Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for all members of the media for being here for this important issue.
Thank you to all the residents of the Chateau Apartments and all their Central District and other Seattle neighbors who are here in solidarity with them.
I'm one of them.
I live near MLK and Yesler, and I'm also the District 3 council member in the city of Seattle.
And I also thank all the housing justice advocates and activists who are here in solidarity with the Chateau residents.
And I want to also especially thank Pastor Buckley and Reverend Jeffrey for joining this community.
As many of you have already heard, The story of the chateau apartments is the story of Seattle, and indeed, every metropolitan region around the United States, where we see sky-high rents driving out working-class people, low-income seniors, community members who belong to the immigrant community, the LGBTQ community, the disabled community, and we are seeing Seattle increasingly becoming a playground for the rich.
The Shadow Apartments has residents who have lived here for decades, some who have recently moved here, some with little children and expectant children, and we've seen this building bought up by Cadence, which is a garden variety corporate developer, they have $185 million worth of real estate holdings.
And they have notified that they plan to demolish this building.
And not only are all the working class residents going to be displaced and evicted, but we have also a specific situation of several Section 8 voucher residents who will have nowhere to go.
And so collectively they are united in raising their voice and saying we as working-class people, low-income seniors, families with children, the immigrant community, we are diverse neighbors, we have our community here, and we have the right to live in our neighborhood.
And they are demanding that Cadence has the responsibility to make sure that they have alternate affordable and accessible homes to go to in the neighborhood.
This is Cadence's responsibility because Cadence is going to make large profits out of this project.
I wanted to invite Renee Holmes who has moved back here from out of town to take care of her mother aunt Darlene Gordon and Renee is going to talk about why she is part of this struggle.
Thank you.
I want to thank Osama for letting us know what was going on because we had no idea that they were going to even demolish the building.
We did get a notice saying that they were going to get rid of Section 8, but, you know, I said, well, we'll just pay the difference because we don't want to move.
And I have a little speech here.
Again, my name is Renee.
I take care of my aunt, Mother Gordon.
She took care of me since I was three months old, so I relocated back in Seattle four years ago to take care of her.
Mother Gordon is 88 years old.
She has lived at the Chateau for 30 years now, and the Chateau is her home.
She is upset and hurt to think that she's going to be kicked out of her home because Cadence Real Estate wants to tear it down and build new small units.
Our family came from Arkansas in the 40s and settled in this area.
This was the only area we were allowed to live in.
My cousin JJ lives upstairs in an apartment.
We like having him nearby.
We feel safe knowing he is close by.
Mother Gordon has seen her friends pass away and their children sell their property for pennies on the dollar.
She's seen the neighborhood change so much.
Whenever I take her out, she says, I don't recognize this neighborhood anymore.
It's changed so much.
And I tell her, it's OK, but it's still changing.
And I never thought the change would come to our doorstep.
Mother Gordon wants to stay in her home.
Her church, God's Pentecostal Temple, is located just three blocks away on 16th and Fur.
It's been there since the 30s, and she got saved there when she was 16 years old.
Her doctor, Mary Curils, is just up the street on 19th at the country doctor.
We shop at the local stores, Trader Joe's, the Central Co-op, Grocery Outlet, and PCC.
It's convenient to get to the stores and the clerks know us and they even give us a hug and it feels good to know that they know us and we know them.
The Senior Citizen Center is up the street on Jackson.
That's where she can go sometime to get a hot lunch and see some of her remaining friends.
Why does she have to leave?
Why do we have to be uprooted from our communities?
She's very hurt and I'm hurt too.
Chris Garvin, John Garvin, Barrett Johnson, please put people before profits.
It shows here that your company has a $185 million portfolio.
Surely you can afford it.
How would you feel if someone did this to the people you love and care about?
Remember St. Mark 836, for what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
It's time for soul searching.
Now.
Amen.
I want to introduce Stuart and Kelly.
Stuart is right here and he just moved in three weeks ago.
They were homeless for two years or so in their car, three years, and they finally just got a spot and now they have to go.
It's not fair.
Stuart.
Hi, my name is Stuart and this is my wife and two and a half of our kids.
Um, A month ago, we were living in our car.
Been in our car for a long time, in and out of shelters, nowhere to call home.
I'm disabled, I can't hold a normal job, so I can't afford to pay a ton of rent.
We finally got our Section 8 voucher and got accepted a month ago.
Three days after we moved in, they canceled our voucher and told us at the end of the year, we don't have one anymore.
When we lose this voucher, it's four years to get another one.
We ain't got nowhere to go for three years.
A week after we moved in, council members come by to tell us that they're gonna tear my building down.
I just promised my daughter she had a place to call home for good and that we didn't have to go back to our car again.
We have a tiny little truck we've been living in.
A week later, I gotta tell her that we're gonna have to move again and we don't have nowhere to go.
Our case managers can't help us get into housing for a long time.
The shelter we were in that we moved out of, we were in for a month, was a year-long program, but you can only go into it once in your lifetime.
Where are we gonna go when Cadence won't move us to one of their 700 units apartments that they've got?
They're all out of housing.
Why you gotta tear down our family's building and build something for single people that's gonna make you a load of money and kick all these innocent people, people who have been here forever, people who have been looking forward to a home forever, people with kids, people with disabilities, people with nowhere to go.
And now I want to introduce our pastor from God's Pentecostal Temple, Pastor Marva Buckley.
Thank you, Rene.
We just saw a pastor here at God's Pentecostal Temple at 16th and Fir and we're just here to help support Rene and Mother Garden and all the tenants and all the leaders that are here.
We're just here to support them and you know they shouldn't have to move.
Our church is there and they're welcome to come and we just We're just here to support them and to do what we need to do to help the Lord bless them to be able to stay there.
So God bless you.
God bless you.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Pastor Buckley.
I would like to introduce Reverend Jeffrey from the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church that is in the neighborhood to add a few words.
Thank you, Councilwoman Swatt.
I personally am not against growth or capacity or the capacity of people or communities to grow and develop.
However, what I decry and will always contend against is growth that does not take seriously historical inequity.
or growth that does not take seriously the importance of historical community sovereignty.
Not many communities can compete with the war chest of $185 million.
In addition, we must respect the rights of communities that have built institutions and collective spiritual comfortability in certain spaces.
Might and capacity doesn't make it right.
What we need is an all-inclusive housing summit.
We need an all-inclusive housing summit where developers can sit down with community residents and where sanity can come back into play.
What we're doing now is insane.
We're putting 80-year-old people out in the cold.
We see them sleeping on the streets of Seattle every day.
We're putting children and women in the streets all in the name of some kind of profit or in the name of growth.
That's insanity.
That's not planning.
That's not city planning.
That's crazy.
And what we need is an intelligent, sophisticated plan on how growth can take place in conjunction with community safety and the safety of our elders, safety of our children.
It is incumbent upon any civilized community to do this.
And why we haven't done it to this point, I don't know.
But I think if we keep on going down this course, this course is not a course that's going to get us anywhere to any place but chaos.
Nobody wants that.
I think it's time for us to come to our senses and let reason, compassion prevail.
Thank you.
The residents have done an incredibly courageous job of getting organized themselves.
And in addition to thanking them, I also wanted to thank Sasha Somer and Jonathan Rosenblum, who are community organizers in my office, who have walked with the tenants every step of the way.
And I wanted to invite Sasha right now to read us a statement from a tenant who couldn't be here because she had to be at work.
Thank you.
All right, yeah, so this is a statement from Rojala.
She says, my husband, our daughter, and I lived in a shelter for eight months before we found temporary housing.
We applied for the Section 8 housing here, and when we got it, we were told it would be permanent housing.
When I moved in, I thought I wouldn't have to worry anymore.
We have only been living here for five months, and then they told us they plan to demolish us.
demolish it.
There is nowhere else we can go.
This place is very important to us.
We have been homeless.
This is important so I can work and go to school and support my child.
Me and my husband aren't making a lot of money.
The income isn't enough to afford rent.
I work part-time at the Amazon warehouse.
They won't let people work more than 20 hours a week.
When I was first hired at the orientation, they said we might be full-time workers, but I've been working there for a year and still am only part-time, and I don't see anyone else that is full-time.
Cadence.
It is not good to just throw people out.
We'll be on the streets.
You have to think of us as human beings.
It is not just us.
There are a lot of older people here, disabled people, people that can't work.
They have to think about our children's future.
It is not good in the shelter for a baby.
Being homeless is not good.
The most important thing is the children.
We have a two-year-old daughter.
They are just thinking about themselves, that they can make a lot of money for themselves.
They need to think about us.
I'm also a student at Seattle Central College, studying to be a surgical assistant.
It is hard for me to focus on work and school when I am worried about losing my home.
My husband, Michael, works as a dishwasher in Bothell.
He says that Cadence should think about us, that people are important.
It is too late to find housing in just one year.
Cadence has to do something for us, find us a new place.
Thanks for this organizing also goes to the Good Neighbor Cafe, where we are doing this press conference, and specifically to Elizabeth Bullard, who is the manager who runs the shop, who has been extremely supportive, and the owner, who's also been extremely supportive, Asfaha Lemlem, who is going to share a few words.
Again, my name is Asfa Alemlem.
I own Good Neighbour Cafe for almost...
I mean, it used to be a store.
After that, it used to be a small Ethiopian bakery.
Now it's a cafe.
And I am here about 11 years running this business.
I am really...
lucky to have a landlord who is extremely nice and generous to work with me, giving me lease and very favorable renting.
But a lot of other business was not lucky enough to have what I have, so I am hopeful.
And also, most of the people who used to live in the apartment, Chateau apartment, who used to be my customers, and I know almost all of them by name, not by name, but at least in person.
So I am really sorry to see that place is demolishing.
And I hope the city and other organizations help them to find other housing for most of the residents.
Thank you.
I think the words that Asfahar shared are also a reminder that neither residents nor small businesses should be forced to rely on the incidental goodness of a rare landlord.
In reality, most of us, whether we are small businesses or working families or retirees, we are subject to the whims of big developers, massive property development corporations, and real estate speculators.
And that is why it is important that we're here not only to fight for the chateau residents, but also to call for commercial and residential rent control.
And today is an eventful day, not only because we're here, but Oregon is on the cusp of passing a historic rent control bill.
Let's use this fight to also fight for commercial and residential rent control in Seattle.
And on that note, I wanted to invite Kaylin Nicholson, activist with Socialist Alternative.
As Shama said, my name is Kaylin Nicholson.
I am an activist and organizer with Socialist Alternative here in Seattle.
The first thing I want to do is just thank the tenants, the residents of Chateau who are here today for being willing to put themselves in the spotlight and fight against this, you know, this tragedy, this catastrophe that you know, completely through no fault of their own has been inflicted upon them.
We are hearing this story not because this is unique.
This happens all the time, all over the city.
Affordable housing, affordable apartment buildings are bought up by developers and demolished and turned into higher-end housing all the time.
The eviction rate for people in the Central District is, I forget what it is, but it's multiple families per day are pushed out of this area due to rising housing costs.
The reason that we're hearing about this particular instance is not because it's unique, it's because the residents of this community are uniquely brave in being willing to come forward, again, put themselves in the spotlight and say enough is enough.
We demand to be treated better than this.
We demand to be valued as human beings and not just be collateral damage to the for-profit housing market that is steamrolling so many families, working-class families across Seattle.
So thank you, because this is not just a struggle for your own homes, but this is for all working-class and low-income people in Seattle and beyond.
As Council Member Sawant just said, I think we need what these residents are demanding is that Cadence Real Estate, which clearly has the money to afford to relocate them, that it take responsibility for ensuring that they're able to find stable, affordable, permanent housing.
We absolutely need to fight for that demand.
But as Shama said, it's much bigger than just this one issue.
We need to fight for rent control.
so that existing affordable housing stays affordable and to protect not just our housing market but our entire economy against speculative bubbles that can inflate out of control and then burst and cause massive economic damage to our region.
We also need to tax the big developers and big businesses that are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of this humanitarian crisis and use that money to build publicly owned, permanently affordable social housing to increase the supply of affordable housing that exists in our community.
The only way that we're going to make any progress on the crisis of homelessness, the crisis of displacement that is ravaging our city, is if there is more affordable housing available for people to move into.
As we've heard from multiple families here today, people are waiting years, families are waiting years on the streets in order to get access to affordable housing.
It's not a question of them not being willing to work.
It's not a question of them not being interested in finding housing.
I can't believe the excuses I hear from pro-developer lobbyists to try to explain away why so many people are homeless.
The reason so many people are homeless in Seattle is because there is not enough affordable housing to go around and we're not going to fix that problem just by in a defensive way, here and there, responding when a certain developer threatens to demolish a certain building.
The only way we're going to solve that problem is by massively increasing the stock of affordable, permanently affordable housing that exists in our city.
And to do that we need to fund it, not off the backs of working families who are already unable to pay their rent, but off the backs of the massive corporations, developers, who are making such huge profits off of ordinary people living in this city.
That's why I'm a socialist.
I think that capitalism and the private housing market has proven itself completely unable to address the crisis of affordable housing and to meet the basic human needs of people in this city and around the world.
And I think we deserve a system that, as other speakers have said, that places basic human needs, basic human rights above the profit motive and until we provide a serious alternative to the private housing market we're not going to see that happen.
Hi, Kshama asked me to tell you about another one of our tenants who couldn't make it today because she's taking her parents to the doctor.
Her name is Roselle Johnson, and she lives at the Chateau.
She's been there for over 10 years.
And she lives at the Chateau because she had a traumatic brain injury.
Her and her husband were walking, and she got hit by a car.
Her husband was killed in that accident, and she was no longer able to work.
And she has migraine headaches.
And she still lives there and she's very upset that she's thinking that she's going to have to move.
And I'm going to read her statement now.
Again, her name is Roselle Johnson.
And she said, I want Cadence to relocate all the tenants in Chateau Apartments.
They cannot just move out or give us a voucher.
Some of the tenants lived here.
for a decade, some 30 years or more.
There's one tenant that doesn't have limbs and some tenants are seniors.
There is a tenant here who's 93 years old.
Some are on disability.
That's why we want Cadence to relocate us.
We want to stay and live close by, especially my parents.
We all love our parents.
My dad was recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and he is a non-smoker.
He undergoes chemotherapy every week.
My mom just had knee surgery.
They live close by and they depend on me.
If Cadence is going to move us out, I don't know where I'm going to live and who's going to help my parents.
Cadence should have sympathy on us.
They can't be too greedy and don't even think about the poor people.
God can change things.
I've been praying to God and I'm hoping that Cadence will relocate all of us.
Thank you.
I have a letter that we're going to present, and this letter goes to Chris Garvin, Barrett Johnson, and John Garvin of Cadence Real Estate.
And it's, Dear Chris Garvin, John Garvin, and Barrett Johnson, we, the undersigned tenants at the Chateau Apartments, along with your council member, Kshama Sawant, need to hear directly from you about your plans to demolish and replace our apartment building, and what commitments you are prepared to make to ensure that we continue to live with affordability in our neighborhood.
We are working class people, low-income seniors, and we are a diverse community.
Several of us have lived at the Chateau for years, even decades.
These are our homes, and many of us have nowhere else to go.
Our churches, shopping places, LOD relatives and friends, and the community center are nearby.
Recently, your property manager announced that you will be terminating Section 8 housing at the Chateau at the end of this year, displacing many of us.
Your representatives have described plans to demolish our building of 21 affordable family-sized rentals and replace it with 70 to 80. to two to 80 tiny apartments.
Your plan to displace us with a project that will make cadence large profits at our expense without solid commitments for our continued housing is unacceptable.
The Seattle City Council's Human Services, Equitable Development, and Renters' Rights Committee meeting will be held Saturday, March 16th at 1 p.m.
focusing on tenant displacement at the Chateau Apartments.
We urge you to attend this meeting to explain your development needs and plans and let us know what you're going to do for us and hear our housing needs.
Seattle City Council Human Services Equitable Development and Renters' Rights Community Meeting will be Saturday, March the 16th, 1 p.m.
at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which is located at 124 21st Avenue.
Seattle 98122. Thank you.
Thank you.
And what Renee?
Um, Didn't mention also is that they have, the residents themselves have door knocked their neighbors and already 16 residents of this building have signed this letter.
And I'm sure we will get 100% signing on this letter.
And we will be making sure that the developers know about this.
And as Renee mentioned, my committee will be meeting on March 16th.
That is a Saturday at 1 p.m.
at Pastor Jeffrey's church.
And we urge the developers to be there because we want to know how they are going to organize housing for all these residents in the neighborhood.
As others have said, Cadence has at least $185 million of real estate holdings.
I'm sure they have other sources of equity for themselves.
And if you add up their stock portfolio and so on and so forth, it's going to be much greater than $185 million.
And they are well able to afford it.
But what it will require is for us to get organized.
So I really urge everybody who is watching this, if you are reeling yourself and your family is reeling themselves from sky-high rents in Seattle, you are struggling to maintain a foothold in the city, or maybe you've already been pushed out of the city because of the rents, or maybe you have faced bouts of homelessness, which is one of the most devastating experiences human beings can be put to.
Or, if you have stable housing but you care about social and housing justice, then stand with the Chateau residents, come join us at the committee meeting at the church on March 6th at 1pm, and at the meeting we will be demanding that the Cadence developer organize alternate affordable and accessible housing in the neighborhood.
But as other speakers have said, this story is linked to the story of all of Seattle's working people and the majority renters who are finding it hard to live in this city.
We need to fight to stop evictions and displacement from the Central District and from the entire city.
In District 3, statistics show that there is an eviction every other day.
And it is not the rich who are evicted.
It is poor, low income and working class people and sometimes middle class people too.
It is hitting our people hard and these are the people who go to work every day and make our cities run.
So let's stand together and fight to stop evictions.
and make the big developers pay, and let's also fight for commercial and residential rent control and to tax big business to fund publicly affordable housing.
For the media, I wanted to share a few things.
One is that a recent report that came out from a King County study shows that, and this is not a study from socialists, it's from King County, It shows that at least 244,000 additional affordable housing units are needed by 2040 in order to even make a dent in this crisis.
Yes, at least.
There is no way that a for-profit market is going to provide that.
We have no option but to fight for social housing, which is high quality, publicly owned, affordable permanently affordable housing which are automatically rent controlled because they are publicly owned and not privately owned by for-profit developers or property management corporations so but for that we need to tax big business you saw what happened the amazon tax was repealed last year and then what happened after that The Amazon tax was repealed by seven Democrats on the city council because they said, oh, we cannot fight Amazon.
This is too big of a corporation.
They have bullied us into submission because if we don't repeal the tax, they will take their business elsewhere.
They will stop, you know, renting the building space.
What happened yesterday?
Amazon announced that it's going to sublease that space anyway.
This is part two of the same old story that started with Boeing Corporation that has repeatedly extracted, extorted, sweetheart deals from the state legislature saying that if you don't give it to us, we'll move jobs.
They got those deals and they moved the jobs anyway.
So we cannot rely on corporate politicians to solve our problems.
We have to get organized ourselves.
Look at what the working people in New York City did.
They said no to the $3 billion corporate handout to Amazon.
And everybody thought it was a done deal.
And one of the most powerful corporations in the world and the richest man in the world had to back down.
This is possible.
Working people can get organized and win.
So let's do that and let's stand with the shadow apartments because their success and victory will be a victory for the whole housing movement.
I wanted to share that with you.
Well, the developer has said that they won't do it until the end of the year, but we are not going to let the grass grow under our feet.
We have to fight for affordable housing for the tenants now, and we have to build massive public and community pressure to make sure that the developers pay heat, because they are not going to if they can help it.
But if Amazon can be pressured to back down, certainly Cadence can be pressured to back down and give what we need.
I also want to share with the media that I have sent an email, my office has sent an email, I'm just trying to find it so I can email it to all the media outlets if you would like, but I have sent an email to the Seattle Housing Authority, asking them to come and tell us how we can organize Section 8 vouchers to be transported to other housing units for all the Section 8 residents.
And I'm looking forward to hearing back from them.
And we have also written to the departments, the Office of Housing, City of Seattle Office of Housing, and the Department of Construction Inspections to also come and guide us as to what our next steps can be.
So we will be taking all those steps from my office in the city of Seattle, but that is not going to be a substitute for the community getting organized.
So join us on March 16th at 1 p.m.
at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church.
And I'm happy to take questions.
No, I don't.
I think that unfortunately there are any number of loopholes existing right now both in the city law and in the state law which allow landlords to do things that are not illegal but they are certainly immoral and extremely unjust.
So I'm glad you're asking this question because If something is illegal, something is legal, but immoral, then we have to fight to change those laws.
And it is through getting organized like this that we were able to win the move-in fee cap and payment plan, which was upheld in the King County Superior Court last year despite, you know, vicious fight back from the big developers and the landlord lobby.
So similarly, we are going to have to close more loopholes and build a real Tenants' Bill of Rights.
And in fact, the Chateau struggle has led my office to do some thinking about this, and we are going to make sure that whatever loopholes we can close to make something that's legal to be illegal, we will be doing that in the near future as well.
Well, one of the loopholes is that it doesn't behoove the landlord to say, I am maybe planning to demolish these units in 10 months or 12 months.
What the law says right now is when you go to the city of Seattle, when you as a developer go to the city of Seattle to ask for a demolition permit, then the law says that at that point, if you start renting units, you have to tell the renters.
But right now, the state that we are in, they haven't filed for a demolition permit yet, but they have let it be known that they're going to demolish.
So what we need to be able to do is that, in the law, we need to be able to say that once you make any kind of public announcement, once it becomes known that you are intending to do this, then it should be illegal to not let your prospective tenants know that this is going to happen.
Well, you know, in the middle of the snowstorms, some of the worst snowstorms that the city had faced, the developers put up some signs, I think just pro forma signs, on some of the streets here.
And a housing justice activist incidentally happened to see one of those signs.
She sent my office a photo of that and said, can you please be there?
And my staff were there.
The conditions were really bad, but we were still there.
But we went there Imagining that there will be a number of tenants there and the developer, although we wondered why didn't the developer postpone the meeting given the conditions?
Because there's elderly and disabled people here.
How can they travel the roads in such bad conditions?
But we went there.
There was nobody at the meeting except for the developers, representatives, and my staff.
And then, two days later, my staff, Jonathan and Sasha, door-knocked the building to find out what happened.
And it so turned out that the residents found out about the prospective demolition from us, not from the developer.
The developer had not reached out to any of them as far as I know.
As to now, the property management company still says that they don't know the building's coming down.
Maintenance yesterday told me they'd never heard of it before.
that they don't think it's coming down.
There's no way it's coming down.
Just relax, it's okay, you got your housing.
And just to clarify, as far as my office knows, that meeting was not organized as some sort of public service gesture by the developer.
They are required to have one public meeting to proceed to the next step.
And they did that, but it was a completely meaningless meeting because if none of the tenants are there and they don't even know what your plans are, then you cannot just check the box.
But it was a check-the-box meeting.
And what the tenants here are saying is that, no, we don't accept a meaningless check-the-box meeting.
You need to come on March 16th and do that meeting.
I don't know, because I don't know when they decided to do the meeting and when they put the poster, the few posters up.
I'm not implying that.
What I am saying is that once the snowstorm happens, they should have postponed that meeting.
But more importantly, it's their responsibility to go to the tenants in the building, at least hand out written notices, but better yet, actually speak to the residents and say, hey, do you know that the developer is planning to do this?
You need to come to this meeting.
They did none of that.
Let's go to the kids and say hey.
We're going to be doing that.
They're getting this letter signed, and very soon we will be going together to Cadence to do it, but you also have to understand that this is a massive developer who's going to make big profits from this development.
They are the owners of the building.
It is incumbent on them to let the tenants know.
It is not the tenant's responsibility to go and find out.
It is the developer's responsibility to let them know, and all the responsibility lies with Cadence, none on the tenants.
Caden says, we plan to demolish on this date, a specific date?
I, Jonathan, can you?
2020 or 20, in 2021 new construction.
Because you have the document.
Yes, and we can share with you the press reports where they announced.
Yes, and we're happy to share all that.
I'm happy to forward all the emails that I've sent to set things in motion to find out.
But I would like to, go ahead, go ahead.
I just want to, from my family's perspective of being homeless, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
It's okay, it's okay.
When we say permanent housing, when we become homeless and we go into shelters, shelters give you an exact exit date on when you have to be out.
You have to achieve something by this date.
If you haven't, sorry, you're back out on the streets.
We get moved to transitional housing, okay, that's a year.
you still have a date when you have to leave.
The whole time they're telling you, you're filling out applications for permanent housing.
This is housing that nobody's gonna come to you in the middle of the night and go, there's a more important case.
You're gonna have to give up your room because this family needs it more importantly than you.
So now all of a sudden at midnight, me and my kids are outside of the building with all of our stuff in arms going, okay, well, call 911, they'll move us to another shelter.
That can't happen when you go to permanent housing as long as you pay your rent, you're a good tenant, you do what you're asked to do and you don't destroy the property, you can stay there as long as you need to.
There's not a specific date when you have to be out.
They just gave us the, you're in permanent housing, as long as you do everything right, you guys are good.
Nobody's coming in to inspect your housing once a week to make sure that your dishes are washed.
You're not gonna get thrown out because one of your kids grabbed a crayon and wrote on the wall.
This is your home.
You can feel free to live your life in your home and let your family be your family without a million rules over your head on, well, we're gonna throw you out if you don't do this.
We can actually take our time and put our kids into school.
My kids are supposed to start school and him next week, the other one the beginning of the next month.
We were made a promise and they knew that they weren't going to keep it.
What do you feel like made that promise?
Cadence made that promise to us.
When we sat down with the person, they chose to run that building and to manage that property.
And he looked at us and said, I was crying, telling you, thank you for accepting my family.
He looked me in the eyes and told me, don't worry, this is your permanent housing.
You guys are good now.
Three days later, it was over.
What kind of permanent housing is that?
How can you offer yourself as HUD housing people who are supposed to help?
You just took us, my family, out of the loop for everything we've worked on for three years.
We're getting started over at square one, zero ground again.
Now I'm going through, okay, well if we don't find a place and we move into our car, CPS is coming to take my children.
We've been through all the shelters.
We've been doing this for three years now.
We have four case managers that have done everything they possibly can for my kids.
Kane's just messed my family and my kids out of a secure future.
Out of being able to start school, my kids are already behind.
My son over two years old and can't talk yet.
He's supposed to be starting special classes with specialists that are gonna come to his house every week to help him learn how to talk.
If we lose our house, they can't do that.
We have nowhere for him to come to teach my son.
So what are you gonna do for my family?
The family you took off the streets and eliminated all their other chances.
Just so that you can have a year of somebody in an apartment, so you don't have to say, well, we've got vacant apartments, but they're gonna stay vacant.
What about the family that's getting ready to move in in the apartment next to us?
They just finished the remodel yesterday.
They're moving somebody in in a week.
They don't even know yet that the building's coming down.
They have no clue.
Nobody from that building has come to any of us residents and said anything except no.
We just remodeled those apartments.
We're not taking them down.
No way we're doing that to you.
I think it looks pretty much like the building's coming down.
Come talk to us.
Come see us face to face.
Look at my children.
And then tell me to my face you don't want to help and that you can't do anything.
That's right.
Amen.
Unless there were any other questions, we were planning to close the press conference at this point.