nothin Abandon All Hope? Not Just Yet | New Haven Independent

Abandon All Hope? Not Just Yet

Thomas Breen Photo

DuBois-Walton at forum.

Amid all the talk about impending dangers from the incoming regime in Washington, Karen DuBois-Walton offered a glimmer of hope Tuesday night: Perhaps, just perhaps, there is opportunity in uncertainty?

DuBois-Walton, who runs New Haven’s housing authority, was one of three expert speakers at a community conversation” on what New Haven should expect from, and how it should respond to, President-Elect Donald Trump’s recent choices to run federal departments. DuBois-Walton specifically addressed the selection of neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s appointment to become the next secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

I am very concerned about Dr. Carson’s comments about how the government is not the right provider of a safety net for the poor and the elderly,” DuBois-Walton told the 100 people who gathered at the forum at Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel (BEKI) on Harrison Street (which started a half hour late because of a scare over two pressure cookers left across the street on Whalley Avenue).

But the Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH) has always taken advantage of whatever opportunities came down the pike. There are clearly administrations and policies that make our work easier, and there are those that introduce greater barriers. But without a real track record either from the President-elect or from the Secretary nominee, it’s really hard to gauge yet how this administration is going to approach the issue of public housing.”

That was about all of the optimism the night would afford, however, over the course of a two-hour conversation.

From concerns over the stalling of criminal justice reform to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to the defunding of HUD, that assessment was charged with both anxiety and resolve to push back at the local level.

WNHH pundits Rawls-Ivy, Ricks, and Turner on in the panel.

The community conversation was the second in a monthly series of post-election debriefings and planning sessions organized by the New Haven Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Following up on last month’s meeting at Bethel AME Church on Goffe Street, the Deltas, a sorority of college-educated African-American women, reached out to BEKI in a gesture of cross-cultural communication that legal aid attorney and BEKI member Amy Marx identified as reminiscent of the golden era of collaboration between the African American and Jewish communities, when we marched together and fought together for civil rights equality” in the 1960s.

Unlike last month’s meeting at Bethel AME, which looked back at the reasons behind the election results and then looked forward to increased citizen engagement with activist non-profits, Tuesday night’s conversation was grounded in the complicated and all-too-uncertain present. New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass, with support from the WNHH Pundit Panel crew Markeshia Ricks, Babz Rawls-Ivy, Michelle Turner and Joe Ugly, moderated a series of presentations from policy experts and community leaders that focused on understanding the local implications of the current national political moment.

Perry: Doesn’t look good.

Civil rights lawyer Joshua Perry kicked off the evening with a sobering reflection on the president-elect’s nomination of Alabama U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions to be the next attorney general.

I think there’s a really optimistic scenario, and I think there’s a worst case scenario,” Perry said as he described the nation’s next top law enforcement official, whose responsibilities will include overseeing U.S. district attorneys to setting high-level policy in areas like civil rights enforcement.

If I had to guess, I think we’re going to be a little closer to the worst-case scenario with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as the attorney general. This is somebody who is fundamentally out of step with a bipartisan movement towards criminal justice reform, and you can expect that local federal prosecutors will be encouraged to seek heavy, serious punishments even for low-level and drug offenders.”

Push back at the local level, he urged the audience, by supporting immigrant defense organizations, civil rights lawyers, and state legislators who advocate for criminal justice reform, for these groups are going to have a busy and trying four years ahead.

Dillon.

Next up, New Haven State Rep. Pat Dillon spoke about Tom Price, the president-elect’s choice to lead the department of Health and Human Services.

“In Tom Price’s bill [to replace the Affordable Care Act], an insurance company is defined as having a ‘conscience,’” she noted. “And can therefore deny women’s reproductive services.” Her recommendations: Donate to Planned Parenthood, support community health centers, and be vigilant about how money is distributed from an ever-shrinking state budget in Hartford.

Finally, DuBois-Walton took the floor to talk through the uncertainties around Carson’s imminent leadership of HUD, focusing her presentation on how the funding of public housing services supports more than just a roof over everyone’s head.

At the core of public housing is “a belief in people that uses the housing as an opportunity to get involved in people’s lives more broadly,” she said. She identified as core to HANH’s mission initiatives that “leverage tenants’ economic and educational success,” such as programs that help children in public housing developments get through school and into college, and others that help residents become entrepreneurs and eventual homeowners themselves.

Warning against the allure of lower taxes, she asked the audience to “think about tax policies beyond your own paycheck,” for so many of her department’s public housing services are funded by tax credit programs that rely on higher income levels who pay their taxes and seek out tax breaks.

A few audience members in the subsequent Q&A found amidst this rash of conservative appointments one or two unlikely sources of optimism for a Democratic opposition, including one attendee who described the president-elect as a “valuable opponent” because of his thin skin and reactionary Twitter polemics. But the tone of the night’s conversation was marked by concern over the potential harm that these nominees could inflict on the welfare of the city’s most vulnerable populations.

“What we should all be prepared for is how you kill a program by continually underfunding it,” DuBois-Walton said towards the end of the evening, expressing a sentiment inherent in all three of the expert assessments of the incoming federal department heads. “I’m not worried that HUD is going to cease to exist. But if it’s not funded at the level that’s required to meet the needs of homeless families, or that allows people to get their first mortgage, then that’s a real problem that’s going to eat away at our city’s social services.”

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