A squatted social center isn’t just a building for concerts and workshops, but a site that mobilizes resistance against state and capital, not just in the content of its programs but in its very existence; this basis in structural defiance of the law marks the difference between a pacified faux-radical target market and an actual culture of resistance.
I thought maybe the banks are just as confused as we are. This is so sudden, so many houses underwater at once. But then Bloomberg did an article revealing that Bank of America was deliberately doing this stuff.
We’re going to be paying our rental checks to financial institutions that collude with the big banks that orchestrated a foreclosure crisis that pushed us out of our homes and tore apart our communities in the first place.
“Nothing is more tragic than watching generation after generation trash potentially powerful movements by making the same mistakes.”
Squatting is actually quite easy, as long as the property owners don’t call the police on you. If it’s an abandoned house and fairly run-down, it’s very easy to squat.
One thing that’s happened all across the country is the rise of unpaid labor as the entryway into creative and intellectual professions, where young people are expected to work for free, and to have the financial means to support themselves when they begin working in fields like art, journalism, entertainment, or even policy.
Even the market-minded Mobimo must make peace with these facts: While there is certainly money in housing, there are also PEOPLE in it.
As tensions continue to rise surrounding housing and right-to-the-city issues in Switzerland, one squat’s struggle was derailed at a critical moment by violence. How the Schoch Family of Zurich’s Binz responded and what we can learn from their equanimity
