ACT UP tells Joe Biden HOMES ARE HIV PREVENTION!
ACT UP Philadelphia’s Memo to the Biden Transition Team:
To: Members of the Biden-Harris HUD Agency Review Team
Click image to view our 12/2/2020 action in Delaware.
From: ACT UP Philadelphia
Date: World AIDS Day, December 1, 2020
Re: Housing and Ending Pandemics
Background
In 2020, America is in the midst of several pandemics. Most obviously, COVID-19 is exploiting existing public health disparities, and straining already strained resources. But on World AIDS Day, as on every day, we must not forget that America is still in the midst of an HIV pandemic. While infections and deaths from HIV fell steadily since new medicines were discovered, trialed, and made accessible to millions, we have reached a plateau in infection rates, and in some locations have seen them start to creep up again.
In addition, America continues to face the ongoing pandemics of public health disparities which HIV and COVID exploit and make visible, but do not cause. HIV preys on homophobia and transphobia, racism, mass incarceration, and a failed response to addiction. COVID preys on high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses that are caused or exacerbated by poverty and racism. And both diseases are contagious and their spread simply cannot be contained when so many people face unstable, unsafe, unaffordable, and inaccessible housing.
Our experience and extensive research on HIV and housing indicates that on each step of the HIV Care Continuum, housing is a factor in successful outcomes; indeed, housing has “zoomed by” many other well-accepted health care interventions in terms of published evidence. Housing status is likely the most important characteristic of each PLWHA who seeks services - the most significant determinant of each PLWHA’s health and risk outcomes. (Dr. David Holtgrave, concluding remarks, Housing and HIV/AIDS Research Summit IV)
Research on HIV/AIDS and housing has also shown that housing is cost effective as well as effective at saving lives, improving quality of life, and reducing individual and community HIV risk.
These same lessons must be applied quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have already seen how crowded and congregate living conditions lead to increased spread of COVID; how people living in nursing homes (many of whom could live independently with accessible, affordable, integrated housing) are at increased risk; and how COVID exploits underlying health conditions for which housing is a vital component of treatment: diabetes, high blood pressure, and other heart and vascular diseases. Permanently affordable housing also increases people’s ability to self-isolate, avoid work when sick or potentially exposed to COVID, maintain good hygiene, and help reduce the community viral load.
Housing is the most important tool we have to reversing the health disparities these multiple pandemics have exposed.
Recommendations
Move quickly to enact key components of the Biden-Harris housing plan:
Fully fund Section 8 housing in the 2021 budget.
Create a renter’s tax credit to cover rent and utility costs over 30% of income in the 2021 budget.
Invest in additional affordable housing in the 2021 budget.
Fully fund Maxine Waters’ comprehensive Ending Homelessness Act.
Enhance support for Rapid Rehousing in the 2021 budget.
Strengthen the Biden-Harris housing plan to immediately respond to the COVID-19 crisis:
Immediately stop evictions and foreclosures, and maintain the moratorium throughout the end of the pandemic and recovery -- moving people into homelessness, shelters, or doubled-up housing during a pandemic is a public health nightmare.
Cancel rent and ensure that renters and homeowners do not emerge burdened by housing or utility debt due to lost work during the pandemic -- housing instability and debt will only exacerbate the health disparities that COVID helped reveal.
Immediately increase support states to move people out of congregate housing (including shelters, nursing homes, jails and prisons, and group homes) and into permanently affordable, accessible, integrated housing -- which will not only slow the spread of COVID immediately, but make our communities more resilient in the long term.
Strengthen the Biden-Harris housing plan in the long-term:
Invest in solutions that prioritize housing as a public good:
Explore alternative ownership structures like community land trusts and co-ops that help keep housing permanently affordable and treats it as a common good.
Reinvest in public housing: cities like Philadelphia that currently have decades-long public housing wait lists while publicly owned properties sit vacant need investment in public housing.
Invest enough to meet our affordable housing shortfall of approximately 9 million homes, and do so in a way that creates permanently affordable options (through public housing or land trusts, for example) -- ensuring affordable homes are available in every community creates healthy competition for landlords, helping make rent more affordable (and allowing the government to eventually reduce spending on vouchers and tax credits for renters).
Do even more to strengthen protections for renters and low-income homeowners, protecting us from unreasonable rent hikes, no-cause evictions, predatory lending, and other practices that allowed profiteers to get rich while people’s health and well-being suffered.
Promote housing as public health:
Ensure that people experiencing or at risk of health disparities such as LGBTQ+ individuals, Black and brown and indigenous people, disabled people, HIV+ people and others with chronic health conditions have full access to permanently affordable, accessible, integrated homes. This includes fully funding the HOPWA (Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS) program.
Allow system-wide medical cost savings to be reinvested in housing, helping to ensure that housing interventions are cost-effective (without tying individuals’ housing to receiving specific supportive services, or services to receiving specific types of housing).
Press release from the Dec 2 action: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kJQY-gnCJjsQs8MUK3aeqLNF2LcZvPJ4u34AZ_k_nZM/edit