Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City - Hardcover

Starecheski, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022639980X ISBN 13: 9780226399805

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Synopsis

Though New York’s Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan.
 
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

About this title

About the Author

Amy Starecheski is co-director of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. She won first prize in the 2016 SAPIENS-Allegra competition. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ours to Lose

When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City

By Amy Starecheski

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-39980-5

Contents

The Narrators, 
The Eleven Buildings, 
Introduction, 
1 From Drug Murder to Door Ceremony: Claiming Buildings, Building Claims, 
2 Who Deserves Housing?: The Battle for East Thirteenth Street, 
3 Making the Deal: Debating the Values of Housing, 
4 Why Work?: The Values of Labor, 
5 Making Claims on the Past and the Future: Debt, Kinship, History, and the Temporality of Homeownership, 
Conclusion, 
Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

From Drug Murder to Door Ceremony: Claiming Buildings, Building Claims

April 1984: Opening 539

Rolando Politi: The first building to be taken was 539 East Thirteenth Street. It was the smallest of several buildings there. And me and two other people, including David Boyle, were working next door, two buildings next to 539, just for some slum landlord, doing construction, Sheetrock and, you know, the usual stuff. But we kept always looking at 539. I know there were people going in and out. At that time in 539 it was like many other places — drug location. And in April of '84 there was a murder. No big deal. One more drug murder in 539. Somebody was shot on the top floor while a cab was waiting outside. But when the drug murders happened in the neighborhood, that was a nono for the police department, of course. They cleaned out 539. So me and David and the other people said, "OK, now is the time. They're out of there, police got them." So we went in there a couple of days thereafter.

* * *

David Boyle: Sarah Farley was a community activist. I think she was Harlem-based originally. Great singer, I think she had a singing career. She had an accident, I think she fell off a streetcar and hurt her legs. It led to her being very overweight and difficult to get around. So she became this sort of sage figure. They made a bedroom apartment in the ground floor of a building on Sixth Street for her. In the front part of it was a giant table — she always said it was really important to have a big table. She started organizing meetings in this place, and she started a group called LAND, which was an acronym for Local Action for Neighborhood Development. In that same building is also where Sandro Dernini, the Plexus guy, had the basement. It was called the Shuttle Theatre. It was a very lively cultural scene with Miguel Pinero and the Nuyorican Poets, who were in exile at the time — they didn't have a place. So a lot of the Nuyorican scene was taking place in Sarah Farley's building.

LAND was promoting that the members of LAND, those who were capable, do new projects. Totally new and not all clumped together. It was supposed to be something that caused people to fan out and do new things. She had a guy in that building named Clee Carter, who was a jazz musician, and he and his friends had a building on Thirteenth Street that they lived in and had a bad landlord. But it was a building that had a tradition of jazz musicians. There were only three floors — four floors, counting the storefront. The way he said it was that the landlord just threw his hands up and gave them the building but didn't really do it formally. He just said, "I'm not going to collect rent, I'm not going to do anything more on this building, I'm out of here. You guys take care of it." I think he dreamed that they were going to somehow come up with a plan and talk to him. They had a fire in the building, the building got messed up. The boiler blew up. They moved out under pressure from drug influences on the block. It was a very bad drug block.

But one night a cab driver got killed in the building, and everybody ran away from the murder scene, from the drug gang called the Outstanding. He [Carter] wanted an apartment in it, but he said, "Now everybody is going to run away because there is going to be a murder investigation. Detectives are going to be all over the place, and now is the time to take the building."

We went over and nailed the building shut with big spikes. So you'd really have to work at it to get in. That was what we considered our taking possession, and then we had meetings that week and put up notices saying we were going to do a homesteading project on Thirteenth Street. And then we met at Life Cafe, and David Life, who was one of the partners in Life Cafe at the time, he was one of the people. Nelson Oceundi, a fashion guy, Garick Beck, Joanee [Freedom]. It was a pretty broad group. Daniel Caldero, who was a photographer. A bunch of people. [Rafael] Bueno was my mentor at that time, and he'd been counseling how to do it better.

Sarah Farley was totally behind it; we had a meeting at Sarah's. We organized so that the next weekend we would go and we'd already possessed it by sealing it, so with a group we would laboriously take the spikes out and put up a door and perhaps move into it. I think in the weeks before that — no, it was months before that — I ran into Marisa DeDominicis. Because I lived across the street from the Sixth and B Garden, and I saw a woman climbing over the fence because she didn't have a key, with a broken hammer clawing at the earth so she could put seeds in the ground. It was very impressive, and she was looking for a place to stay. She was the first person to spend the night in 539.

* * *

Marisa DeDominicis: On my day off, which was President's Day, I came down to Sixth and B Garden, and I climbed over the fence. I was quickly befriended by a woman, Joan, who got a ladder out of the Dumpster to help me get out of the garden instead of climbing the fence. So I don't know what I was doing; I just thought if I went down there, somebody would come along and tell me about the garden. Also at that time I met David Boyle and Joanee Freedom, who somehow decided that because I was there in the middle of January gardening, guerrilla gardening, that I could possibly be one of the people that could be a part of the initial meetings that they were starting to have about what to do for their housing situation "plan B." Because they had issues with their landlord and they were feeling like they might get evicted.

So I was invited by David to come up to his apartment and warm up because it was quite a cold day. He then invited me to a meeting at a community center on Sixth Street to talk about potentially getting some housing. I was eager because I didn't really have a high income at the time, and I was intrigued that what was being said could possibly be something I was ready for because I was looking for some thing or work to get involved in.

Starecheski: The story I've heard is that you were digging in the garden with a broken tablespoon. Is that true?

DeDominicis: Um, hammer.

Starecheski: [laughs] And so what was that meeting like on Sixth Street at the community center?

DeDominicis: It was a rainy day, and it was like an odd eclectic storefront where this woman Sarah had people there from the neighborhood — all walks of life. I was pretty gung ho; I kind of look back and think I was a little crazy because they were basically saying that the building they were thinking of going into was hot because there had recently been a murder there, and I was like "Yeah, sure, I'll go into that apartment!" And I did. So I just felt that was probably the best thing to do. I wasn't afraid, which was also kind of crazy, and I really didn't want any help. Because I was concerned that there were just a lot of guys and I wasn't ready to just park myself next to some guy, I would prefer just doing it. I liked the space, I liked the little building. It was cute.

Starecheski: 539 East Thirteenth Street?

DeDominicis: Yeah.

Starecheski: What was the first time you ever went to that block? Do you remember it?

DeDominicis: I went right to it after the meeting.

Starecheski: You just went to the meeting and then walked right over there?

DeDominicis: I was like, well, what am I going to get involved in? What are they talking about, that the place was hot and there were abandoned buildings and there were rat holes, human rat holes to go through and escape down to Fourteenth Street? Well, if I'm going to get involved, then I'm going to go check this out.

There was a lot of debris in front of almost all the buildings. I think the stoops were boarded up somehow so people couldn't get in. But there were holes in the cinder blocks. The space that became the garden that I worked in was totally full of rubble and building debris because people would dump things in it. I don't think there was a gate or anything, so people could walk through there. That was part of the escape route and part of the way people accessed it; it was just empty. The only cars parked on this street were abandoned. Abandoned meaning burnt out with no wheels on.

So the space itself, there were holes in the roof that the fire department had put in to put out fires, and there was a lot of water damage in 539. That place where I was in was on the third floor, and that was also strategic because it wasn't as badly damaged as the fourth floor. It was central; it would be easy for me to get in and out and hear people coming up the stairs. I think almost everything was boarded with tin because that's how HPD managed the buildings. We used that tin for a lot of alternative purposes, like when we made our stoves out of barrels, we used them for a way to go through the window for flues. We reused them for spray-painting too to advertise what we wanted, "HPD keep out" or whatever they said, or "This building belongs to the city"; I don't remember what it said. They would be great if we could find them and use them in a museum.

Was there traces of drug activity? Yes, there was. There were stashes of little cellophane envelopes that had a stamp on it that said "outstanding." And so that's where I got the idea to make the 501(c)(3) Outstanding Renewal Enterprises. ORE. So there was cocaine; I found a lot of cocaine in these little packages. What else was there? There was nothing as far as traces of where the body was or anything. Like it wasn't marked or anything. I was just told that the police were watching and it was hot. And that it was a good idea to move in then because otherwise the drug dealers would move in the next week and so we had to move fast.

Starecheski: Had the building been opened already when you went? Had David or anyone gone in?

DeDominicis: I just looked at the outside of the building, and so I believe, I don't remember if I went with David or if David was the first to open the building. I think maybe he did go, I don't remember. I just remember that I went in the building and stayed. And I remember him saying, "You shouldn't stay here." And I said, "I think it's the best thing to do if we want to keep this building. To just establish residency."

Starecheski: What did you bring with you when you went to stay there? What was it like living there all by yourself in an abandoned building?

DeDominicis: I remember it was a rainy spring. It was cool and I didn't have very much. I get cold easily, so I probably came with a lot of sweaters. I didn't have much; I came with a backpack and was really pretty streamlined. I don't remember what I brought. I didn't bring much.

Disinvestment, Abandonment, and the Social Roots of Squatting

Let us think about this group story in terms of two simple questions, through which I will explore the history of disinvestment, abandonment, gentrification, and struggle that led to the events of April 1984:

Why were these buildings vacant?

How did these people come to take them?

How Capitalism Produces Vacant Buildings

In order to understand why these buildings were vacant, we must understand the process through which usable tenement housing became economically worthless; in political economic terms, how housing with plenty of use value came, for a moment, to have no exchange value. In the 1970s and 1980s disinvestment devastated entire neighborhoods of America's inner cities. The Lower East Side was particularly hard hit. Yet New York City remained, like many American cities, a metropolitan center with a crowded housing market. Why abandon habitable apartments in a city without enough housing?

The mass abandonment of inner-city housing in the 1970s and 1980s has its roots one hundred years before. The housing form typical of the Lower East Side, the dumbbell tenement, was mainly built just before the deep depression of 1893–97, which initiated a long migration of capital for industrial and residential development from inner cities to the cities' edge (N. Smith 1996, 59). Thus, inner-city land was densely filled with low-quality residential buildings just as eighty years of disinvestment in working-class inner cities was beginning. This eventually led to what Smith calls a "rent gap," in which land with run-down, outdated buildings on it comes to be worth less than it would be empty (67–70). Because the buildings, run-down, out of fashion, and full of tenants without much capacity to pay, detract from the potential value of the land, the owners have an incentive to let the buildings decay and push the tenants out. It is into this rent gap that successful squatters step, taking advantage of the brief moment when the real estate market turns its back and usually carefully guarded urban property rights are devalued and poorly defended.

On the Lower East Side, landlords who owned buildings from which they could no longer make a profit by simply charging rent to tenants began to find other methods of "milking" a building for profit, first delaying maintenance and eventually withholding services such as heat and water. The final stage was abandonment. Sometimes tenants stayed on in abandoned buildings, even while drug dealers and users began taking over empty apartments. Sometimes squatters moved in. Once a building was no longer occupied, scavengers quickly stripped it of anything valuable, from copper pipes and wiring to fixtures. Arson could provide one last payout to landlords in the form of an insurance settlement. Across the South Bronx, Harlem, parts of Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side, the smell of burning was ever present, and residents lived in fear of waking up to find that this time their building was the one in flames. In one example of how this process played out, the final tenants of 539 East Thirteenth Street, the jazz musicians described by David Boyle, continued to live in their apartments after the landlord abandoned the building, until a fire and a boiler explosion made it uninhabitable for them. The city foreclosed on buildings on which taxes had not been paid and, when they had tenants still in them, became the landlord of last resort. All six of the buildings eventually squatted on that block of East Thirteenth Street had been city owned since the late 1970s. Squatters on the Lower East Side almost exclusively targeted city-owned buildings: as citizens, they could more easily claim rights to them and the city was slow to develop them, leaving them empty longer than private owners usually would. While the processes of disinvestment and redevelopment are all too often portrayed as rational, even, and inexorable, with urban landscapes changing in predictable ways as capital flows first out of and then into a neighborhood, the story of city-owned buildings on the Lower East Side highlights how contingent, complex, and uneven this process really is.

It turns out that this was a particularly bad time for the city to become responsible for more and more residential buildings, often dilapidated and full of tenants. In the early to mid-1970s, facing recession, high labor costs, and a shrinking urban economy, New York City relied increasingly on billions of dollars of borrowed private capital to make ends meet. When banks stopped wanting to lend money to the struggling city, bankruptcy seemed inevitable. The federal government declined to help. Only when the city agreed to deep cuts in social services and the wages of municipal employees would bankers agree to loan money again. In the aftermath of this extended fiscal crisis, an intensive period of neoliberalization, privatization, and austerity led to the defunding of programs that aimed to preserve and fill city-owned buildings. Before the fiscal crisis, New York City's government had invested substantial resources into social welfare, including programs to keep tenants in city-owned housing. The banks that bailed the city out insisted on a shift in priorities as a condition of their help: the city would now focus on making money, in particular by attracting wealthy residents and businesses. New York City now aimed to profit from its stock of real estate. Buildings with low-income tenants in them were neglected or emptied, and vacant buildings were kept vacant, warehoused until they could be sold at a profit. During the 1980s, New York City owned thousands of vacant and occupied apartment buildings, and struggled to manage them.

By the time David Boyle, Rolando Politi, and Marisa DeDominicis claimed 539 East Thirteenth Street in April 1984, abandonment had already peaked, and reinvestment had begun. In a case study of the temporal and spatial flows of capital on the Lower East Side, Neil Smith mapped the "gentrification frontier" block by block from 1974 to 1986. He used tax arrears as a proxy for disinvestment, based on the idea that property owners who thought their buildings were valuable would not go so far into arrears as to risk foreclosure. By 1979–80, that block of East Thirteenth Street had already tipped from disinvestment to sustained reinvestment (1996, 205).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022639980X
• ISBN 13: 9780226399805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344