KC Tenants (KCT) leaders living with rent debt and evictions are meeting with City Manager Brian David Platt to negotiate KCT’s eight demands toward addressing the rental assistance program, evictions, and truly affordable housing. Various PeaceWorks-KC leaders and members who have protested with KCT asked for this information to appear here.
On Friday, Oct. 8, leaders from the KCT Rental Debt Team met with City Manager Brian David Platt. They brought a list of eight demands to the meeting that are designed to ensure that federal rental assistance money is being used effectively and is easily accessible for tenants.
Platt agreed to the following commitments:
- Working with KC Tenants to increase city outreach for rental assistance information
- Simplifying the rental assistance application process with the new round of ERAP funding that is coming within the next few weeks. Applying needs to be as easy and automatic as possible.
- Producing public info reports about the rental assistance distribution of funds so far. They will put this information on their websites.
- Changing 30-day protection to 60 days or more for tenants who apply for rental assistance. Late fees and evictions can’t happen for at least 60 days.
- Platt wanted to enforce eviction discrimination through the Civil Rights, Inclusion and Equity Office, led by Andrea Dorch. They will work on presenting an online portal for tenants to file those claims online because they can’t right now!
Read more about the meeting here: https://twitter.com/KCTenants/status/1446537845481656325. The website for KC Tenants is kctenants.org.
Copyright 2021, Jane Stoever, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.
