2. HOUSING JUSTICE
WE BELIEVE that housing is a human right. The City should ensure high-quality, safe, fair, accessible, and affordable housing for all. We support:
1. Ensuring that all decisions on affordable housing, fair housing, tenant rights, and homelessness are made through an equity lens.
2. Policies that affirmatively further fair housing and facilitate economically diverse and inclusive neighborhoods and discourage discrimination and segregation in housing.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
3. The development of additional affordable/low-income and accessible housing throughout the City, including the construction of new City housing, particularly in high-opportunity areas accessible to transportation, jobs, and food.
4. Progressive incentives for developers who maintain a substantial proportion of their developments as permanently affordable housing.
5. Flexible zoning policies that promote affordable housing alternatives, including co-ownership and cooperative housing arrangements, throughout the City.
6. Avoiding the use of eminent domain against resident owners of private homes and local owner-occupied businesses unless there is a clear benefit to the neighborhood and a substantial majority of Madison residents.
7. Zoning policies that increase the supply of quality affordable housing citywide.
8. A dedicated source or sources of adequate funding for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
9. Re-examining affordable housing programs to ensure that affordable housing dollars are reaching those most in need, prioritizing those earning below 30% Area Median Income (AMI), but when possible those earning below 50% AMI.
TENANTS' RIGHTS
10. The right to publicly funded legal representation for residential tenants facing eviction or termination of subsidized housing.
11. Security of tenure for tenants occupying current traditional housing or transient shelter and legal protections to enhance the security of tenure, including a good cause standard for eviction.
12. Improved enforcement of the Madison General Ordinances as well as licensing of property owners and management companies renting three or more residential units so that repeat violators of housing regulations lose their licenses to rent residential units.
13. Prohibiting the use of credit history which is unreliable, dated, or unrelated to a housing obligation, information from court records, or criminal convictions unrelated to housing, to discriminate among applicants for housing.
14. Urging the state legislature to repeal laws limiting local governments’ ability to expand housing opportunity and tenant protection.
HOMELESSNESS
15. Making long-term housing available to people without homes of their own, including making vacant public property available for housing the homeless.
16. Adequate shelter space for homeless individuals and families.
17. 24-7 access to facilities providing basic needs to homeless individuals and families.
18. Securing rights of those applying for and participating in emergency shelter and Community Development Authority (CDA) housing programs to services delivered with respect, courtesy and care; and a third-party complaint process for grievances related to homeless shelter services and subsidized housing.
19. Prioritizing funding for no- and low-barrier housing services that are sensitive to trauma and its impact on people, and service models that meet clients where they are at without requiring sobriety to participate in city-funded housing programs for persons without homes.