Housing… HUD Is Writing Us Off

For about three years I have been doing training for homeless shelter staff around Connecticut and up until last year a team member of the training was a women from HUD. Then last year she was told she could no longer do training on trans inclusion for the shelters.

Read it and weep…

HUD’s plan to remove shelter protections for transgender people would be ‘devastating’
This would encourage shelters to essentially discriminate against homeless trans people who need a place to rest.
Think Progress
By Casey Quinlan
August 2, 2019

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) regulatory agenda this fall includes a new rule which says shelters that receive, manage, or operate HUD grants can essentially ignore nondiscrimination protections for unhoused trans people. But legal experts say that it is unconstitutional and likely to be challenged.

An analysis published this week from the Center for American Progress also finds no evidence of any demand for this rule from shelters, and that HUD has taken strong steps to “formalize LGBTQ-exclusionary practices” for shelter providers in other ways. In May, one day after HUD Secretary Ben Carson told Rep. Jennifer Wexton that he wasn’t “currently anticipating” changing the Equal Access rule, HUD released its plans to scrap  housing protections for trans people. (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent newsroom operating within the Center for American Progress.)
[…]
The rule would also put trans people in the impossible situation of having to choose whether to stay in a space within a shelter that is inconsistent with their gender, or not stay in a shelter at all. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that nearly one in three trans respondents said they had experienced homelessness.

“This would be absolutely devastating in the sense that it would send a message to shelter providers that they can turn away trans people with impunity. They’re wrong. The law is the law and the federal housing Title VIII [of The Civil Rights Act] prohibits discrimination based on sex and that would encompass gender identity. They’re still going to be liable,” she said.

Maybe.

Unknown at this time is how it will affect state laws and then we have this coming up in the fall.

This October the Supreme Court will hear a case on whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to cases of anti-LGBT discrimination. The case is about when Harris Funeral Homes fired a trans woman when she transitioned and a case about a gay man who was fired when his boss found out that he was gay (I wrote about the case on Wednesday).

According to a Center for American Progress column on the proposed rule, HUD has moved forward with this rulemaking despite a lack of outcry from shelters about the implementation of the 2012 rule and the 2016 clarification:

There is no significant evidence that emergency shelters have petitioned the federal government for the kind of changes that HUD is considering. For example, HUD’s response to a May 31, 2017, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Center for American Progress for information regarding waivers or religious accommodations made under the 2012 and 2016 Equal Access rules from their date of publication to May 31, 2017, failed to locate any waiver requests from service providers. It also turned up no records of complaints from service providers pertaining to the rules under both the Obama and Trump administrations. This indicates that no religious exemptions had been requested under either administration.

The column also highlights how HUD has attempted to undermine the Equal Access rule by removing points awarded to applicants for partnering with LGBTQ-serving organizations and for applicants that decided to do trainings on implementing the 2012 and 2016 rules.

The Trump administration is continuing his vendetta against all things LGBTQ+.