LA Quaker: Housing Justice: Decent and Affordable Housing for All is Possible, Si, Se Puede!

Friday, July 5, 2019

Housing Justice: Decent and Affordable Housing for All is Possible, Si, Se Puede!

I gave this PowerPoint presentation today at ICUJP's Friday Forum and was very grateful for the positive response. I was able to connect with a Methodist pastor who want us to help raise awareness about homeless housing and advocacy in the Methodist community.

Par of my talk was livestreamed. You can see it at: Video of ICUJP Housing Justice Presentation

I also have posted 10 Solutions to Our Nation's Housing Crisis You can read them by scrolling down to the end of my presentation.

I was impressed today what journalist Robert Scheer wrote about the moral challenge of homelessness. His words definitely apply to Pasadena, where the disparities in wealth are acute and where the City Council is considering building million dollar condos and a deluxe hotel in the civic center on top of the Julia Morgan YWCA, right next to Centennial Place, where 140 formerly homeless people are living. We want this site to be used for homeless housing and public use and are mobilizing the community to save our civic center from Mammonization.

Scheer, who has lived in California most of his adult life, sees the question of how we approach homelessness amid blatant affluence as one that gets to the core of our humanity.
“The fact of the matter is, we’re kind of in this Dickens world of London,” Scheer says. “We have extreme wealth in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and points in between. And yet we have the most abject misery.
“I do want to encourage people to realize that we are actually talking about a notion of what is civilization,” he adds. “I think that you can’t be a city of the future, which is what L.A. advertises as, [unless you are] welcoming to people who all look different ways, come from different backgrounds, have different skill sets, different employment opportunities.”