Housing/Homelessness

Shack fires are a constant danger. But that danger becomes more serious in winter. This is because during winter people who are living in shacks are trying to keep warm. As a result people resort to making fires which increases the risk of their homes being burnt. There was a serious fire in the Foreman Road settlement in Durban in the past month leaving hundreds of people destitute. On Sunday five people lost their lives in the fire that burnt down the Plastic View settlement in Pretoria.

The homeless people’s suffering belongs to amusement of our political order under a game over the right of marginalized group being transformed into citizens for merely punishment and humiliation. The Public Space Protection Orders is a penalty over one’s condition suffering – it is a fine over the disempowered for being disempowered. This act allows power to fragment the homeless into sub-humans punishable for the state of utter misery.
— Bruno De Oliveira

On April 20th New York’s City Council overwhelming and unsurprisingly approved Mayor de Blasio’s controversial plan for the rezoning of the Brooklyn neighborhood East New York. The final tally was 45-1-0. Unsurprisingly since a month earlier the council had already approved de Blasio’s $41 billion housing plan that aims to create and preserve (a distinction that shouldn’t be glossed over) 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade.

This week we take you inside the sketchy world of booty hiding, otherwise known as offshore tax havens.
In the music break UK rap crew dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip with “Great Britain.”
Then we continue of our coverage of a revolution that’s taking France by storm and that has spread beyond its borders.

On the 1s and 2s:

May of 2012, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, visited his first NATO country, Canada. He found Canada’s poor generally deprived of adequate nutrition (“People are simply too poor to eat decently”). He found the Aboriginal peoples at risk.

Basic Income is a serious proposal necessary to address many of the economic problems facing the developed world. Let us start by defining what Basic Income is. For that, the Green Party’s paper on the subject is helpful:

Spend any time within the tedious realm of New York punditry and one is bound to come across the phrase ‘the bad old days’. Though endemic in discourse for two decades the phrase has been even more bandied about since the election of the ostensibly progressive mayor Bill de Blasio two years ago. Indeed the words have become so common it’s not always clear to what days the chorus is referring. Their usefulness depends on their fluidity.

After a breakdown in mediation between the State of Israel and the Palestinian villages of Massafer Yatta, Israeli authorities destroyed 24 homes in the South Hebron Hills. The homes lie within an area which Israel claims as Firing Zone 918, in which approximately 1000 Palestinian civilians live in 8 villages.

As a world community we have agreed that everyone has a right to a home, (article 25 of the UNDHR makes this clear), however, like many such ‘rights’ – food, adequate health care, good education for example, the ‘right’ to a home is dependent upon your ability to pay for that right.

News item: California’s Right to Rest Act would give homeless people the right to use public space without discrimination. It also describes the right to rest in public, to protect oneself from the elements in public, to eat in public and to occupy a legally parked car.
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