Private property

If you live in San Francisco, save the date. Thursday, Dec. 14, at 5 p.m. at Civic Center Plaza will be the Annual Vigil – A Memorial for Homeless and Unstably Housed San Franciscans. Remember our neighbors who have died this year while living on the streets and on the margins of San Francisco. The event will also be live online at 5:30, at www.facebook.com/sanfrancisconightministryj/live. If we treated housing as a right instead of as a commodity, many of these people would be alive today.  by Barry Hermanson We have a long history in this country of promoting private ownership of land. It is part of the American dream to own a home.& According to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “To Europeans, land was a commodity, an item which could be bought and sold and assigned to an individual owner. Native Americans did not appreciate the notion of land as a commodity, especially not in terms of individual ownership. As a result, Indian groups would sell land, but in their minds had only sold the rights to use the lands. It seems, in fact, that when they sold land to the Dutch, they did not give up...