Squatting

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Example

By Hannah Stutz:

"The San Francisco Commune provided me with an in-depth and tangible experience with squatting as an alternative housing situation. I had taken a homeless and pregnant friend of mine to the SFC. Her options were limited, and the SFC was her first choice for housing herself while pregnant. I knew she would at least have a the benefit of being in doors while carrying her child.

I inquired more about squatting from friends who lived there, and began to observe the framework of squatting. I saw squatting at its raw core: search groups scouting possible open houses, breaking lock boxes that held keys, and seeing certain stresses such as cops and the neighborhood threaten the squat. I had been fascinated with this entirely different reality from the one I was raised in. I had been an average American life on the path of going to school and working a retail job, but I took a sharp turn away from that idea when I became involved with the SFC.

The room where we all slept was broken up into personal spaces, which were marked by sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, and backpacks. This was the common area, where most socialized, slept, ate, listened to music, and smoked. One day when roughly fifteen people were lounging around in the common area, someone remarked that police were outside talking to one of the roommates who had exited the building. Hearts were pounding, sweat was misting out of pores, and all eyes where like deer in headlights. All noise had become deafened silence to protect our sacred home space. The police had luckily left, but that was the first major police encounter, meaning everyone had to be extremely discreet with furture movement. We grasped how fortunate we were to still have the home that night. Though the police encounter was alarming, there were more concerning issues inside the SFC.

While the SFC had revolutionary and conscious souls, personalities amongst the roommates became chaotic, power hungry, and disfigured. At one point, up to twenty people lived in the SFC. With so many individuals cooped up in a relatively small space, tensions grew. Certain members would become frustrated sometimes even physically threatening to others because of expectations not met. Parties thrown until five in the morning and piles of dirty dishes aggravated many who lived at the SFC.

The power structure was unbalanced leading to a split within the group. Because of this, the SFC could not function at a fundamental level. The emotional energy surrounding the house was unhealthy and a poor living condition. This proved how significant and horrific the housing crisis had been, because in a city that can provide housing to each person on the street, swarms of people had to be subjected serious daily emotional challenges just to have an indoor space to sleep.

Though the San Francisco Commune had been open for over a year, the San Francisco Police Department eventually raided the SFC, leaving about twenty people without a home and minimal of time to gather belongings. Even though the group dynamic was rocky and tense, the SFC provided many networking and relationship building opportunities. Love interests blossomed, art and chants filled the walls, and a sustainable garden was being built in the backyard. There were definitely struggles among individuals at the SFC, but the space equipped us to plan events and marches and maintained housing for those who needed it.

Had I not become a squatter at the SFC, I would have simply entered college racking up debt with student loans, with little understanding of the world that awaited me upon graduation. The matrix of debt slavery would have formed before I even got a handle on its implications for my life. But instead, I learned. I learned about squatting, cooking, community, and from other people's experiences. I gained a soul-grasping understanding of love from my fellow squatters, even during the most chaotic of times. I climbed into a dumpster at Trader Joe’s so the house could have enough food. I had neighbors smile at me with a sense of respect because they would never expect this from a “privileged” girl. But I tried, and I did. And these things you can't and won't learn in college. It's the joy of getting out of my comfort zone that makes me miss the San Francisco Commune.

Even with the SFC no longer housing the homeless, many of the occupiers at the SFC are still creating alternative solutions out of the rubble of the depressed economy and housing crisis. The majority are still squatting and attending Homes Not Jails meetings. Others are demonstrating a working exchange system based on trading skills, not money." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/from-occupy-to-squatting-how-one-student-escaped-debt-slavery)

History

UK

"The term "squatting" first emerged during the bloody maelstrom of the English civil war, when radicals on the parliamentarian side, the proto-communists of the Diggers and the Levellers, led a movement for the landless folk of England to take over - or "squat" - the commons and fields.

In more modern times it was World War II which provoked a major spate of squatting, now all but forgotten.

After the war hundreds of thousands of properties had been destroyed resulting in a chronic housing shortage. Many returning soldiers had nowhere to live.

So in battered cities across Britain, thousands of families took matters into their own hands by occupying empty buildings, often barracks or prisoner-of-war camps, putting up net curtains to claim their spot. War-time 'desperation'

Eileen Milton, now a sprightly 90-year-old, squatted in a former Italian prisoner-of-war camp in the Bristol area. She says the idea that squatting was wrong "never entered my head, it was desperation after six years of war". Historical photo of Frestonia squat area The formerly "independent" Frestonia squat area is now prime real estate

And it was not exactly luxurious. They lived in what were essentially huts, though Eileen managed to make hers a home: "I put the bedroom furniture at one end and made a living area at the other. We made it quite cosy."

In London the Communist Party led a campaign to occupy the mansion blocks of the rich in the Kensington area, many of whom had fled the city to avoid the blitz, and filled them with the displaced poor of the East End.

This post-war squatting highlighted different societal attitudes which have persisted to this day.

On the one hand, the squatting of municipal buildings has often been treated leniently.

On the other, the squatting of private property has been met with fierce moral outrage and, in the 1940s, with the full force of the law when several ring-leaders were jailed.

Fast forward to the early 1970s, it was amid the dying embers of the hippy era that squatting really had its heyday.

Alternative notions of communalism and anti-materialism coincided with a glut of empty and abandoned buildings, to create a series of vast, often infamous, squats, especially in the capital.

The population of inner London declined dramatically as town planners condemned swathes of old housing stock for slum clearance. Between 1941 and 1981 it was almost cut in half as people moved out to new suburbs.

In their place, the hippies and the artists, the drop-outs and the activists moved in, often taking over whole streets in what were then the "undesirable" neighbourhoods of Notting Hill and Camden Town.

The most famous of these was based around Freston Road, in west London. Squatters there fought a long battle against the threat of eviction by the then Greater London Council.

In an entertaining publicity stunt, the squatters declared independence from the United Kingdom and set up their own state called "The People's Republic of Frestonia".

They issued their own passports and stamps, which actually worked, and asked the United Nations to send in a peace-keeping force. Needless to say, the UN did not oblige.

But it was not all fun and political games. Tony Sleep, who lived in Frestonia for eight years, says it was an uncomfortable way to live.

"It was a wasteland, the houses on Freston Road had been empty for more than ten years. Many had no windows, some had no doors, no electricity, no water, holes in the roofs.

"It didn't feel like you were depriving anyone of anything."

It also did not feel safe.

It was an era of violence and Mr Sleep used to keep a row of bricks by his bed to ward off any unwanted intruders. He says squatting felt "disobedient and wrong in some ways, but you get over that if you need to". (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15776450)