UK: Evictions held over, hotels for the homeless — Covid is upending housing

By: fawda - March 31st, 2020  Filed under: News

The legal situation has been changing so rapidly that even full-timers are struggling to keep up, but with the introduction of Practice Direction 51Z it looks like eviction proceedings are finally off the table for now and we have time to take stock of what is now utterly uncharted territory in British housing.

Minutes after I’d finished an article regarding the situation regarding squats and ongoing evictions in Britain the information became outdated, as emergency procedural changes were brought in by the government, in theory protecting everyone, squatters, renters, and the street homeless, from the risks of being out on the streets during this period. Let’s explore what each of these measures might realistically mean.

Up until this moment, the government had promised a three-month breather for mortgage repayments, and then – under pressure – caved and stated that tenants who fail to pay rent will be protected from eviction for the next three months. This does not mean a lot in practice, as the rent still needs to be paid, and agreements for doing so settled on. [Read More]

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London: Squatting, Evictions, and the Coronavirus

By: fawda - March 27th, 2020  Filed under: News

Some days after granting a 3-month breather for mortgage payments the government caved to pressure and stated that renters who fail to pay rent will be protected from eviction during the next 3 months. This meant very little to squatters, and as explained later, still means very little to renters.

The Pie ‘n’ Mash Autonomous Cafe was evicted the morning of that same announcement, the same day that the cafe (having closed for safety reasons some days earlier) was to become London’s first Mutual Aid Centre, to complement the anarchist-instigated and autonomously-organised Mutual Aid groups that had sprung up around the city, and now the country. The council (who without a doubt had a hand in effecting the eviction of the Pie ‘n’ Mash) announced the very next day their own initiative of a centre to assist Mutual Aid groups in distribution of needed goods, co-opting the idea to suit their own agenda and save face in the eyes of the public.

Things have not gotten better for squatters by any means in the following days. Multiple evictions have taken place on buildings that have been awaiting bailiffs for weeks, seemingly a rush by owners and bailiff companies to do business in the case that the government prevents them from doing so in the future. [Read More]

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London: Living in the cracks. How housing has fallen into crisis

By: fawda - February 26th, 2020  Filed under: News

The causes of the housing crisis are, in a nutshell, the unchecked power of landlords, the 40-year attack on social housing and stagnant wages. The consequences are people sleeping in tents and doorways and under bridges, children in A&E with constant chest infections, poverty, debt, mental distress, and endless moving.

One of the major causes of the housing crisis is the undermining and running down of social housing. Since the introduction of Right to Buy in 1980, 1.5 million council houses have been sold, 40% of which are now rented out by private landlords. Alongside Right to Buy there has been a campaign of slurs by media and politicians against people in social housing, with other people encouraged to despise or resent them for the high rent other tenants pay.

As well as Right to Buy, many councils are knocking down large estates and redeveloping the land as high-density private housing, often purchased as an investment not a home. Tenants are usually rehoused locally but there is a loss of social housing in the area which increases the length of the waiting list. On many council bidding pages now the number of flats on offer is in the single figures, while 1.1 million households are on waiting lists. [Read More]

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Berlin: Renters organize to expropriate the mega-landlords

By: fawda - November 28th, 2019  Filed under: News

Berlin’s spatial dynamics and organized working class show how to secure liveable spaces and combat the financial nature of housing: socialize them.

Over the last few decades, housing in cities around the world has undergone unprecedented financialization and artificial speculation. Investors have never been richer. The worldwide value of the current real estate market is $217 trillion, 36 times worth the value of all the gold ever mined.

Profits from the commodification of the housing market have skyrocketed in step with the enclosure of spaces and the fixing of financial value to them. Living spaces are now complex financial products that can be packaged up into investment funds and swapped by companies across the world. [Read More]

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Berlin: Expropriate Everything

By: fawda - September 1st, 2019  Filed under: essay, News

It’s an unusually warm Saturday in Berlin—if it even makes sense to refer to the weather as “unusual” anymore. I wake up early, read a bit, write some emails, change some diapers, and then head out to meet some friends at the café before the big demo. The Mietwahnsinn or “rent insanity” protest is an annual gathering of tens of thousands of people at Alexanderplatz who come together to loudly and colorfully decry the seemingly unstoppable rise of rents in the German capital. Like most big protests here, it feels like a party. Strolling down Karl-Marx-Allee, a massive boulevard built in Stalinist style for East Berlin, 40,000 human beings throb to the bass—young, old, parents, roommates, co-workers, students, tenants, and activists all drifting together in common disarray, like a roving concert, shouting about rent-sharks, high costs of living, and, most of all, expropriation. The word is on everyone’s lips, not least the city senate, the big property owners and real estate companies, the struggling tenants and just about anyone else who’s read the paper, watched the news, or walked the streets where posters, banners and graffiti calling for the expropriation of Deutsche Wohnen & Co are ubiquitous. In most cities, such radical slogans would be ignored or dismissed as the infantile fantasies of an ultra-left fringe. But not here. The demand to expropriate the largest profit-oriented property owners in Berlin—in other words, to socialize over 200,000 private apartments—is a serious proposal, one that may, in fact, take place. How did this happen? [Read More]

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Precarious housing in the Czech Republic

By: fawda - April 26th, 2017  Filed under: News

kuncovka_brno_czech_republicKuncovka, an apartment complex 10 minutes by tram from the centre of Brno, the 2nd city of the Czech Republic with a prosperous centre. A five year old girl is walking her “dog”, a broken DVD-player, on the field at the front door. The power cord serves as the leash. Inside a group of 15 sits in a 18m2 room, the largest room of the apartment. In between the meeting children play with cardboard boxes, no toy in sight. 4 chairs, 2 small tables and a mattress are all the furniture there is. Coffee and tea is made in the bathroom, there is no kitchen.

Julek is our host. He lives in 1 of the 48 apartments in the complex. He tells us the dilapidated apartments of 30m2, without kitchen, are rented out for 10500 crowns (roughly 400 euro) a month. Last winter the owner refused to turn on the heating. He wanted to make an even higher profit. He often extorts the tenants by switching off the electricity. For 750 crowns (30 euro) he puts the electricity back on for a day.

The tenants lack regular rent contracts. There are monthly contracts which are tacitly renewed by the owner, even though these are illegal according to the Czech law. If you criticize the owner, the extortion, or the atrocious state of the building, your contract won’t be renewed. When the owner has a bad mood he refuses to give a payment receipt for the rent, which causes you to lose your housing benefits. [Read More]

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Saving Midtown: San Francisco Renters on Strike

By: fawda - February 24th, 2016  Filed under: video

This is the story of the Midtown rent strike, the largest rent strike in San Francisco since 1978.
by Global Uprisings http://www.globaluprisings.org/midtown/

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Amsterdam: Kolenkit is not for sale!

By: fawda - February 5th, 2016  Filed under: Communique, News

20160205_BPW_Kolenkit_niet_te_koop_The Kolenkitbuurt’s struggle is part of a broader struggle which is the claim for right to the city for people. Since the Kolenkit’s neighborhood was decided to be turned into transformations with renew urban projects, such as the Koelkit project, we decided to organize the struggle hand in hand with inhabitants.

Indeed, Rochdale has the plan to renovate and sell 4 buildings in which people with 5 different types of temporary contracts are currently living. This Koel Kit project will force these temporary tenants to leave, and replaced by others, given that the 154 housing accomodations are gonna be more expensive, sold and privatised.
Therefore we went to Rochdale on the 4th of January in order to claim our requests:
1. Stop sell out of these rental houses
2. Make temporary homes indefinite homes
3. No evictions without replacement housing [Read More]

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