US criticized over soaring housing costs

On Friday, the richest and most powerful country on earth was the subject of a damning report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. The United States rarely finds itself brought before HRC, and issues of U.S. domestic policy seldom make their way into official U.N. proceedings. But Raquel Rolnik, a Brazilian architect and urban planner and the HRC's special rapporteur on adequate housing, found that U.S. housing practices were not in keeping with the agreed international framework on human rights. During a visit to the U.S. this past September, she found that affordable housing was threatened by lending practices, reductions in public housing availability and the lack of a safety-net for poor families whose incomes are all but devoured by exploding housing costs. Her report also highlights homelessness in the United States, and looks at how the demolition of public housing units, housing foreclosure and exploitative "subprime" lending practices combined to create an "affordable housing crisis" in the U.S.