In a sharply critical speech from the House floor, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-7th District, tore into the chamber’s Republican majority for advancing a housing funding bill that excluded an affordable housing development in Boston for LGBTQ+ seniors.
“It would seem with my colleagues across the aisle that the word freedom is selectively applied,” Pressley said Monday of the $825,000 trimmed from the bill for The Pryde, a 74-unit development in Hyde Park, which is in Pressley’s district. “It does not apply to my bodily autonomy. It is not applied to intellectual freedom for women, African-Americans, or LGBTQ siblings when it comes to our books ... And it does not apply to the freedom to love who you love.”
The nonprofit group LGBTQ Senior Housing began redeveloping the former Rogers School in Hyde Park in the spring 2022 for the new housing development. Plans call for 74 units, a mix of studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments for LGBTQ+ seniors aged 62 and older, along with a 10,000-square foot community center, according to its website.
On their website, the developers said they “expect to welcome [their] first residents in early 2024.”
Pressley has supported the project through Congress’ Community Project Funding process, which is overseen by the House Appropriations Committee. It is among the 15 funding requests the Boston Democrat has submitted to the panel for fiscal 2024.
In her floor remarks, Pressley said the decision to exclude the funding was “unconscionable,” arguing that the project “satisfies the committee’s requirements and would meet a critical need in my district at a time when mortgages are skyrocketing, and one-third of LGBTQ seniors are living in poverty, and many are forced to re-closet themselves in order to age in community in their twilight years.”
With the move, “Republicans are choosing homophobia over housing, profits over people, cruelty over compassion,” Pressley said. “Their actions to target, attack, and dehumanize our LGBTQ siblings are nothing more than a show of contempt.”
In a Tuesday statement, Pressley said she’s worked with Democratic Massachusetts U.S. Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren to advance the funding in the Senate.
The GOP’s “act of policy violence contributes to the physical violence that far too many LGBTQ folks experience,” Pressley said during her floor speech, adding that as “the vice chair of the Task Force on Aging and Housing. I want my LGBTQ constituents and siblings in the movement to know: you deserve safe and affordable housing. You deserve to be seen and loved, and I will never stop fighting for you.”