America in the cross hairs: The U.N. housing police

International community organizers come to America

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The United Nations is fretting that the United States might be violating human rights by not providing adequate housing. To get to the bottom of the issue, the U.N. Human Rights Council has dispatched Brazilian architect and urban planner Raquel Rolnik, the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, to our shores. We apologize for being unwelcoming hosts, but she should go back from whence she came.

Miss Rolnik's bureaucratic pity might be better targeted at her native Brazil, where 28.9 percent of the urban population lives in slums, according to the UN-HABITAT Global Urban Indicators database. Or China, where the rate is 32.8 percent. Or Kenya at 54.8 percent, Mozambique at 79.5 percent, or Sierra Leone, where 97 percent of people in cities are slum dwellers.

But instead, the U.N. is expending its limited time and resources on the United States, where the homeless population is a fraction of a percent, three-quarters of people below the poverty line live in homes with two or more bedrooms, and median square feet of living space per person in poverty is 91 percent of the national median, according to the 2007 American Housing Survey. This is not what you would call a human-rights nightmare. More...