AWHA Stands Against Budget Caps and Cuts
The cuts proposed by the GOP will be harmful to young people experiencing homelessness and housing instability. Lawmakers must take action against the systemic violence of gutting care programs of their funding.
The Republicans’ proposed budget cuts and caps show a blatant disregard for America’s most vulnerable neighbors. Among cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a slash in housing voucher funding affecting hundreds of thousands of youth and young adults as well as other rental assistance, Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG), and Continuum of Care (CoC) assistance are proposed. These programs are already underfunded, and further starvation would be a display of commitment to willfully supporting disparity that harms youth and young adults experiencing homelessness. Beyond HUD, the siphoning of funding from care services will jeopardize Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for over 1 million older adults - a critical benefit that helps keep children out of foster care. A million impoverished children may also be at risk of losing income assistance as well as hundreds of thousands of children potentially losing access to childcare and/or Head Start. These are only the beginning of the cuts and caps that concern us.
Measures like these take resources away from adolescents and young adults who were already struggling to hold on to what little they had. This sort of deprivation is traumatic for children whose adverse childhood experiences will have lasting impacts on their brain development. We see these concerns for resourcing even into transition ages (18-30) where they still struggle to achieve economic independence due to barriers like those proposed in these cuts and caps. Once policies like this reach the ground, lawmakers can hide in homogenous communities to avoid their effects.
Instead of connecting young folks’ cries for help to these morally bankrupt policies, members of dominant social groups internalize this systemic antagonism and take it upon themselves to act as vigilantes, lynching members of marginalized populations for human responses to their material conditions. This structural neglect leads some citizens to believe that their own neighbors deserve to be starved, stripped of their rights, and summarily slaughtered in view of the public. Our legal system may only recognize the most proximate perpetrator as guilty. Meanwhile, the lawmakers whose policies declared a war of attrition against the marginalized are rewarded with power. The brutality that murdered Banko Brown and Jordan Neely begins with policy, but it could also end with policy.
This is an opportunity to change course immediately to prevent even more irreversible harm. Instead of depleting already empty pockets, we could be intentionally investing in BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities as a sign of belief and hope in their self determination. We could be repairing centuries of racialized dispossession. We could be showing those struggling under critical conditions that we will not, yet again, abandon them in their time of need. The National Low Income Housing Center has developed a resource for anyone who wants to take action against this systemic abuse.
Which approach will ensure that young people have what they need not just to survive, but to shift into thriving? Which approach is more American? We are all deciding right now. May our votes and budgets honor lives lost like Jordan Neely, Banko Brown, and so many others without the indignity of their deaths going viral. We offer our gratitude and urge your support for local organizations like VOCAL-NY that are led by the most impacted and support targeted communities on the ground facing systemic violence.
