Socially excluded localities

Residential hotels closing in Czech city, Romani tenants have yet to find substitute accommodation

1.6.2018 19:22 The inhabitants of two residential hotels in the Czech city of Ústí nad Labem that will close at the end of June still do not know where they will be moving. During their housing search they are encountering the need to pay deposits they cannot afford, as well as discrimination from landlords.
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Czech Labor Minister says lower housing benefits will drive down rents, experts say it will destroy social housing policy

31.5.2018 16:19 The proposed reduction to housing benefits for families with four or more members and for persons in residential hotels, according to the acting Czech Labor Minister Němcová (ANO) will lead to a decline in the overpriced rents being charged where people in need live. Receiving less state support will reportedly not deteriorate or endanger the situations of people in need.  full story

Czech MP from the far right is a trafficker in poverty

19.3.2018 8:29 Lubomír Volný, an MP in Tomio Okamura's "Freedom and Direct Democracy" (SPD) movement and a regional assembly member, has been renting properties for five years to the same impoverished families that the SPD customarily labels as "inadaptables" or "parasites", making money from the very welfare system that the SPD otherwise rejects as costly and dysfunctional. Public broadcaster Czech Television has reported on his business dealings in detail during an episode of Reportéři ČT that aired on 12 March.  full story

Czech Justice Minister threatens to resign if SPD party joins the Government, calls it fascist, they plan to sue

21.2.2018 20:49 Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikán (ANO) absolutely disagrees with the program of the SPD movement and considers the party, chaired by Czech MP Tomio Okamura, to be fascist. He said he is prepared to resign if SPD joins the Government.  full story

Vojtěch Lavička: Czech municipalities fouling their own nests by cancelling housing benefits

5.10.2017 11:42 Almost 20 municipalities in the Czech Republic have decided to cancel the disbursal of welfare benefits issued to tenants living in problematic localities for their housing. This step - which to me is a stupid one, to put it mildly - has been facilitated by an amendment to the law on aid to those in material distress.  full story

Slovak mayor aids Romani settlement and his village by resolving illegal construction situation

8.6.2017 14:17 Michal Didik, Mayor of Čirč, a community in eastern Slovakia, has recently aided the Romani settlement there, the residents of which have illegally built their homes on land belonging to others. "It was clearer to me than anything else under the sun that the Romani residents would never be buying the land beneath their houses. At the land registry office I ascertained who exactly owns the land beneath the settlement. I was startled by the big number of individual owners - one hectare is owned by as many as 150 people. I personally found each of them and asked them to donate their land to the municipality," Didik told news server novinky.cz.  full story

Czech lower house has only just begun reviewing the social housing bill, its chances of approval before the elections keep falling

13.4.2017 9:46 The social housing bill drafted by the Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry under Michaela Marksová (Czech Social Democratic Party - ČSSD) and approved by the Government faced almost nothing but criticism in the Czech Chamber of Deputies on 11 April. The right-wing opposition has called it an unusable mockery.  full story

Czech nonprofit real estate agency helps people facing discrimination find housing

26.3.2017 9:46 Iveta Horváthová grew up in a children's home in Moravia. After she graduated from high school she moved to Prague in order to work.  full story

Interview with Romani activist Veronika Kmetzová of Předlice in the Czech Republic

18.3.2017 9:47 Veronika Kmetzová (age 29) is a Romani activist who, in collaboration with other partners, has established an association, Amare Předlice, which has tasked itself with aiding the improvement of the lives and social situations of the inhabitants of the Předlice neighborhood of Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. In its manifesto, the group says one of its aims is to "focus on improving public spaces in Předlice and on work with the local community to involve them in finding solutions".  full story

Czech association of local residents wants to clean up and revive the Předlice ghetto

15.3.2017 7:57 "We are a group of people, non-Roma and Roma, who can no longer watch the situation in the Předlice quarter of Ústí nad Labem, where most of us live. We do not want
Předlice to continue to be considered the worst neighborhood in the Czech Republic, to persist as a ghetto. We want to put Předlice back on its feet, solve its problems, and activate its inhabitants," reads the manifesto of the AMARE Předlice association, which was created at the beginning of this year.  full story

Director of Czech NGO says Karlovy Vary Region suffers in terms of education

6.3.2017 13:28 In the year 2001, Trappist monks chose to use the agricultural area of a former Baroque-era estate in the town of Nový Dvůr as a monastery and initiated the creation of a nonprofit organization called Český západ (Bohemian West) in the excluded localities of the Teplice and Toužim area. The headquarters of the NGO are located one kilometer away, in the town of Dobrá Voda, near a prefabricated apartment building inhabited predominantly by Romani community members.  full story

Czech Govt Agency for Social Inclusion director says both housing and social workers necessary to social housing

20.2.2017 9:10 A conference on social housing was held on Tuesday, 14 February in Prague's Lichtenstein Palace by the Czech Government Agency for Social Inclusion in collaboration with the Salvation Army of the Czech Republic. Its aim was to present examples of practical experiences with developing and launching social housing systems in the Czech Republic.  full story

Slovakia: More than 50 children from socially deprived families institutionalized since year began

19.1.2017 8:49 Since the beginning of this year audits have been underway of the living conditions in socially vulnerable families in Slovakia during the persistently cold weather, with social workers visiting thousands of families around the country and institutionalizing 56 children as of 17 January. "The consequence of our visits is that we discovered cases in which we had to remove the children. In some cases, our colleagues had to call ambulances for them," said the head of the Slovak Headquarters for Labor, Social Affairs and the Family, Marián Valentovič.
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Analysis: "Inadaptables get free apartments" - the Czech lie that kills

17.1.2017 11:50 The resistance of the ANO movement, the Christian Democrats, and the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) in the Czech Republic to social housing is based on fabrications that will have tangible consequences: People dying in the streets and broken families. The freezing temperatures falling to -20 C at night now form the backdrop to the coalition Government's tiffs over the planned law on social housing.  full story

Czech coalition Government reaches agreement on social housing, will the law pass?

16.1.2017 7:56 The parties in the Czech governing coalition met on Thursday, 12 January and agreed that the law on social housing will not create a new central office to administer such housing, as Labor and Social Affairs Minister Michaela Marksová (Czech Social Democratic Party - ČSSD) proposed before Christmas, and that municipal involvement in the system will also be voluntary. Vice-chair of the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) Jan Bartošek said the law would make possible a pilot program and if municipalities do not voluntarily step up, they will be obligated to provide social housing through an amendment to the law.  full story

Analysis: What happened to the Czech social housing law?

5.1.2017 10:24 Reporter Saša Uhlová, writing in Deník Referendum, has provided us with a very open description of the state of preparations for the law on social housing in the Czech Republic. A so-called national-level "Social Housing Office" (Úřad pro sociální bydlení) has made it into the law just because local authorities are refusing to administer social housing.  full story

Dušan Červeňák: "I don't believe in projects much - you can't work with people from behind a desk"

15.12.2016 1:11 "This work is not about education, but about aid to those who need it," says DUŠAN ČERVEŇÁK, vice-chair of the Ostrava-based group Romipen. After 12 years of practical experience in Ostrava's excluded localities, where he has worked as a Romani adviser and field social worker, he decided this spring to establish his own nonprofit organization.  full story

Commentary: After you visit the music festival in Ostrava, take a look at the ghetto

21.7.2016 9:57 It used to be called "Black Ostrava". That was in the days when the motto was "We're miners and we're the best."  full story