Today tenant activists protested in front of a court in Warsaw against the legal farce that many people encounter there. Many tenants wind up in court fighting for the right to live in their homes after unfairly losing legal title or fighting against eviction. In the most dramatic of cases, they sometimes even have to fight for the right to their children because the state can take them away if their housing is substandard.
After some time, the crowd went to the so-called "social consultation" that the city tried to organize to avoid speaking to tenant organizations. The city organized the meeting on the same day the protest was called, quietly announced it and required people to register, giving them only two days to do so. Activists delivered a couple of hundred registration forms, dashing the hopes of the bureaucrats to hold this "consultation" without the activists.
The head of the housing department was interrupted while giving her "informational speech", which was the same she had presented before and which says nothing. People demanded the right to speak and told about the problems with public housing - pointed out that all this was already told to the city doznes of times and submitted to the city in the report of the Tenants' Defense Committee in April. Still, nothing has been done about the situation, so the crowd demanded that the housing office be dissolved and the bureaucrats lose the jobs. People were angry with the farce and demanded to know when the city would actually do something about the situation. Of course there was no answer, because the truth is that this is their anti-social housing policy.Tenants promised to make some more actions in the coming weeks against the bureaucrats.
