Housing is a human right: Massive march about to hit Rochester, NY

On October 16th Metro Justice will march to City Hall in a “Housing is a Human Right March”. We hope that you will join us in co-sponsoring this march!

With hundreds of people homeless every night, in a city that has enough vacant properties to house them all, we know that our communities are in crisis! When thousands of homes have been foreclosed upon by massive banks in our city, we know that housing must be a human right.

Adequate access to housing is the cornerstone on which we build a thriving and vi
brant community. At Metro Justice, we’ve taken that seriously and our Housing is a Human Right Campaign is growing. Our campaign makes two requests of the city that we intend to make very clear at our march on October 16th:

1. As a consequence of their awful foreclosure record across New York State and nationally, the City of Rochester should divest all public funds from JP Morgan Chase.

2. Due to the widespread fraud in mortgage foreclosures by big banks, the City of Rochester should halt police participation in evictions by those banks for one year.

We believe these requests are important steps for our city to begin to acknowledge the human right to housing. We know however, that there are many other actions that the city can take to ensure access to quality housing for all.

This has been a part of the growing housing movement that has hit Rochester, and the rest of the country. Under banners like Take Back the Land, Occupy Our Homes, Anti-Eviction Campaign, and others, the necessity of housing has brought about direct action to meet people's needs. In this way the movement is built of of the only logical response to the housing crisis: to save our neighborhoods. We are coming together to say that housing should no longer be simply a commodity to be bought and sold so that a crust at the top of the financial pyramid can become even wealthier. Instead, we are building a mass movement that has the ability to say that we will no longer support a housing model where people are being put out of their homes in mass and lets people sleep on the sidewalk when there are more than enough empty homes to go around. We need to create the kind of public movement they can no longer ignore, and we are calling for everyone to come out and tell the city and the country that we believe that if housing is a necessity to live then it should also be a right for everyone!

We hope that you will consider joining us in our Housing is a Human Right March on October 16th and that you can bring the important perspectives that you offer to this growing movement. This is a chance for all groups and individuals who believe we need to challenge the banks for kicking people out of their homes, and to bring ideas for what this change can look like!

We will be gathering first at Washington Square Park and then marching to City Hall, where we will have a rally in support of the idea that housing should be for everyone. After that some of us will head into City Hall to pack the place and show them what community power really looks like.

This march was originally called for by the Metro Justice Housing Committee and Take Back the Land Rochester, and now a large coalition have come together to make this a massive event! Rochester Red & Black, part of the In Our Hearts network, along with Band of Rebels, SEIU Local 200, Working Families Party, Pride at Work, International Socialist Organization, Monroe County Green Party, and dozens of other organizations have signed on!

You can't evict a movement, and we aren't going away.