The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
Local movement histories are invariably embedded within broader cycles of capitalist accumulation and housing inequality, not to mention the different forms of resistance they produced (public occupations, rent strikes, tenant unions). It is with this longer history in mind that the book begins and ends in New York. Along the way, it stops in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, Bologna, Milan, Rome, Turin and Vancouver. At the heart of the book is an account of squatting as the political other to ‘creative destruction’, such that we continue to find in the lives, spaces and practices of squatters an alternative vision of the city that grows ever more necessary and urgent in the face of capitalist urbanisation.
This is a book that does not, in the end, seek to posit a blithe romanticism about squatting, nor does it mean to sidestep the sheer precarity and insecurity that many have historically faced in seeking adequate forms of housing and shelter. The book recognises the kind of stealth or deprivation-based squatting most often carried out by or on behalf of homeless people and other desperate would-be squatters.37 It also acknowledges the ‘dark side’ of squatting; its fraught relationship to the logics of urban renewal and regeneration not to mention the many disagreements, failures and losses that often punctuated and shaped the experience of squatting. Squatted spaces were sites of liberation and possibility but equally sources of intense conflict and struggle.
It was Colin Ward who, in a small and elegant conspectus, described the history of squatting as a ‘hidden history’.38 The stories gathered together in what follows are an attempt to bring this history into sharper focus. The examples that are drawn here point to the different ways in which new, provisional, often ephemeral and sometimes durable urban worlds are composed in settings of growing inequity. To do so, as the radical history of squatting documented in these pages show, is to reveal the conditions – the counter-archive of practices, sentiments and stories – that point to the potential reorganisation of our cities along more collective, socially just and ecologically sustainable lines. It is these living geographies that hold the promise of the autonomous city.
From Shantytown to ‘Operation Move- In’: Squatter Sovereignty in New York
It’s a fine free country, this is, where honest folks can’t build a little house to cover their heads on an old rock like this without having the very ground blowed away from under them.
‘A Visit to Shantytown’1
Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don’t you ’member I told you about it
Way last week?
Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It’s a wonder you don’t fall down.
Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that’s Ten Bucks more’n I’ll pay you
Till you fix this house up new.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain’t gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
Langston Hughes, ‘Ballad of the Landlord’2
In 1970, a forty-two-minute black and white documentary depicting the struggles of a squatters’ rights movement in New York’s Upper West Side Renewal Area was released by Newsreel, an activist documentary film organisation that had emerged as part of the American New Left in the late 1960s. The film Rompiendo puertas (Break and Entry) portrays the efforts of over 150 predominantly Puerto Rican families to secure safe and affordable housing against a backdrop of intense inequality, pervasive discrimination and persistent dislocation.
Formed in New York in December 1967 by a group of underground filmmakers, Newsreel was a ‘radical news service’ that had been initially established to chronicle the various identities, alliances and strategies that characterised the New Left in the United States. It drew particular inspiration, in this respect, from activists rooted in a range of anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. Rompiendo puertas was one of a series of films it produced between 1969 and 1972 that focused on New York’s communities of colour.3
Taking its name from the police shorthand for house burglary, Rompiendo puertas details the actions adopted by a group of Latino families who occupied and repaired a series of abandoned buildings on the Upper West Side in the spring and summer of 1970. The families were all part of Operation Move-In, a local anti-poverty and squatters’ rights group. The group had been installing low-income families into sound vacant buildings that had been slated for demolition by the city as part of its urban renewal programme. They used crowbars to pry off the tin seals covering doors and windows while helping families to carry their belongings and furniture.4
The film combines documentary footage of clashes between the squatters and the police with voice-over analysis exploring the causes of New York’s housing shortage. Many of the original organisers of Operation Move-In were old leftists and mavericks of Lyndon Johnson’s signature War on Poverty campaign, as well as a group of radical young activists from the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican organisation.5 They were led by William Price, a former UN correspondent, journalist and Communist who was fired in 1955 from the New York Daily News in the wake of his appearance before the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Price became a housing activist on New York’s West Side with loose connections to the Metropolitan Council on Housing (hereafter Met Council), one of the city’s most important tenants’ rights organisations. As Rompiendo puertas, however, shows, this was ultimately a squatters’ rights movement that was largely organised and executed by working-class Puerto Rican women. It was their voices and actions that are the main subject of the film.
The film documents the challenges that its predominantly Latino protagonists faced in securing a home in a city where many residents lived in inadequate or unsafe housing while others faced ‘removal’ to the outer boroughs as part of the city’s urban redevelopment plans. As one activist in the film noted, ‘wherever the city sets up urban renewal programs, it removes working people and poor people and removes them from their homes and replaces them with rich people and big business’. In one scene, we watch a group of families moving their possessions out of an apartment in sacks and papers bags while a voice-over proclaims that ‘hundreds of working people like us are being evicted and forced into the streets’. ‘Housing,’ another activist concludes, ‘is a necessity. Why should we pay for a necessity?’6
As Rompiendo puertas shows, it was the death of a neighbourhood teen that served as the catalyst for the emergence of Operation Move-In and the seizure of empty vacant buildings across the Upper West Side. The teen had died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a first-floor apartment on West 106th Street. The film follows the funeral march held for the teen as well as the occupation that took place in its immediate aftermath. A day later, another nine buildings around Columbus Avenue and the West 80s were squatted by dozens of families who moved in during the night.7
The film places particular emphasis on the actions undertaken by the squatters while foregrounding the role played by middle-aged and elderly Puerto Rican women as leaders of the ‘movement’. It depicts the collective formed to organise and undertake building repairs. The squatters created a system to pool their money and labour as part of the effort to renovate apartments. The film also draws attention to the wider