Global Day of Action--San Fran: Support New Orleans Housing!

Say NO to White Supremacy and Neoliberalism in New Orleans and the World!

Stand up for the Right to Return!

Demand the Human Right to Shelter!!!

WHEN: January 26, 2008 3:00 pm

WHERE: Senator Dianne Feinstein's Estate. 2460 Lyon Street (at Vallejo Street), San Francisco, CA

WHO: Everyone that Supports the Human Right to Shelter.


The homeless crisis in New Orleans is one of the worst in history. More than 12,000 residents are now homeless after Katrina and hurricane survivors face long waiting lists to get into city shelters. In response to this emergency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has decided to bulldoze more than 4,500 public housing units!!! This is an egregious affront to New Orleans residents and a blatant attempt to gentrify the region.

As a member of the Senate's Appropriation's Committee that funds HUD, Senator Diane Feinstein has not cosponsored S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, a bill that would guarantee a *Unit For Unit* replacement of New Orleans demolished public housing units.

That is why, on January 26th, in accordance with the World Social Forum's Global Day of Action against neoliberalism, Bay Area activists will gather at Senator Dianne Feinstein's five-story-estate to demand an END to racial and ethnic cleansing in New Orleans and the World.

As Bay Area Katrina solidarity activists, we feel that the crisis in New Orleans is intrinsically connected to the United States Social Forum's larger themes of liberation from heteropatriarchy, racism, militarism and imprisonment, colonialism, environmental destruction, and immigrant and worker exploitation. As HUD attempts to destroy the housing of mostly African American working-class women, Halliburton and development corporations have traveled as far as Oaxaca looking for cheap migrant labor to exploit and leave homeless in the Gulf Coast. Companies like Corrections Corporation of America are building for-profit prisons in the South under the guise of "hurricane relief" and as the United States government spends billions of dollars bombing the homes of Iraqi women, men and children, they are out-sourcing New Orleans reconstruction to private corporations who are attempting to gentrify the region at all costs.

Supporting the Right to Return for Katrina/Rita Survivors not only advances the right to self-determination for African American communities in the South, it advances the right to global self-determination--the right for all people to define their own destiny—From New Orleans to Latin America; from the Middle East to the Bay Area.

The Bay Area racial justice community understands all too well that the New Orleans housing crisis does not exist in a vacuum. It points at this much larger global crisis. Gentrification policies have made the San Francisco Bay Area one of the most expensive places to live in the nation with one of the highest concentrations of homelessness. Instead of supporting the human right to housing, politicians like Diane Feinstein are seeking to make racial profiling laws such as the San Francisco's gang memorandum national policy. In the Bay Area, African American and Latino residents of Hunter's Point and the Mission District are finding it increasingly difficult to afford skyrocketing rents, yet when they leave their homes they find their community has become a police state.

On the 26th people all around the world will demonstrate against injustice. In San Francisco, we need your presence, passion and voice to stand in solidarity with Hurricane and Rita Survivors and with the people of the world to express our outrage for foreign and domestic greed and white supremacy—in New Orleans, Oakland, Palestine and beyond.