U.S. Housing situation draws attention of U.N Human Rights Council

[jotsy]

Found this at Truthout, by Armin Rosen/Inter Press Service
From Friday


United Nations - On Friday, the richest and most powerful country on earth was the subject of a damning report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The United States rarely finds itself brought before HRC, and issues of U.S. domestic policy seldom make their way into official U.N. proceedings.

But Raquel Rolnik, a Brazilian architect and urban planner and the HRC's special rapporteur on adequate housing, found that U.S. housing practices were not in keeping with the agreed international framework on human rights.

During a visit to the U.S. this past September, she found that affordable housing was threatened by lending practices, reductions in public housing availability and the lack of a safety-net for poor families whose incomes are all but devoured by exploding housing costs. Her report also highlights homelessness in the United States, and looks at how the demolition of public housing units, housing foreclosure and exploitative "subprime" lending practices combined to create an "affordable housing crisis" in the U.S. She found a 33 percent increase in families "facing serious problems finding affordable housing" between 2000 and 2003, according to a press release from COHRE, a Geneva-based housing rights NGO.

According to Eric Tars of the Washington, DC-based National Law Centre on Homelessness and Poverty, Rolnik visited the United States at the invitation of the Barack Obama administration.
The NLCHP had been trying to get the previous rapporteur on adequate housing to make an official visit to the United States during the early 2000s; that rapporteur applied to the U.S. State Department for an official invitation but did not get one until the final month of the George W. Bush administration.

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There is more to the story at the website, links are not yet a part of the skill set, I am working on it, pardons please.

The jump includes rebuttal comments made by an author of 'U.N. reform' who's position I found particularly annoying.

[tXr]

1. Here is the link to the article.

http://www.truthout.org/us-criticised-over-soaring-housing-costs57450

All you have to do is copy the information in the search bar at the top of the screen and then paste it into your post. That will create the link to the article. :)