Fair Housing Policy Agenda, Amended & Adopted
Hello - to our St. Paul MICAH friends, allies, members, and family -
from John Slade, MICAH East Metro Community Organizer
In our September 19th meeting, we amended and adopted our Fair Housing Policy Agenda.
This document serves two main goals - it is our official input to the City of St. Paul's Fair Housing Policy Agenda process, led by Kirstin Burch, our Fair Housing Coordinator for the City.
It also serves for our newly growing MICAH St. Paul chapter to define what our issues are and where we want to focus our activities. From Section 8 to Tenant Screening to Fair Housing Testing and Rent Control, we are building power around a series of agenda items that we feel get to the heart of housing justice.
For faith leaders, take these to your congregations and fellowships and get feedback and see where strength lies. For elected officials, consider these policies as serious directions to look at policy change. For people who work in housing, homelessness, and justice, know what kind of work we are doing.
This document represents one of our clear directions. We also remain deeply committed to the issue of youth homelessness as can be seen in the 2100 homeless youth in the St. Paul Public School system, and supporting and growing the services for those kids and their parents.
But while we want to make sure that every child in the St. Paul school system, and every adult in the City, has housing that they can afford, we need do ask - why don't they currently have that housing? Why are they paying 50% of their income on rent? Why is their apartment full of mice and mold? And how do we change that?
We feel this Fair Housing policy agenda makes a start to change the systems that give us so many homeless people, so many Black and Indigenous and other People of Color being discriminated against, so many people caught in the situation where the rent is too damn high and their wages are too damn low.