At Tuesday’s Legislative Meeting, I and my colleagues made a difficult decision on the future of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which is suffering under the weight of pandemic-era needs without pandemic-era funds.

Below are my remarks regarding the B25-0968 – Emergency Rental Assistance Reform Emergency Amendment Act of 2024, which I supported.

Transcript of my remarks

This is a council that has repeatedly shown its dedication to the ERAP program.  

We have repeatedly put funding in when the Mayor has fallen short. We have pushed to make access better for those who need it, whether that’s through technology or funding for CBOs that are supporting residents. And during the pandemic, we made this resource available to everybody and anybody because we had hundreds of millions of dollars available to us from the federal government. 

Walking back from that is painful. Acknowledging that there is a huge problem out there with rent instability, with housing instability, and that we don’t have all the tools and all the solutions is incredibly painful. 

And also we need our emergency rental assistance program to work for the people who need it, for the people who are in crisis right now and do not have the means to pay. And for whom this lifeline can actually help stabilize them in their housing. 

So today we are recalibrating the program, putting it back where it needs to be for the budget that’s available, for the people it’s intended to serve. 

That does not mean that we are released from our responsibility to address these underlying issues. I truly look forward to working with my colleagues on the Housing Committee to work on the permanent legislation to push all of our partners in the executive branch on all of the various pieces of our affordable housing ecosystem that need urgent attention and resources.  

It is a huge blow that we are having to utilize the Housing Production Trust Fund just to stabilize existing affordable housing. Huge, for everybody. That was painful too. But we were fortunate that we had those resources available to do so because of the way we have all worked together over the years and stuck together to make affordable housing a priority, to make the Housing Production Trust Fund a priority and to make programs like ERAP a priority. This is not going to be easy. 

And those of us who serve constituents directly like councilmembers do, we will have to step up also because our constituents will come to us in need and we won’t have all the tools we need to help them. So we are going to have to get creative. 

But I do support this amendment and the underlying measure, and I look forward to the next steps.