It’s been nearly a decade since Shernita Jefferson made her first vision board.
On Tuesday, Jefferson told a roomful of public officials and private executives how having that vision helped her focus. Nine years later, she is a wife, a homeowner and has two children in college.
Her journey was exactly what Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said he hopes to replicate by establishing an “EnVision Center” in a Southwest Washington housing complex.
The center, a hub Carson will have installed at 18 public housing facilities in 15 states and the District, will give residents receiving federal housing assistance access to services to achieve “self-sufficiency,” he said. A kind of interactive vision board, the hubs will let children and families in poverty “see beyond what you can see, as my mother used to always say,” Carson said. It will centralize access to programs that offer job training, child care, education and scholarships.
But getting to “self-sufficiency,” or the point at which families no longer need to rely on federal assistance, is a long road, said Mark Bergel, founder of A Wider Circle, a nonprofit that helps people get out of poverty.
“When we’re talking about real, sustained self-sufficiency, we’re talking about a lot of different things, like setting someone up with a career — not just a job — so they can begin to earn enough to put them at 200 to 300 percent of the poverty line,” Bergel said. “It’s a long-term strategy that is about making up a lot of ground for folks who were, in many cases, born into poverty.”
Carson didn’t address his proposal to raise rents at public housing complexes around the country during his hour-long roundtable. But, Bergel said, the two are connected: Rising costs of living make self-sufficiency more difficult to reach.
Residents at the Greenleaf Gardens Apartments, where Carson announced the new center would be located, could be among thousands of District residents paying hundreds of additional dollars in rent over several years if Congress approves his plan.
According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, D.C. residents who receive federal housing subsidies would see an average rent hike of $980 per year — the most dramatic increase in the nation. Carson has argued the hike will push residents to find employment and, eventually, off federal benefits.
Carson said Tuesday that most public-housing residents he spoke to in a cross-country tour didn’t seem worried about rent hikes because they “realize that’s just the beginning of a conversation about being able to sustain these programs.”
“We’re simplifying the system considerably,” he said. “Right now there’s like 3.2 million different rents that are being paid and that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Carson touted the program as low-cost, noting that no HUD or federal money was being used to support the EnVision Centers, and that each would be run by local agencies.
Tyrone Garrett, director of the D.C. Housing Authority, said the possible rent hikes aren’t a concern — yet.
“Once something is set in stone we can determine what our residents need and put policies in place,” Garrett said. “We’re waiting to see how it all comes down.”
He applauded Carson’s vision-hub as a way to bring attention to the myriad services D.C. already offers public housing residents and families living at or below the poverty line.
Read more:
