Rick Lazio: “we hear the same old stuff: Keep the status quo. Protect things the way they are. Continue to warehouse the poor.…”

“we hear the same old stuff: Keep the status quo. Protect things the way they are. Continue to warehouse the poor. Continue to keep disincentives to work. Penalize the working poor. Raise rents on the poor. Keep things the way they are because that is OK. It is not OK. It is not acceptable. This bill begins a process of strengthening communities, of making communities healthy, of increasingly having mixed income in developments, in public housing developments, of encouraging people who want to work to go to work, to make sure that a mom who wants to work overtime can do that without fear of getting a 25- or 30-percent tax the day she goes to work. The Frank amendment destroys that opportunity. It is a disincentive to work. It destroys the ability to have mixed incomes. As long as they wed themselves to the old status quo model of tying income to rent, it will continue to be a disincentive to work and will continue to have the effect of concentrating the poorest of the poor in certain developments.”