Boston City Councillor Kendra Lara Refuses To Give Up Government Subsidized Housing She No Longer Qualifies For Due To Salary, Has Multiple Evictions, Won’t Pay Lactation Consultant 6 Year Old Bill

 

Last week we published a blog about a public records request we conducted looking into Boston City Councillor Kendra Lara’s claims that she receives daily emails calling her “n word whore,” as a result of a random woman on Twitter who she demanded be censored. Predictably the Boston Globe had no interest in reporting on her completely made up story used as a pretext by a government official to silence critical speech from a constituent. But this isn’t the only thing Lara is lying about.

Lara lives in a swanky new housing development at 161 South Huntington Street, right in the heart of Jamaica Plain.

 

This is government housing, and to live there you can’t make more than a certain amount of money. Lara lives with her son, which would mean the maximum income limit at that address is $96,650 at 100% AMI.

I wasn’t sure what the percentages meant, and no one at BPDA could answer that for me when I called. But it’s clear that she can’t live there if she makes more than $96,650. After getting elected Lara tweeted that she gets paid $80K a year, which would mean she qualifies to live there under 90% and 100% AMI.

But this is a lie. Her salary is $103,500 a year, although she is looking to raise that to $115K.

That’s more than the allowable income for living there on affordable housing.

Our sources tell us that the Boston Planning and Development Authority has been trying to force her out of there, since there is a lottery and a waiting list of people who actually need the housing assistance. But Lara has reportedly told a source that we spoke with:

“Good luck with the optics of throwing out a single mother of color with a disabled child.”

This is entirely consistent with something she would say, since Lara simply cannot complete a sentence without mentioning how oppressed she is due to the color of her skin. Therefore, rule don’t apply to her because she can play various marginalized cards.

Prior to becoming a City Councillor Kendra didn’t like to pay her rent either. That’s why they attempted to evict her for nonpayment of rent in 2019 and again in 2020. In 2019 she defaulted by not showing up for court.

Keep in mind, her rent is subsidized due to her salary prior to becoming a City Councillor, and she still couldn’t pay in time. Since she no longer qualifies for rent assistance due to her salary she would be paying well over $3K a month in rent to live there, as opposed to the $1,300 she pays with assistance.

She presents landlords as “aggressive multi-million dollar corporate landlords,” because they expect to get paid rent by tenants.

Smearing corporate landlords is easy and popular because they’re faceless entities that can be portrayed as villainous for evicting poor people. But Kendra also likes to screw over regular, every day people like Christine Fischer-Rothman, a lactation consultant and life coach who works with new families. Fischer-Rothman filed a small claims lawsuit for a $455 bill that Lara refused to pay and then stopped returning her phone calls. The bill is over 6 years old now, and Fischer-Rothman said she would work with her and be flexible. Lara gave her the runaround and said insurance would pay, but they never did.

Kendra couldn’t be bothered to show up for a June court date and thus defaulted.

She still owes this small business owner $542.30 and clearly has no intention of paying. Fischer-Rothman is white, which means Lara will almost definitely accuse her of racism for trying to collect money for services rendered.

Prior to getting elected Lara would always complain about the burden of having to pay rent on social media, and patted herself on the back when she actually did.

Imagine complaining this much about rent when over half of it is being paid for by the government anyway? She also has a child that lives with her, so presumably she qualifies for child support as well.

Ironically she has been leading the fight for affordable housing:

But she currently is taking up an apartment that she doesn’t qualify for, which means someone who actually needs it can’t live there. Kendra Lara is just an upper-middle class bureaucrat displacing an impoverished family while pretending to care about their plight. She knows that being a woman of color gives her privileges she’d never have if she wasn’t “marginalized.” Particularly the privilege of being able to threaten to smear BPDA the same way she smeared the constituent she demanded be silenced on Twitter.