’ve head there’s a protest encampment out in front of the prison building where he is now located. What is the future of the Workers Party and other progressive popular movements such as MST, the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, as they confront a system that has veered very much hard, right over recent years?

MARIA LUISA MENDONÇA: In 2016, there was a coup against President Dilma Rousseff. She was elected and then re-elected. And that was after Lula was elected and re-elected. So the Workers Party had been in power for four consecutive elections in Brazil and implementing a progressive agenda in the country’s social programs that were very popular. So the right-wing parties knew they could not win elections; they could not take power through a democratic process. So they orchestrated a coup – a parliamentary coup – against President Dilma Rousseff. And then they use an excuse saying that you know, she had committed some administrative crime. But the thing is her administration was doing something very common that all the previous administrations had done, which was to delay payments from the federal budget to the public banks to pay for special programs such as low income housing, for example. And most Brazilians don’t even understand the reason for the impeachment because people think that she was accused of corruption, but it had no case of corruption against her.

So the main reason for the impeachment was for the right-wing powers to take over the government and to command a conservative agenda to cut social programs, you know, to privatize public companies, to implement austerity measures in Brazil that were not popular. And then this year, former President Lula was leading the polls for the presidential elections that will happen in October – are supposed to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen because it’s such political instability in the country now. And they also orchestrated a case against him saying that he received an apartment as a bribe. But there is no proof that he owns – he doesn’t own the apartment. He never spent any time in the apartment, so all the case was based on one testimony of a company executive or construction company executive that was in prison and had his sentence reduced from like 15 years to 3 years in exchange for accusing Lula. So, you know, now he’s in prison and he’s still very popular even after his arrest. If elections were today, he would win in all types of cases, of scenarios.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Lula is in prison. I’ve head there’s a protest encampment out in front of the prison building where he is now located. What is the future of the Workers Party and other progressive popular movements such as MST, the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, as they confront a system that has veered very much hard, right over recent years?

MARIA LUISA MENDONÇA: Yes, the social movements in Brazil face a great deal of repression now. Just a few days ago, this camp in front of the prison was attacked by gunmen. They shot at people when they were sleeping and two people got wounded. So, yeah, that is a serious track of repression; almost all types of mobilizations, protest face now police violence. And, we also had the case a little over a month ago of a congresswoman from Rio. Marielle Franco, who was assassinated with four bullets in the head and killed, so, you know, in addition to dozens of leaders of social movements, peasant movements, the Landless Workers Movements, who have been killed since last year.

So we see a great deal of repression in the countryside and in urban areas and also of social leaders, grassroots movements and also any type of protest against the coup. Usually the response is police repression, slaughter, impeachment of presidents and Dilma Rousseff, we realized that we could not trust any institutions in the country. The Supreme Court is part of the coup. Mainstream media outlets support the coup. It’s really difficult for people to mobilize. That’s why having international visibility is important.

For more information, visit Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil at social.org.br; Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University at cwgl.rutgers.edu/about/meet-us/affiliates; University of Rio De Janeiro’s International Relations Dept at iri.puc-rio.br/en.php.

This week’s summary of under-reported news

Compiled by Bob Nixon
The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is dropping its plan to deport thousands of African migrants after failing to find a willing country to take them. The government had planned to deport migrant men primarily from Sudan and Eritrea who crossed the Sinai Desert to enter Israel. (“Israel Abandons Plans to Forcibly Deport African Migrants.” Reuters, April 25, 2018; “Israel Scraps Contented Plan to Deport Tens of Thousands of African Migrants,” Washington Post, April 25, 2018)
In the last six months, only 44 Syrian refugees have been permitted to be resettled in the United States, just a fraction of those welcomed in the previous two years. Once in office, President Trump cut in half the number of refugees allowed to enter America. (“US Has Cut Inflow of Refugees to a Trickle,” Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2018)
Fox News host Sean Hannity has amassed a $90 million real estate empire owning over 800 homes in 7 states, with the aid of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development financing. Along the way, Hannity a friend and unofficial advisor to President Trump, worked with shady real estate speculator Jeff Brock who was convicted of criminal conspiracy to manipulate the sale of foreclosed properties. (“Sean Hannity’s Real Estate Venture Linked to Fraudulent Dealer,” Guardian, April 24, 2018; “Michael Cohen Case Shines Light on Sean Hannity’s Real Estate Empire,” Guardian, April 23, 2018)

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