In the words of the Keep Families Together campaign, “All of us deserve the freedom to live where we want and take care of our families without fear of being evicted.”
Yet the Trump Administration continues to threaten to destabilize housing for millions of low-income tenants. Most recently, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published several proposed rules that, if implemented, will only serve to increase housing instability and place far too many households at risk of experiencing homelessness.
How Do Federal Rule Changes Work?
To make policy changes, HUD and other federal agencies are required to follow a rule-making process: they must publish a proposed rule on the Federal Register, and open up a 60-day comment period for any member of the public to respond. The agency is required to review and respond to the substance of all comments before finalizing and publishing their final rule.
Recently, HUD issued several proposed rules that seek to impose new barriers on people residing in HUD-assisted housing and separate families with mixed immigration statuses.
These rules threaten to place millions of households at risk of homelessness:
Mixed-Status Families
While current regulations allow for proportional housing assistance for eligible tenants, HUD seeks to strip all housing assistance from “mixed-status” families – i.e., families with at least one member who does not have “citizenship or eligible immigration status.” Families will be forced to make the gut-wrenching decision to either separate the household or stay together and experience displacement and homelessness. Because of this reckless proposed rule, 80,000 people could be evicted from their homes. That includes 37,000 children, nearly all of whom are themselves U.S. citizens.
Work Requirements and Time Limits
HUD seeks to allow Public Housing Agencies and property owners/landlords who operate HUD-supported housing to impose two harmful stipulations on federal housing.
- Work requirements: federal work requirements, like those proposed/enacted for programs like SNAP or Medicaid, mandate that recipients of these benefits prove their employment (or employment search) or else they lose these benefits. Implementing work requirements in federally-assisted housing has failed before due to costly administrative burdens and unintended evictions.
- Time limits: this rule would “allow for time limits on assistance after two years.” Yet just a two-year time limit on assistance would result in an estimated 3.3 million people losing their rental assistance, including 1.7 million children.
What You Can Do
Using the power of the public comment can have strong results. For example, the first Trump Administration tried to enact this same Mixed Status Rule back in 2019, but a massive outcry put an end to this cruelty.
Here’s how you can respond to these current threats:
Submit public comments.
Submit a comment today as an individual and encourage your organization to submit organizational comments. In your comment, explain how your community will be harmed and share data and stories about the people who will be impacted.- Educate and mobilize your network. Educate and mobilize grantees, partners, board members, and other community members so they understand the stakes and take action. here.
The Administration claims that these proposed rules would free up space in subsidized housing for new individuals and families. If the Administration truly wanted to end homelessness and provide housing for people who need it, then they wouldn’t seek to cut HUD’s budget by 13 percent, delay critical funding, and cause chaos across communities working to bring people home.
Every single voice across each community matters and is desperately needed through the public comment process. Advocacy is for everyone, and we need your help in soundly rejecting these disastrous proposals.
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