United Front Says: Housing Is a Human Right!

A united front is mobilizing around the powerful idea that housing is a human right.  For over twenty hours testifying before the state legislature's Housing Committee, a diverse outpouring of tenants and allies demanded limits on a corporate landlord’s unchecked power to increase rents and gut communities with profit-driven evictions.

Cap The Rent CT, a coalition of over 50 organizations including tenant unions, labor unions, housing rights and legal aid organizations, community, faith, socialist and student groups testified that rent increases are not fair and are harming the working class.

One mother from Meriden, Anabel Hernández, told about the eviction violence she experienced after falling behind on her landlord’s aggressive rent increase. Speaking in Spanish with translation she said, “Un día a las 8:00 am llegó el marshals y sacó todo a la calle, yo cargué solo a mis hijos.”  (“One day at 8:00 am the marshal threw my things onto the street, I only carried my children.”)  She said working class mothers demand caps on rent because: “La vivienda digna es nuestro derecho.”  (“Dignified housing is our right.”)

Connecticut AFL-CIO president Ed Hawthorne said union members are burdened with 30% to 40% rent increases in just the last two years calling for rent caps to protect working people from homelessness.

Representing the Connecticut Communist Party, Mariano Rivera said people in his community are being driven into unprecedented levels of homelessness, including 25% childhood homelessness, because of the drive of landlords to extract value from the productive members of society. Saying housing as a human right, he warned of the growing crisis of financial investors acquiring mobile home parks from independent owners generating massive profits at the expense of low income and disabled park residents

Outnumbered by tenants five to one, corporate landlords provided fear-based testimony that a cap on rent increases would, somehow, cause rents to increase.  Working class tenants demanded a rent cap of 2.5%.

In a public poll last month, over 72% of people in Connecticut supported a cap on rents.  Struggling to survive, many are tired of paying for the landlord’s privilege and profit.

There is recognition that the dangerous housing crisis caused by landlord speculation and barbarism needs to be addressed through organized and direct community action.

The movement to build safe, healthy, peaceful communities says: Housing is a Human Right!