Wanted: Decent and Affordable Housing. Location: Everywhere.
by Rafeel
What does it mean to be suddenly homeless—caught between warring factions, fearful and destitute, seeing your children hungry, wondering how you will care for your elderly relatives, and where the next meal is coming from?
Statistics from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and the World Refugee Survey 2002, estimate there are thirty-seven million displaced people worldwide.
In the West Bank and Gaza Strip 8,970 families have had their homes totally demolished, and 2,736 partially demolished since September 2000, according the UN Relief Works Agency. In many instances refugees had to flee while bulldozers were already at their doorsteps.
Development projects like dam building contribute enormously to the problem of displaced and homeless people. China’s Three Gorges Dam, now under construction, will result in as many as 1.8 million people being forcibly resettled. In India, the average number of people displaced by a large dam is 44,182. The Secretary to the Planning Commission estimates the number of people displaced by dams in India in the last fifty years was around forty million. A very large percentage of those (up to sixty percent in some areas) are tribal people. It is not the tribal people who will chiefly benefit from the dams but the corporations who construct and operate them.
Here in the United States homeless shelters often find that significant numbers of those seeking shelter are full-time wage earners amounting to almost one in five, meaning, that even a full-time job can leave you in poverty. Rising health costs and the growing shortage of affordable rental housing coupled with rising poverty aggravate the problem. This means that being poor leaves you just an accident, an illness, or a paycheck away from living in the streets.
In his book, No More Shacks, Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity states,
The simplest answer to the question of how to eliminate poverty housing in the world is to make it a matter of conscience. We must do whatever is necessary to cause people to think and bring adequate shelter to everyone, and we do that through a spirit of partnership.
First we’re in partnership with God. If Habitat were primarily a movement of individuals there would be nothing lasting to it...Second we’re in partnership with each other. One of the most exciting features of Habitat for Humanity is that people who don’t normally work together at all are coming together everywhere to work in the cause....
Sedona, considered an affluent city, has abundant high-end real-estate but scarce low-cost housing. An entire Hispanic community in the Red Rock Loop Road area faces displacement with the recent sale of the rural property which includes the Schuerman mobile home park. And, those who find themselves homeless in Sedona and in most US cities and towns will not find a homeless shelter.
Leadership is not just a position but a challenge. We, as local citizens of Sedona, national citizens of the United States, and global citizens of this planet must actively become engaged in the empowering of our brothers and sisters to have lives of dignity and fulfillment. Support leaders who are concerned about the quality of life of others and who create opportunities for better living for all.
It is the business and duty of society to provide the child of nature with a fair and peaceful opportunity to pursue self-maintenance, participate in self-perpetuation, while at the same time enjoying some measure of self-gratification, the sum of all three constituting human happiness. (The URANTIA Book, p. 794:12)