World homeless crisis a ‘scandal’

Press, 20 February 1988, Page 34

World homeless crisis a ‘scandal’

By

PHILIP PULLELLA

NZPA-Reuter , Vatican City The Vatican, in a major document on the homeless, said the housing crisis in rich countries as well as poor was a scandal which governments could not blame on individual misfortune. The Vatican’s Commission on Justice and Peace prepared the 30-page document at the specific request of Pope John Paul, who wrote a preface calling the homeless “poorer than the poor.”

The document was called “What Have You Done To Your Homeless Brother? The Church and the Housing Problem.” “The cry of despair of so many men and women, children, and elderly who do not have a roof over their head ... resounds across the world,” said the document, which has been sent to the United Nations.

A billion people, onefifth of the world’s popiz*'

lation, did not have adequate housing and 100 million “who are born, live and die in the open air,” did not have a roof over their heads, the document said. Calling the homeless problem "a distressing sign of the times,” not confined to poor countries, the document said: “From an ethical point of view, it is a scandal and one more indication of the unjust distribution of goods, originally destined for all.” The document did not mention any countries by name. The problem of homeless Americans has become a major issue in the United States’ presidential campaign. There, and in other advanced countries, unemployment and soaring housing costs have aggravated the homeless problem. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, a Washingtonbased lobby group, there

are more than half a million homeless children in the United States. The Vatican document said decent housing “must be equitably provided” and in an apparent reference to exorbitant costs in some areas said housing was “a basic social good and cannot simply be considered a market commodity.”

The same “inhuman separation” which existed between rich and poor countries also occurred within prosperous nations. Governments could not put the blame on individuals. “At the source of the problem of housing ... lies unemployment, low salaries, the rural exodus and an unregulated and overly rapid industrialisation,” the document said. It added: “Any person or family that, without any direct fault on his or her part, does not have suitable housing, is the victim of an injustice.” Current government

plans and housing policies were inadequate to solve the problem, which the document said was “not merely the result of a series of unrelated circumstances.”

Although there were more immediate causes, the document said the housing crisis was rooted in “present-day social ills: an unjust distribution of goods, the gap between rich and poor in the same society or between nations and entire continents.”

In his preface the Pope deplored the effects of unbridled urbanisation and industrialisation, “the creation of mega-cities, the rise of zones around cities where living conditions are sub-human, marginalisation, misery.” The document said the Catholic Church was convinced that by following the path of social justice and overcoming selfishness, substantial progress could be made to solve, the housing crisis.*,