The Common Front for the Right to Housing – FCDL – is an initiative of people whose basic right of housing is in danger to be broken or has already been broken.
Created by a group of persons evicted and at the risk of being evicted from Bucharest, Romania, alongside relatives, friends, activists, artists – FCDL is a platform of housing activism on a national level. We address firstly evicted people but also: anyone not affected by evictions but solidary with the right of proper housing; civic organizations; independent political groups but also to media, political decision makers, local and central authorities.
People of various backgrounds, spread in the countryside or in cities, are constantly affected by the gross breach of their fundamental right to housing. It’s either a real-estate company that invades the neighborhood to raise the market price of rents, either a city hall that does not give the proper support to vulnerable families, either a local council that decides the isolation of a whole community on the basis of ethnicity – we see everywhere cases of abuse and oppression enacted in the name of profit and power.
We believe that a real change can come only through solidarity and self-organizing.
This is why FCDL is an initiative with two main aims:
I) facilitating organization of various people in front of the breach of their housing rights;
II) bringing this issue on the public agenda of mass-media and authorities.
In front of authorities, we claim:
1. Identifying legal solutions to ensure housing to all tenants of former nationalized houses that are at risk of being evicted. No one should end up on the street!
2. Making available to the public on the websites of all city halls the updated lists of priority criteria in granting housing for the evicted.
3. Vouching for and granting of decent housing for people without a shelter.
4. Housing justice as a priority of both local financial agendas and general public agendas of authorities. We solicit the rise of budget allowance for the Housing Fund of the State with the aim of building and/or purchasing housing for both the evicted and the people whose income does not allow them to buy or rent a house in the current economic conditions. The current state of affairs is that because of deregulations and annulment of social rights during the last twenty years, housing problems are the rule, not the exception! This is why, the principle of social cases and social housing policy is not an efficient solution for the basic needs of most people.
5. Regulating rent prices for private housing according to the current standard of living.
6. Introducing in the Constitution the right of housing.
FCDL aims in the beginning:
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To gather people with housing issues of all neighborhoods of Bucharest but also from other cities of Romania, with the scope of collectively organizing our rights.
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To initiate public debates on the social consequences of the Law of Retrocession.
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To contribute with direct actions, mass-media interventions, case studies and critical theory in combating ideas and stereotypes given to economically vulnerable people without any housing who cannot afford one – like not willing to work, or parasiting wellfare structures, or being the inheritance of the communist regime, etc.
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To establish and maintain contacts with political groups for housing rights in Eastern Europe and elsewhere through the exchange of experience and knowledge.
February 2014