Against the MIPIM and its world!
Let’s mobilize against the factories of speculation and the housing crisis / All to CANNES on the 14th of March!
Everywhere in Europe and in the world the housing crisis hits the working classes hard. It is the bitter fruit of real estate and land speculation, fuelled by public policies which artificially raise the price of land, housing and rent, weakening and driving modest inhabitants out of their neighbourhoods, throwing the least protected into the great precariousness of makeshift housing, into the arms of slum landlords, worsening the housing crisis and its dramatic effects: increase in the number of the homeless, makeshift housing, evictions, overexploited tenants…
The MIPIM, the international market of real estate professionals which has been held in Cannes (France) every year in mid-March since 1990, is an essential cog in the overexploitation of this essential need to have a roof over one’s head, a stable, decent, affordable, ecological home.
It brings together that small milieu of 25 to 30,000 people that counts, who decide without even consulting us to change our cities, destroy our neighbourhoods, our local solidarities, and even our lives in order to build offices, luxury apartments or tourist housing, all in the name of profit.
- The public authorities who sell the common land – the land that belongs to us all – without even asking for our opinion. Capital cities, metropolis, regions and states secretly elaborate big and small urban planning projects and jostle each other at the MIPIM to sell them to the commercial sector, often to come up with expensive, even useless projects that fuel the social cleansing of working-class neighbourhoods, instead of building housing for the people;
- Investors, banks and financial groups equipped with their armada of advisors, who manage the money of the ever-richer opulent, but also savings accounts or pension funds seeking juicy investments. They finance these urban planning operations that drive us out. It’s money for the sake of more money, not in order to build affordable housing, nor a better world …
- The promoters and construction companies who, to the detriment of the quality and sustainability of construction, encourage an avalanche of subcontracting companies to increase their profit to the detriment of the Right to housing for all…
If the MIPIM is a global factory of speculation in which corruption and money laundering are too often mixed, the real estate fairs are the wholesalers and even the retailers: they spread the same message, attracting small investors to push them into rental income and the exploitation of others from this fundamental human need.
In order to denounce and highlight the misdeeds of this predatory fair, the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City, which brings together associations and collectives for action and defence of the inhabitants in many countries and many cities in Europe, has decided to invite itself once again to this concert of expensive housing that produces the housing crisis and therefore human distress.
Let’s put the spotlight on their harmful actions and make our resistance to the bulldozers of gentrification known.