The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing made her maiden voyage to the village of Harlem on October 22, appearing at a town hall meeting at the Union Theological Seminary on Broadway and 121st Street.

According to information provided to the press, Raquel Rolnik, a professor of urban planning and management at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paolo in Brazil, will visit seven locations in the United States, including a stop at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Her mission has been approved by the U.S. State Department.

The special rapporteur on housing was appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2008. However, she is not a U.N. official, nor is she salaried.

Rolnik will document the national housing crisis and its impact on those suffering from foreclosure, homelessness and inadequate social support for housing, such as through limitations on Section 8 vouchers and demolition and defunding of public housing. At the end of her tour, Rolnik will present a report on the status of the human right to housing in the United States to the 192-member U.N. General Assembly, located at 42nd Street and First Avenue.

"Housing is a human right," the special rapporteur told the handful of reporters who had gathered in the basement of the seminary for a press briefing. "It is a constant fight, a constant struggle for people to get government, whether local, state or federal, to exact policies that ensure their rights to adequate housing," Rolnik stated.

Some of the New York City housing issues that the U.N. representative will explore are: a lack of affordable housing; homelessness that has 36,600 men, women and children sleeping on city streets or in shelters, and 130,000 families on the New York City Housing Authority

(NYCHA) waiting list; Section 8 rental assistance with a waiting list of some 127,825 families; predatory lenders targeting low-income, largely minority communities; and the use of eminent domain by the state to seize private property for commercial development.

"We want to open dialogue to put adequate housing on the radar screen of public policy," stated Rolnik.

"This is a very important mission," Brenda Stokely, labor activist with the Million Worker March and the Katrina and Rita Survivors Network, explained to the AmNews. Stokely, who also served as the moderator for the town hall meeting, said that it is also important that the special rapporteur visits the United States now because "people across the board have lost their ability to live happily and securely."

"Do society and the government have a moral responsibility to take care of its citizens?" Stokely asked rhetorically.

Some of the organizations represented at the Harlem town hall meeting were: Picture the Homeless, Community Voices Heard-Public Housing, N.Y.C. Katrina Survivors, the Human Right to Housing Program and Concerned Citizens of Harlem.

Dr. John Derek Norvell, a public housing activist from Concerned Citizens of Harlem, spoke about the national campaign to restore human rights to public housing. "I am here to talk about the issue of forced community service," Norvell said, holding up for the audience to see what he called the "slavery papers of NYCHA."

Norvell claims that a bill passed by former President William Jefferson Clinton, that all able-bodied tenants of NYCHA perform community service where they reside, is a "violation of the 13th and 14th amendments."

Two speakers that have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina told the audience that the federal government must declare survivors as "Internally Displaced People."

For more information concerning the special rapporteur's official report, go to www.restorehousingrights.org or http://www2.ohcr.org/english/issues/housing/index.htm.