Proposal To Alleviate The Homeless: City Governments Should Seize
Abandoned Homes.
by
Darin
City governments should
seize foreclosure property from large capitalist banks and house the homeless
with them. Since city governments don't do this, it is clear that they are
simply a larger tool of the capitalist / corporate machinery, and so many could
argue such governments should not exist also. It is even more clear that since
city governments do not reach out in such a fashion to help end human
suffering, that they really do not give a shit at all about the epidemic
problem that homelessness, joblessness, and thereby the helplessness it creates.
Following a model of urban logistics from Jane Jacob's The Life and Death of
Great American Cities[1],
I have come up with a proposal that someone like Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland
would probably dismiss in an instant. “I don't believe the City of Oakland
is capable of making such a profound change in civic justice at this time,”
I can almost hear her say. Or California's Governor Jerry Brown [even when he
was Mayor of Oakland,] or Obama. At any event the proposal is likely too simple
for the current governing bodies to consider. I’m sure my theory needs some
work. Please feel free to write and give me some advice on this, the first
section is my theory, and the second section incorporates personal interviews.
To explain more
comprehensively: Maybe Anarchists aren’t looking forward to government
intervention, that’s my point actually, my theory is that it’s just a matter of
time and that we need to establish a sold grass roots community methodological
approach to housing “attainment,” and get into a good position before the
government takes it over and tries to disrupt the process. By doing so we
secure a fundamental right to housing and housing security that cannot be taken
away from us no matter how the fuck they strong arm banks into compliance to
help alleviate the housing crisis, which the government isn’t really taken to
serious issue of and which I need to elaborate on. The caveat of legal
foreclosure seizures in light of economic inequality is that the government is
going to want to have their greedy hands in the process somehow. Governments
are broke! They don’t have any money, and most banks haven’t paid their dues in
regards to the recent economic disaster, they will be held accountable, and we
need to get into that game before they do.
Make banks with
unscrupulous records [that is to say all of the banks,] forfeit their
seizures as tax revenue write offs for cities as a donation to help end urban
blight. Someday a ruling will come out against such seizures, why wait for
that? These companies need to be given the cold shoulder by any means
necessary, I really don't care if the government insists on seizing their
assets for the greater benefit of all people for their unscrupulous crimes
against humanity, which are too many to print and we all know what they are. Shut
‘em down! Banks take your $100 and then lend out $1000 based on no equity what
so ever. Someone should put them out of business, what the hell, Iceland more
or less did, why can't we? Bolivia shut out the World Bank, and Chiapas was
technically freed... This country should reallocate its priorities. We need to
start a campaign and petition immediately, someone should. Install / employ
[actual civil employment, something that most politicians aren't interested in,
just something they say they have interest in so that they can get
elected, problem is, most social workers, and anarchist are interested neither
we can sadly assume, most people are too busy with basic survival,] social
service people to house and facilitate people for the sake of a communal
house-hold.
People already squatting
the home? They can become facilitators to the communal “flop-house,” they can
run the consensus meetings, they can create guidelines for decision making. At
any rate the domicile could become a legal non-profit. The home tries to help facilitate people to the best of their
abilities. The communal house-hold decides what fits, what doesn't and
non-social service residents need to oblige themselves to house rules and
conduct. Those house members and guests that are not working or looking for
work, would be spending the time on the residence for the purpose of
restoration and upkeep [renovation, gardening, urban farming,] or volunteering
[Food Not Bombs, Spiral Gardens[2]
comes to mind.]
I lived in a squat in
the East Bay for six months [6mo,] and I recently left a squat in said region
after a few weeks. In 6mo you were welcome for three days, and if you intended
to stay longer you needed a sponsor who was a house member. House members might
have upwards of three people who they sponsored. In the 6mo squat people rolled
out their sleeping pads and bags and slept like sardines on the living room
floor. That residence would have maybe twenty to sixty people floating in and
out of there at any given time. If such a house-hold existed every twenty
blocks, what a difference! Consensus shouldn’t be something I need to explain
to an anarchist, regardless to whether it is based on personalized house
politics, community communal housing or something more like Occupy. Neither is
low income housing. People understand necessity.
People always complain
about homeless people, although few are willing to do anything about it. Low
income housing existed in Jane Jacobs' day [the bowery[3],]
although 20th century gentrification pretty much eliminated all of
it. We can't even get public toilets every twenty blocks, to speak nothing of a
place to sleep with computer access, bathrooms with showers, electricity, laundry,
and phone usage. Downtown Los Angeles,
like many American cities once housed the down and out. PEOPLE once had a
chance to possibly enrich themselves just based on the means of their
environment. Rich real estate developers created the new downtown Los Angeles
and other places like San Francisco’s South of Market Area. Or rather began the
physical process of destroying social services, and created a genocide based on
economic division. Places that once offered hope to low income people, places
that were gentrified to bring you skyscrapers, buildings with concrete and
glass walls, privatized, although public for those who can afford it, and
exclusive to those that are not given the opportunity to contribute.
Watch the movies Citizen Kane, Chinatown, They Live! or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, read author
Mike Davis, or Rebecca Solnit, find out what happened for yourself to these
places. Learn about it and find out why my theory on public housing is just an inevitable
eventual fact.
You know how it goes,
you know how it went, the death of Fordism, and whatever securities that unions
might have had went with it, industry moved overseas, the industrial live/work
spaces became rare and unaffordable due to gentrification. Urbanized utopia
became a privatized Bobo[4] paradise for the bourgeois
in the late 20th Century.
Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
cites the need for mixed primary uses one of the main conditions for city
diversity. A Great or healthy city would be a diverse one. Mixed usage means
zoning diversity so that many types of different people co-inhabit space,
buildings, neighborhoods, districts. Diversity creates change and education,
and function by way of it myriad of uses, its facilitation of multi- facetation
is a need and a function within itself that gentrification and overbearing
regulation ignores, overlooks, misinterprets, mis-characterizes, and
discriminates against. So much diversity going on in one place creates
diversity so that diversity must propagate diversity to survive. Like a
diversity of tactics for example. Gentrification, strict zoning control, this
is the urban blight that destroys opportunity, creativity, the advancement of
the mind, the regulation and control of the privatized secular. Jacobs explains
one building she lived in that had a dance studio, an attorney’s office, a
manufacturer of goods, an importer, a branch of the public library, and so many
other tenants which varied wildly. Fun place right? Insurance won’t cover it
this century, and a whole world, an entire myriad of distinction, of diversity
remains an unknown concept to many. Believe me, if you don’t know about her,
she fought it tooth and claw.
The caveat of legal
foreclosure seizures in light of economic inequality is that the government is
going to want to have their greedy hands in the process somehow. You can’t just
have a legal flophouse, FDR is long gone and so are basic humanistic
tendencies, especially in regard to government involvement. You’ve got to have
a computer operator, bean counter somewhere in the process in order to verify
tax revenue or some such bullshit. The last issue of Slingshot had a nice view
of the Anarchist Proudhon, and how deregulation of capitalist revenue could
possibly exist, but nobody in history ever looked twice at the concept. If you
put your foot in the door and find ways to deny capitalism, even for a little
while, that’s a big step forward, especially right now, right now that’s a
revolutionary step forward. Big brother is watching, etc. Do it now.
Seems like a crazy
fucking idea right? Prostitution during major soccer matches in Europe were
such a nuisance that in many places temporary cabins are established upon the
outer periphery of such events for I suppose modesty's sake, if such a
correlation is possible. In the city of Caracas, Venezuela I read recently that
the city’s tallest structure went unfinished in the 1990s due to economic
conditions. Now The Tower of David, as
it is called is basically a large squat for the disenfranchised and apparently
many people in the city believe it to be the source of all crime in Caracas. Ex-cons
and homeless took the building in an aggressive protest campaign and have been living
there ever since. Although the “security squad,” individuals seem to appear
mafia-like it is more like a communal living situation, with meetings, board
members and decisions that are met by way of a consensus based model. What
black marketeering might be available there is purely circumstantial.[5] The building has several
bodegas, at least two beauty salons, and at least one child care service. Since
Hugo Chavez made education socialized in that country, the crime rate
apparently had gone down at The Tower
since everyone agreed that kids need to go to school. Human beings can just
agree on shit, without government in many cases. Weird right?
That's just the thing in
America though, when is too much homelessness and helplessness too much? The
food stamp laws have changed in the last twenty years in order to prevent
really fucking angry hungry people everywhere, but that obviously isn't enough.
We need more than that to be human. What if I just want to chill with friends
and listen to music? Sorry can't, no way to do that, you are homeless, can't
have any friends, you are a homeless, you can't actually conduct yourself like
a human being, sorry-you are a homeless. You are homeless because you don't
have a home. Because you are a homeless, that's why you don't qualify as a
human being. We have all of these yuppies everywhere, and we facilitate them,
but not you, because you are not human, you are a homeless.
Geez, thanks, go get fucked you classist piece
of shit!
There is actually more
to my proposal. These houses would have links on the internet, private links
for the workers there, and for house members also. This plan is vaguely based
on my knowledge of the Berkeley Digger Collective[6] from the 1980s. So these
houses can contact other similar houses in other states, and possibly other countries
also. Have homeless people who want to travel, expedite them! Allow them to at
least feel like people, for fuck sakes, everything in this world is so
backwards! I sometimes feel like I know all of the answers to the world's
problems, but capitalism, greed, and militarism always get in the proper way of
things.
Maybe some houses
incorporate trade/shares, and others have more capitalistic approaches. Maybe
some of them have cafes, or some kind of store, maybe they have a studio and
produce things that are sold. Maybe they collect books and sell or distribute
them. Maybe they are carpenters or furniture builders. Another house might have
a recording studio, and yet another might have an art studio. Maybe one would
have a digital darkroom, while a different one would have a chemical darkroom.
One might have a farm. One might operate a restaurant. One might help feed the
homeless. One such residency might be a staging ground for political protests.
We have heard of this before.
Some houses would be
different. You would have the men house, the women house, the recovering
alcoholic house, the narcotic's recovery house, the house for travelers with
animals, the big house with the big farm, okay, the farmhouse. The
student house. Etc., okay the Etc House. I suppose you would need a
crazy house for people to have fun, and also a crazy house for mentally
disabled people who are upwardly mobile. Fun is important, and I know too many
mentally disabled people that really should have something like that. You would
look on the internet, or the social worker person or house member would, and
okay; “You are a punk and under 30, I have just the thing for you, let me
print you out directions, do you need bus or train fare? Wait, what's your
name, do you have id? I should call them first and tell them you are coming.”
Boom-there-it-is-that punk is going to the crazy house, simple as that. You
know that person is going to have fun, and that there will probably be good
music involved. It won’t matter if that punk is homeless, that person will get
hooked up regardless.
It’s something I really
needed when I was in my teens and twenties, and that's not exactly how things
worked out. There was The Gilman Street Project in Berkeley, so okay,
not too bad for me, I had some fun. Unfortunately it will come back to haunt me
if I should ever have children, because any dumb idea that I have will likely
actually be used by the government just as soon as an easier solution should be
considered; so I will predict that this proposal of mine would be common
practice in about fifteen to twenty years or so. Sad isn't it? Such a fucking
waste. Those motherfuckers, how can they perpetuate this bullshit? Squat now,
squat tomorrow, squat often-if you can or must. One more thing to remember:
Property is theft!
Governments with
homeless problems, that is to say, everywhere in the world there is a problem
with economic inequality and facilitation should be set into motion. Government
regulated bank foreclosure seizure for the sake of community at large probably
should be a UN mandate, although it currently is merely an isocratic people’s
achievement. At one point there may have been an idea that ‘democracy,’ somehow
equated to freedom. Some sort of myth that capitalism created I suppose. The
following is the diatribe as I present to various urban denizens who might
identify somehow to my theory on ‘institutional widespread privatized communal
living.’ Or whatever it is.
I was time traveling
again: in 20 years most incorporated squats and government bank foreclosure
seizures (flop houses, hostels) live to work programs are privately networked
by the community at large, although some are sponsored, privately funded, there
are non-profits and independents (real squatters who wish to house fellow
community members and wayward travelers.) Following doctrine from Jane Jacob’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities,
one such residency will exist every twenty blocks. So will parks. So will
gardens/farms. There will be public restrooms every five blocks. FIVE DAMMIT!
Tell me what you think
of this. It sucks that homeless and poverty alleviation seems to literally be
(remember I was time traveling,) the last thing the government will do. A day
late and a dollar short, government is worthless right? There has to be a right
and wrong way for a community to support this idea of community support for the
low-income and still allow for every poverty stricken demographic to feel
fairly represented and accounted for.
I’m asking a wide range
of people in the Bay Area sub-cultural, and social service community for their
ideas on how to make something like this work despite what I believe is
government’s inevitable up-coming intervention.
“Whatever you destroy
we’ll create it again,” Officer, by
Operation Ivy.[7]
Send me a rant or rave
on the subject matter please.
[1]
Random House, 1961.
[2]
Spiralgardens.org/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobos_in_Paradise
[5] Letter From Caracas; SLUMLORD: What Has Hugo
Chávez wrought in Venezuela? By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, January 28, 2013.
[6] Based
on personal interviews with Sennet Williams.
[7]
From Maximum Rock’n’Roll compilation album, Turn
it around! 1987.
