NY Senate passes PWA rent-control bill
The New York State Senate voted today to pass a bill protecting New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS from having to choose between paying rent and buying groceries.
Says NY City Council Speaker Christine Quinn:
“I thank and applaud the New York State Senate for overwhelmingly voting today to provide affordable housing protection to over 11,000 New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, many of whom are on the verge of eviction. State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Deborah Glick deserve particular praise for skillfully sheparding this bill through the legislature.
“By voting in favor of a 30 percent income contribution cap for New York State’s HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA) clients, the legislature is coming to the aid of New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS who currently pay as much as 70 percent of their benefits toward rent, leaving many of them to live on a little over $11 per day.
“It is my hope that Governor Paterson will sign this bill into law soon. We must stand for fair and equitable housing policy. By making this bill a law, much needed relief will be provided to a most vulnerable community.”
A post on HousingWorks.org [1]gives the background:
Nearly 11,000 low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS are at risk of becoming homeless due to a flaw in the HIV/AIDS Services Administration’s (HASA) rental assistance program. HASA clients receiving rental subsidies pay between 50 to 85 percent of their disability income (SSI, SSDI, Veteran’s Benefits) towards rent each month, which leads to high rates of arrears, evictions and homelessness. Those who keep their apartments are forced to choose between paying their rent or buying essential household items like soap and toilet paper.
This bill was originally introduced in 2006, and came about after the State and City announced that they would no longer honor the federal law that caps rental contribution at no more than 30 percent of income for approximately 2,200 HASA clients living in federally subsidized housing. Some clients would see a 200 percent increase in rent virtually overnight.
With a few days to spare, Housing Works and co-counsel Matthew Brinckerhoff rushed to federal court and secured an injunction against the proposed policy, preventing the rental increases. Thereafter, with the injunction in place, the City and State agreed to abandon the proposed policy and honor the 30 percent federal rent cap. They continue to do so to this day. But the 30 percent cap only covered clients in federally funded housing, and that this essential protection should be extended to all HASA clients under New York State law as well. So Housing Works’ Legal Department worked with State legislators to draft a new State law extending the 30 percent rent cap to all HASA clients, and not merely those in federally funded housing.
Momentum has been growing over the last year. The Assembly passed the affordable housing bill [2], and the Senate already passed it by a margin of 52 to 1 [3] once last July. Governor Paterson told NYCAHN leaders [4] he would sign the bill when it reached his desk.
[1] http://www.housingworks.org/blogs/detail/action-alert-tell-your-ny-state-senator-to-vote-yes-on-30-rent-cap-bil/
[2] http://www.housingworks.org/blogs/detail/assembly-expected-to-vote-on-30-rent-cap-bill-today/
[3] http://www.housingworks.org/news-press/detail/toms-triumph/
[4] http://www.housingworks.org/blogs/detail/paterson-says-hed-approve-30-percent-rent-cap/
NYC takes new action for gay youth
New York City is trying out a new initiative aimed at preventing LGBT homelessness, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced Monday.
The New York City Commission for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Runaway and Homeless Youth will address the problems of LGBTQ teens before they resort to …
New Yorkers: How to get to the Equality March
Sure, there’s plane, Amtrak and Bolt Bus – but you can also hitch a ride with one of the many buses going from NYC to DC this Sunday for the Equality March.
Buses leave from Williamsburg, Chelsea (where you can ride with NYC Countil Speaker Christine Quinn), the Upper West Side/Columbia, …
Speaker Quinn leads Tel Aviv vigil in New York
(New York) Tonight, New York Council Speaker Christine Quinn, LGBT Jewish groups, youth LGBT groups and others will join in remembrance of those killed over the weekend at the LGBT Center in Tel Aviv. The vigil will take place at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah at 57 Bethune Street …
Quinn urges Obama, Congress to take action on LGBT rights
New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, in remarks at a fundraiser for the upcoming LGBT-rights march in Washington, D.C., recounted an incident during which she urged President Barack Obama to “do more” for LGBT people. “I’m happy there’s something we can organize around in October to send a clear message that we’re thrilled that he’s the president and we’re thrilled that Democrats have control of the House and the Senate, but it’s simply not enough,” Quinn said. PolitickerNY.com
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The Gay Movement, After Marriage New York Observer -
On the night of June 26, two days before the gay pride parade would overtake Manhattan in honor of the 40th birthday of the Stonewall riots that are popularly imagined as the birth of the gay rights movement, a group numbering a couple of dozen mostly gay men and women found themselves crammed into the parlor floor of the West Village townhouse of John Connor, a former banker who lives with his companion, the designer Steven Gambrel.
It raged and stormed outside, while inside, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the first openly gay person to win that office, thanked the group for coming.
They’d been summoned either because they had money or because they had influence in the “gay movement,” such as it is today, and the organizers of this affair needed their money and influence to stage a large national march for gay rights in Washington, D.C., this October.
The mood was intense, and hardly celebratory, despite the tremendous progress toward legalizing gay marriage in New York State that many of the attendees had been involved in.
“We want results,” Ms. Quinn said. “We want them now. We don’t want to be told any longer that we have to wait. ‘Cause look, in Albany? They said they couldn’t do marriage at the beginning of the session—that they had to get other business done first. And now it’s exploded in Albany. If they kept their promise from Day 1, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
See The Gay Movement, After Marriage
New York Observer -
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Se3nate Power struggle impedes New York gay marriage vote
New York’s annual Gay Pride parade was a colorful celebration of 40 years of progress toward civil rights for gays, but once the dust settled, gay couples who wish to marry in New York state remain thwarted.
A bill to legalize gay marriage in the state that saw the dawn of the gay rights movement is mired in political stalemate in the state capital Albany, where Democrats and Republicans are battling over control of the state Senate.
“I had hoped today’s march would have been a bit of a wedding march. It’s not,” Christine Quinn, the gay speaker of the New York City Council, said at Sunday’s Gay Pride parade. Held annually, this year’s event marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, which triggered the modern U.S. gay rights movement.
“We are disappointed. … But I know there have been other times our community has been disappointed and you need to keep fighting,” Quinn said at the start of the parade, which organizers said drew more than a million people.
Gay couples can marry in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa and will be allowed marry in Vermont starting in September and in New Hampshire from January. Other states offer same-sex unions that grant many of the same rights as marriage.
See Power struggle impedes New York gay marriage vote
Reuters
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New York City Council Speaker Quinn less optimistic about gay marriage
(New York) Though she has not accepted defeat, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was less optimistic when talking about the future of marriage equality the state of New York. Quinn made her remarks in response to the recent upheaval in the New York state senate at the city …
Whose Holocaust? Plan to Recognize Gay Victims at Memorial Sparks Row
A plan to memorialize gay male victims of Nazism amid a collection of memorial stones for Holocaust victims in a quiet half-acre patch of Brooklyn has provoked an outcry.
New York State Assembly Member Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat whose many Orthodox constituents include numerous Holocaust survivors, has decried the planned addition as a distortion of the Holocaust’s meaning with regard to Jews.
“It’s easy to say, let’s include everybody, let’s be universal, diversity is great,” he said. But he added, “It just isn’t fair. It diminishes and really dilutes what the Holocaust is.”
Hikind and the Holocaust Memorial Committee, steward of the tiny Holocaust Memorial Park in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, are calling for the park’s memorial stones to be restricted to Jewish victims of Hitler. But the plan, approved by the city’s parks department, to commemorate non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime there is proceeding thus far.
On June 9, representatives of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors, which proposed the addition, could be found combing the bayside memorial to measure unmarked stone pillars and determine if memorial text could be carved on them, association co-chair Rick Landman said.
The altercation raises a question that Jews have faced with increasing frequency: Whose Holocaust is it, anyway? Roma Gypsies, the disabled and gay men were among those also especially targeted by the Nazis. According to historians, though, only Jews and Roma were targeted for annihilation. Altogether, the Nazis are estimated to have murdered some 11 million from their coming to power in 1933 until their downfall in 1945.
Flanked by Emmons Avenue and Shore Boulevard, at the easternmost end of Sheepshead Bay, the memorial, built in 1997, consists of a tall eternal flame sculpture — engraved with a short statement on the Holocaust and the nations affected by the genocide — surrounded by two adjacent gardens of stone markers, each of which features either a paragraph or two of history or a list of victims’ names.
For $360 per engraved line, donors to the non-profit Holocaust Memorial Committee can pay to have a victim’s name printed on one of the stone markers. The registration form for this service, found on the committee’s Web site, asks donors to provide the victim’s name and a brief history of his or her Holocaust experience. The committee then meets to verify the authenticity of the proposed inscription, committee treasurer and past president Alfred Gollomp said.
Gollomp complained that in signing on to the IALGCHS proposal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the city’s parks department were ignoring a memorandum that gives the Brooklyn-based group control over the park markers.
See Whose Holocaust? Plan to Recognize Gay Victims at Memorial Sparks Row
Forward
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Vanasco: Christine Quinn thinks NY is getting gay marriage
This morning at a press conference to kick off Pride Month in NYC, Speaker of the New York City Council Christine Quinn – an open lesbian – said that her sense after talking with Albany lawmakers is that gay marriage will pass this session, perhaps by New York’s celebration of …
