The South African Civil Society Information Service

Americans Desperate for Public Housing

18 Aug 2010

A report that highlights the desperation of poor Americans. According to this MSNBC report, last week 30,000 people turned up close to the city of Atlanta just to get an application form for public housing. People queued for hours in extremely hot weather, some passing out from heat exhaustion, simply for the opportunity to get onto the public housing waiting list.

Notwithstanding the humiliation of having to wait for hours to collect application forms from a clearly disorganized housing authority, insult was added to injury when authorities sent out riot police to deal with the flood of applicants. According to the MSNBC correspondent reporting from field on 11 August 2010, on that particular day, 13,000 people queued for application forms -- while a representative of the housing authority acknowledged that there were zero subsidized/public housing units available for them.

The footage in this report clearly highlights the racialised nature of poverty in America. The irony of the situation is that many amongst this group would have voted to bring Barack Obama to power as America's president, only to watch him turn his back on them.

There is little doubt that some of these people would have been victims of the sub-prime mortgage scam, which led to the financial crisis of 2008. While the banks have been bailed out by the Obama administration, the victims of their devious financial machinations have been left out to dry.

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You can find this page online at http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/262.19.