Increasingly expensive United States housing is leaving many more people homeless at a time when the financial crisis is hitting hard, an independent United Nations expert said.
"Millions of people in the U.S. are spending high percentages of their income to make their monthly rent and mortgage payment, face foreclosure or eviction and live in overcrowded and substandard conditions," Raquel Rolnik,
the UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, said in a statement issued here Monday, following her first official visit to the United States.
"The number of homeless continues to rise with increasing numbers of working families and individuals finding themselves on the streets. The economic crisis has exacerbated this situation," she said.
Rolnik travelled to Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, as part of an 18-day fact-finding mission about the status of affordable and adequate housing in the United States. Rolnik met with senior government officials at the local, state, and federal levels, including the Department of State and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She also attended public town hall meetings in each city visited and engaged in discussions with representatives of civil society and people experiencing homelessness.
In the statement, Rolnik also said she was pleased to note that the new U.S. administration was thinking critically and broadly to confront and solve the affordable housing crisis in the country, reversing decades of budget cuts and proposing large additional budgetary resources to housing.
But she noted that a wider range of permanent options for affordable housing, particularly for the most vulnerable, was required.
Rolnik stressed that, in designing and implementing these options,affected residents and community members should be partners in the planning and decision making process, as required by international human rights norms.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on Dec. 10, 1948, states that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family," including housing.
Rolnik, who serves in an independent and unpaid capacity, will present her official report to the UN Human Rights Council in March 2010.