“We don’t match the reality” is the conclusion of a round table organized by Project on Ethnic Relations (PER) debating on the state’s role in providing proper housing conditions for the Roma communities. As long as the state promises homes for the Roma and the development strategies are just on paper, the real problems of these people are still ignored.
The representatives of the Ministry for Development, Public Works and Housing announced during the event organized in Bucharest on the 28th and 29th of October that the Government approved, through a ministerial order, a 300 million euro pilot program for 2009 to build 300 social houses on land for the Roma throughout Romania. They called this program “an additional measure” intended to be the first rigorous technical step in the ministry’s actions with regard to housing.
The measure was not commended by the other guests, who stated that this doesn’t “match the reality” as long as the statistics indicate that approximately one million people in Romania live in cardboard boxes, in sheer poverty, and 90% of them are Roma.
The statistical data taken from the National Agency for Roma report on housing in Romania indicate:
- 31% of the Roma live in very poor conditions, and their homes are very small
- 43% of their homes are made of adobe
- 36% were built before 1990
- 17% of them only have one room, 42% have two rooms, 59% use their kitchen as bedroom as well
- 87% are not connected to the gas distribution network, 13% to the electricity grid, 85% have no sewage system, 85% are heated using stoves
- only 13% have access to drinking water
- 10% have no toilets and in 81% the toilet is located in the courtyard
- 24.7% of the Roma have no valid lease document or ownership contract for the houses they inhabit, while 4% have such a document, but it is not validated.
Nicolae Gheorghe, sociologist, stated that “it is a huge waste of money, time, energy and will because we don’t relate to the reality of the Roma community” and continues by explaining that “obviously, from various levels, including the level of the activist Roma, we do not have the will to solve the problem”.
The housing programs from Romania are promoted and funded mainly by the Government, but most of them are developed only in those towns or villages where local authorities decided to use these opportunities. Marian Daragiu, president of the Ruhama Foundation mentioned that “local authorities do not really show an interest in the Roma community”.
“Things are very simple”, he explains: if the percentage of the Roma community is not sufficiently representative in an electoral year, we cannot expect the local councils to make decisions that impact positively the Roma communities every month or every quarter. “This becomes a priority only in crisis situation, such as pressure from the majority population on the local decision-makers on grounds that they cannot coexist any longer with the Roma”, continued Daragiu.
Bogdan Suditu, deputy director general of the Directorate for Housing Policies at the Ministry of Development, Public Works and Housing, strengthens this idea of non-cooperation between the stakeholders responsible for improving the housing conditions for the Roma, stating that “there are numerous examples at local level where local authorities are not aware of the social-demographic situation of the community, do not know the exact number of constructions and the problems with the housing conditions at local level”.
Catalin Berescu, program manager of the Association “Tranzitia Urbana”, also confirms this: “at local level, nothing happens until there is this pressure from the central government”.
The same report on housing issued by the National Agency for Roma indicates that the Ministry of Transportation, Construction and Tourism has no housing programs specific for the Roma and that the housing policies from Romania are decentralized and most of them under the control of the local authorities.
“Our major problem is the implementation of these policies, their coordination”, said Victor Giosan, Secretary of State at the General Secretariat of the Government of Romania. “The Roma issue can be considered from two perspectives: as an ethnic issue or as a social exclusion issue”. In his opinion, this is a classical identity issue, combined with social exclusion.
“If we only build houses and offer no economic alternative, if we do not create jobs, stable income, then we only solve part of the problem”, mentioned Giosan.
Nicolae Gheorghe said that “we are all accomplices in creating a discourse about the Roma that compensates for the lack of action for the Roma and dilutes their will or ability to act at local level. At the moment, we have the chance that most Roma left to other European countries, and this was the solution to the Roma issue: sending them to other countries”.
Livia Plaks, the president of Project on Ethnic Relations (USA), mentioned that “as long as these problems, such as housing, methods to integrate the Roma communities in the modern society, shall be passed on from one ministry to another, they will continue to worsen and nothing will get solved”.
The conclusions of the debate indicate that the problems of housing and policies on Roma issues shall take time to solve, with small steps and professional information about the number of beneficiaries, available land, construction methods and constructors, efficient and non-discriminatory methods for integration of the Roma families in the new housing environment, earmarked funds etc.
The event was organized by the Center Regional Project on Ethnic Relations (PER) for Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, together with the National Agency for Roma, with support from the Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issue (CPRSI) of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR/OSCE) and is part of the program “Roma in the 21st century. Policies and measures for Roma in Europe and their outcomes”.
The list of guests included representatives of the local and national authorities (the Ministry of Development, Public Works and Housing, the National Agency for Roma., the General Secretariat of the Government of Romania, the Department for Inter-ethnic Relations etc), as well as representatives of the Roma from Central and South-Eastern Europe, from countries like Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain and Romania. (Mihaela Dumitrascu, DIVERS – www.divers.ro)