The first few months of Donald Trump’s presidency hasn’t been good for a local housing organization. CNY Fair Housing has lost federal funding and is working with a federal bureaucracy that has been drastically cut back.
The case of an Oswego landlord accused of sexually harassing tenants is one of the most notorious cases CNY Fair Housing helped bring to light. And they did it with funds from a federal grant that paid for community outreach.
“There had been women reporting allegations of sexual harassment, which is a violation of fair housing laws, for decades in that community,” said Sally Santangelo, executive director of CNY Fair Housing. “And nobody had done anything about it. Nobody had informed these women that they had rights until someone had attended one of our trainings."
The funds for those trainings is now gone, a victim of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Santangelo said she got an email notifying her that they were one of 66 fair housing organizations across the country that immediately lost a federal grant.
CNY Fair Housing gets 60% of its funding from the federal government. Santangelo is concerned about another grant that’s supposed to be renewed in June. In light of that, they’re scaling back operations.
"Moving forward, we're going to start to have to cut back on those investigations,” she said. “We're already changing our plans for summer. Usually do a lot of outreach in the summer. We do a lot of tabling at community events. We're canceling those plans. We're not going to be doing that community outreach. So, in all of those ways, we're starting to peel back our work and cut our work.”
CNY Fair Housing has 11 employees and works to ensure equal access to housing opportunities for people across upstate New York.
