On Monday, over a dozen activists gathered on a plaza outside the University of the District of Columbia's Theater of the Arts as the crowd filed into Mayor Muriel Bowser's State of the District Address. The participants handed out fliers urging repairs to public housing units and protested the displacement of low-income residents in the city. (Photo courtesy of Bread for the City)

Aja Taylor: Why we interrupted the mayor’s State of the District Address

By Commentary On Mar 22, 2019 Last updated Mar 22, 2019

As foreshadowed in Mayor Muriel Bowser’s State of the District Address earlier this week, there are some good things in the proposed fiscal year 2020 city budget she unveiled Wednesday morning.

The proposed $2.5 million to assist our undocumented neighbors with legal and other assistance is a step in the right direction. Resources devoted to fighting homelessness, such as funding for a day center and partial funding of the Homeward DC plan, are also welcome additions. Continued free rides on the DC Circulator and the pledge for additional Metro funding are critical in a city where so many people rely on public transportation.

Aja Taylor is the advocacy director at the local nonprofit Bread for the City.

However, despite the economic boom that has visited this city in the new millennium, not all residents have benefited from our increasingly prosperous and thriving economy. Some have been actively excluded and ignored. That’s why organizers and advocates from Bread for the City, Empower DC, The Sanctuaries and ONE DC took the message directly to the mayor, disrupting her State of the District Address on Monday night three times.

The disruptions were tense. But recall the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” Disguised by the chorus of applause from the well-dressed audience, there exists a tension caused by the District’s distressing levels of economic inequality and displacement. This tension is a de facto war on the poor.

We interrupted Mayor Bowser because we didn’t need a report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition to tell us that tens of thousands of Black residents were being displaced. They are our neighbors, our family, our friends. We have seen the people and places we love disappear. We have seen the results of not fully funding public housing, which is currently the most-affordable housing that exists for people living on extremely low incomes.

We interrupted Mayor Bowser because her proposal to expand the District’s 2020 investment in the Housing Production Trust Fund from $100 million (the figure in recent years) to $130 million is woefully insufficient to address the egregious impact of displacement on this city. Just 40 percent of the extra $30 million would be allocated to those living at the lowest incomes — netting a paltry 60 of the 37,000 units needed to adequately address the housing crisis for this segment of the population. Given that the city failed to meet the statutory minimum for building units at the lowest income level during the mayor’s entire first term, a first step toward making reparation to those residents would be investing $140 million in the Housing Production Trust Fund just for extremely low-income housing.

We interrupted Mayor Bowser because her actions have shown that profits take precedence over people. The District’s incentive package, when it was trying to woo Amazon into bringing HQ2 to the city, was valued at between $488 million and $1.05 billion. Of that, $200 million was pledged to the Housing Production Trust Fund. Yet when Amazon chose Northern Virginia, Mayor Bowser suddenly could find only $30 million to make sure her constituents had a “fair shot.”

Immediately following the State of the District Address, I released a statement: “This budget isn’t a fair shot, it’s a bullet to the heart of people who pinned their hopes on a native Washingtonian.” I was accused of being hyperbolic. The language is strong, but a strong response is what these times call for. When entire neighborhoods in Black and other communities of color are erased, what other response can there be to incremental budget increases for catastrophic problems?

As Mayor Bowser heads into her second term, we want her to know that the time is up for platitudes, ribbon-cutting photo ops and fanciful claims that everything’s all right in the District. While displacement started in this city before her tenure, she has a responsibility to help end it. Malcolm X said, “Power never takes a step back [except] in the face of more power.” We are organizing, and we are building community power. As we said Monday night, until there is no more homelessness, until the city spends more money to house Black and brown people than to police us, until public housing is fully funded and protected, we will continue to disrupt.

We are here. We are coming.

Aja Taylor is the advocacy director at the local nonprofit Bread for the City, which works with low-income DC residents to develop their power to determine the future of their communities.

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