Tomorrow the squatted apartments in Zuilen will be evicted by Mitros, with help of the police. The judge decided not to wait for the higher appeal, but just allow the eviction.
Perhaps you’ve read in the newspaper that the squatted apartments at the Boelesteinlaan will soon be evicted. These places were squatted about a year ago to highlight the fact that Mitros is not doing their job even according to their own statutes and to protest the lack of affordable housing in Utrecht.
In 2010 there was a fire in one of the apartments. Instead of cleaning the little bit of soot from the hallway Mitros evicted the remaining houses and shortly afterwards cut off the basic services to prevent anyone from living in the building.
Mitros has been planning for a few years to tear down this neighborhood in order to build expensive houses aimed at rich people. They have been slowly pushing out all the regular renters for years, a practice that they do all around Utrecht. So it seems this fire was conveniently used to quickly empty a few apartments.
This was all a few years ago. In the the meantime Mitros still doesn’t have the money to demolish and put their new investments. So they are slowly replacing all the regular renters with temporary renters. These temporary renters pay about 3 times as much as the regular renters and often have particularly precious renting conditions. During this process, communities of families who knew each other for years from living together have been broken apart and displaced (usually in the direction of Overvecht) and replaced by transient groups of students whose presence only ever helped accelerate the whole process.
For some time Mitros has had the policy of tearing down social housing in order to build yuppie flats on the same ground. This process is reflective of what is going on in almost all major cities in europe and around the world. Gentrification is a form of urban social cleansing which leads the excluded in society further into precariousness through measures such as eviction, rent increases, increasing prices of immediate amenities and police harassment. All for the sake of “development”.
This is not what the job of a social housing corporation is. With the police to enforce their orders and harassment they will continue to destroy our communities unless we fight back.
The people who stand up against these outrageous policies are met with a great deal of repression. Aided by the law and the police, Mitros and other so called social housing companies succeed in kicking out people and harass them.
Tomorrow morning Mitros will come to evict the places to leave them empty. They are expected at around 9 o`clock in the morning. Updates will be posted on indymedia.nl
You play a role in this. be critical, think, don’t let them fool you with their stories, fight back!
Published on https://www.indymedia.nl/node/20844
More background on Mitros, the owner: http://nl.squat.net/tag/mitros/
Eviction (16/01/2014):
