Our homelessness IS a human rights crisis
It’s funny how you don’t hear something until it is an outside voice saying it, because the reality is out housing crisis IS a human rights issue…
An expert from the United Nations has labelled New Zealand’s housing situation a “human rights crisis of significant proportions” that the Government isn’t doing enough to address.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to housing Leilani Farha has released a statement at the end of her visit to New Zealand saying a “more ambitious, innovative and courageous approach” is necessary to solving the housing problem.
She said the “human rights crisis” has impacted the most marginalised – including Maori, Pasifika, those from the LGBT community, immigrants, single parents and people with disabilities – the greatest.
“When one in every hundred people is homeless, half of whom are under 25 years; when thousands are living in vehicles or house in motels provided by the State; when houses are in such disrepair that they cause otherwise preventable illness and disease; and when middle-income earners are finding it difficult to afford and access and rent home, the result is not just a housing crisis, it is a human rights crisis of significant proportions,” she wrote.
“These conditions indicate not only violations of the right to housing, but also the right to health, security and life.”
Farha said at the root of the issue was a speculative housing market that had been supported by successive Governments. She said homeownership had been promoted as a form of investment.
…the only pathway to wealth in NZ for the Middle Classes is property speculation. It was what locked the middle classes into voting Key for 9 years because they earned more each year from their property valuations going up than they did from their actual salary.
You can have every book Marx published in the home library, but when National were inflating your property values in double digits each year, you’ll vote to add creationism to the Science curriculum if it means keeping National in power.
That’s why National are proposing to revoke any of the changes Labour have passed so as to recreate the housing crisis and get those middle class property portfolios singing again.
That’s why we have ghost houses so smelly tenants don’t damage the asset value.
That’s why homelessness is still crippling.
That’s why generations are still locked out of home ownership.
That’s why greedy landlords love to increase rentals and point to the minor insulation changes as the reason.
That’s why housing needs to be seen as a human right and not a way to get rich.
We need radical and sweeping changes to empower tenants by rapidly increasing state house builds and allowing tenants to buy those houses directly from the state so as to stop the desperation slum landlords use.
That desperation is why slum landlords don’t have to provide proper housing. The sooner we remove that desperation, the sooner slum landlords have to clean up their act.
By refusing to see housing as a human right, we allow the speculators to continue to dictate their interests over the interests of society.
Haven’t we allowed speculators and landlords to call the shots for far too long?
Interesting how its magically become the “wicked landlords” who are at fault since Labour and National led governments failed to keep up state housing. Back in the day having a rental property was a sign of success borne of hard work and effort, not to mention an entrepreneurial flair.
Now landlords are oppressors of the downtrodden masses. Goldstein style villains, whose infamy is only assuaged by smiling politicians with yards of impractical ass covering legislation, that actually makes it ever harder and yet more expensive to rent a property.
Shame all that tax landlords pay on rental income could not be used to help fund state housing. State housing that helped to moderate the over heated private rental market and provided homes for generations of New Zealanders. Guess its easier to pass the buck than do something productive and meaningful with it.
A lot of public land and public services that have been privatized ended up as private housing developments for cash. Now we’ve got pregnant mothers and vulnerable people traveling further for those services.
Just declare war on the property owning middle class, and seize power by a coup!
Berlin has just brought in a five year rent freeze, with price caps.
EuroNews Berlin Rent Freeze Million Homes
Berlin is freezing the rents of 1.5 million apartments for the next five years starting this Sunday in a controversial move to control the exploding costs that have forced many to move outside Germany’s capital city.
Berlin is the first German city to influence the rental prices so directly and the law has been both celebrated as a step toward more fairness by its supporters and ripped apart as a socialist method by critics.
In recent years “rents have skyrocketed” in this city of more than 3.5 million people, and there is “an overall housing shortage”.
As housing became unaffordable, Berliners marched in protest. This from April last year:
Thousands took to the streets of Berlin on Saturday in protest against rising property rents and called for properties of large-scale landlords with more than 3,000 houses to be taken over by the government. Other protests have been held across Germany’s major cities, including Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich on Saturday. German Protests Demanding Govt Take Over