The United Nations is sending in an investigator Raquel Rolnik to investigate the state of affordable housing in New York and six other places in the United States.

Rolnick is a Brazilian architect and urban planner, and a professor at the University of Sao Paolo. She is also the former Director of the Department of Planning for Sao Paolo, and from 2003-2007 served as the National Secretary for Urban Programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Cities.

How successful will she be? It remains to be seen. As she told the NYC free paper, The Indypendent , Mayor Bloomberg has refused to see her. Which says a lot about how little NYC city officials regard the United Nations.

But Rolnik says the state of housing in NYC, and for that matter anywhere, is linked to climate change. She says all the talks about a climate change treaty seem to ignore the fact that the ones who will suffer the most from bad storms, rising seas and heatwaves will be those living in poor conditions. "Market mechanisms – and unregulated markets – result in locations at risk of flooding and landslides being left for the poorest," she said. "This population does not have the means to get insurance or move to other places when they are threatened by natural disasters."