Public Housing Policy
Dear Editors: It has come to my attention the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation is enacting a scheme, in the form of a bad policy, to evict tenants from public housing in stages. Simply, tenants will receive a rental subsidy that is withdrawn in stages over a few years, as they are required to increase their portion of the rent, presumably by finding employment.
This plan has two practical flaws. It also has moral flaws, but I wish to address only the practical ones.
First, Sitka has limited housing opportunities, especially for unemployed or under-employed people, or for those working but not earning a living wage.
Second, many of the poor living in AHFC housing have severe disadvantages. These range from low education to cognitive impairment in the form of life-long FAS/FASD effects, to medical disability.
Many of these folk attended meetings on the policy changes. Their attendance was taken as consent. It was a pitiful display of holding open meetings for people needing advocacy, for people subjugated by their economic dependency on the agency.
A plan to evict persons with disadvantages into a limited employment scenario, with a limited and expensive housing market, simply is callous. We need more affordable housing, creative public housing thinking and public housing policy that does not create ghettos, such as Paxton Manor, where the poor are isolated – until evicted in stages.
We need practical, not ideologically heartless solutions.
I should disclose that my family and I live in Paxton Manor, where we pay the full rent and spurn any subsidy.
John Welsh, Sitka
