More Tolerance Please by Daphne Carpenter
Squatting: The act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use.
This winter’s been cold. I’ve been living in my tent off and on for four months on the side of the fourplex house that I used to rent at. I don’t end up staying in there every night, however, but that little tent, like my trustworthy comrade, is always there when I need it. It’s my refuge.
This is no new concept searching out shelter. How many peoples’ lives have been extended by finding a warm cave, tiny shack, or abandoned building to sleep in? Since the beginning of time we’ve instinctively known how to take care of ourselves. We are naturally nomadic.
Last month, one of the tenants (a former friend of mine), expressed his desire for me to leave my little tent area. Up until four months ago I was a paying tenant; I lived upstairs. I left because my roommate moved out and needed to get his deposit back, which meant that the house would have to be vacated (for the management company to do the walk-through and the move-out assessment). Then the deposit could be returned.
My plan was to move right back in after they painted and cleaned up, so for convenience, I stashed two boxes and two tables downstairs on the side of the house, in an earthly-and-private section opposite the unenclosed backyard garden (which opens out into an alley). Shaded by trees, this indiscrete, unkempt side-corner is often used as a storage space by the tenants for random pieces of old furniture and the likes.
As the apartment was cleaned and painted, I waited excitedly. Then I found out the manager rented my apartment to someone she knew personally, instead of back to me. Upset, I cursed her out as I drove away from the rental company with the news. But really the situation was no one’s “fault.” The new tenant was moving in that day, though, and I hadn’t even looked for another place.
But in reality I wasn’t really that worried. You know that kindness you’ve shown to strangers, saints, vagabonds, and to random-people-in-need along the course of your life because you know it’s right? Well I feel really close to that aspect of reciprocity. I knew the universe had my back on this one.
I’m lucky to have a job so I wasn’t totally screwed. I just started staying in different locations. Being employed, I’m able to get a hotel room once in a while or I can sometimes stay with friends and family. But I won’t let myself have nowhere to sleep on any random night. I live in a beach city where it’s often cold and windy, and I’m female. I don’t know what you would do in that situation, but I get my ass off the street. So to be safe, on that same property, I pitched my small, two-person tent by my stuff—right there next to the chicken and his coop. It was rebellious to do so.
I found out from another woman at the rental company that my application wasn’t even looked at. I felt like, “Okay then, rental-company-that-didn’t-even-consider-my-application, thanks a lot! Well I’m going to just post-up right here, on ‘your property,’ in this discreet little section. P.S., I’ll maintain it clean—way cleaner.”
Yeah, so up went my tent. I felt justice. And in reality, it was better for me because I really needed to save some money anyway. I squatted that tiny piece of land, went to work, and continued to take life day-to-day.
Squatters are artists living in abandoned warehouses, families (or runaways) living in neglected, boarded-up buildings, favela residents in Brazil, couples secretly breaking back into their homes that have been foreclosed on, and are now just sitting there. Squatters are also homeless people. Homes Not Jails, an advocacy group for squatting and for the rights of homeless people, takes “direct action” and engages in “civil disobedience” by publicly occupying vacant buildings and helping homeless people move in. According to the group’s mission statement, “Property rights still reign over human rights and people still die on sidewalks in front of vacant buildings.” The human rights group promotes the use of vacant buildings because they know that “to escape from the discouraging spiral of poverty, people need a respite to get back on their feet.”
Squatting is often stigmatized because of some bad seeds. For the sake of this article I’m not going to elaborate on what destructive, unconscious squatters often do to a property (go in, trash the place, have harsh parties, piss and shit everywhere, and then leave after they’ve made such a mess that not even they can stay there). These kinds of occupants are destructive and probably aren’t thinking longer-term. The squatting movement then gets a bad rap for this.
You see all these empty buildings around here? Vacant property ends up just sitting there unused, often for quite some time. Meanwhile, some people go without places to live, or even shelter. Who has more rights, a human or an abandoned building? Why protect the building instead?
For people who believe housing is an inalienable human right, squatting is as much about protest as it is about finding shelter (http://travel.howstuffworks.com/how-to-build-a-shelter.htm). And on principal, squatting challenges the capitalistic approach to renting an apartment or buying a home. Just because someone doesn’t want to have to pay rent or a mortgage forever, does that make him or her a “bum” or a social reject? Of course it doesn’t.
I’ve been a squatter for all of my adult life—starting out of necessity in Germany. In the mid-90s, while traveling through Europe after high school, my “backpacking” money ran out at one point and the people who put me up were squatter punks. I lived on what would have been the east-side of Berlin, if not for the Berlin Wall coming down a few years earlier. There were tons of squat houses in the area, and as long as the tenants weren’t too unruly, the police remained virtually uninvolved. I was young and impressionable then, and the principles I learned from the punks were:
Equality—I deserve shelter from the elements, just like you, whether I have money or not, and I’m willing to fight for this right.
Just because somebody doesn’t like me personally, or doesn’t like “my kind,” I have a right to live in my own safe place.
Finding shelter is more of a concern for me than a potential trespassing violation.
Stay out of other people’s business when it comes to living, especially when there’s no harm being done to you.
In the favelas in Brazil I noticed that this same courtesy is shown to neighbors as a general rule (for the most part). More than half the people I met there had squatted a piece of land and built their homes on it. They managed to somehow get all those heavy bags of cement, tools, and bricks way the hell up into the hills and then build their homes, just like back in the day when the former slaves escaped and made their way up into the hills; they would find an agreeable piece of earth and then just start building shelter. No one was paying anyone rent, and no one owned the land—really, how could somebody “own land?”
But in modern, capitalistic societies, so much of the earth is cemented-over and is “owned.” And “property owners” often lock up, neglect, and then ignore their empty buildings. We’ve all seen those derelict structures; they were once someone’s home or business, a farmhouse, a warehouse. And now the space has been cleared out, bolted shut, and is sitting in darkness.
Meanwhile, as this vacancy persists, a homeless man, woman, or family might be sleeping outside of the building. This is unjust and goes against basic human rights. By chance, if these destitute people somehow manage to work their way inside, the police might be called by some nosey neighbor. The squatters might be forced back out into the elements by the police, who defend their actions (and the building) by referencing an abstract combination of numbers and letters (602 PC)—the California “trespassing code.”
Let’s go on a little mission right now. We’re going to squat an empty, unused property, and we’re going to do it in a manner that we (us particular squatters) find to be respectful. Some of you more conservative folks might find this journey shocking, offensive, or even “immoral,” as Tara-Nichole Nelson, a former Bay area broker agent, referred to it in an article for www.msnbc.com. But just come along anyway for the ride.
Location: just outside Central Amsterdam, late 1998. A few of us (us, hypothetically) have been noticing that the bureaucrat building that was vacated eight months before is still empty. There’s nothing’s being done to utilize the space, nor are there any signs of movement or construction.
The squatters standing at the gates are people of trade and skill. They can break a door down, hook up electricity and plumbing, cook for large numbers of people, paint, make music, intellectualize, and make resourceful use of empty space. They share in the opinion that there are creative ways in which someone can live with little money. Often they’re street smart, in touch with their survival instinct, and less dependent on currency.
Clandestinely, the squatters eyeball-out empty spaces with the expectation of bringing life to these shadowy realms—by creating art galleries, cultural centers, community gardens, and living spaces with things like bedrooms, bathrooms, showers etc.
And what about the bank that “owns” the space? Well too bad, they say defiantly. Right? Like the banks can do to us? Like the foreclosure that took-up little grandma’s house of 40 years? Just like that, “too bad!”
We’re taking the power back by occupying and resisting. It’s a real renegade way of looking at and doing things, and the banks don’t like it.
Before the squatters moved into this particular space in Amsterdam, the building was the Belgian Embassy. It was a monolith of a structure that stood six stories high in the middle of an urban neighborhood, with mostly immigrant families.
After the space was opened up, many people went to live there (about 150 people, including children and babies, from twenty-something different countries) and over the next two years the community blossomed. There was a donation-based dinner served nightly (everybody ate, money or not). If you needed clothes, you could get some from the clothes-trade-section on the second floor. If you were feeling intellectual, you could go to the library and feed the brain. For two years the Eternal Light Family (ELF) Haus thrived and was also at the epicenter of Amsterdam’s underground culture (for more on this squat, refer to my blog).
Luckily Amsterdam’s squatting movement is highly organized. There’s a blurred line between the legality and illegality of squatting, so for the most part, it’s tentatively tolerated in many areas. The police leave squatters alone under the following stipulations: you can prove the space has been inactive for more than six months (in Amsterdam, squatters do their legal homework) and you’ve managed to get in and have placed a mattress, a desk, and a lamp inside, and have changed the locks and locked yourself in.
This constitutes a take-over, or an okupa (ocupar=to occupy) and this kind of movement gained momentum and support from the local community in the 1980s, during the height of an intense period of housing shortages. Absentee landlords came face-to-face with articulate squatters who appealed the judicial system and claimed they were well-utilizing empty spaces. Liberal (political) attitudes of the time also leaned towards a more sympathetic outlook on squatting. Artist communities (many of which are still there today) were established in place of empty stretches of farmland and vacant buildings. Subculture flourished where expressionless structures once stood in vain.
Where is that kind of love here, I ask? I believe a lot of us have turned into 911-dialing meddlers who, for some reason, often feel threatened by lower income and underprivileged folks who are just barely getting by. If only the community could just be more tolerant towards disadvantaged people in these circumstances, if not by giving “hand-outs,” then at least by leaving them alone to work with the available resources.
Anyway, I’m very happy where I am now in my new, secret little spot. I didn’t bother fighting for that little side-corner where I had my tent because, actually, it wasn’t really worth it. It was noisy and messy and they (he) kept throwing more shit down there where I slept, even after I would clean up. I was also disillusioned by him and a few other “food-not-bombs-green-living-community-building” individuals who thought they had more of a right to be there because they were “paying rent” (at their indoor places, with all the amenities that indoor places have—the ones I went without). I did love sleeping under the trees during this winter’s rainy season, though! I’m free as a bird, and as long as I’m not hurting anyone, I do as I please.
Occupy and Resist,
Blue Lunar Eagle.Daphne Carpenter is a writer and videographer who alternates between living in California and Brazil. She is also an advocate for the rights of homeless youth, and does everything in her power to change their unjust situations. She can be reached at daphnestree@hotmail.com or at her blog, http://paintzflwrs.blogspot.com/