University students seek attention for South Florida housing crisis [View All]

[Doondoo]

A fledgling activist group of college students plans to erect a mock shantytown on the Florida International University south campus this week to draw attention to the region's affordable housing crisis and show support for 40 squatters living in the Liberty City political protest-turned-homeless commune known as Umoja Village.

Muhammed Malik, 24, a religious studies graduate student at FIU, said he and his friends have been searching for a way to add their voices to the outcry over the housing situation since reading House of Lies, a Miami Herald series published last summer that documented mismanagement and possible malfeasance in Miami-Dade County's public housing agency.

"A bunch of students from FIU and (the University of Miami) got together and started talking about that and about all the people being displaced by condo construction," he said. "Affordable housing is such a huge issue - I have a friend who is an FIU student who is homeless and living out of his car. And I don't know that the word 'gentrification' ever even comes up in classes. We decided to do something."

Malik and other members of ANSWER/FIU plan to spend three nights sleeping in a shantytown on FIU's south campus. Some UM students and homeless people who live in Umoja Village have pledged to join in the demonstration.

Umoja means "unity'' in Swahili.



http://www.palmbeachpost.com/state/content/state/epaper/2007/02/19/m4c_shanty_0219.html