News Roundup

  • Baltimore’s Latinx Community Faces Higher Housing Insecurity during the Pandemic
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    In Baltimore, many Latinx residents—many of whom are frontline workers—face housing insecurity amid the pandemic. They have been severely affected by COVID-19’s health and economic effects, as they make up 5.3 percent of the city’s population but 9.7 percent of COVID-19 cases. And before the pandemic, one-third of Latinx renters already spent 40 percent of their monthly income on housing. In March and April of 2020, they represented 57 percent of working-age adults who lost jobs, work hours, or work-related income. The city has created a cash assistance and eviction prevention program and released resources to inform Spanish-speaking immigrants and refugees about available resources.

  • California Launches New Homelessness Database
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    Last week, California introduced a publicly accessible database, called the Homeless Data Integration System, that aggregates homelessness data from 44 databases across the state. The website breaks down efforts by locality and will soon provide more detailed metrics to help policymakers better understand homelessness. “For the first time, we will have the necessary data and tools to better coordinate statewide services” said Ali Sutton, deputy secretary for homelessness under the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency.

  • DC Allowed Hundreds of Housing Vouchers to Go Unused
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    The DC Department of Human Services and DC Housing Authority distributed only 55 percent of permanent supportive housing vouchers reserved for individuals and 37 percent reserved for families last fiscal year, despite both agencies stating all allocated vouchers were approved and distributed. The agencies said the pandemic increased processing times for these applications from an average of 45 days to 144 days. DC Housing Authority director Tyrone Garrett told DCist the agency had taken a conservative approach to disbursing the vouchers because of potential budget concerns prompted by the pandemic, and the agency has hired additional staff this year to process applications more quickly.

  • A Chicago Neighborhood Shows Preservation Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All
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    A battle over Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood has spotlighted the nuances around preservation. To preserve existing affordable housing and prevent displacement, the city’s Department of Planning and Development proposed turning the neighborhood into a historic district. But there’s not much data on whether designating historic districts addresses displacement, and residents—many of whom are Latinx—argued the plan wouldn’t protect their community or culture and could saddle them with additional costs to conform to district’s design standards. “The historic district could only protect the buildings, not the people,” said alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez. “That’s why the community didn’t want the district.” Di Gao, senior director of research and development at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, believes preservation should partner with community organizations. “Historic preservation has an enormous responsibility to be a force for social justice in communities,” says Gao. “There is a lot of legacy within the field where it seems like preservation was created to primarily preserve grand legacies of elite, white men,” she says.