Aesthetic Realism Explains America’s Housing Crisis, the Cause & the Solution!
There's an honest answer to the housing crisis and homelessness in America. It's in this groundbreaking presentation:
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Dale Laurin, RA, Moderator:“My colleagues and I are here because we want and need to do something about the cruel, unjust, totally unacceptable situation of over 600,000 people in our country—many of them children and senior citizens—without a decent place to sleep on any given night. We are going to speak about what we have seen through our study of Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the great American philosopher, poet, and critic, Eli Siegel, about the cause of our country's housing crisis and the SOLUTION!” |
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Barbara Buehler, NYC Department of Planning, (ret.): "I’ve seen firsthand the terrible results of the massive cuts in federal funding for housing programs. The only reason homelessness exists in a land so rich with natural resources is because a person’s need for a home is seen as a means of someone else making profit. This is contempt, which Mr. Siegel described as ‘the addition to self through the lessening of something else.’ Contempt, he showed, is not the result of the excesses of the profit system, but its very basis.” |
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Anthony Romeo, AIA, Program Director, Culturals/Parks Program, NYC Dept. of Design + Construction: “There is a choice that has to be made in this country to end homelessness, and it’s exactly the same as the choice an artist has to make to create something beautiful: it is a choice between respect and contempt. Studying Aesthetic Realism made for a new integrity in my life. I learned that beauty and ethics are inseparable— that the way to take care of myself was by trying to be fair to other people, that in order to express something original, I had to be impressed by the world in a deep way. We have to oppose contempt in the way this country is run, and we have to oppose it in ourselves.” |
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Ken Kimmelman, Aesthetic Realism Consultant, Emmy-Award winning filmmaker: “I feel passionately that when people learn to see other human beings as having insides, hopes, feelings as real as their own, homelessness will be a thing of the past. And I want people to know what is in these sentences from the book Self and World by Eli Siegel: ‘The world should be owned by the people living in it...All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs.’” |
Ken
Kimmelman’s award-winning public service film on homelessness,
"What
Does A Person Deserve?" is part of this event.
Housing: A Basic Human Right Return to homepage of housingaright.org