Tenants Actions and Rent Strike in Warsaw

From Oct. 1 there is a rent strike action in Warsaw. The action is a protest against the anti-social housing policy of the city. In the last year there was a drastic rent increase, the city does not build new housing and every year many flats are lost from the public housing system. This is due to reprivatization, bad condition of buildings and sales. The result of this is little affordable housing, a spiral of debt, evictions and homelessness.

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Tenants Actions and Rent Strike in Warsaw

From Oct. 1 there is a rent strike action in Warsaw. The action is a protest against the anti-social housing policy of the city. In the last year there was a drastic rent increase, the city does not build new housing and every year many flats are lost from the public housing system. This is due to reprivatization, bad condition of buildings and sales. The result of this is little affordable housing, a spiral of debt, evictions and homelessness. For the past year and a half, tenants have been fighting this, but there is too little done.

Tenants demanded and won an extraordinary seesion of the City Council in April. Members of Tenants' Defense Committee / ZSP prepared a report on housing problems but have not officially received answers since then. Everybody sees that the politicians are blowing people off. In September tenants demanded a new session. ZSP threatened direct actions against politicians if there was no session. There was a session Sept.30, but again the city listened but blew everybody off. The answer: more actions planned and a strike.

The strike is being called by ZSP and includes radical postulates like bringing housing (and everything else) under direct social control and kicking out the politicians. But also there are a number of others for the here-and-now like raising the income limits to qualify for public housing, building new housing, etc. etc.

More on some of the main problems for tenants can be found here:
http://www.zsp.net.pl/rent_strike_and_protests

On Saturday and Monday there were tenants' protests. Also on Monday activists visited the fake social consultation organized by the city to tell the housing authorities what they think of their farce politics.

More information on the protests are on the ZSP Warsaw blog:
www.zspwawa.blogspot.com

Information in other languages (like Spanish, Russian, Slovak) can be found here:
http://internationalworkersassociation.blogspot.com/sea...l/ZSP

ZSP-IWA