Community Leaders Action for Housing Justice

On Monday April 14, 2008 over 500 national community leaders “stormed” the lobby of the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Washington, D. C. headquarters declaring “Our communities are not for sale,” according to the National Training and Information Center’s data that month.

The coalition of public housing residents, homeless people, Section 8 subsidized voucher holders and advocates from the NTIC’s Housing Justice Campaign, demanded an “immediate moratorium on all public housing demolitions, dispositions, and conversions, until there is a plan for the future of the nation’s low-income housing and communities.”

The advocacy group for the poor and needy is also demanding an adoption of a Housing First Policy that “directs resources toward putting homeless families into homes, rather than into unnecessary and punitive programs.”

They stated in their press release that month, that “in the midst of the most severe housing crisis since the Great Depression it is not the time to be tearing down housing.”

They also reported that while they were still in negotiations with HUD officials, their protesting efforts resulted in “an immediate victory” in which the federal housing agency the day after the protest “dropped their plans to make cuts to the 964 regulations, which give residents the right to have a voice in policies that impact their lives,” which was another demand by NTIC.