September 22, 2021
Mayor Todd Gloria
Members of the San Diego City Council
Re: Advance Child Tax Credit
Dear Mayor Gloria and Councilmembers,
The City of San Diego Human Relations Commission would like to applaud your work to establish an Office of Child and Youth Success as well as your support of Resilient Communities for Every Child.
As a commission, we advocated for the creation of this new office because of our collective desire to see San Diego reach its full potential by becoming a city where all who are born, grow up, and come of age here can reach their full potential. We are committed to ensuring all San Diego children – and particularly those who live in historically underserved communities – have access to all they need to lead thriving lives, including stable housing, culturally responsive and trauma-informed community services, clean and safe spaces to live and play, and robust mobility options.
As a city committed to equity, we want to make sure you are aware of an opportunity to connect thousands of struggling San Diego children and families to material resources to improve their lives right now. Through the Advance Child Tax Credit Payments, parents earning up to $112,500 a year ($150,000 for joint filers) are eligible for monthly payments between $250 and $300 per child. Unfortunately, low-income households may not be getting the tax credits to which they are entitled if they did not file 2020 or 2019 tax returns. According to the Treasury Department, across the U.S., as many as 2.3 million children may be in such families.
According to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, there is already evidence that the first set of advance child tax credit payments are having an impact as a smaller share of households with children are reporting that they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat over the past seven days than they did before the payments started going out in mid-July.
We are calling on you to use all channels at your disposal to promote this significant monetary benefit to low-income families across our city (and have included details on page 2 of this document to help you do this). Now that the eviction moratorium and unemployment benefits have ended, this infusion of cash could serve as a needed lifeline for families struggling to stay afloat. Not only will it help families in need, but their spending will also support our local economy.
We also want to point out that parents who are not citizens can receive the payments for their citizen children as long as they have individual taxpayer identification numbers and their children have Social Security numbers.
Thank you for your partnership and consideration of our request.
Sincerely,
Shana Hazan
Chair, City of San Diego Human Relations Commission