Browse recent media coverage of FBC’s advocacy efforts in the District:
It is unsurprising that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit D.C., the people who were already struggling were hit the hardest. For some, sheltering in place, foregoing public interaction, and working from home were mere inconveniences. For others, it was a matter of safety and the ability to survive the economic fallout of the pandemic.
“At the FBC, we are a part of the Universal Basic Income coalition and we support economic stipends, guaranteed income and reparations for Black individuals,” the statement said.
Teanna Willis, the budget organizer for the Fair Budget Coalition, a group of mainly progressive organizations who favor strong funding for social and human services programs, said wealthy residents should pay higher income taxes to assist the city’s poor, many of whom are African American.
Moving forward without meeting critical human needs would be another shortsighted moral failure for our District. We stand with the Fair Budget Coalition in its call for our legislators to make better choices this time around by raising revenue.
Moving forward without meeting critical human needs would be another shortsighted moral failure for our District. We stand with the Fair Budget Coalition in its call for our legislators to make better choices this time around by raising revenue.
An hour before activists gathered downtown to press D.C. lawmakers for millions in additional housing funds, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson announced he will propose another $25 million for public housing repairs in the city’s 2021 budget. The move comes after a drumbeat of advocacy from the progressive Fair Budget Coalition, which urged the council to invest more in housing for low-income Black D.C. residents disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, a coalition member, originally proposed the transfer of funds from the city’s streetcar project to public housing repairs. The organization also advocated last year for a roughly $25 million cash infusion for public housing repairs from Events DC reserves.
Jesse Rabinowitz, advocacy and campaign manager for Miriam’s Kitchen, testified at a hearing on the budget on behalf of The Way Home campaign and said D.C. has prioritized funding for less essential services over affordable housing, hurting D.C.‘s residents of color and causing them to experience higher rates of homelessness.
But there is good reason to believe, given D.C.‘s own housing crisis, that Amazon would make the problem worse. “Nearly 40,000 black, low-income residents have been displaced from D.C,” Stephanie Sneed of the Fair Budget Coalition, which has co-organized opposition to HQ2 in D.C., told me. “Our position is that the city government isn’t doing enough to stop people from being pushed out of the District and forcing people to leave what’s been a lifetime home for them.”
The black and Jewish co-leaders of the Fair Budget Coalition, a Washington-area group, released a statement about White, calling for more across-the-board condemnation of prejudice. One, Stephanie Sneed, who is African American, suggested that White could be susceptible to believing false conspiracy theories because of real incidents, such as the Tuskegee, Ala., experiments, from 1932 to 1972, when the U.S. government secretly left syphilis untreated in African Americans so it could be studied.
But progressive advocates say this amount of funding is not enough to meet the needs of longtime and low-income residents who are squeezed by the District’s booming housing market. For one, the Fair Budget Coalition—a nonprofit group of more than 60 member organizations—has asked for more than $300 million in affordable housing investments targeted at the District’s lowest-income families next fiscal year.
When it became clear that the D.C. metro area was a front-runner among the finalist cities, the Metro DC DSA, Jobs for Justice, and the Fair Budget Coalition banded together to launch #ObviouslyNotDC—a play on D.C. Mayor Bowser’s hashtag campaign for HQ2, #ObviouslyDC. “Let’s prioritize DC communities, not the world’s richest man,” their website reads. (Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $112 billion, superseding Bill Gates on Forbes’ just-released Billionaires list.)
“Jeff Bezos personally has more money than the district’s budget,” said the group’s co-director, Monica Kamen. “Are we going to give the richest man in history a tax break before we make sure that homeless children have a place to sleep?” The Fair Budget Coalition has worked with the local DSA chapter to launch “Obviously Not DC,” a campaign that takes its name from the district’s pro-DC hashtag campaign, #ObviouslyDC.
Monica Kamen, co-director of the D.C. Fair Budget Coalition, said in a statement that the new law is “a huge step forward for the District and for our democracy. With officials truly elected by the people to serve the people, we can look forward to greater investments and attention paid to all of the pressing issues affecting District residents like housing security, economic justice, food access, healthcare, and community safety.”
The message was “obviously DC is the best place to be and everyone is thriving here,” when what we were seeing is homeless encampments being torn down in newly-developed areas,” Monica Kamen, co-director of the Fair Budget Coalition, told me over the phone. “We just felt like it was a bit disingenuous considering how many people are struggling to get by here.”
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