Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, held her monthly telephone town hall Thursday evening, where she focused her remarks on housing justice.
“I want to update you all on the work we’ve been doing to ensure that every single person in this country can access safe, stable and affordable housing,” she said at the beginning of the event.
“I am a firm believer that housing is a human right. I have been unhoused myself, living out of my car with my two babies. I know that trauma firsthand and I carry it with me every day as we work to build a world where nobody else has to go through that kind of pain.”
She noted that was the reason she introduced a resolution in July declaring homelessness a public health emergency, and creating an “unhoused bill of rights,” affirming that those without secure housing have the same rights to healthcare, safety and food as the rest of the population.
“I have been unhoused myself, living out of my car with my two babies. I know that trauma firsthand and I carry it with me every day as we work to build a world where nobody else has to go through that kind of pain.” —Rep. Cori Bush
The activist-turned-representative was joined by Grace Kyung, housing specialist for St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, and Yusef Scoggin, St. Louis County director of the Office of Family and Community Services. Scoggin will become the city’s Department of Human Services director on Oct. 20, 2021.
Scoggin and Kyung also both serve as points of contact for the county’s and city’s ERA programs, respectively.
“Mayor Jones has made it a priority to keep families in their homes and make it easier for people to navigate resources such as rental assistance,” Kyung said. “In July she used her executive action to move more funding towards helping people have access to the rental and utility assistance available.”
She explained the city received $8.9 million from the U.S. Treasury Department for emergency rental assistance and that people can access that resource through the city’s website. The assistance covers things like rent owed, forward rent, utilities and other expenses such as expenses for moving, rental deposits and storage fees. Any applicant can receive up to 12 months back rent and a maximum of three months forward rental assistance.
“This pandemic has presented us with quite the challenge,” Scoggin later said. “And so, our efforts around housing stability and the need to support households started last year under the use of the Cares Act dollars in 2020.”
Scoggin said the county was able to distribute $20 million in humanitarian funds subject to that, $7 million of which work for housing stability services. He noted that the guidelines of the county’s rental assistance are similar to the city’s. He also noted that the county’s government learned from last year’s program.
“St. Louis has its degree of segregation and entrenched concentrated poverty,” he said. “And so, we wanted to use that data to support where we should direct our resources in a particular way. How we might focus, what partnerships should we entertain? And also, when we think about our current operations for the library system, which libraries might we want to choose where we’d have the most impact. And so, to that end, we’ve been able to set up our operations to support that effort.”
Bush also took questions from attendees, who asked everything from how mortgage holders can get financial relief to providing relief to pandemic healthcare workers who make too much money to qualify for relief to what Bush will do to get home health care workers a union.
“You know everyone, every time I get on the phone with you all, I’m reminded of the incredible work being done all over St. Louis,” Bush said in closing. “Every time I fly back to D.C., I bring St. Louis with me. We are all there walking the halls and sitting at those tables every step of the way. Whether it’s helping resettling our new neighbors from Afghanistan, working with our veterans to make sure they’re receiving the benefits and care that they so honorably earned or ensuring that each one of our eligible community members received their stimulus checks earlier this year, every bit of our work is done in the service of building a better St. Louis.”
The town hall can be heard in its entirety at facebook.com/RepCori/videos/570891881024902.
