by Jordan Davis
Last year, I joined several former and current permanent supportive housing tenants, as well as an attorney from the Eviction Defense Collaborative, in presenting possible solutions to the eviction crisis in PSH to the Homelessness Oversight Commission. We worked off a draft of a document that detailed best practices from the Department Of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), which consulted only PSH providers. This was only one example where tenants were never “in the room where it happens.”
We were told that there was not much the commission could do, because most of its functions were under contract from housing providers, and therefore, it would be too hard to establish uniform minimum standards to prevent evictions and to treat PSH tenants with the same autonomy as tenants in other forms of housing. The following month, the Homelessness Oversight Commission heard from providers who claimed in their presentation that uniform policies were a bridge too far.
One year later, I don’t see any significant progress, and I’m now afraid that tenants’ rights might even regress. I have been living under some fairly infantilizing and authoritarian rules for years, and I feel that I am at a breaking point, because we often have no place to turn when our rights are violated. However, I have seen HSH exercise its authority when it wanted to pass a uniform policy. We did not come out better for it.
It was the beginning of Pride Weekend on June 28, when many PSH tenants were being impacted by activities at Civic Center. On our doors, we got a notice from HSH posted about a policy that it drafted this spring. The notice was dated and signed on May 2, but only reached us seven weeks later, during a weekend where everyone was distracted by Pride festivities. The notice directed us to sign off on new leasing terms by August 1, which was barely a month away. If that is not—as the kids say—”sus,” then I don’t know what is.
The new policy concerned grounds for termination of a housing subsidy for not following program rules. As you might recall, there is a municipal ordinance where permanent supportive housing tenants pay no more than 30% of their income towards rent, which implies that rent should only ever exceed 30% of a tenant’s income if the tenant fails to recertify their income. This is a necessary evil to make the policy workable. Most of the clauses in this policy are already in our leases, but several red flags emerged.
One clause that required benefits be directed to a third-party payee that deducts a large chunk of my disability check to pay the landlord before the tenant receives the rest. I find this requirement extremely ableist, as I’ve pointed out in a previous column. Another clause involved the expansion of housing quality inspections into permanent supportive housing, something that is already required in Section 8 and other public housing. Given that failing habitability inspections for minor issues, such as stray hair dye on a bathtub or shoes under the bed, are often used to build an eviction case, I really believe that we need to better understand how these inspections are going to impact us. We need tenant advocates living in buildings subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be able to consult on this.
Furthermore, the new policy creates a Subsidy Termination Appeals Committee consisting of people who work for housing providers, as well as people with lived experience with housing insecurity. Why is this our first time hearing about this? What is the precise makeup of this committee, and what are the qualifications to join? How do you get on this committee? It just seems like they want to pull this over our heads.
It was only from other Tenderloin Housing Clinic tenants that the Homelessness Oversight Committee—the panel that monitors HSH—learn about this new policy. The next committee meeting is on August 1, which will be too late for it to act. I’m sick of us being treated like second-class citizens.
In late 2018, HSH notified my fellow tenants and me of changes to the wellness check policy. Previously, we were allowed to opt out of wellness checks, but they wanted to take away our option to opt out without meaningful tenant outreach. At that time, the HSH commission didn’t exist, and I was on the SRO Task Force. Imagine serving on an advisory backwater with only one forum that was able to hear this issue. Fortunately, I was able to call for an HSH presentation on the issue. While, we apparently can now still opt out of wellness checks, we shouldn’t have this late notice.
The reason why we have a Homelessness Oversight Commission in the first place was because of the Chronicle exposé on the busted SROs used as permanent supportive housing. While I think there needs to be standardized policies for permanent supportive housing, these policies must center tenants’ needs and autonomy and require some public process. Any policy change that will affect permanent supportive housing tenants should be presented in a public forum, and the City must go above and beyond notification requirements under the Brown Act and have the agenda and proposed policy needs posted on our doors. Nothing about us without us.
Jordan Davis (she/they) is a long-term permanent supportive housing tenant who successfully fought for rent reductions to 30% of income for thousands of tenants. She can be reached at 30rightnow@gmail.com
