Long-time public housing leader and MayDay New Orleans member Sharon Jasper is facing an assault charge and housing voucher termination for her courage to speak out against New Orleans’s policies of public housing demolition and displacement. After her participation in a May 28 demonstration protesting the private Columbia Parc development that replaced St. Bernard public housing and denied many former residents the right to return, Sharon was slapped with an assault charge on a Columbia Parc rental agent and threatened with eviction.
Sharon’s case is a symbol of the constant threat of eviction faced by all public housing tenants. It’s also part of a disturbing pattern of using eviction to intimidate tenants against exercising their right to expression and organization. A strict set of HUD regulations threatens tenants with eviction or voucher termination for breaking a number of rules around public housing developments, but when it is used to silence resident leaders who choose to organize and speak out, this has a particularly chilling effect on democracy.
From NOLA to New York, Sharon and all public housing residents and leaders need our sustained support.
If you’re in NOLA, come through this Saturday, July 31 to aSurvivors Village meeting:
4 pm at the St. Bernard Community Baptist Church, 4000 St. Bernard Ave
The agenda includes planning for Sharon Jasper’s legal defense. More information on the meeting can be found at the Survivors Village blog.
Wherever you are in the world, sign this online petition demanding all charges against Sharon be dropped.
Please continue to call/fax these officials and demand that Sharon’s charges and voucher termination be dropped:
David Gilmore, Executive Director, Housing Authority of New Orleans: (504) 670-3300
Human right to housing movement leaders J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights and Endesha Juakali of Survivors Village New Orleans appeared last night on Los Angeles’s KPFK 90.7FM Beautiful Struggle. You can listen to the whole broadcast here.
Among the many hot issues J.R. and Endesha discussed during the broadcast–including reflecting on local struggles in New Orleans and Chicago–J.R. spoke to the imprudence and injustice of the Obama administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s public housing privatization plan PETRA in the face of the national economic and housing crisis:
“We have been engaged with HUD around a conversation around Preserving, Expanding, and Transforming Rental Assistance (PETRA), which is also known as the preservation of public housing. And how do you preserve public housing, they say? By taking it out of the hands of the government and giving it to the banks. The same people who just failed us, who failed middle class America, you now want them to fail poor people.”
Sharon Jasper at the May 28 Columbia Parc demonstration.
Public housing residents are under constant threat of eviction or voucher termination for violating any one of a broad range of rules made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, from missing an appointment or a utility bill to having a verbal dispute with a security officer. When these hostile and excessive regulations are employed to silence community leaders and activists, it only further underscores their inconsistency with democracy and the human right to housing. No one should have to choose between free expression and keeping their home.
Show your support for Sharon Jasper, New Orleans public housing resident and community leader facing a battery charge and an eviction order after her participation in a May 28 demonstration organized by Mayday New Orleans and Survivors Village. The demonstrators, taking part in Take Back the Land Movement’s May 2010 Month of Action, staged a sit-in at the Columbia Parc management office in New Orleans to demand the unconditional right of return for former residents of the St. Bernard Housing Development. Columbia Parc replaced the St. Bernard public housing complex after the City of New Orleans voted to replace the 1500 public housing units with a “mixed income” development, and later imposed a strict set of eligibility criteria on public housing residents to return.
Columbia Parc filed a battery charge on one of their rental agents against Sharon, though no complaint was filed by Columbia Parc the day of the demonstration and the alleged battery was not mentioned when protesters were ordered to disperse. This charge resulted in an eviction order for Sharon.
"Let the people in!" The May 28 demonstration at Columbia Parc.
“Sharon was not arrested because she broke any laws, but because she has been a tireless and uncompromising fighter for the right of poor people to return to their communities after being displaced by the government negligence which led to the city of New Orleans being flooded. Further, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and HUD are now trying to make an example out of Sharon by taking her voucher away. With rent three times as high as it was before the evacuation, this is basically an attempt to make her one of the thousands of homeless people that already exist in the city of New Orleans. If we allow these people to be successful in their efforts to silence Sharon, no resident will be safe to express themselves or fight back through protest and community actions.” –Endesha Juakali, Survivors Village organizer
Get informed:
Watch video of the May 28 demonstration, from the march to the sit-in at the Columbia Parc management office, here:
Video regarding Sharon Jasper’s arrest, posted by Survivors Village New Orleans, can be found here:
News coverage of the May 28 demonstration, collected by Take Back the Land, is available here:
Information regarding Sharon Jasper’s next hearing and a photo slideshow of the May 28 demonstration can be found at the Survivors Village New Orleans blog:
TAKE ACTION:
If you’re in New Orleans:
Check out this call to action from Survivors Village organizer Endesha Juakali:
TODAY, Tuesday July 20 at 3 pm in Municipal Court Section D, our comrade Sharon Jasper has her first court appearance. We are hoping that she will receive wide support from those who believe in social justice and community activism.
Survivors Village met on last Saturday with many individuals and organizations to plot a long term strategy for this fight, and we will win!!
More information will be forthcoming soon, but the first step in the battle is to support Sharon in court!!
And if you’re not in NOLA:
Call/fax these officials and demand that the charges and eviction order against Sharon Jasper be dropped:
David Gilmore, Executive Director, Housing Authority of New Orleans: (504) 670-3300
Today the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights, along with the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and Housing is a Human Right released a new trailer for an upcoming documentary about the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing’s first official fact finding mission to the United States in the Fall of 2009. This trailer was produced for a NESRI and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions event today entitled “The Housing Rights Situation in the US” which took place at the UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Earlier today the Special Rapporteur presented the UN Human Rights Council her report based on her mission to the US. View a webcast of this presentation (You will need to scroll down on the page to the 10th Plenary Meeting from 12:00 – 15:00. Once the webcast starts, she presents her US report at 8:12.)
The trailer and documentary video was shot by volunteer videographers, audio recorders and photographers from around the US and is being edited by a team of volunteer video editors based in New York City.
By Chris Famighetti
Intern, NESRI Human Right to Housing Program
Taraneh Ghajar Jerven’s recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, “2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony: What about Vancouver’s homeless?” highlights the injustices perpetrated in the run-up to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.(1) Jerven discusses the expensive development costs associated with the 2010 Olympic Games, where the original budget of $660 million was revised to over $5 billion.(2) The astronomical increase in costs for the Vancouver Olympics is especially egregious when considering that the city’s homeless population has doubled since 2003 – the same year that the city secured its Olympic bid. This rise in homelessness leaves one wondering: how can an international event that claims to celebrate peace, unity and global harmony so callously ignore the needs of the most vulnerable populations? What kind of priorities is the international community embracing in such an outright rejection of the human right to housing?
Violations of the human right to housing are not specific to the 2010 Vancouver Games, and are unfortunately indicative of a growing trend in these types of mega-sporting events. One key example is the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where violations of the human right to housing displaced approximately 1.5 million residents. This trend can be followed to other host cities, such as Seoul, where 720,000 people were displaced to make way for the 1988 Olympic Games. Additionally here in the United States, in the run-up to the 1996 Atlanta Games, 30,000 people were displaced and 2,000 units of public housing were destroyed.(3)
When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was selecting a host city for the 2016 Olympics, the Chicago Coalition to Protect Public Housing (CCPPH), a local resident-led advocacy group, recognized the threat that Chicago’s bid for the games posed to the human right to housing. Community concerns specifically focused on the dangers Chicago’s public housing would face in the top-down, pro-development approach other cities adopted in their preparations for the Olympics. Consequently, CCPPH along with allies developed a campaign to ensure that the IOC knew that the people of Chicago would not accept mass displacement. CCPPH and its allies organized rallies outside of IOC meetings, facilitated community education about displacement around past Olympic Games, and conducted meetings with IOC members. Ultimately these and other direct actions helped steer the games away from Chicago. Given that public housing in Chicago has been under siege for some time, through demolitions and subsequent displacement, residents could simply not afford the damaging impact that the Olympics would have wrought upon their communities. Unfortunately others across the globe, particularly the poor and marginalized, have not been as successful at thwarting these mega-sporting events.
Raquel Rolnik, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, has outlined the myriad of violations to the human right to housing in circumstances surrounding mega-sporting events, namely the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup Soccer Tournament. Development in the run-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup Tournament in South Africa, for instance, intends to displace 20,000 residents from the Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town.(4) This mass displacement would resettle the community to the periphery of the city, leaving them with little access to job and education opportunities. The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and the South African Shack Dwellers Movement have aggressively advocated in the court system and actively mobilized in grassroots communities to fight this massive displacement. This direct action mirrors the steps taken by the CCPPH and its allies in Chicago, and shows the breadth of the international struggle and solidarity for the human right to housing. Yet, again we beg the question, why must development policies around these mega-sporting events target poor, marginalized communities for displacement? As the stated objective of these events is to foster international peace and goodwill, isn’t there a better use for these funds that is in line with the universal belief in the human right to housing for all?
While the efforts of the CCPPH and its allies have helped steer the Olympic Games away from Chicago, concerns about displacement due to the Olympic Games still persist. Rio de Janeiro won the bid for the 2016 games, which calls for continued vigilance by all of us who advocate for the human right to housing. Given the class and racial disparities already present in Brazilian society, it is imperative that a portion of the $14.4 billion currently allotted for the 2016 games be used to help alleviate the existing human rights concerns of the city’s most marginalized.
No one sums up the feelings of those whose communities and homes are at risk more than Willie J.R. Fleming of CCPPH, “The Olympics would have been a distraction for our city. We need our leaders to focus their time, energy and resources on the real needs and concerns of the community, including housing and other vital services. Instead of investing in the Olympics, which seem to only profit private developers, we should invest in our real future, the well-being and
security of our children.”
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1
In addition to the homelessness crisis, there have been several concerns around indigenous issues and the Vancouver Games. Read more here.
2
Given the massive spending that accompanies mega-sporting events, many cities hosting such games are often left in debt. Hence, these games are not the financial wind-fall they are sometimes presented to be. The Athens Olympic Games, for instance, left the city with $17 billion in debt. Read more here.
3 See this link.
4 See this link.
This article has been corrected since originally published.
Last week Raquel Rolnik, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, released her report on her visit to the United States. This report will be presented before the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The Special Rapporteur wishes to emphasize that low-income housing assistance programmes should receive additional funding. The Federal Government provides much higher levels of subsidies to high-income homeowners via tax exemptions as compared to subsidies for low-income housing assistance. “Each year, the federal
government spends more than three times as much on tax breaks for homeowners – with a large share of the resulting tax benefits going to upper-income households – as it spends on low-income housing assistance.”
An example [of inadequate redevelopment of demolition of public housing] is Cabrini Green in Chicago. Cabrini Green originally had 3,114 high-rise public housing units, of which 2,700 were demolished. Since the demolition, only 305 public housing units have been built in mixed-income developments. As a result many residents were displaced and are unable return to the area.22 The Housing Authority plans to demolish the remaining 414 high-rise units in September 2010.
The Special Rapporteur deeply regrets the demolition of thousands of public housing units in New Orleans. Many residents and victims of Hurricane Katrina were prevented from returning to their homes (many of which according to residents sustained little storm damage) and had their homes demolished.23 The current housing
crisis in New Orleans reflects the disastrous impact of the demolition policy. In particular, the demolition of the “Big Four” housing complexes (B.W. Copper, C.J. Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard) has displaced approximately 20,000 individuals. Only one public housing complex still remains, Iberville, which is in need of better maintenance. Residents of Iberville fear demolition of their homes. In addition, former public housing residents of New Orleans are facing grave housing challenges in other cities. One New Orleans resident told the Special Rapporteur that he had met Katrina survivors who are homeless or close to homeless in other cities, “the legacy of the demolition policy”.”
The End Homelessness Blog on Change.org has listed “The 10 Most Notable Homelessness Stories of 2009.” Included is the UN Housing Mission to the United States. Take a look at the whole list.
News of the first official visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing continues to ripple through communities in the United States and even abroad. Even though Special Rapporteur Rolnik has departed, it feels as though her mission continues. Here’s what people have been writing since the last posting:
