To the editor:
With the impending termination of Chapter 257, the pandemic-related rental assistance program that saved thousands of families from eviction, those same people are now in imminent danger of losing their housing.
Housing advocates such as Mass Coalition for the Homeless, along with others, have strongly urged the extension or reinstitution of the program or alternative assistance through RAFT (Residential Assistance for Families in Transition).
Gov. Maura Healey’s response to the crisis was in one way disappointing, while in another, nothing short of astounding.
Not only did she significantly reduce the benefits of the RAFT program when it has never been more desperately needed; but when asked why she did not seek to extend Chapter 257, she said: “The pandemic programs were emergency measures. These things are related to COVID really. The federal public health emergency is ending, and as a result the programs and initiatives that we put in place to take care of people in vulnerable times and vulnerable circumstances are also ending.”
Quite aside from the fact that many medical and scientific experts seriously question whether COVID-19 is indeed ending, the governor’s wildly fallacious logic seems to confuse, identify, or worse, confine vulnerability to the threat of COVID — the equally fallacious corollary being that when the latter ends, so does the former.
It might be understandably difficult to convince a young family threatened with eviction that they can now celebrate the end of their vulnerability, albeit in the street. The fact is that in the civilized pillage that passes for today’s housing market, they were threatened before the onset of COVID, and will likely remain so long after its eradication.
They are simply dealing with a different, but no less virulent, disease – one for which there is no vaccine. Vulnerability comes from the Latin word for “wound.“ One of its more forceful, and eviction-appropriate significations is, “subject to attack.”
The governor’s position here is quite different from Mayor Michelle Wu with her proposal for rent control. Interestingly, both are designated liberals; the difference, of course, being that Mayor Wu really is one. The governor, by contrast, with her wrong-headed and insensitive fiscal prudence, could easily pass for a conservative Republican.
Sincerely,
Joseph R. Noone
Lynn resident
