Our Housing Crisis On Video

This originally appeared in Fran Quigley’s Housing Is A Human Right blog

In this issue of our newsletter, I share some videos about our housing crisis that readers may find to be of value.

• As part of the orientation for our law students before they take on clients facing eviction, we show a 26-minute “Evicted” video from Kansas City PBS. I think it does an excellent job depicting the individual suffering caused by evictions, how the courts too often serve as a state-sponsored eviction mill, and the broader affordable housing crisis that underlies all of this struggle. It also shows the early stages of the vibrant tenant movement that KC Tenants is building. The video can be viewed here.

• John Oliver and his writers are magicians at incorporating humor, education, and outrage into segments on social issues, and their 22-minute presentation on “Rent” is no exception. It can be viewed here.

• Frontline documentaries can be terrific, and there are good spots in their “Facing Eviction” piece. But I think it fails to accurately depict the mushrooming corporatization of rental housing that leads to price-gouging, poor housing conditions, and quick-trigger evictions. Instead, it sympathetically portrays alongside struggling tenants an iconic mom-and-pop landlord. This “both sides” approach does not provide the necessary context that these small landlords are a vanishing breed and are not the drivers in our evictions crisis. But you can judge for yourself by viewing the show here.

• I had the opportunity to speak earlier this year at Manchester University as a guest of their Peace Studies program on a topic--Religious Traditions and the Human Right to Housing—that I know is of interest to some of our readers. Video of that talk is available here.

• Also earlier this year, I was one member of a great panel discussion on our evictions crisis convened at North United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, which included the perspective of a judge who is tasked with ruling on eviction requests. That panel discussion can be viewed here.