The European Minister of Housing and Urbanism will meet Monday November
24 in Marseilles (France).

Since they meet, the prices of rents, real estate and land have never
been higher, rents and speculative profits have been madly on the rise,
lack of housing and precarity in housing have been knocking at each
door. The rights of tenants suffer direct attacks, home ownership is at
the price of unsustainable loans, the so-called "revitalization" is
evicting the urban working classes not only from inner cities but also
from suburbs, forced and urgency evictions are increasing, social
housing is threatened through privatization and funding tools being
actively dismantled, repression is hitting peoples suffering precarity
in housing.

Ministers are only worried with profits of speculators and banks
threatened by a real estate crash. As for the European Central Bank,
supposed to curb inflation, it does not seem to have noticed that
housing costs!

Choosing Marseilles, the ministers could not have found a better place
of example about the dramatic consequences of the financial
globalization of real estate, 20 years of bad policies in the fields of
planning and housing and the concurrence between cities organized by
Europe in the context of the Lisbon strategy. Thus the working class
center of Marseille is under high speculation encouraged by local
authorities. For example, at rue de la Republique hundreds of families
were displaced, and dozens of buildings were "devitalized", to sell
lofts at retail price of 4 000 EUR/m2. The current owner, a subsidiary
of Lehman Brothers, is now bankrupted in the wake of the subprimes
crisis : These hundreds of homes are likely to remain uninhabitable for
years unless local authorities decide a requisition for social housing.
And the fact that Europe has appointed Marseilles as European cultural
capital in 2013 is a bad news for housing. Every international event,
ever cultural or sporting, has unleashed speculation and attacks against
residents of working class neighborhoods all over the world.

Stop pushing an increasing proportion of the population in the streets,
insecurity, debt, and encouraging the urban segregation with violent
consequences - present and future- ! We reclaim the end of evictions, of
policies of gentrification, of urban and social cleansing of the working
class neighborhoods and the restoration or enforcement of policies
regulating rents and protecting tenants’rights.

To finance an effective right to housing for all, we reclaim a taxation
of real estate profits at European level, and the European Central Bank
watchdogging the inflation of housing prices and rents.


Main site (mostly French)
 http://marseille2008.no-vox.org/

Video
 http://marseille2008.no-vox.org/spip.php?article60

Poster
 http://marseille2008.no-vox.org/spip.php?article40