Bucharest's City Hall from an old postcard

Gipsy Strike at City Hall
By Gabriela Vieru
Viorel Zdreteanu had his hand cut off and sewed back while on the job. Today, he can longer work. The 32-year-old Rroma man from Bucharest has been living for the last three months under bridge in Carol Park with his wife and his two little girls who are eight and nine years old.
He took up residence on the lawn in front of the city hall for District 5, in the center of Bucharest, on the 3rd of October. For the last four days he has been in a hunger strike demanding a home.
"My only income is the pension of 1,700,000 lei per month (About $35)," said Zdreteanu. One of his two daughters has only one lung left from a previous illness, and neither girl goes to school because Viorel can’t afford to send them.
Viorel was one of 20 Romany Gypsies staging a protest in front of the City Hall in the freezing first week in October. Children clustered around their parents or played on the improvised cardboard beds, plastered with signs proclaiming, "Hunger strike for a house". They were demanding houses in Ferentari district of Bucharest, a neighborhood populated mostly by Gypsies.
"I ask only for a little room or a little parcel of land so I can build a room from adobe and to be able to send my children to school," Viorel said.
The administration at the city hall for District 5 has been renting apartments and houses to Gypsies since 1971 at prices ranging from 100,000 lei to one million lei ($3 to $30) depending on the surface of the flat, the number of people and on the special needs of the person asking for the space. A typical rent for an ordinary person who rents an apartment in Bucharest through through a commercial agency is around $150 per month.
The previous government department in charge of apartments in Bucharest was called "Constructions Repairs and Locative Administration Enterprise (ICRAL)." It was privatized and divided into smaller commercial agencies in 1993. These agencies are now responsible for managing the apartments that belong to the city administration. Officials at the city hall for District 5 representatives said the commercial units are not only responsible for managing the flats, but also own them and they receive the money for the rent.
The former units of the ICRAL are now responsible for building new apartments and keeping track of available housing for rent. They then inform the overall city administration, which transmits the information to the city halls in each district. The districts then provide the available housing for rent to the people who request it. An apartment which goes on the market can be turned over to a new occupant in a few years, a few months or a few days, depending on the houses available, according to Stefan Gheorghe, counselor on Rroma issues at the city hall for District 5. Some say it is a question of luck.
Viorel has not been lucky. "Since 1991, I have asked the City Hall 23 times for housing," he says. "I never received an answer. Today I am asking one more time."
In order to get on the list for a government apartment, potential occupants have to at least ten different documents:
_ a request form
_ photocopies of the identity card of the husband or wife, children of age
_ photocopies of birth certificates of under age children
_ photocopy of marriage certificate
_ income or alimony certificate on the last 12 months
_ photocopy of certificate of working years or the pension decision
_ fiscal certificates of all the members in the family of appropriate age
_ a declaration from a notary that you don’t own another house
_ photocopies of the house documents, rent contract or sub rent of the owner of the house that is your address in the identity card
_ photocopies of a certificate indicating that you are handicapped.

Liliana, 32, from Bucharest, joined the protest in front of the city hall and was suffering from the hunger strike. She was asking for a small room to live with her two children and husband who is paralyzed.
"Seven months ago, my husband had a stroke," she says. "They operated on his brain, but he is still paralyzed." Her parents said that the couple couldn’t live with them in their two-room flat. Liliana’s family survives with 1,500,000 lei (about $30) income per month from her welfare allotment.
They moved in an empty apartment for two months, but the ICRAL had already assigned the apartment to another woman. When that woman saw Liliana’s situation, she decided not to force the family to leave. Instead, she also went on a hunger strike to ask for yet another apartment. The two women stood side-by-side in front of the City Hall for four days. Liliana wanted the house she had been living in for the last two months to be legally assigned to her, and the other woman wanted another place to stay.

Eufrosina Tudorache, 53, from Bucharest was on a hunger strike that she began on August 25th, and she had been living in front of the City Hall for three days. She was asking for a house for her daughter who was 8-months pregnant.
"We checked on a house at ICRAL that has no one living in it," said Tudorache. "The people from the City Hall told us to wait, but we have been waiting for too long and my daughter needs a home to give birth to her child." She said her daughter keeps the furniture in the hall of the block of flats and the neighbors are watching to see that it does not get stolen.

The Romany Gypsies said that the clerks at the city hall did not want to let them inside the building.
"The security guards won’t let us in, even though there are certain hours when the building is supposed to be open to the public," said Tudorache. "They jumped on us. They grabbed us by the shoulders and kicked us out."
Viorel said that he had tried to get inside the building, too. "The security guards slammed the door in our face and told us to go jump in a toilet or die from hunger."

The security guards deny that version of events: "We couldn’t possibly have done that," one explained. "We are in a public institution which respects people."

While the Romany Gypsies were freezing, the atmosphere inside District 5’s City Hall was warm and cosy.
Inside the office of the expert on Romany Gypsies, the girls were having fun on the computer. Ionela Carlan, one of the experts smiled first, but soon she became grave and said she was a private consultant in the office. "I don’t deal with the situation in front of the City Hall," she explained, "but there is a counselor who does." She couldn’t remember his name. "I have no information on this issue and you know from your journalism books that an interview is always something that has to be arranged in advance," she added.

The person responsible for advising Romany Gypsies at the City Hall of District 5, Stefan Gheorghe, wouldn’t see me in person, but he did agree to talk on the telephone. "We don’t have any houses in district 5 that are available now," he told me. "Nothing has been built here in 15 years." Gheorghe admitted that ome houses have no one living in them, but are still not declared as being free in the ICRAL files, so they can’t be given away. "We don’t have an answer for these people," Gheorge said. "They should stay where they have been living until now."
Besides, Gheorghe explained, as he saw it, most of the people in these cases end up in the street because they don’t pay their rents. "We gave some of them apartments," he said, "but they were kicked out because they didn’t pay for 3 months and their leases were canceled." He added that Romany Gypsies work on the black market, because no one trusts them to work anywhere else. They are paid next to nothing, so they can barely support their families.
On Friday, October 7th, Stefan Gheorghe said three studio flats were going to be handed out in the Ferentari area and the strike would soon be over.

A clerk from the ICRAL confirmed a few minutes later that three apartments had been turned over to the city hall of District 5. She refused to identify herself or be quoted. She explained that she would be fired for revealing information to the press.

Most of the Romany Gypsies abandoned their protests at the entrance of the city hall at around 3.30 PM on Friday. One last holdout a young man-- was still sleeping on a piece of cardboard on the ground next to a sign that read "Hunger strike for a house."

"Dinca and Vultur tricked them again," he explained. "But I really need a house and I’d better stay here until I get the documents to be sure that I have it". He added that the people from the City Hall had lied when they promised the Romany Gypsies that they would give them houses on Monday morning. The officials in the city hall had said that the mayor would be there to sign the papers. On Monday morning, the entrance to the City Hall at District 5 was empty. There was no one was sleeping on the ground.
When I contacted Gheorghe on the phone and asked what had happened, he answered evasively and then hung up after promising to meet me at the city hall and to give me the new addresses of the Romany Gypsies who had been given new apartments. He never came to the meeting, and when I telephoned his cellphone later, there was no answser.

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