Lowercase: Chicago squat blog

The Lowercase Collective now has a Wordpress blog, all the better to more easily disseminate information on their upcoming eviction and defense.

http://lowercasecollective.wordpress.com/

Tribune article highlights needs for widespread squatting

Cindy Almendarez avoided the homeless shelter for as long as possible, shuffling her children from a friend's basement to a roach-infested apartment before bunking down in the back seat of her car, where, for nearly two weeks, they tried to pretend they were camping.

She tried to cheer up Zachary, 10, and Zarah, 4, by joking that the family was "temporarily unassigned a permanent location" before finally winding up at a PADS Crisis Services homeless shelter this fall.

Almendarez, 41, is one of the early victims of the foreclosure crisis, losing her Waukegan home in February 2007 after the death of her husband. Spiraling into depression, she lost her job, her financial footing and personal dignity as she tried to keep the children's daily routines intact while recovering from her losses.

Across the Chicago area, social service providers say more families are turning to shelters. Just as alarming, they say, is the ballooning number of people who aren't homeless—yet—but who, lacking intervention, could join the ranks in 2009.

Some have been evicted from apartments after their landlord was foreclosed upon, and cannot afford the security deposit required to rent a new one. Others had their hours cut back at work and are struggling to meet their monthly bills.

"They were already just hanging on," said Marilyn Farmer, the executive director of the Morning Star Mission in Joliet.

Since October, Chicago-area homeless shelters have reported increases of anywhere from 5 percent to 39 percent in people needing immediate housing, compared with the same time the previous year. The number of homeless students enrolled by Chicago Public Schools in November was 9,132—up 28 percent compared with November 2007, a spokeswoman said.

What's harder to quantify are the numbers of people on the brink.

Experts say that's because becoming homeless usually happens over time, not abruptly, and may never involve a formal shelter or governmental agency.

"People will use up every available resource, staying in a motel, staying with friends and family," even in their car, before going to a shelter, said Lynda Schueler, executive director of West Suburban PADS, based in Oak Park.

But social service providers are noticing an uptick in people asking for the kinds of help that often presages homelessness—primarily help in paying their rent or mortgage and to catch up with utility bills.

"Lots of people are living doubled up," said Darlene Marcusson, executive director of the Lazarus House in Wheaton, which has seen a 20 percent increase in people seeking help to pay rent.

full story at the Trib

Mortgage Crisis Opens Doors for Squatters

López lives in a three-flat in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. An ex-girlfriend lives on the first floor. She’s the one who invited López to move into the basement space last year. She was a legitimate tenant, but now says she doesn’t know who to pay rent to. No one in the building has paid any rent or utilities since the landlords moved out more than a year ago.

A deed filed with Cook County shows that one of the nation’s largest banks foreclosed on the property months ago. A county court summons also names that bank and alleges 10 building-code violations. The squatters asked us not to report the bank’s name.

from Chicago Public Radio

I heard this on the way to work this morning. This situation apparently has repeated itself throughout the city -- disappearing landlords leaving the buildings with tenants and questionable status. It's much easier and less sketchy than breaking into an abandoned home. If this is a common occurrence in certain neighborhoods, perhaps a squatter and support network could be developed to ensure that if steps are taken by absentee landlords to claim property, an organized effort could resist evictions and make tenant claims to land and homes something more permanent.

Homes and Freedom

This anonymous letter was read to the CrimethInc. convergence held this summer in July. The reader said it was written by some friends who couldn't attend the convergence but were launching their own project of liberation:

For the past year, we have inhabited an occupied space in conflict with the prevailing logic of capitalism: everything that can be desired is for sale (nothing escapes the realm of the commodity); in order to survive one must exchange commodities for their representation in the form of currency; one's daily experience, the sum of life itself, is nothing more than a good to be sold on the open market. That space and the lives we have come to know and to love are being directly threatened by those who have chosen to base their livelihoods on exploitation, fear, and the destruction of life. We are anarchists, squatters, and gardeners who by asking no leave, no permission to live, have attempted to take directly some of the means necessary for life: the space and time to breathe and recover from the incessant monotony of school, work, rent, and the supermarket; the thought and energy to mount an attack against all that which is killing us piecemeal.

Unfortunately, nowhere do the authors even hint at where they reside, and so "Midwest" could mean anywhere from Kansas to Ohio. But they acknowledge the fragility of their situation and ask for folks to keep an ear to the ground in the event of future trouble that may be heading their way. They explicitly state their goal is not merely another place to live but a place worth living:

Our project is the destruction of the current social order and the creation of lives truly worth living. Squatting is one means of many we choose to further this endeavor. We have never been interested in finding yet another way to merely survive. Our interest lies in the generation of conflict and combustion capable of skyrocketing us out of this mess.

The creation of a confrontational squat is a relatively new and rare occurrence for the United States, at least outside of New York City. As mentioned earlier, the social situation is opening up space for the reclamation of unused housing. A well-planned and well-defended squat could be not worth the authorities' efforts to evict -- especially when it would mean just one more derelict building on a block of foreclosed homes.

Also interesting is the squatter's ignoring (and by implication, rejection) of using the squat as just another way to leverage city officials for a new homeless shelter or other concessions. Squatting contains the possibility of removing the "housing advocates" or activists that mediate between government and its subjects. The squat contains both the petition and the demand itself, eliminating both the desire for and the possibility of compromise on the part of the rebels.

The Vancouver Woodward Squat will likely be cited numerous times in the discussion on insurrectionary housing; some of the anarchist squatters have provided numerous texts and analysis of the experience. Their piece Squatting or Activist Posturing? looks at attempts to accelerate the Woodward Squat from a 10-day plea for social housing into a permanent, self-managed squat for homeless folks, free of external control, and how "anti-poverty" activists stifled momentum.