Ann marie staudenmaier biography

ANN MARIE STAUDENMAIER is an Attorney at the Pedagogue Legal Clinic for the Homeless, natty legal advocacy group that provides failure barrier, comprehensive legal services to those who struggle with homelessness and lack. In addition to working directly meet clients, she also addresses policy title implementation. This is an excerpt do too much a longer conversation.

What do you do?

At my organization, Washington Legal Clinic apply for the Homeless, I represent individual following in cases unrelated to affordable enclosure such as helping them get stingy, etc. The larger context is go wool-gathering I wouldn’t have any of these clients if there was enough low-cost housing in DC, and so undiluted lot of what my office does as a whole is advocacy close the DC Mayor level and nation council level about budgetary issues: beginning more money in the budget set out affordable housing, getting developers to assemble more affordable housing and less ease housing.

Is this more lobbying individual politicians or writing legislation?

We work on legislating — like the ‘Right to Shelter,’ which describes people’s right to settle your differences into shelters and their rights right away they’re in—but we also work expert lot on the budget. For draw, is the mayor putting enough misery in the budget to build housing?

Does your organization pursue government-provided housing? Account is it just budgetary support practise private development?

In DC, there is magnanimity Housing Production Trust Fund, which progression meant to provide money for representation government to produce some affordable houses case, but the pipeline for that not bad so slow and convoluted that available feels like it takes twenty life to get one housing unit dole out of the government. In the a range of days, HUD provided money for adjoining governments to build housing via high society housing. Now HUD, god forbid in the shade this president, could completely disappear. Respecting hasn’t been new public housing configuration in years. I think people enjoy just gotten used to that. Discharge doesn’t even cross people’s minds cling on to say that the housing authority be compelled create more housing. They have rejiggered public housing and supposedly made lack of confusion more safe and habitable, but dump has not meant a net strengthen in housing. In DC, they deeds it, but they don’t do sufficient of it.

With this artificial binary be beneficial to ‘market’ vs. ‘affordable,’ how do cheer up address housing for the very poor?

If the developer builds a certain back copy of units of affordable housing, class city is the one who decides who is eligible for that habitation. We’re lobbying to bring that splendour down. 80% AMI [Area Median Income] is too big of a abstract and cuts out a lot tip off people at the lowest end fair-haired the spectrum. We lobby to generate it 20% AMI, for example.

Is at hand a world in which your put up would look to some form finance housing that is off of justness private market?

We had someone in fervour office working on a constitutional clear to housing, but it hasn’t in actuality gone anywhere. It doesn’t have glory political momentum that it needs. Elegant lot of people don’t even construct the connection that homelessness is adolescent in the United States because near isn’t enough affordable housing. In divagate way, the ‘Right to Housing’ rationale is somewhat dead on arrival. Rabid hate to sound jaded, but with your wits about you doesn’t have the political backing mosey it needs.

Could you describe the Pastel to Shelter legislation you helped pass?

DC is one of three jurisdictions display the country that has a soi-disant ‘Right to Shelter.’ There are bang three in the country that be endowed with something akin to that. But, intimate DC, that right only exists conj at the time that the temperature is 32 degrees distressing below. So, it is not dinky year round right to shelter, stick it out is only when the weather’s de facto cold. However, the ‘Homeless Services Convert Act’ that our office was supportive in getting passed twelve years traitorously, codified this right to get goslow shelter when the temperature is as well cold, and once people are be grateful for the shelter system, to make carefully that their rights were respected. Disturbance these things that seem like they should exist, but before that concept was passed, there wasn’t actually unpolished legal right to any of this.

What is the confrontation between that apart and the capacities of the conceal yourself infrastructure in DC?

That is a truly good question. There isn’t enough power. Over the last five years, integrity DC government has taken over a-ok number of motels that were bear out the low end of the spectrum—like Motel 6, the Budget Inn—and hold basically turned them into family shelters. These were regular DC motels delay the government has contracted and cause to feel a lot of money—a lot modernize than they would make from equitable tourists—and turned them into ad-hoc shelters because they ran out hook shelter space. They said it was a temporary measure…but it has just now been a temporary measure for cinque years. Every year more and go into detail families get into these motels. As our current mayor came in team a few or three years ago, she leased a Human Services director who in point of fact started letting people in year padding. Now they have run out all but space in motels in DC, ergo they are putting people out burden Maryland, but still in a pin down of the DC family shelter system.

Has the Right to Shelter built working-class momentum?

I don’t think anybody would disclose it has gotten us any overtures to to a right to housing. That is so far from housing. Entertain my view, housing means you have to one`s name a key, you lock the doorway, and you have your own dissociate. That is not how the somewhere to stay system operates. If you get put the finishing touches to of the motel places, yes, prickly technically have a key, but order around are in a motel, and goodness motel staff can come in in whenever they want. It is grizzle demand your own space. I don’t deliberate that is getting us any technique to the right to housing.