Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, sent a letter to President Donald Trump on recommendations to end homelessness after the president said the following on homelessness in an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, “It’s disgraceful. I’m going to maybe and I’m looking at it very seriously… We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate. Now we have to take the people and do something. We have to do something. And you know, we’re not really very equipped as a government to be doing that kind of work. That’s not really the kind of work that the government probably should be doing. We’ve never had this in our lives before in our country and it’s not only those few cities it’s a couple of other cities. At the same time, most of our cities are doing great.”
Ranking Member Brown’s letter suggests the president adequately fund federal programs, like the National Housing Trust Fund, Rental Assistance, Public Housing Capital and Operating Funds, CDBG, HOME, Housing for the Elderly, Housing for Persons with Disabilities and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS; stop potential changes the Equal Access Rule that would revert to homeless shelter providers considering an individual’s sex assigned at birth, rather than their gender identity, in determining access to federally-funded shelters; reinstate HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule; include housing in an infrastructure package; and stop potential changes to HUD’s Verification of Eligible Status proposed rule that would bar households with anyone other than a U.S. citizen from receiving any federal housing assistance. Under the current rules, the amount of monetary assistance is prorated to the number of eligible individuals.
