On December 6, in more than two dozen cities across the US, Occupy Our Homes, “an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, took on the housing crisis by re-occupying foreclosed homes, disrupting bank auctions and blocking evictions,” as CNN described it. Representatives of Occupy Our Homes said they were “embarking on a ‘national day of action’ to protest the mistreatment of homeowners by big banks, who they say made billions of dollars off of the housing bubble by offering predatory loans and indulging in practices that took advantage of consumers.” For a report on the opening of a foreclosed home in Brooklyn, used to house a family in need, see this Guardian article, and also see this article by Amy Dean for Truthout.

Also in December, for CNN, Sonia K. Katyal and Eduardo M. Peñalver law professors and the authors of Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership, published by Yale University Press in 2010, wrote about the historical precedents for a shift “from public spaces toward private property” — in this case, foreclosed homes, and stated:

This shift may end up leaving Occupy even stronger than it was before the ejections began. It answers critics who have accused Occupy of lacking a political program and will help the movement build stronger ties with working-class Americans. To understand why, it helps to view Occupy in the context of earlier social movements that employed similar tactics.

A straight line runs from the 1930s sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, to the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins to the occupation of Alcatraz by Native American activists in 1969 to Occupy Wall Street. Occupations employ physical possession to communicate intense dissent, exhibited by a willingness to break the law and to suffer the — occasionally violent — consequences.

Effective occupations, however, have managed to do more than convey intensity. They have crafted visible signs of the reality protesters hope to create, thereby spurring legal change. The sit-down strikes arguably laid the groundwork for the enforcement of federal labor laws; the lunch counter sit-ins led to the enactment of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Alcatraz occupation paved the way for a milestone reversal in Federal Indian policy, leading President Nixon to support tribal self-determination.

In the UK there has been less of a focus on property, although it is clearly of significance, with the Tory-led coalition government close to criminalising squatting in residential properties, even though this is both unnecessary and cruel. This is because there are robust civil procedures in place to allow squatters to be evicted from residential properties, and squatting only exists because: a) people cannot afford the disproportionately high rents that have arisen in an unregulated greedy market, and b) there are around a million empty properties in the UK (of which around 350,000 are long-term empty properties), and at least 500,000 homeless people — in accommodation provided by councils, in hostels, squats and on the streets. For further information, see this Guardian article, and Channel 4′s campaign, “The Great British Property Scandal,” which over 100,000 people — myself included — have joined to express their support for “stop[ping] this senseless waste.” You can join here — it will only take a minute.

After I joined, the campaign let me know that in the London Borough of Lewisham, where I live, there are an estimated 1,322 empty homes, according to Freedom of Information requests filed in 2011, and 16,060 people on the housing waiting list. Via the website’s “Report an Empty” page, I also learned that 121 empty homes in Lewisham have been reported since the campaign began at the end of last year.

I do encourage those who are concerned with homelessness to join Channel 4′s campaign, and also to find out what is happening to the most vulnerable homeless people — rough sleepers — via the website of The Pavement, the free magazine for homeless people in London and Scotland, which a very good friend of mine, Val Stevenson, is involved with.

However, following up on the theme of occupying empty property as part of the Occupy movement, I’d like to discuss the recent activities of People Before Profit, a Socialist, activist political party which began in Lewisham, and which promotes a policy of resisting cuts by the Tory-led government and providing jobs in the local area.

In February, People Before Profit discovered that Lewisham Council was planning to sell five houses — and a non-residential property — in an auction, despite the fact that there are, as Channel 4 noted, 16,060 people on the housing waiting list in Lewisham, and as PBP noted, around 1,000 families in temporary accommodation, a further 350 in hostels, and around 50 families in bed & breakfast accommodation, paid for by Lewisham’s council tax payers.

In response, activists staged what the Evening Standard described as “an audacious occupation” of the houses to halt Lewisham Council’s “‘knock-down’ sale of its properties.” The Standard added, “Teenagers and pensioners are among dozens of locals who swooped on the houses, mostly traditional Victorian terrace homes, during an open viewing day at the weekend. At the end of the viewing, the protesters refused to leave.”

A video that was made following the initial occupations is below:

With the three- and four-bedroom houses submitted with a reserve price of as little as £130,000, the auctioneers, Savills, cannot have done their cause much good when they told the Standard that “with improvements they could fetch as much as £400,000 on the open market.”

The Standard also noted that the council claimed the homes were “run down and too expensive to refurbish,” but a spokesperson for PBP explained that they needed “relatively little spent on them and the sale would only exacerbate the area’s housing crisis,” and added, “The council claim it would cost them £40,000 per house. But even if you spend that it’s still cheaper than using taxpayers’ money to put people into private sector housing. This is only making our housing crisis worse.”

A second video, dealing with the refurbishment of one of the houses, is below:

Over the next week, following the occupations, as the council withdrew the properties from the auction, activists worked on making the properties habitable, tidying them up, getting the electricity and gas working, and getting hot water running, and a petition was launched via Change.org, entitled, “Lewisham Council: Stop Selling Our Homes,” which stated:

We call upon Lewisham Council to ensure that ALL the council’s housing is made available to rent by the 16,500 people on the housing waiting list. Where refurbishment is necessary local people should be employed and training opportunities created for unemployed people to learn skills.

At the end of February, and the start of March, PBP — having had no luck in getting the council to talk to them — called for a family in need to move into one of their refurbished properties. As the website explained, “We heard from several families who wanted to move into the house in Angus Street and the council failed to nominate anyone from among the families in temporary accommodation, so we have agreed with a family of two parents and three young children that they can move into the house. Of course we have explained that it is possible that they will be evicted if the council chooses to apply for a court order for repossession.”

The News Shopper reported the story here, and a video about the Angus Street property is below:

After these initial successes, People Before Profit then received a tip-off that London & Quadrant Housing Association was selling off two flats at auction, and, at viewing time, visited the flats, in Hazeldon Road, Crofton Park, to investigate. As they explained:

[We] found two purpose built flats in need of redecoration but in perfectly good structural condition. The auctioneers’ catalogue showed a guide price of £275,000 to £300,000 for the whole building, not giving first time buyers the option of buying just one of the flats. We occupied the flats on Tuesday 27th March, shortly after the last viewing had been held and have cleaned the flats thoroughly, changed the locks and had the steel security doors removed. We have written to L & Q asking them to make the flats available to families from Lewisham’s housing waiting list and are awaiting a response. We have had several enquiries and the first family is moving in this weekend.”

Soon after, the Greenwich People Before Profit group expanded the campaign to SE12, occupying “a huge mansion” in Eltham Road, which is owned by Greenwich Council and “had been boarded up for about two years.” Greenwich PBP explained, “According to a previous resident, his family was evicted when the previous owner couldn’t afford to renew the lease on the building and it became the property of the freeholder — the Mayor and Burgesses of the London Borough of Greenwich,” who have since boarded up and abandoned the property, which was previously converted into seven flats.”

The News Shopper, reporting the story of the occupation, stated that People Before Profit had announced that it intended and to clear the house and reconnect the heating and electricity supplies, although a Greenwich Council spokesman “said legal action would be taken.” Disregarding PBP’s call for council housing to be provided to local people in need. he claimed, “A decision has been taken to dispose of this property as it is in need of extensive repairs. The money raised from the sale will be put towards the provision of affordable housing and essential fire safety works in other properties which could now be delayed as a result of the actions of this group.”

In the South London Press, a front-page story announced, “Squatting drive ‘could work in other boroughs,’” and the report explained that the People Before Profit activists “want to widen their campaign across South London,” and are “demanding councils hand empty homes to people in need to combat the council’s housing shortage crisis.” Speaking of the Eltham Road property, campaigner John Hamilton told the newspaper, “Why Greenwich hasn’t been using this building to help re-home people on its housing list is a mystery,” adding, “We have also had interest from campaigners in Southwark who want to do the same thing with unused Southwark council properties, so the campaign could stretch across South London.”

Personally, I think that would be appropriate, as direct action tends to sharpen politicians’ minds to problems that ought to be staring them in the face, but as this story rumbles on I’d also like to mention another interesting initiative undertaken by People Before Profit — the occupation of the non-residential building that was also withdrawn for the auction, a decrepit garage on Harts Lane in New Cross. Occupied on March 10, it was cleaned up by volunteers and renamed Harts Lane Community Studios, and, on Saturday April 21, was opened up to the public with an art exhibition and live bands playing on the roof.

Local artists Boudicca Collins and Katie Surridge curated a show entitled “Heaven Baby,” which they described as “featuring sculpture, installation, drawing and painting from locally active artists,” and “exploit[ing] the idea that there is a paradise to be found in the abandoned, neglected and disused spaces in our everyday mundane surroundings.” Other artists included Andrew Clarke, Mark Anthony Brown and Tisna Westerhof, and the musicians on the roof included Black Dove and Alex & Richard (who I missed), and teen rockers Sunbeam, whose last number, “Rosie,” I caught the end of. Not venturing up onto the rickety roof for Beatles “Let It Be”-style glory were the Strawberry Thieves Choir, who sang their Socialist songs at street level.

With a free food kitchen and a sunny day, this was a great event, and one which, without this community takeover of the garage, would not have happened. What particularly struck me was what a lovely friendly vibe it was, and how little those who are elected to our councils and our government do to provide us with the opportunities to entertain ourselves and others in public spaces — and to be frank, how few opportunities exist for events that are’t corporate in nature. It felt very much like a new twist on the kind of events that were widespread in the 1970s and the 1980s, and even in the pre-Blair 1990s, but that almost became extinct after New Labour presided over the biggest housing bubble in British history, which made almost every single space in London into something that someone owned, or was to be flogged off as an investment opportunity.

I’m pleased to note that People Before Profit liked the event so much that they stated, “The event was such as success that we’d like to offer the venue to any group supportive of People Before Profit’s aims who can organise an event and publicise it. NO CHARGE — IT’S THE PEOPLE’S VENUE.”

On May Day, I can’t think of anything more appropriate, and I wish Barbara Raymond, People Before Profit’s candidate for the Greater London Assembly, the best of luck in Thursday’s elections, when, as I also hope, the Tories receive a massive blow to their electoral standing with the ousting of Boris Johnson as Mayor.

With photos at http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2012/05/01/a-future-for-the-occupy-movement-occupy-our-homes-in-the-us-and-people-before-profit-in-south-london/

We have decided to squat knowing that it is surpassing the small path of legal protest. Nevertheless two final reasons lead us to that conclusion:

First: The gap between what is legal and what is regarded as justified by us is too big.
Even though RWE is, by destroying the forest in order to dig out the brown coal for burning it, also destroying the regional basis of living, as well as endangering peoples‘ health in the area, not speaking of the worldclimate, they are legally allowed to do so.
However we cannot find any „real“ justification for RWEs doing.
By squatting this forest we‘re not acting legal according to the current laws.
But the squat is justified by the aim of trying to stop RWEs wood and world destruction course.

Second: We believe that the gap between what is legal and what is just will always exist, due to the simple reason that a neutral point of view cannot exist.
Just and legal remain different because everybody has a different definition in mind of what is just and what is not.
Therefore establishing a free and lively discussion about what is just and reasonable, is a must; rather than having the definition derivated from ancient laws which, for the most, are only protecting the interests of the ruling elites.
By squatting we‘re trying to generate such a process of vivid negotiating, furthermore thematizing the topic of how climate and enviromental destruction shall be dealt with.
Loudly we‘re shouting „No!“ at anybody whom’s solution it is to go on just like used to be, AND who are -just like RWE- even speeding up in the old fashioned way by building new coal-fired power-stations.

If we are to be evicted by police force then we are facing the answer of a repressive state which is tring to supress any horizontal and vivid process of self-organization.
That is the ideolgy of the state, as well as of the capitalist cooperations, who are far too inflexible, not mentioning their wrong maxim of action, to give reasonable answers to the problems of our time.
They will eventually perish just like the dinosaurs who were also unable to cope with the changing conditions.
In fact the solution is not to modify the existing system of exploitation and opression into something more flexible, but to overcome that system!

Against coal energy – Here and Everywhere

This squat is opposing coal energy in general as ist is the most CO2 intensive form of gaining energy. The „Rheinish brown-coal-region“ is Europe’s climate killer no. 1. But we also stand in solidarity with communities in other parts of the world e.g. Columbia where the extraction coincedences with brutal human rigth violations.
Worldwide the conflicts arising alongside coal extraction and burning are getting worse. Especially in Southeast Asia where in the last few years resisting activists have been murdered.
We want to create awareness of these struggles to help the people fighting.
Therefore we‘ll include more informations about the on-goings in these areas in our further declarations, letting those acivists speak.
Furthermore we declare our solidarity towards the radical anti-coal-campaign like the coal-action-network in the U.K., rising-tide-groups in Australia and North-America, or the „wij stoppen steenkool“ campaign in the Netherlands. With their direct form of action, these groups gave an us inspiration, and we hope that these actions will inspire other groups world-wide as well.

The woods for all!

Squatting the forest shall be an act of re-empowerment by the locals. The „Occupiying Force“ RWE shall loose their „right“ of determining the future of the region, unscruplously destroying the local and global fundaments of live.
People should decide of what will happen to the forest in a cooperative manner instead. This space should be open to all on the basis of equal treatment of each other.
Therefore it is necessary that the people question the role-models and ways of acting they reproduce and how they perform acts of dominance or support them. We think that it is important that we all act together to fight, prevent and intervene disriminating acts of any kind.

Space for preparing the change

Squatting the Hambach Forest is an action directly confronting the injustice.
But we want to go on further: It‘ll also be a place for people of different backgrounds to meet up and network. People that used to have only the fight against brown coal in common shall come together exchanging ideas and experiences of the ongoing surpression.
Through this exchange a network and organisation shall emerge – for the furthermore resistance, but also beyond that.
We need spaces where people are able to plan how a climate-just future should and can look like.
Firstly because the current politics totally failed and keep on failing in answering the pressing matter of climate change!
Secondly because organizing ourselves from below is much more fun anyway!
Maybe this squat might become such a place.
The offshoot of a new world inmidst the heart of fossil-nuclear capitalism.

Why „Declarations of the Hambach jungle?

The name of this text came up following the tradition of the Zapatistas in Mexico and their „Declarations of the lacandon jungle“. The Zapatistas achieved their aim of living in dignity in the borders of the poorest Mexican state through a strong direct and determind push back of the repressive police and para-military of Mexico.
We are not that bold of claiming our action to be comparable to the things happening in Mexico but nevertheless our aim is the same. Fighting for a self- determinated life in dignity inmidst a system of destruction and opression.
We believe that succesfull fights as in Chaipas all over the world are possible and necessary.
We want to make the first steps in this direction.

That form of a declaration was also chosen because we are tired of corrupting and shortening the contents only to make them fitting into a standard press format, whereafter they‘re still totally corrupted by the press.
Instead we‘re optimistic that this and the following declarations will reach -hopefully many – people directly.

We call that forest Hambach jungle knowing that this term is not correct. But the Hambach Jungle is, in its structure, one of the oldest forests in Western Europe. Rare habitats are found here. Unlike RWE, wanting to destroy the forest in total, we plead in favour of another solution, an experiment wherby that very natural forest will, in a few decades, turn into jungle-like wood.
Then, we would leave the Hambach Jungle deliberately!

Today saw our dear server Squat!Net unreachable for several hours due to a court order directed at http://grotebroek.nl. The public prosecutor didn’t take kindly to a picture (mirror) of a poster announcing the Hang The Queen Party at this legalised squat in Nijmegen (NL). Considering this an insult to the monarchy and thus a felony offense, they ordered the datacenter colocating our server, Leaseweb, to take down the site.

This resulted in our main IP address being blocked, effectively taking offline hundreds of websites, email accounts and mailing lists. After discussing the issue with Leaseweb, who were bound by the court order to keep the site unavailable, we decided together with the comrades from Grote Broek to temporarily disable http://grotebroek.nl in order to get the block lifted and all the other services back online.

We would like to stress that the server has not been seized and none of the data, except for http://grotebroek.nl, has been affected by these events.

We are not only outraged by this blatant censorship, whose only aim appears to be keeping the highest of upperclass comfortable and far away from dissenting voices, but also by the amount of collateral damage the public prosecutor is willing to cause in doing so. Tomorrow our lawyers will try to do what they can to get everything back online, tonight is our night to show solidarity.

Yours truly,
squat.net team

p.s.
hang the queen!

See also : https://www.indymedia.nl/node/4024

Why the rush to criminalise squatting? Well homelessness and mortgage repossessions are on the up. Public housing has been reduced to a parody, with ‘affordable’ rents set at 80% of the market rate, short term social lets imminent and parents threatened with losing their council homes if their children are convicted of ‘anti-social’ behaviour. Squatting is again starting to look like a fair alternative for homeless families, as well as single people who can’t get on the housing ‘ladder’. I have no doubt that the new law is a pre-emptive strike to try to make sure we don’t take things into our own hands when things start to get really tough. I’ve been very lucky. My landlord is a decent man, happy for me to do my own repairs to keep the rent reasonable, and to sublet so I can still afford to live here since I lost my regular job and need to rely on housing benefit. Though I don’t live in a squat any more I haven’t forgotton what it’s like, and want to tell some stories that show the positive side of squatting for a change. I don’t want to make out squatters are all heros. There are some negative aspects of the culture around squatting. One is that it is some kind of crusading lifestyle outside the normal bounds of society. The right to rave doesn’t appeal to me, if it stops me from getting enough sleep, and I don’t like having to clear up after other people’s parties or having their dogs given more respect than my child. The politics of squatting goes deeper than a fashion statement.

I left home aged 16, when staying with my mum became intolerable. I found a room living with some fellow musicians, who had been squatting a big house in Shepherd’s Bush and converted it into a housing co-op rather than being evicted. That was in the days when housing co-ops were able to take over ‘short-life’ places that the council couldn’t afford to renovate. After a couple of years I fell pregnant. I don’t regret this – though it messed up my immediate plans for university, in those days you could get an education at any time of life without getting into debt, and the birth of my daughter is the very best thing that ever happened to me. Her dad is a fine man, but our relationship was strained by youth and poverty. My housing co-op room, though ok for a single person, was not really the ideal place for an expectant mum. Here I must mention that it is a myth that teenage mothers automatically get housed by the council. We were told we wouldn’t be considered as a homeless family until our child was born unless we got married. My mum, though she wasn’t living in our old flat in Greenwich at the time, said we couldn’t stay there either while having an ‘immoral’ relationship. We got married. Then the council said they wouldn’t rehouse us as we could stay at my mum’s place. We broke up after two years, lived under the same roof for another year, and then things just got too strained. I stayed with friends, sleeping on floors in spare rooms, for about six months, and all the council would offer me was bed and breakfast miles away in Paddington. My ex-husband and I were determined to share parenting despite having split up so this was not any kind of an option.
Squatting my old house was one of the best things I ever did. For over a year we managed with no mains electricity. Calor gas, candles and batteries were enough, along with an open fire. I learned to be self-reliant – fixing the roof and windows, rewiring to professional standards, plumbing and plastering. And I had a lot of help from my friends. There were a few squatters and a lot of ex-squatters in the community. Quite a few had got council tenancies after living in 1930′s council blocks and keeping them habitable. There were ways for people on the economic margins to work creatively within the system – pretty effective safety valves, keeping social unrest at bay in the 60′s and 70′s when working class radicalism was quite a threat to the status quo. People could still remember the squatting movement after the war – a practical as well as principled stand to stop the stagnation of empty government properties existing side by side with hundreds of thousands of homeless families.

After nine and a half years I was starting to hope I would be able to stay there forever. My house was the last remaining of a Georgian terrace, left standing through the Deptford ‘slum clearance’ to be the caretakers house for a Victorian school building. My grandma’s brothers went to this school I later discovered – I still have a book inherited from my mum that was her uncle’s fourth form prize. I was working at a local school and a music project – the famous Lewisham Academy of Music that itself had evolved from the occupation of the nearby empty Coroner’s Court and mortuary. The Academy eventually folded under financial pressure after signing an expensive coucil lease to get Lottery funding for building development. This would not have happened without intervention from careerists who thought it politic to jump through the funding hoops rather than stick with a peppercorn rent and a mere license. The housing co-op movement decayed under similar pressures. This is one of the reasons why I feel unable to trust well-meaning liberals, who follow the path into state co-option rather than stick to independent methods of organising.

I had read the legal documents surrounding the disbanding of the Inner London Education Authority – though my building was an unregistered property it had been managed by the ILEA, and I was reassured that it looked clear that such premises would devolve to the London Residuary Body, a transitional arrangement for ex GLC and ILEA assets, and remain in limbo rather than go to Lewisham Council. Lewisham were already getting heavily against squatting, despite the local history of the family squatting movement, and sadly a lot of ex-squatters, now with comfortable tenancies, didn’t seem to mind. (A fair few of them took advantage of the ‘right to buy’ – my contempt for these people is almost palpable. If anyone is stealing from the public treasury it is not squatters, it is the promoters and profiteers of this dishonest scheme.) Then there was a ‘statutory instrument’ – written by officials without parliamentary scrutiny – that changed the terms of the ILEA property handover and I found myself at the mercy of Lewisham after all. There were no short-life co-ops willing or able to take my house on. It took the council’s lawyers years to do the digging to establish title, evict me through the courts and have their ownership recognised by the Land Registry. I had two choices – try and share a council flat with an ex-partner or move away. By this time it was not a good proposition to squat again with a child to think of, and fortunately I had the resources to rent somewhere, though I had to move a few miles away from the commuter belt.

My next experience of squatting was at ‘Use Your Loaf’ – the old Hurst’s bakery at the North end of Deptford High Street. This was a grade II listed building owned by a speculator waiting for it to become a dangerous structure so he could knock it down and develop the site along with three neighbouring shops. I wasn’t one of the people who opened it up, but soon got involved with running it as a social centre with a cafe, radical resource base and educational classes and workshops. It survived like this for two and a half years, and got much good feeling from the community as well as local press coverage. Two and a half years is a pretty good run these days. And now it’s being done up properly rather than demolished or left to rot.

So when Crispin Blunt’s amendment was being rushed through I didn’t hesitate to raise my voice, not only against the criminalisation of squatting, but also against the press angle to present us as nasty intruders preying on nice families and stealing their homes. I was happy to demonstrate outside the Evening Standard’s building in Kensington and we got our point across. They published a piece on squatting that was much more balanced a few days later. Then I was pretty knackered after traipsing to Crispin Blunt’s address in Fulham only to find he had moved away after separating from his wife and family. I sat down on my way home to talk about the good old days with old friends and new. I happened to sit down on the only piece of grass near my bus stop on Westminster Bridge that is not fenced off from the public – Tot Hill mound by the statue opposite the House of Lords. I had some good conversation, some food and drink and a cigarette, and wondered what the future would hold for us. Then, without warning, I was grabbed from behind by two officers of the Territorial Support Group, and bundled off to the nick.”

- Ashleigh Marsh, charged with unauthorised demonstration under the Serious and Organised Crime and Policing Act 2004, now repealed.

For Press enquiries, please email to info [a] squashcampaign [dot] org

http://indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/04/495371.html

You can see the latest news and photos in the portuguese Indymedia.

The former primary school building in the Fontinha neighborhood in Porto has been abandoned for 5 years before a group of people decided to squat it and open for the local community to create a self managed social center. People were evicted from the building after a month of functioning and continued the activities on the streets of the neighborhood. After negotiations with the city hall, the project was allowed to go back to the building and a commodity contract was promised by the municipality. The contract was never sent, but the municipality threat that the Es.col.a. will be evicted again in March.

The municipality sent police forces this morning, 19 of April, few days after Es.col.a. was feasting its first anniversary. There where about 30 people in the terrain, making pacific resistance. Police came in large numbers, around 200 officers of municipality police and intervention police. They did not present any legal documentation validating their action, most of the police officers refused to identify themselves and were not wearing identity cards on their uniforms. After an hour long operation, all the people were taken away from the Es.col.a’s terrain. After that the police forces together with municipality workers started to “clean” the building, destroying all the equipment that was inside (including library, computer spaces, gym, bicycle workshop and kitchen) and to brick the entrances and windows.

Two people were detained after being injured by the police officers during a street protest in the neighborhood. At least three more people got beaten up by the police during sitting aiming to block the police cars way out of Fontinha. After a popular assembly, a decision was made to make a protest in front of the city hall building.

We need international support and we need to show that nowhere in the world police can act illegally against people, without any consequents of their actions.
One eviction, ten more occupations!

More info here.

Although The People’s Café was offered an extension on the eviction date until February, the offer was declined on the pretence that there was an insufficient number of managerial staff that could run the centre. The two court representatives for The People’s Café were initially involved in the Occupy Edinburgh movement and took onboard the running of the café in order to provide a premises for the three day National Occupy Conference on 16th December. Many of those who initially showed interest in building a social centre inside the former Forest Café wanted to distance themselves from the Occupy Movement. These activists feel betrayed by those who represented them in court and believe members of the Occupy Edinburgh movement hijacked their social centre; ‘We didn´t know about the extension in court … certain individuals from the Occupy Movement destroyed The People´s Café.’

The steel shutters, chains and padlocks sealing the windows and doors of what was The People’s Café in Edinburgh only serve to remind its residents of how little our councillors and politicians care for community space in Scotland. In this climate of political realization and social unrest, the reopening of 3 Bristo Place was perhaps an opportunity to expand on the peoples requirement for an autonomous space within the community. What this story highlights is not only the extreme conditions initiated in order to open up a space for dialogue and organization but the requirement for all social movements to forget their political agenda and remember the source of this struggle; our basic human right to gather in numbers as a means of self-empowerment and organic community strength.

People’s Cafe (archived) website: http://peoplescafe.noflag.org.uk/

Source – http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/2012/04/09/doors-closed-on-the-people%C2%B4s-cafe/

A celebration and documentation of Australians putting abandoned and disused property to good use.

What this site is about: During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries individuals, collectives and sometimes whole movements in Australia have taken over abandoned and disused property and put it to good use.Whether this has been to provide housing or to create spaces for community use the practice has gone to the heart of property relations challenging the right of governments and private companies to allow land, house and buildings to remain unused whilst others are forced to pay rent or go homeless. In challenging waste and speculation, and by raising human rights above property ones, squatters have often come into conflict with the laws, police and courts employed to maintain the status quo. They have also been misrepresented in the mainstream media and portrayed as either hopeless charity cases or selfish, dangerous deviants. Despite having the legal and economic odd stacked against them generations of squatters have turned unoccupied properties and land into homes, social centres, womens’ refuges and cultural venues learning valuable skills along the way. This website is all about documenting and celebrating the lives, cultures and places these squatters have transformed.

What this site is not about: Many Australians either associate squatting with anti-social activity (which this site will hopefully help debunk) or with the eighteenth and nineteenth century practice of British settlers and freed convicts claiming uncolonised land following the murder and forcible removal of Indigenous Australians. Despite some of these invaders losing their lives and livestock to Indigenous resistance the majority prevailed destroying and damaging Indigenous cultures and the native environment in the process. Many of these squatters subsequently used their stolen wealth to move themselves up the social pile and become a powerful economic and political force during the nineteenth century. Some founded dynasties which continue to own and dominate pastoral, mining and other Australian industries today. Despite the occasional attempt by some to employ Indigenous people or provide charity the majority of these modern day scions remain at the forefront of Indigenous dispossession opposing land rights, treaties and native title claims whilst continuing to forcibly open up Indigenous lands to exploitation. This website is not about documenting this kind of squatter.

What this website includes: Over the coming months and years we will gather together stories, posters, stickers, articles from mainstream and alternative media, video clips, radio interviews and documentaries, photos and much,much more spanning squatting history from the 1940s to the present day. In doing so we hope that the Museum Of Australian Squatting will provide insights into Australia’s squatting heritage and inspiration to those taking up the practice today. Contributions can be sent to us via ozsquat AT gmail.com

http://www.australianmuseumofsquatting.org/

A succession of failed Government policies ostensibly to address homelessness and culminating with the current failure “The Road Home”: Government programs are widely viewed with derision as opportunistic Government / NGO constructs to monetise the marginalised.

FOTO – Stanley St Squats East Sydney c 1993

Squatting has long been a norm in Sydney with all fringe city areas having hosted squatters at some time. While recent predominant squatting activity has been in the Broadway Redfern and Surry Hills areas, in the recent past there were numerous squats in Woolloomooloo Darlinghurst Surry Hills Millers Point and Pyrmont. The now 5 star Blue Hotel was until the mid nineties “The Finger Wharf squat” with many groups autonomously inhabiting various areas. The Stanley Street squats of the 90s were squatted for about eight years with the full knowledge of the consolidator engaged in buying the block for redevelopment, one Kerry Packer. Squats in other Sydney areas last for varying periods of time, from a few days to years. Both commercials and residentials are fair game to occupy.

When English law was exported here they brought all the parts which benefited the ruling classes and their gentry friends and left the parts which benefited the people in England. Squatting laws are among those which the ruling class left behind as obstructive to their aims and unnecessarily enabling the people.

Residential Squatters in Sydney and NSW have few legal protections. We mostly find buildings open. By securing buildings we find open we stop vandals damaging them or children innocent hurting themselves when playing in them. As well as providing shelter for those who need it. So you might say we provide a public service…

http://squatthelot.blogspot.com.au/

Several politicians, including Rome’s Mayor Alemanno, released statements in solidarity with the police operation, against those “dangerous criminals” that were hiding behind the occupations. A few people spent months in prison, some lost their jobs as a result of it.

Now the judges confirm that the accusations made by the Carabinieri and the right were a joke. No evidence at all has been found for any of the charges made, and therefore the case is closed. Finally, even the justice system confirms what we already knew: that the housing movements are nothing more than groups of people who decide to refuse the exploitation of higher and higher rents and mortgages; who organise in order to find concrete answers to the housing crisis; who fight for dignified housing for everyone.

“We know nobody will apologise for the mud that’s been thrown at all of us” the umbrella housing organisation declared, “but we hope that at least now the police forces, together with some journalists and politicians, will find something better to fill their time with, instead of always criminalising people who fight for their rights.”

Translated from this article here.

See below for reports from Brighton (today) and Bristol (yesterday).

Brighton today -

In response to the ban on squatting being passed in the House of Lords on Tuesday, Squatters and their supporters took a meandering march through Brighton and Hove today.

At 2pm, around a hundred squatters and supporters gathered at Victoria Square Gardens (the site of the now evicted Occupy Brighton camp) in the centre of town. A soundsystem blasted out Gabba and the squatters started to march, with nary a copper in sight.

The first target was Brighton town hall, which was briefly picketed. Squatters marched on to the seafront, chanting “Whatever they say, Squatting will stay!” The march quickly picked up a large escort of coppers as it marched along the seafront towards Hove. Police were trying to force people out of the road they were blocking, on to the pavement. One particularly agressive uniformed thug hit a squatter in the chest with his re-enforced glove for the slightly dubious crime of walking too fast. For a while things were very tense, and it seemed like things were gonna kick off, but then the coppers backed off and allowed the march to continue, albeit in a mobile kettle.

After marching along the seafront for half an hour or so, the marchers surprised the cops by cutting through a residental street to blockade Western Road, Brighton’s main shopping thoroughfare, then turned back on themselves to march along Western Road towards Churchill Square mall and the centre of town. Around halfway down, the mobile kettle that had escorted the march since the seafront suddenly dissolved, the police decamping back into their vans, which promptly drove away, leaving the march totally free and starting the hilarious chant “We don’t need no cops, all we need are squats!”

Squatters marched past Churchill Square, down North Street (another main shooping street) and then along London road and down to the level without incident, deciding it was time for a party. However, it was not to be. Around 5 minutes after the squatters arrived, the mysterious vanishing police escort returned. 9 vans of riot police, a cctv van and a FIT team turned up to crash the party, provoking a brief confrontation before squatters decamped to the beach to continue the party.

https://network23.org/snob/2012/03/31/squatters-march-in-brighton/

Bristol yesterday –

In response to the Government’s moves to make criminal squatting in residential properties people gathered in Bristol on Friday to protest against the passing of the Legal Aid Bill. Around 30 to 40 protesters meet outside Metropolis on Stokes Croft (another empty property, which if the Government has it’s ways, would be left to rot in the interests of property speculators). Comrades from The Red & Black Umbrella in Cardiff even came over to Bristol to join the protest!

At 2:30PM people set off down the street, taking the road and displaying a banner which read: “Whatever They Say, Squatting Will Stay!”

We successfully blockaded the road for the entire protest, moving down Stokes Croft, past BRI, down Park Street, through Broadmead and after a quick scuffle with security in Cabot Circus ended up in Castle Park where we ended the day in the sun. The Police paid little to no attention to the procession though we were accompanied by two PSCOs the whole time (who’s attempts to keep people from blocking the road, failed miserably).

Several people expressed their solidarity either through honking their horns or joining the demonstration. We know that this demonstration won’t be enough to reverse the criminalisation of squatting that has already been put into motion. We need to build a strong movement to combat their attempts to make illegal our way of life. We need to create strong solidarity networks, responding to evictions and helping fellow squatters out with potential court cases and fines and possible imprisonment!

One thing that is important is that we do not allow the criminalisation of squatting to be the end of the squatting movement in Bristol (or the UK)! We need to take cues from our comrades in Europe and elsewhere around the world where squatting is already a criminal offence. We need to keep squatting, keeping resisting and keep building our movement despite what the law might say.

There will be another demonstration two weeks from now, on Saturday 14th April. Assemble outside Metropolis, Stokes Croft at 1PM! Bring banners, placards, megaphones, sound systems & anger! Spread the word!

WHATEVER THEY SAY! SQUATTING WILL STAY!
FUCK THE LAW, SQUAT THE WORLD!
FIGHT THE ANTI-SQUATTING BILL!
AGAINST THE CRIMINALISATION OF HOMELESSNESS!

http://bristol.indymedia.org/article/708161?&condense_comments=false#comment55844