Is housing affordable in Chicago? UN representative to find out
We all know it isn’t easy to find an affordable place to live in Chicago. The Chicago Rehab Network says that to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at $711 a month, a person would either have to earn at least $13.67 an hour or work 106 hours a week at the minimum wage.
But is housing so unaffordable that it violates human rights? The United Nations is here in Chicago to find out.
The UN Special Rapporteur on housing will visit the United States with seven stops in major cities, including Chicago.
Raquel Rolnik will start her visit by meeting with regular Chicago citizens at a town hall meeting at Fernwood United Methodist Church at 10057 S. Wallace Street in Roseland today from 7 to 9 p.m.
Everyone is invited and encouraged to attend to share your stories of Chicago’s housing situation with an international audience.
What do you think? How is Chicago doing according to U.N. standards?
Rolnik met with New York City residents last week in another town hall meeting.
What did she hear? According to the New York Times, it wasn’t such a good report.
“‘We have no one to help us,’ said Delores Earley, 73, who said her landlord has been trying to push her out of her Harlem rent-stabilized apartment for 20 years. ‘Somebody has got to know.’”
Rolnik will be in Chicago from Oct. 27-29. More details on her schedule for the three day tour are available from the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights.
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I really don’t get how this lady is adding value at all. I guess she provokes stories in the media about how bad the housing situation is, but don’t we have plenty of those stories anyhow?
I didn’t have all the details when I wrote this (more coming soon) but she will write a report on the state of housing in the U.S. that will be presented to the UN general assembly and US officials. She also meets with city officials and such like the CHA to give them her recommendations and reflections.
But Rolnik herself admitted that the report on its own doesn’t do much. She said at a Tuesday night meeting that she wants her visit to help people hear each other’s stories and organize together to advocate for better communities themselves.
The prices of housing should be left up to the market, not the government. Government intervention in the housing market is one of the main reasons of this economic downturn. Even the most liberal economist will tell you how things like rent control don’t work. People think for some reason that goods and services such as housing and health insurance are “rights”. They are not human rights, and they are most certainly not constitutional rights.