The continued presence of the Occupy movement in major cities across America, coupled with the seemingly ceaseless stream of home foreclosures, has emboldened a more traditional form of occupation: squatting. "Occupy Our Homes", a campaign formed from the coalition of "Occupy Wall Street" and "Organizing for Occupation", views the the takeover of abandoned property as a material act of "liberation". As such, the campaign seeks to protect and protest against foreclosures, whilst simultaneously aiming to make new possibilities for community supported housing both visible and viable.
Josh Harkinson reports on "Occupy Our Homes" for Mother Jones:
Last Thursday in New York City, a soft-spoken man with a thick beard, whom I'll call Paul, casually approached a brick apartment building and broke off a padlock with a bolt cutter. A spotter called to say a squad car was on its way, but Paul didn't feel his phone vibrate; he was too busy jamming a crowbar in the door. "Fortunately, the cop car just drove up the street and turned," he recalls a few days later as he and his wife wait at a subway stop to meet up with members of his cleanup crew. He'd installed his own lock on the door, which led to a vacant unit where the crew hoped to install a family of squatters.
Paul has asked me not to publish the names of his crew, the location of the building, or too much detail about the single mother who wants to squat there with her two children. The family was evicted from its apartment two weeks ago after a city-subsidized housing program ran out of money. "The reason I am doing this," Paul told me, "is that there are people who are really hurting."
After three guys in work clothes showed up with brooms and a shovel, we headed through graffiti-sprayed streets to the building. Everyone would need to be as discreet as possible; a neighboring unit was still occupied by a legal tenant. "The idea is to go in very quickly and confidently, like we are supposed to be there," Paul tells the group, one of several crews connected to a new 200-member squatting organization known as Organizing for Occupation (O4O).
Today, O4O teams up with Occupy Wall Street and others to launch a campaign called Occupy Our Homes, a public showdown against the big banks and housing authorities. They intend to disrupt foreclosure auctions, unveil secret squats, and announce further plans to defend foreclosed-upon homeowners from eviction in some 20 American cities.
Squatting has apparently been on the rise, driven by persistent unemployment, an ongoing foreclosure crisis, and the success of Occupy Wall Street. Reliable stats are hard to come by, since most squatters fly under the radar, but Max Rameau of the national squatting support group Take Back the Land says the number of organizations pursuing the tactic has taken off—from about 15 in July to around 75 in recent weeks. Many of the newcomers are local Occupy groups.
Occupy Our Homes has roots in the early 1970s, when declining working-class incomes and a lack of bank financing for low-rent properties left thousands of New York City buildings abandoned. Hundreds of former tenants squatted in vacant buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side, East Harlem, Chelsea, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. "We were taking as many as we could," recalls Frank Morales, a 64-year-old Episcopal priest and longtime squatter. "But in terms of the left, the housing organizations wouldn't touch us with a 10-foot pole."
Through the 1980s, Morales helped renovate some 30 squats on the Lower East Side. He lived for two years in an abandoned building with no electricity and half a roof. Using pulleys, his team eventually hoisted up new roof beams. For power, they tapped into the base of a street lamp, burying the cable under the sidewalk and taking just enough electricity to power a single light bulb in each unit.