Grassroots Report on US Mission of UN Housing Rapporteur: Our Voices Must Be Heard
During the fall of 2009, Raquel Rolnik, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, toured the country to assess the impact of the current U.S. housing crisis and determine the extent of violations of the human right to housing in the United States. From October 22nd to November 8th 2009,
the Rapporteur visited six cities, meeting with over 70 community-based organizations. The Rapporteur’s visit had the distinction of being the first official visit of its kind focusing on the failure of U.S. Housing policy as a human rights concern. A central part of the Rapporteur’s mission was to meet with members
of impacted communities, hear testimony from those most-affected, and dialogue with government officials at the local, state and federal level about the issues uncovered.
The purpose of the report is to document the critical role that community-based groups, in particular members of the Campaign to National Restore Housing Rights, played in ensuring that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing’s first mission to the U.S. captured the housing struggle a significant number of people in the U.S. have been facing for many years.
We hoped to demonstrate the links between this long-standing struggle and the crisis facing the newly-impacted after the financial and housing crisis that emerged in 2007-2008. This report also celebrates and acknowledges the growing human right to housing movement in the U.S., a movement of activists, grassroots organizations and advocates that traverse geographic, racial, and economic boundaries. We would like to recognize the hard work that local chairs put into making this a success, including:
New York, NY: Picture the Homeless
Wilkes-Barre, PA: Northeast Pennsylvania Organizing Center
Chicago, IL: Coalition to Protect Public Housing and Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign
New Orleans, LA: Mayday New Orleans
Pine Ridge, SD: The Oglala Tribal Community and Bill Means
Los Angeles, CA: The Los Angeles Community Action Network
Washington, D.C.: Friends and Residents of Arthur Cappers and Carrollsburg
We would also like to acknowledge the over 70 community-based organizations from across the country that participated in this effort.
Executive summary
During the Rapporteur’s U.S. mission, the visit focused on these major facets of the U.S. housing crisis:
- The rapid rise of foreclosures;
- The increase in homelessness throughout the U.S.;
- The demolition of public housing in many municipalities; and
- The general shortage of accessible and affordable housing, including inadequacies in federal rent subsidy programs.
The different U.S. cities and towns visited by the Rapporteur illustrate that there is more than one face to the U.S. housing crisis. The Rapporteur visited such varied locations and communities as: New York City; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Chicago; New Orleans; Pine Ridge, South Dakota; Los Angeles; and Washington, D.C. The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) and members of the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights, with assistance from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), coordinated visits to the locations featured in the Rapporteur’s mission. The primary objective in assembling these locations was to ensure diversity, in order to communicate the breadth of the housing crisis. Such an approach was designed to help illustrate that seemingly disparate struggles, in different locations, are interconnected via the inequitable nature of failed federal housing policies. Thus, the Rapporteur’s schedule included visits to urban communities, as well as rural (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) and indigenous (Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota) communities.
In organizing the mission, we sought to ensure that directly impacted communities fully participated and led each city visit.
At the close of the Rapporteur’s mission, meetings were held with federal officials, including representatives from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the State Department. In these meetings, the Rapporteur discussed how the damaging effects that the housing crisis wrought on the different communities with whom she met implicate the failings of U.S. housing policy.
Given the historic nature of the visit – the first time the UN came to monitor housing rights violations – the Rapporteur’s mission received significant press coverage, from local papers to international press.
Following the U.S. mission, the Rapporteur released her official report chronicling the U.S. housing crisis and presented her findings to the UN Human Rights Council in March of 2010.
The findings was featured in the UN Human Rights Council’s periodic review of the United States on November 5th, 2010