Housing Actions – February 2023

After 2 years of hard work campaigning and collecting signatures, ALB could present their petition for rent decrease to the Brussels’ parliament !

“Yesterday was a great day for us, a great day for the tenants, for all those who carried with us the petition “FOR a rent reduction”, who signed it, who spread it. We have FINALLY been heard by the Housing Commission!”

You can find the text they read here : https://www.actionlogementbxl.org/…/la-petition-au…/ 

Before entering the parliament, a rally took place Place Saint-Jean, with more than a hundred people supporting the ALB members.

“We were carried along by the collective energy of all those who were there, of all those who carried the petition, of all those with whom we are fighting for a drop in rents in Brussels, but also for an end to evictions, transparency of the land registry, the financial contribution of multiple owners, the requisition of empty buildings with a view to transforming them into social housing… and other necessities!”

On that morning Emma had to leave her apartment. The municipal Franz Anton Gering Foundation had the senior evicted. @die_halbe_stadt organised a protest against it.

👏A successful demonstration was organised following the call of the Collectif TAP (Toulouse Anti Précarité) to ask the Prefecture for shelters, especially for families and children. Many people, many organisations and homeless people were mobilised.  

A delegation was received by Mr Le Roy, head of the DDETS (Departmental Directorate of Employment, Work and Solidarity).

No concrete solution was proposed 🤬. The recent opening of places for 40 families and 20 men were highlitghed … but this is clearly insufficient! There is an emergency! 

More than a hundred people, including very young children and people with very fragile health, are still without a solution, on the street, in the middle of winter.

An appointment has been re-requested to meet with Occitania prefect ! A Roof is a Right! 

Alongside Collective 20092 and the families who suffered a shameful eviction on that morning, many people took the streets of Cinisello in the evening to bring the struggle for the right to live against evictions and speculation with anger and determination. 

An eviction will not extinguish our dreams: “space exists, the void is you.”

On Saturday 25 February a demonstration was organised for a just life. Members of Habita! immersed themselves and mingled in the midst of the bodies of the thousands of people who decided to take their lives into their own hands to fight the crisis that increasingly grips those who work, those who have always been pushed to the margins of society, of political power.

“We cannot continue to accept that the prices of essential goods such as food, transport, housing grow disproportionately according to the wishes of those who make money, according to the pleasures of those who speculate. People cannot continue to be evicted and put on the streets without any alternative from the places they consider home. We no longer want to be stuck in the labour and existential precariousness promoted for decades by neo-liberal policies that focus on the profits of those who already own so much at the expense of those who own little or nothing. For all this we took to the streets. Because united we are strong, because organised and determined we are even stronger. Only in this way can we make ourselves respected, only together can we stop the war against the poor that has been going on for decades.”

According to them, it was wonderful to take back the city for a few hours. To see comrades they hadn’t seen for a long time, but above all to meet new ones. To feel for once that even the peripheries, physical and mental, can converge towards the centre by demonstrating to solve their needs, by beginning to put their collective desires into practice. Last Saturday’s demonstration is only the beginning of a journey. In March Habita! will be in the streets alongside the Greve Climática Estudanti, together with women, migrants, and as often as necessary.

On 1 April they will take back the city for the right to housing, at the “Casa Para Viver” demonstration, on the occasion of the Housing Action Days promoted by the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City.

The springtime of struggles has already begun.

 DAL – Droit Au Logement Grenoble is protesting in front of city hall!

Their banner >  “Grenoble is not for sale, not at MIPIM, not anywhere else!”

They published an open letter to Eric Piolle and Christophe Ferrari about their presence at the MIPIM (International Property Developers Market) in Cannes on 14-15 March 2023.

The DAL reaffirms its total disagreement with these commercial logics and will fight as long as necessary for the right to housing for all!

For more infos about MIPIM and the mobilization against it, check out our website! https://housingnotprofit.org/stopmipim2023/ 

One month before the MIPIM, the biggest real estate fair in the world which is happening in Cannes/ France, the European Action Coalition for the right to housing and to the city (EAC) organised a public webinar with the scholar Antoine Guironnet who published in 2022 the study ‘Au marché des métropoles’ (on the market of metropolises) on the MIPM. 

This February 2023, PAH celebrated its 14th anniversary. ❗️ When the Platform of People Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) was created in 2009, probably no one would have thought that in 2023 it would still be active, alive and internationally recognized.