Welcome Home Kentucky is a coalition of tenants’ unions and advocacy groups from across the state. They canvassed in Danville over theweekend to ask residents about housing issues as part of a wider campaign.
Immanual Tesfai is a field organizer for the group. He said they’re looking to build relationships with residents.
“We want to understand what they care about, the ways they've been affected by housing injustice, and give them opportunities to get involved, to do something about it with this campaign,” he said.
Kentucky’s minimum wage has remained at $7.25 since 2009. Tesfai said stagnated wages make it harder to afford essentials like shelter.
“That's essentially killing the American Dream. People are forever stuck in a renting, tenant-landlord cycle. Most people have given up on home ownership as a possibility in their future. So that's something we want to tackle,” he said.
It also comes as the Commonwealth is facing a housing shortage.
The Kentucky Chamber says the state would need to build more than 300,000 homes over the next three decades to maintain a healthy housing market. That includes homes in both urban and rural areas.
Danville Mayor James Atkins said his town alone is 1,700 homes short of what’s necessary to take care of his citizens.
“Just like all cities in the state of Kentucky, we have serious housing problems at all economic levels. Affordable workforce, middle class, upper class, whatever it might be, we still have some shortages,” Atkins said.
A priority for the group is to promote legislation that would remove evictions from tenants’ records after a certain amount of time. Campaigners said around half of Kentucky’s evictions are dismissed in court, but still show up on citizens’ records.
One such bill was filed to address that issue last legislative session, but died in committee.
