Homelessness Law Blog

Before I left South Africa, there was one more visit I had to make: to the Apartheid Museum.  Today’s lesson: while it’s good that apartheid is where it belongs – in a museum – the job isn’t done yet.

At the museum entrance, your ticket randomly assigns you either “White” or  “Non-White”, and then you must pass through segregated gates – making a physical, in addition to emotional impact.  From the moment I pushed through the turnstile, I felt a heavy weight descend on my shoulders.  Of course, I knew the long arc of the story told by the museum bends toward a better ending, but the immediate intensity of the pain and suffering of generations was overwhelming.

As I wound through the museum (literally – parts of it are set up as a maze – perhaps so you can’t see the end while you’re in the middle of it), the thing that struck me most was the cruelty of many of the quotes from politicians and regular people alike proclaiming their superiority and the inferiority of other races.  It boggled my mind that people here felt they could make those statements openly, in my own lifetime.  But then I thought, have we really moved so much further?

At the end, the story had wound its course to a free South Africa, finishing with the negotiation of a new constitution which replaced the laws of separation with seven pillars of Democracy, Equality, Reconciliation, Diversity, Responsibility, Respect, and Freedom. A constitution which, like our own, contains the best of our ideals, but, as shown by recent events, needs a lifetime of work to put it into practice. The attorneys and activists I’ve met this week are part of that work for the respect of universal human rights, and I count myself lucky that my own job is as well. Together, we’ll work to keep putting more of the world’s inhumanity into museums.

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director

Today was an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking day of site visits to three key sites for the movement for housing rights in South Africa: an active squatters building, two buildings where squatters have been relocated, and an informal shack dweller settlement in Kliptown, in the Soweto suburbs of Johannesburg.  Though there’s so much I wish I could share, for now, the lesson for today is: litigation can achieve huge victories in protecting the human right to housing, but it will require much more to see the right fulfilled.

Our first visit was to the 115 Main Street building in downtown Jo’burg, where three floors of a former garage have been turned into dark warrens of essentially indoor shacks constructed of plywood, metal, and fabric.  The approximately 120 residents, including 20 families with children, live without running water or regular electricity, and were threatened with eviction by the building owner, who wants to upgrade this building in a gentrifying area.  Because of South Africa’s phenomenal constitutional protection of the human right to housing and the supporting Prevention of Illegal Evictions Act, local lawyers were able to stop the eviction until the city proposes alternative accommodations for the residents. (more…)

Today marks the first in a mini-series of blog posts from my trip to South Africa, where I am attending a convening of housing rights experts put on by the Ford Foundation. Today’s lesson is: we are not alone!

Participating in today’s conversation were lawyers and advocates from South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Egypt, India, Kenya, and Argentina.  And despite coming from vastly different legal and political contexts, the challenges we face are strikingly similar.

A quick sampling of issues – see if you can match the issue to the country:

• A poor community living on potentially valuable waterfront real estate is threatened with summary eviction to make way for redevelopment, where they “may” have a chance to purchase housing units after they have been displaced for several years.
• Homeless persons dying of exposure on the streets while politicians claim there is no money in the budget for shelters.
• Police marching into a homeless encampment and tearing down tents and shelters without warning.

The answers, in this case are Nigeria, India, and South Africa.  But any of them could have taken place in the U.S. (more…)