No Vacancies: Squatters Move In

Growing movements on both sides of the Atlantic try to
turn bank-owned houses into homes.

BY Rebecca Burns

In These Times - April 19, 2012

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13037/no_vacancies_squatters_move_in/

[photo] Tene Smith prays at a press conference outside her
re-occupied home on January 19. (Photo courtesy of
Liberate the Southside) News " April 19, 2012

In the U.S. today, a new wave of squatters is moving
into vacant foreclosed properties in cities like
Chicago, New York and Minneapolis.

After three years of staying in her sister's living
room, Tene Smith decided to move her family into a home
that had sat vacant on Chicago's South Side for more
than two years.

With the help of Liberate the South Side, a
Chicago-based organization that targets vacant homes
for re-occupation and spent months renovating the
house, Smith and her three children moved in during a
public ceremony attended by community members and the
media in January 2012. "I was fearful when I first made
this commitment," she told In These Times, "but as the
days passed I had a sense of independence that had
eluded me for a long time."

The term "squatter" conjures images of the
predominantly young, urban hipsters who in decades past
claimed vacant property in areas such as New York
City's Lower East Side. But with five times as many
vacant homes as homeless people in the U.S. today, a
new wave of squatters - just as likely to be hard-hit
families like Smith's as young activists making a
political statement - is moving into vacant foreclosed
properties in cities like Chicago, New York and
Minneapolis.

Today's housing movement has yet to approach the pace
of its predecessors - historians Richard Boyer and
Herbert Morais estimate that in 1932, unemployed
workers' councils moved 77,000 evicted families back
into their homes in New York City alone. But buoyed by
the support of the Occupy movement, housing rights
groups have stepped up their efforts.

With more than 1 billion people worldwide now living in
informal settlements, journalist Robert Neuwirth argues
that squatters' communities are among the primary
creators of housing in the developing world. Now, in
the context of a global foreclosure crisis, a
squatters' movement is emerging across the developed
world to claim otherwise vacant buildings as homes.

In Spain, established squatters' networks have
converged with the M-15 movement of "indignados."
"Squatting is more connected to radical politics and
autonomist movements in Spain," explains Miguel Angel
Mart'nez, a sociologist at Madrid's Complutense
University, "but it was adopted by M-15 because they
experienced the tragedy of so many people attending the
assemblies and asking for help while they were living
on the streets or under threat of being put there."

An estimated 350,000 evictions have taken place in
Spain since 2007. The collaboration between experienced
squatters and M-15 activists has produced, among other
things, highly functional "squatting offices" in major
cities that coordinate information on empty buildings
and offer consultations to people who wish to squat.

In Ireland, squatters linked to the Occupy movement
have begun taking over the thousands of properties that
speculators handed to the National Assets Management
Agency (NAMA), a national bank created to buy up bad
property development loans after the housing market
crash. In Cork, activists occupied a NAMA building in
January and converted it into a community resource
center with a library and free counseling services.

In countries with older, more visible squatter
cultures, laws tend to be more lax and the
possibilities of occupying vacant buildings for
community centers greater. Though many U.S. states have
"squatter's laws" stipulating that occupants who have
been in a property for more than 30 days can only be
evicted through a formal legal process, the ambiguity
surrounding the situation can be dangerous for families
living in vacant homes.

After Tene Smith and her family had been occupying
their new home for more than a month, its long-absent
owner, who had fallen into foreclosure in 2007,
re-emerged. Smith decided to leave, acknowledging that
"our fight was with the bank and not the homeowner."
But Liberate the South Side told In These Times that
because the house was suddenly put for sale in
February, they suspect that Bank of America, the
mortage servicer of the house, offered to negotiate
with the homeowner only after Smith moved in in
January. (The bank did not respond to a request for
comment.)

Housing groups have in the past two years won a string
of less ambiguous victories by pressuring banks to
reduce the principal of mortgage holders in
foreclosure. For the first time, politicians are
calling for a large-scale principal write-down. But Max
Rameau, an organizer with the housing rights group Take
Back the Land, says it would be a shame if the movement
were to stop there. "If the government puts out a
principal reduction offer, and the movement jumps on it
and ... does nothing for the low-income people of color
who suffered the most under this crisis, that will be a
real sellout," he says.

Rameau, who has been moving people into vacant homes
and doing eviction defenses with Take Back the Land
since 2007, says that principal reduction only helps
homeowners who are employed, and does nothing for the
public housing residents facing a crisis that is
"objectively worse" than the foreclosure crisis.

Though the mortgage crisis has created political space
for a movement to emerge, Rameau says that the ultimate
goal is to create more affordable housing and to give
communities control over how it is managed. "Our real
objective is not to target banks," he concludes. "Our
real objective is to fulfill the human right to
housing." ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Rebecca Burns, an In These Times staff writer, holds an
M.A. from the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute
for International Peace Studies, where her research
focused on global land and housing rights. A former
editorial intern at the magazine, Burns also works as a
research assistant for a project examining violence
against humanitarian aid workers.

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