Originally published in In These Times on October 31, 2016.
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Affordable housing may not have received much attention in the presidential election, but it’s on the minds of many voters. A national survey released by Ipsos Public Affairs in July found that six in 10 Americans say it’s a key issue for them, and nearly sixty percent of respondents say their local officials are not doing enough to improve housing affordability.

Faced with rising housing costs, at least twelve cities will be voting on affordable housing ballot initiatives come Election Day – with most of them revolving around constructing more affordable units and providing more support for the homeless.

In addition to pushing for bond and loan referendums that would create new financing for these ends in pricey areas like San Francisco and Oakland, community activists are confronting a deepening housing crisis in Baltimore, a city that’s often overlooked in discussions of affordability. Baltimore residents will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot initiative that would amend the city’s charter to create an affordable housing trust fund – an entity to provide housing assistance for families making 50 percent or less than the area median income. The fund could also support a variety of other affordable housing efforts, such as providing homeownership workshops and credit counseling, developing new low-income housing or rehabilitating vacants.

Many Americans think of places like New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco as the most unaffordable places to live, but though they have higher rents, they also also higher median incomes. Johns Hopkins graduate student Philip Garboden analyzed the most recent American Community Survey and American Housing Survey data and found that of the top 25 largest cities in the country, Baltimore ranks fifth for rental housing burdens, behind only Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Memphis. (Los Angeles residents will be voting on two housing initiatives this November – one that would raise property taxes to fund housing for the chronically homeless, and another that would require large housing developments to set aside a portion of units for low-income residents.) Despite Baltimore rents ranking as average among the 25 largest cities, only six cities have lower median incomes, and all of those six cities have lower median rents.

For the 34 percent of Baltimore renters who live below the poverty line, the challenge of finding affordable units on the private market has grown increasingly difficult—not to mention that the majority of poor renters in Baltimore receive no housing subsidies from the government. The city has also seen sharp rent increases in recent years, so middle class families with stagnant incomes have also experienced unprecedented housing burdens. In the past six years, the number of cost-burdened middle-income renter householders in the city shot up from 1,800 to more than 7,500.

Affordable housing trust funds are not a new idea, but they’ve attracted more attention as of late. “They have definitely been picking up at a greater clip,” says Mary Brooks, the senior advisor of the Center for Community Change’s Housing Trust Fund Project. “When I started working on these in the late 1980s there was only a handful, and now there are 770 existing in cities, counties, and states across the country.” They’re no panacea – plenty of costly cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston have them – and a housing trust fund’s effectiveness depends largely on how committed the local jurisdiction is to funding it. But they can be powerful tools: in Washington D.C., their formidable trust fund receives annual allocations of $100 million.

Brooks says that housing trust funds tend to be politically popular because their dollars are extremely flexible – there are fewer strings attached to how money can be directed, so funds can be used at different times for different things. “A community could say, ‘Okay, we want to improve existing properties’ – and they do that for a few years,” says Brooks. “And then they could say, ‘Okay, now let’s start producing new housing.”

Housing for All Baltimore, a coalition of local groups, including the ACLU of Maryland, the Community Development Network of Maryland, CASA de Maryland, Enterprise Community Partners, and United Workers campaigned for the referendum. Volunteers needed to collect 10,000 signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, and ultimately gathered more than 18,500 over the summer months. The Baltimore Board of Elections then certified 12,057 of those signatures.

United Workers, a Baltimore-based human rights organization, did a lot of the organizing legwork to collect petition signatures. Members stationed themselves all over the city—from grocery stores, to churches, to community festivals. “I was surprised by the diversity of interest in this issue,” says Todd Cherkis, an organizer with the group. “There really just hasn’t been robust public policy around affordable housing and community-driven development in this city, and we found that that there really was widespread support.”

Last January United Workers unveiled their “20/20 Vision” campaign – a call for $20 million annually invested in public bonds for community land trusts, and $20 million annually invested in public bonds to hire the unemployed to deconstruct Baltimore’s notorious vacant housing. “The 20/20 campaign is a set of demands and goals that attempt to rewire the city to actually meet people’s housing demands, create jobs and do sustainable development,” says Cherkis. “The housing trust fund would be a vehicle to help raise resources directly to do some of this. It’s only a first step.”

If the measure passes, steep challenges will remain. Chief among them, the ballot initiative does not come with any source of funding because the state constitution prohibits appropriations by referendum. Instead, the referendum would empower the City Council to direct funds into the trust fund. At present, only the mayor has that authority. “That’s why we needed the referendum,” explains Odette Ramos, the executive director of the Community Development Network of Maryland. “We thought if we tried to do it through the legislative process, the mayor would veto it.” When asked how much she anticipates going into the trust fund, Ramos says she’s “hopeful” that that they can raise between $15 – 25 million. The fund would be open to public financing, including from state and federal sources, as well as private financing, like individual donors and philanthropic organizations. Advocates say they’re exploring different dedicated revenue sources, like a tax on AirBnB rentals. There are also discussions around pressuring local universities to pay directly into the housing trust fund, as they are currently exempt from paying property taxes. “We’ll throw everything on the wall and see what sticks,” Ramos says.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the initiative. Carol Ott, a local housing advocate, says she’s voting against the trust fund this November. “This is what Baltimore does,” she tweeted. “Invests in strawman ‘game changers’ that change little to nothing for those who need it the most.” Ott calls for creating a program that allows middle-income affordable rental housing to coexist with homeowner-occupied homes, as well as diverting more resources from subsidized downtown developments to neglected, poor neighborhoods (something United Workers also supports).

While the goal of raising $25 million for a Baltimore housing trust fund seems relatively paltry compared to the likes of Washington D.C., Mary Brooks says not to underestimate what even a modest housing trust fund could accomplish in Baltimore, and notes that funds in other cities – like Nashville and Richmond – have increased their revenues over time. If the ballot measure passes, supporters say they don’t expect to see money come out of the trust fund until at least 2018. Advocates will also have a brand new city council and mayor to work with following November’s election. According to The Baltimore Sun, about half of current councilmembers are retiring, seeking other office, or lost their April mayoral primaries.

Originally published in The American Prospect on October 20, 2016.
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This election season Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders aimed to galvanize millennial voters by raising the issue of college debt. In a new book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab lays out why college has grown far too expensive, and why our existing systems of aid so often fail to help students manage their financial obligations. In an interview with The American Prospect, Goldrick-Rab discusses her research, her proposals for reform, and why the price of college needs to be at the forefront of affordability conversations.

Rachel Cohen: A prominent theme in your book is that the nature of going to college has changed, but the policy discussions around college have not really changed.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: There’s been a lot of discussion over the last five years about how the students in college are different. The Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, and most of the D.C. policy people recognize that what we used to call a “non-traditional student” is now a traditional student—meaning there’s recognition that college students are now older, more racially diverse, more likely to be a first generation student, more likely to have children, and so on.

So there’s been a lot of talk about that, but as I’ve listened, it’s become very clear to me that these people don’t realize how paying for college has changed. In other words, they recognize that the students are different, but they seem to assume that the same sorts of strategies to pay for college that they were used to 10 or 15 years ago work today.

How are things different?

There’s been a lot of change in a very short period of time. First of all, one of the biggest changes is that families are not getting ahead. Prices are rising and people’s incomes are not keeping pace. And at the same time, college feels less optional than it once did.

Prices have notably risen very dramatically in the public sector, including at community colleges. Community college was supposed to be the one place you could go if everything else was unaffordable.

Another shift has to do with work—it is increasingly difficult to find stable, part-time employment, and this really complicates the ability to match work with school.

And then lastly, there used to be more supports for low-income people who wanted to go to college. Those systems have been dramatically changed since welfare reform, which added work requirements, and made it much harder for people to go to college if they’re on cash assistance, or receiving food stamps.

You say there’s too much focus on the “cost” of college and that really we should be focusing on the price. What do you mean?

The cost is what it actually takes to deliver the education. The price is what the institution charges. The price is going up because states are now putting in less money on a per-student basis. We need to understand that the reason that the price is going up is not because the cost of education is rising quickly, but because the government has stopped putting in their share, which forces tuition in the public sector to increase.

You describe how the longer it takes someone to get their college degree, the less likely it is they will finish. So if students have to switch from being a full-time student to being a part-time one in order to manage school and work, they actually decrease their odds of degree completion. Why is it not slow and steady wins the race?

Part of it is because there’s a momentum issue. If you’re trying to learn, it’s very helpful to do it continuously and to focus. It’s very hard to split your attention, and if you’re a part-time student, and you’re working, and you have a family, and you’re probably doing all kinds of other things—to carry on all those roles, for a long, really extended period of time, is hard. Eventually something gives.

Here’s the thing though. The idea that it’s best to go to college full-time has also led to a movement that I strongly disagree with. Now people are telling kids that they should take 15 credits a term, not just 12 [which represents a full-time class load], so that they can finish faster. But that’s hardly realistic unless we make it so that students can really focus. There have been really awful changes to financial aid policy to push people to go faster. The broad assumption is that students just don’t know they should go faster. I find that offensive, and without empirical basis.

More so than just affordability, your book spoke to the importance of public higher education institutions. You raised a lot of questions and concerns about the subsidies the government funnels to private institutions, especially as public colleges grow more expensive, and struggle to stay afloat.

I don’t have many colleagues, if any, who have been speaking about this and I really don’t get it. I don’t get what’s so terrifying about questioning the distribution of sizeable taxable resources to private education. We subsidize private colleges and universities in many ways, and one is through the tax code, and the other is through federal student aid. We have a voucher system in higher education—Milton Friedman liked this thing. This was all about choice, and the theory that the only colleges that would exist were those that provided a good quality service at a good price to the so-called consumer. And the federal aid system would facilitate that choosing. I think it’s sort of laughable that people thought this would work, and that this system would put low-income people in a position where they could somehow exact accountability from powerful institutions.

I don’t know how that was even going to happen, but I think there’s also this question of change over time. I think initially there was a capacity issue. We didn’t have enough public colleges and universities. But now we’ve got plenty of public seats, and I think most of our private institutions are drawing away resources that should go to the public sector.

I’ll add that there is a class of private colleges that exist to serve the most vulnerable—one of them is religious schools, one of them is for our students of color, like HBCUs, and one is tribal schools. Those institutions are a very different category of private schools, and I think we could easily carve out another category for them to continue receiving federal aid, or make them state-supported in some fashion. I think it’s legitimate to say we don’t have a public alternative for those schools.

You’ve done a lot to draw attention to the for-profit college sector. Some defenders say these are the only institutions that will educate poor black and Latino students. How do you respond to that?

That’s nonsense. Any opportunity at a for-profit is available at a community college with sufficient resources. Now, many community colleges are underfunded so they can’t provide night classes, which are what many low-income students want to take. But if community colleges are funded appropriately, then they almost always expand their course offerings to the evening. The University of Phoenix, [a for-profit], invests all these dollars into advertising, but community colleges don’t spend their limited resources on advertising.

This past summer, when Chris Christie came out with a proposal to divert public funds away from New Jersey’s poor urban schools towards wealthier suburban schools, the public was outraged. Yet as you discuss in your book, this happens regularly in higher education, and we don’t have the same sorts of reactions. We don’t direct more resources to higher education institutions serving the most needy students, or even really talk about how we should be doing so.

Yes, the process is quite opaque. Even when people talk about declining investments in higher education, the discussion is never about the breakout in types of institutions, which means people aren’t really asking the right questions. I think there really are big tensions because people assume that higher education is not like K-12, and if there are inequities existing in the system, then it has to do with people’s personal failings. But it’s really a systematic underinvestment in institutions like the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

And then look at the Community College of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. Why should UPenn be getting federal student aid with the endowment it has, when the Community College of Philadelphia sits there without the resources it needs?

You’ve done research to show that many college students are going hungry, lacking the resources to afford food. You’ve proposed creating a subsidized meal program for college students, just like we have in K-12 public education.

Yes, and this idea has gained some traction. Most people don’t seem to realize that people end up hungry in college, and once I proved that and started to explain the types of fixes out there—well, I’ve heard from folks who disagree with me on 90 percent of things I say, yet call my proposals to curb college hunger “common sense.” And this gives me a little hope that maybe under a Clinton presidency we could get this one done.

Originally published in The American Prospect on October 19, 2016.
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In cities across the country, teachers unions have been strategizing ways to broaden the demands they bring to the negotiating table. Organizing under the banner of “bargaining for the common good,” educators and their community allies have started to challenge a legal regime that for too many years left unions solely focused on wages and benefits.

One window of opportunity that teacher unions are exploring is charter authorizing—the process of opening, closing, and monitoring charter schools. Though laws vary from state to state, 90 percent of the nation’s roughly 1,000 charter authorizers are local school districts. (The other 10 percent include statewide boards, independent boards, and nonprofit organizations.) Someone looking to open a charter school would in most cases have to apply to a local school district for permission. If their application were approved, the school district would then be tasked with ensuring that the charter meets academic standards and all other relevant laws and regulations.

In recent years, more charter teachers have started to form unions at their schools. But since most are at-will employees who work on year-to-year contracts, the threat of retaliation presents a serious hurdle to unionization efforts, particularly since the charter sector is generally known for its union animus.

As a result, teachers unions representing educators at traditional public schools have started to explore how they might use their leverage at the bargaining table to make union organizing easier for their charter brethren.

“You can see a pathway when school districts are the authorizers, because the union bargains with school districts as employers, and could put proposals on the table around rules for charter authorization,” says Shaun Richman, a labor writer who directed the American Federation of Teacher’s charter organizing program from 2010 to 2015.

The first local to do this was the Cleveland Teachers Union. By the middle of the last decade, the Cleveland School District had sponsored several non-union charter schools. With a new round of contract negotiations coming up, the local teachers union wanted to figure out how they might insert their voice into their employer’s charter authorizing process. When bargaining began, the union sought the right to talk freely about organizing with teachers in any charter school authorized by their district. Though ultimately unsuccessful in winning this demand, the union did win language in its 2010 contract requiring their school district to remain neutral if teachers at any charter school it authorizes sought to unionize.

This neutrality language has proven useful, according to David Quolke, the Cleveland Teachers Union president. He says that when three Cleveland charter schools organized unions this past year, their anti-union charter operator, I Can, wanted the school district to intervene. “The employer was trying hard to stop the union, but the school district had to stay out of it,” Quolke says.

While his union did not get everything it wanted in 2010, Quolke says its “foot is now in the door” and he can envision pushing for more authorizing concessions in the future.

The Chicago Teachers Union took Cleveland’s efforts one step further in its recent round of collective bargaining. Rather than push for a commitment that their employer—the Chicago Public Schools—remain neutral, the union demanded that the school district require all charter schools it authorizes to remain neutral if their teachers decide to organize.

Chris Baehrend, acting president of ChiACTS, the union representing Chicago charter teachers, says that neutrality agreements make a profound difference for workers. “The main reason that teachers don’t form unions is because they’re afraid—they’re afraid they’ll get fired, or they won’t succeed,” he says. ChiACTS currently represents 32 schools, and roughly 1,000 teachers.

Stephen Lerner, a veteran labor organizer, likens these types of efforts to the Justice for Janitors campaign that he helped lead in the early 1990s. “The whole idea of that campaign was to use our existing base to bargain for neutrality for other folks,” he says. “A major part of the organizing strategy was negotiating where the union was strong for neutrality in other parts of the contract, and for other divisions [of the employer’s company] that were non-union.”

While the Chicago teachers did not win their demand for citywide charter neutrality when they reached an accord with the district last week, they actually won something even more surprising: an agreement to halt charter growth. In the new contract, the Chicago Public Schools agreed to not increase the net number of charter schools or charter school students through 2019, an unprecedented concession.

The United Teachers Los Angeles has gone even further with these contract efforts—bargaining not just for labor rights for charter teachers, but also for greater overall accountability for charter schools. During its last round of contract negotiations in 2014, the Los Angeles teachers union, in partnership with local community groups, called on the Los Angeles Unified School District to ensure that all schools under its purview—district and charter—be held to the same set of transparency, equity, and accountability standards. The union also proposed requiring that before the district opens up any new school, it first must assess what the economic, educational, and communal impact would be on existing schools. (Under California state law, however, school districts are prohibited from considering such factors when reviewing new charter school applications.)

Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the Los Angeles teachers union, says that although it wasn’t successful in getting these demands codified in their contract (not surprising, in light of the state law), raising the issues catalyzed new and important conversations with their employer. “Our efforts also had an impact on other affiliates across the state,” Caputo-Pearl says. “They read our proposals and are now really thinking about how to introduce similar types of demands.”

It should be noted that not all teacher unions are yet ready to think creatively about their contract negotiations. In an interview with the Prospect, George Jackson, the communications director of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said, “there’s really no advocacy [the union] could do at the bargaining table” around charter authorizing since charter teachers are not directly part of their union.

And not every instance of unions inserting themselves into the charter authorizing process has been so positive. In 2011, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers actually created the nation’s first and only union-backed charter authorizer. The goal was to open innovative charters that elevate teacher voice, and to secure unions a seat at the education reform table. But five years into the experiment, the authorizer, the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, oversees mostly low-performing schools, and only one is unionized. Many rank-and-file public school teachers have also protested their union’s decision to fund charter authorizing.

In addition to bargaining with school districts, unions are also beginning to flex their legislative and lobbying muscles to try and influence the charter authorizing process.

In New Jersey, it’s the state department of education that authorizes charter schools, not local school districts. Marguerite Schroeder, a staffer with the New Jersey Education Association, says her union closely monitors the entire process from start to finish. “We navigate, we scrutinize, we legally request every application for new charter schools that the department of education considers,” she says, adding that her union is prepared to work through all legislative and legal channels to ensure that New Jersey is held accountable for any charter it authorizes. It also works to monitor how and where public funds are spent within the charter sector.

In 2014, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University released a set of national policy recommendations to promote increased charter accountability, transparency, and equity. The recommendations called on charter governing boards to file financial disclosure reports, and to prohibit charters from using registration procedures that directly or indirectly discourage certain students from enrolling. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers came out in strong support of the Annenberg proposals, and have since been advocating for school boards and state legislators to adopt them.

In California, the local unions have lobbied the state legislature for a number of bills inspired by the Annenberg standards, including bills that would require charters to be more financially transparent, and to establish more equitable discipline policies. Though many of these bills have failed to make it through the legislature or have been vetoed by California Governor Jerry Brown, they’ve sparked a larger political discussion in the state around charter regulation. And such efforts haven’t been confined to blue states. In 2015, after a campaign led by parents and the local teachers union, the school board governing the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools voted in favor of adopting all of the Annenberg standards.

Ultimately there may be legal limits to what unions can bargain over with their school district in matters of charter authorization. Advocates hope, however, that opening up the conversation on the local level through contract negotiations can help to create broader political momentum for legislative change.

But other questions remain. For example, as unions get more involved in the charter authorizing process, and as more charter teachers go union, how willing will unions be to close down failing charters that have unionized staff? The Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools recently rescued a scandal-ridden charter from closure at the last minute, and the fact that the school had unionized teachers may have been a factor.

Still, Secky Fascione, the National Education Association’s director of organizing, is optimistic about unions’ ability to positively impact the charter school environment in conjunction with community groups. She sees all these efforts as just new iterations of bargaining for the common good. “I think there is real excitement here,” she says. “There are many community stakeholders who would love to make proposals around charter schools, and we have a real opportunity as unions to open up the process to really get those voices heard.”

Originally published in The American Prospect on October 18, 2016.
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Unionized teachers and staff at UNO, a charter network comprising 16 elementary and high schools in Chicago, may go on strike Wednesday.

Many local news organizations have incorrectly claimed that a walkout by the unionized charter school teachers would be the first labor action of its kind. But as Jacobin first reported, teachers at a Philadelphia charter school staged a “sick-out” in 2011 when school administrators refused to bargain in good faith; the two sides ultimately reached a contract compromise. In 2014, the unionized teachers at the same Philadelphia charter voted to strike, but reached a contract deal with administrators before a walkout took place.

Nevertheless, a UNO strike would be significant development. UNO is one of the largest charter chains in the city, educating roughly 8,000 students. As more charter teachers opt to unionize across the country, more educators will likely begin engaging in traditional labor protests.

More than 95 percent of the 532 unionized UNO workers voted in favor of going on strike. The stickiest points of the charter union’s negotiations revolve around pension payments, class size caps, and salary increases. Their first-ever contract, negotiated in March 2014, has expired. Teachers and school administrators have been in contract talks for the past eight months.

“We aren’t going to strike just to make history,” says Erica Stewart, a fifth grade UNO teacher on the union bargaining team. “It’s just not feasible, or the right thing. If we need to walk off the job, it needs to be for the right reasons.”

While UNO administrators have said that they can’t afford to pay for all the teachers’ demands, the union members don’t believe them. Teachers point to things like UNO’s central offices located in downtown Chicago, which rent for more than $30,000 per month. They argue that their employer could be making very different budget choices.

Union leaders and school administrators plan to bargain all day Tuesday. If they fail to reach an agreement by midnight, then teachers will strike. UNO has already reached out to families to warn them that all school and extracurricular activities may be cancelled beginning Wednesday.

Stewart, who has taught at UNO for six years, says that the working conditions at her school were very challenging before the charter network formed a union in 2013.

“I was constantly afraid to ask for anything, I was afraid to leave my classroom if I needed a bathroom break,” she says. “I always felt I was going to get fired, and I took the job because I’ve got three kids at home to feed and I needed the work. I love teaching, and I love my students. It was just really difficult to work in a culture of fear like that.”

When I asked how parents and students have reacted to the possibility of a strike, Stewart says they’ve tried to keep bargaining politics out of the classroom and have organized informational meetings for parents, off-campus, after school hours. “The parents have been going out of their way to talk to us,” says Stewart. “They’re also trying to get their own voices heard within UNO.”

Originally published in The American Prospect on October 13, 2016.
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The clock is ticking, and pressure is mounting for the D.C. City Council to vote on the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015—a bill, that, if approved, would become the most progressive paid leave law in the country. Originally introduced last October, the measure has to be voted on by the end of 2016 lest it die in committee.

The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to not offer paid leave, and only 12 percent of U.S. workers are currently entitled to it through their employer. While Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993—which offers new parents and those with sick family members the right to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave from their jobs—even this law covers only about 60 percent of the workforce, and many eligible workers simply cannot afford to take unpaid time off.

In light of these realities, some states have taken paid family leave into their own hands. Four—California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York—have passed their own paid leave laws, and some cities are following suit.

Washington, D.C., would be the first jurisdiction to create a paid family and medical leave program entirely from scratch. The four states that have passed paid family leave have had the advantage of adding the benefit onto their existing temporary disability programs—something only five states have. As such, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York were able to incorporate paid family leave relatively easily into their existing state welfare systems.

Joanna Blotner, a Jews United for Justice organizer advocating for the paid leave bill, says that D.C.’s lack of existing infrastructure actually provides the city with an opportunity to become a real national leader on paid leave. “We can build a top-rate program unencumbered by outdated systems,” she says. “And if we can create a paid leave program in D.C., it can be done anywhere.”

Jews United for Justice has been the anchor organization for the Campaign for Paid Family Leave—a coalition of more than 180 businesses, community groups, and advocacy organizations working together to pass the Universal Paid Leave Act. While the legislation was introduced in 2015, the roots of the campaign actually stretch back to the summer of 2014, when Jews United for Justice leaders began exploring potential campaigns. In September of 2014, the D.C.-based Jewish activist group voted to focus on promoting paid family leave.

The organization spent the next eight months figuring out what other jurisdictions were doing around paid leave, assessing who else would be interested in getting involved locally, and studying what would be legally viable in a city like Washington, D.C.

Preliminary conversations for the bill began in May of 2015, and advocates spent the rest of the summer working to flesh out the legislative language with the bill’s co-sponsors, councilmembers Elissa Silverman and David Grosso. (Silverman is an alumna of Jews United for Justice.)

The bill currently being considered looks a little different from the legislation originally introduced last October, which would have allowed employees to take up to 16 weeks a year off from their jobs. (California and New Jersey offer just six weeks of paid leave.) The D.C. legislation has since reduced its proposed leave to just 12 weeks, which is how much New York’s program provides for.

The city council held three hearings on paid leave over the past year—an unusually high number for local legislation. The final hearing, in February, ran past midnight, with more than 100 people turning out to testify in support.

Paid family leave is popular, both locally and nationally. In D.C., Public Policy Polling found that 80 percent of D.C voters agreed that the city needed paid family leave, and a Washington Post poll found that 82 percent of D.C voters supported the paid leave legislation in front of the city council.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has also endorsed paid family leave at the national level, announcing support for it during the first major speech of her campaign. Clinton wants to push for 12 weeks of paid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act, and in aWashington Post op-ed published in May, she wrote she “strongly supports” the paid leave proposal in front of the D.C City Council.

If elected, Clinton might need support from congressional Republicans to push paid leave forward, unless the Democrats manage to win both congressional houses next month—no easy task. The GOP has generally been loath to support social programs that require raising taxes, and Clinton says she would fund paid leave by taxing the wealthy. (Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Rosa DeLauro, on the other hand, introduced a bill in 2013 that would fund paid leave through a small tax on employers and workers, which is essentially the way it’s funded in California and New York.) Still, this past September, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came out in support of a paid maternity leave program (albeit one that targeted middle-class rather than poorer families), a sign that perhaps the political winds even in parts of the GOP are changing.

D.C.’s Universal Paid Leave Act would be funded through small employer contributions—up to 1 percent of a worker’s salary—into a citywide fund. Self-employed workers would pay directly into the program, though they would have the option to opt out if they wanted. A citywide pool of coverage, advocates say, means a more affordable contribution rate for everyone.

Opposition to D.C.’s paid family leave bill has come from unsurprising sources: the business lobby, representing large corporations and trade associations like the D.C. Nightlife Hospitality Association, the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, and the Consortium of Universities, representing D.C. area colleges. These critics generally focus on the legislation’s costs and potential consequences. The D.C. Chamber of Commerce says it “would make the District of Columbia dangerously uncompetitive.” The Washington Post editorial board argues the bill “goes way too far.” A number of small businesses, by contrast, have been strongly supportive of the Universal Paid Leave Act.

Some D.C. residents have worried that such a generous paid leave program could lead to fraud and abuse. The legislation calls for reimbursing 100 percent of wages up to $1,000 a week, and 50 percent of wages above that amount. In other words, the less you earn, the higher percentage of your earnings you’d get back—a key progressive feature of the bill.

But Blotner of Jews United for Justice thinks that many of these concerns about fraud stem from misconceptions regarding how insurance applications works. “To be certified or approved for family or medical leave, you’d have to submit medical paper work, birth certificates, and more for your unique situation,” she says. “All that is then cross-referenced by medical coding and expert advice of professionals. Insurance programs are likely to deter and catch fraud better than a paid leave benefit offered in-house by a company.”

The D.C Chamber of Commerce and the Consortium of Universities recently came out with their own paid leave proposal, a plan that would require all businesses to offer workers eight weeks of paid leave at 100 percent of their paycheck, but to pay for it how they see fit.

Advocates of the Universal Paid Leave Act say this alternative would make it harder for small businesses to participate, since big companies can afford to purchase large disability insurance plans. Councilmembers Grosso and Silverman also say this plan would lack an enforcement mechanism, and would be less efficient than a program administered by the city.

The D.C. City Council failed to vote on the paid leave bill before breaking for recess this past summer, but the odds that the council will vote on paid leave in some form look pretty good. Councilmembers recently tabled a fair-scheduling bill, largely because they didn’t want to overload employers with too many new costs at once. Just how progressive the final legislation will be remains to be seen, as the council is still making final changes to the bill. Paid leave supporters would like to see councilmembers adopt broader definitions of “family” to ensure that all sorts of important relationships would be covered, including parents, grandparents, siblings, and cohabitating partners. And advocates worry that D.C. residents who work outside the city, and those who work for the federal government, may also be excluded from coverage.

Nevertheless, if the city council does move forward with a new universal program, one that particularly addresses the needs of low-wage workers, it will mark a significant leap forward for paid leave, not just in the District but also across the country.