Ayanna Pressley slams Republicans for defunding LGBTQ+ senior housing project

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) delivered a blistering speech on the House floor last week, taking her Republican colleagues to task for stripping funding from an affordable housing initiative aimed at LGBTQ+ seniors.

In March, Pressley requested $2 million in funding for The Pryde, a planned affordable senior housing development in her district, from the House Appropriations Committee during the Community Project Funding process. The project, which broke ground last year, will convert a former public school building in Boston’s Hyde Park area into 74 units of affordable housing specifically tailored to LGBTQ+ seniors.

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The anti-LGBTQ white nationalist group Patriot Front demonstrated in Boston a week prior to the vandalism.

As WBUR reported in July, the House Appropriations Committee’s Republican majority voted to strip $850,000 earmarked for The Pryde from a housing appropriations bill. Roll Call reported that Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) alleged that the project would discriminate against straight people. WBUR noted that while The Pryde will be tailored toward LGBTQ+ elders, it would be open to all.

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Last Monday, Pressley, the vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus Task Force on Aging and Families (TFAF), took the floor to oppose the bill in its current form, citing “the draconian cuts and dangerous provisions included in it” and specifically calling out Republicans for defunding The Pryde.

“It would seem with my colleagues across the aisle that the word freedom is selectively applied,” Pressley said. “It does not apply to my bodily autonomy. It is not applied to intellectual freedom for our 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 Pryde, Pressley said, “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. Unconscionable.”

Advocates for the project told WBUR that one-third of LGBTQ+ seniors in the U.S. live at or below 200% of the poverty line, while a 2021 report from AARP New York and SAGE found that more than a third of LGBTQ+ seniors surveyed feared having to go back into the closet when they enter senior housing or long-term care for fear of discrimination or mistreatment.

“Republicans are choosing homophobia over housing, profits over people, cruelty over compassion,” Pressley said last week. “Their actions to target, attack, and dehumanize our LGBTQ siblings are nothing more than a show of contempt.”

She characterized the Republicans’ defunding of The Pryde as an “act of policy violence” that “contributes to the physical violence that far too many LGBTQ folks experience.”

“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,” she said.

In July, LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc., the nonprofit behind The Pryde, said that it was committed to opening the facility with or without congressional funding. Shortly after House Republicans stripped funding from the project, GBH News reported that Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren (D) and Ed Markey  (D) included $850,000 for the project in the Senate’s 2024 appropriations bill.