Rep. Ramirez: No. 1 priority for me is making housing top priority for illinois

by Suzanne Hanney

Twenty years ago, when State Rep. Delia Ramirez (DChicago) was a 17-year-old accompanying her mother to a Humboldt Park soup kitchen, she wondered why no one was doing more to provide housing and case management for its guests.

And since Ramirez ran for state office in 2018, “the Number 1 priority for me is making housing the top priority for the state,” she said as the October 13 opening keynote speaker for the 2020 Housing Matters! online conference hosted by Housing Action Illinois in partnership with the Strengthening National Communities forum.

“My district is a tale of two districts: $2 million-dollar homes on the east, and $250,000 homes on the western part,” she told the forum. Yes, the cheaper homes have gone up in value, but so have their property taxes. “This year, because of the pandemic, they may be selling their homes because of taxes.” There’s plenty of buyers ready to flip the properties as an alternative to Lincoln Park.

Because of the coronavirus crisis, Ramirez and state Rep. Will Guzzardi (D-Chicago) have been able to engage suburban colleagues for the first time in a conversation about how to minimize the number of people losing their housing during the pandemic -- a number she said could hit 1.7 million. There is no Statehouse housing committee – yet – but they have been able to form a bipartisan working group.

The conversation about housing is not a cookie-cutter one, she said, but one that differs from Humboldt Park to Rockford or East St. Louis. Even when she was running an organization in Logan Square, which today is highly gentrified but was Latino at the time, she said she saw a need for rapid rehousing, affordable housing, eviction prevention and even homeowner protection, because property taxes push displacement.

Ramirez was able to introduce an emergency housing bill at the General Assembly’s special session in May that extended eviction protections to keep people off the streets and also helped make landlords whole. The bill did not pass, “but I was able to put housing on the map.” She won $390 million in financial assistance for renters and homeowners, out of a need she projected at $2 billion. The bill also laid the groundwork for formation of a housing committee in the General Assembly’s January session.

Before they could move housing legislation, however, the legislators had to lay a groundwork of conversation from advocates about why housing is critical to child welfare, health care, environmental justice and criminal justice. “I asked DCFS [the Department of Children and Family Services] how many families had not been reunified because of housing instability. They had no answer for me.”

While education has been the hot-button concern, advocates have to do a better job connecting housing to other issues, because “during the pandemic, it’s unstable housing and contracting the virus that could kill you.”

With the state’s evictions moratorium set to expire November 14 and the federal law “confusing,” she is working with Housing Action Illinois and the Shriver Center on Poverty Law to introduce a bill to seal evictions records. “There will be thousands in the street, whether we like it or not. What I am afraid of is when a person is in the street that eviction flag will make it harder to find affordable housing.”

The daughter of immigrants, Ramirez is the first Guatemalan-American in the Illinois General Assembly. She still lives on the same Humboldt Park block where she grew up. As a high school senior, Ramirez became the case manager and “mail lady” at the soup kitchen where her mother volunteered and realized how important it was for its 1,800 guests to have a place to send and receive mail. Years later, she became the founding executive director of the Center for Changing Lives, board chair for Latin United Community Housing Association and for the Logan Square Neighborhood Association.