In partnership with the National Alliance for Safe Housing (NASH), RHLS is thrilled to announce the creation of VAWAHOME.COM, a resource for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking, as well as for their advocates to learn about housing rights under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and each states’ implementation of the law.
If you missed our webinar, check it out here.
Download a printable about VAWAHOME.COM.
For survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking, finding and maintaining safe housing can be very difficult. It is often an impediment to survivors leaving an abusive situation. Survivors may not be able to find housing because of bad credit histories caused by their perpetrators. They may be evicted because of crimes committed against them. These challenges can be even greater for survivors who are persons of color, are LGBTQ, are immigrants, or who experience disabilities.
What survivors need is secure, safe housing, and thanks to VAWA, federally subsidized housing, including housing funded through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), does offer an added level of protection of housing for survivors. LIHTC is a public-private partnership that creates the largest number of federally subsidized affordable rental housing in the country.
VAWA provides housing protections for survivors applying for and living in federally-subsidized housing, including LIHTC housing. VAWA is critical to ensuring that survivors are not denied LIHTC housing or lose their LIHTC housing because of the violence committed against them.
But in order to access those protections, survivors and their advocates need to know about LIHTC.
A Short History of the VAWA in LIHTC Project
In 2013, VAWA’s housing protections were amended to apply to housing created by using federal Low-income Housing Tax Credits. Since then, there have been a series of efforts coming from the legal services community across the United States to try to ensure that VAWA was being properly implemented in LIHTC.
In 2016, a group of organizations designed and distributed a survey to state housing finance agencies asking them what they were doing to educate partners and residents about VAWA and what they were doing in terms of compliance. You can read more about the history of this project in the 2017 report: Protections Delayed: State Housing Finance Agency Compliance with the Violence Against Women Act.
In 2019, Karlo Ng of National Alliance for Safe Housing (NASH) and Rachel Blake of Regional Housing Legal Services (RHLS) published Upstanders and Bystanders: The Role of State Housing Finance Agencies in Implementing the Violence Against Women Act in the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program.
NASH, under Karlo Ng’s leadership, developed and hosted a national webinar series on VAWA and LIHTC. The purpose was to help advocates who work with survivors understand more about the LIHTC program generally, how the LIHTC program can help survivors, and how survivor advocates can work to make LIHTC more responsive to survivors’ needs.
RHLS, under Rachel Blake’s leadership, in partnership with Vanessa Raymond-Garcia, and with the support of many others, has reviewed the text of every LIHTC Qualified Allocation Plan and Compliance Manual for the last several years, cataloged how each state is addressing VAWA (through fall 2020), and created maps that allow advocates to easily see how their state compares to others. Learn more about how RHLS can help with LIHTC research.
As an advocate, you can get involved in LIHTC advocacy! Find out how on our new website.
Visit VAWAHOME.COM for more information.