Amsterdam: New Policy. No Eviction for Emptiness…

By: fawda - May 16th, 2020  Filed under: News

As a squatter in Amsterdam, looking back on the past year is painful. 2019 dealt heavy blows to a movement that didn’t seem capable of much more than taking the beating. The city has lost its largest squats and despite numerous squatting actions, hardly any new buildings have survived the end of the year. What’s more, politicians tried to introduce a law at national level to further criminalise squatters while the media reported time and time again how afflicted property owners are being deceived repeatedly by squatters. To top it all off, the mayor concludes the year with a report on a new policy designed to implement a more rigorous approach to squatting.
There’s not much left to say beyond 2019 having been a rather grim year, making it difficult to paint a hopeful picture for squatting in Amsterdam in 2020.

We look back on a year in which we, above all, lost a lot. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wassenaar: Huize Ivicke, Restoration Through Expropriation

By: fawda - May 13th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

Instead of unconditionally gifting half a million euros of public money to Van de Putte’s property portfolio, Ivicke must be expropriated before it can be restored. Only then is its future secure.

The province of South-Holland pledged to pay 500,000 euros for Huize Ivicke’s restoration if the municipality of Wassenaar is unable to recover the costs from the owner, Ronnie van de Putte.

This amounts to yet another handout of public money to a parasitic financial firm.

The move comes after the municipality of Wassenaar placed an administrative order on van de Putte last November which supposedly compels him to complete Ivicke’s restoration by July, 2020. Van de Putte contested this order in court, but lost.

In the event that van de Putte does not comply with the administrative order, the municipality of Wassenaar said they will arrange for Ivicke’s restoration and send him the bill. A spokesperson for the municipality of Wassenaar described this scenario as “unlikely,” but past experience tells us otherwise. Ask Amsterdam, Sluis, Noordwijk, or Leiden. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , ,

Wassenaar: Huize Ivicke, One Night With The VVD

By: fawda - April 15th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

Late last year, VVD Wassenaar organized a ‘political cafe’ on the topic of Ivicke and squatting. The event, with little sense of irony, was called ‘Kraken of Actie?’ In three words, VVD Wassenaar disregarded one and a half years of direct action to reverse the decline of a national monument, whilst presenting their party, who sat idly by until it was squatted, as the saviours of Ivicke. Can’t deny their skills as politicians.

Two of the three invited speakers were VVD politicians. Strangely enough, we were not the third invitee. The first speaker, Daniel Koerhuis, has energetically taken on the role of the latest squatter-basher in parliament for the VVD as its housing spokesperson. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , ,

San Francisco: On rent strike against gentrification and the pandemic

By: fawda - March 20th, 2020  Filed under: Interviews, News

An Interview with Residents of Station 40 in San Francisco

In the Mission District of San Francisco, Station 40 has served the Bay Area community as an anti-authoritarian collective living and organizing space for nearly two decades. Five years ago, their landlord attempted to evict them, only to be forced to back down by a powerful coordinated solidarity campaign. Now, Station 40 has taken the initiative to respond to the crisis currently playing out across the world, unilaterally declaring a rent strike in response to the economic precarity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We interviewed residents of Station 40 about the history of their project and the context and objective of their bold refusal.

What is Station 40?

Station 40 is a 17-year-old collective living space that has seen hundreds of residents and thousands of guests and many iterations over the years. This space has hosted numerous and diverse events, housed countless people, served food to the masses, beat the odds on everything from infestations to evictions. We’ve been a hub for organizing Mutual Aid workshops, healing pop-ups, memorials for fallen anarchists, revels, book releases, report-backs from comrades all over the world, prisoner support projects, reading groups, benefits for more projects than we can count. Food Not Bombs cooked here weekly for the better part of 15 years. Communication infrastructure like Indymedia and Signal have their roots here. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Rubí (Catalonia): Rally against the risk of eviction from El Mirlo community garden

By: fawda - February 14th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

Call out from El Mirlo community garden.

Saturday 15 February 2020, 12:00, rally in front of Rubí train station.

If the speculator persists, El Mirlo resists!

May 2016, we occupied the land on 44 General Prim Street, opposite the Ateneu Anarquista la Hidra, owned at that time by Arrels CT Finsol, a BBVA real estate company, in order to build a community garden among all of them. Since then we have been giving life to this space, making use of an abandoned land. El Mirlo (the Blackbird) and its plants have not stopped growing with the effort of all of us, day after day and in each of the open days to the neighbors that are organized every 15 days. We cultivate vegetables, medicinal plants, tubers and we do it all together to learn together and thus share knowledge. The garden is also a meeting place for people and groups, a corner protected from the asphyxiating pollution and asphalt of this city. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Madrid: La Emboscada under eviction threat

By: fawda - December 20th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

Friday December 20th
Hello comrades,
We write this communiqué from La Emboscada (Tetuán, Madrid) to inform you that last December 17th a judge ordered our precautionary eviction based on a complaint made by one of the owners of our Anarchist Occupied Space La Emboscada.
According to this report, the eviction can be very close, in less than 20 days. Taking into account this information, we decided to fight with all our capacities to prevent this eviction. So we called for a demonstration in the evening on the day of the eviction, at 8pm, and we are counting on your support. The meeting place will not be published until the last moment, so we encourage you to be attentive. We decided not to remain silent while we see dozens and dozens of eviction processes both in housing and social centers.
We decided not to give up or negotiate with those people who want to defend their private property above all, because we know that private property only seeks the individual benefit of some and we know that the State defends and supports these old class enemies already known.
We know that this case is not an isolated case (we have all the previous facts occurred this last year) but it responds to a normal capitalist functioning and structure. We know that the owner is not the devil who escapes the norm or the common sense accepted by most citizens. So we have decided to approach it as one more conflict to be faced and with all the will and mutual support that is given among all those who understand and are in solidarity with this fight against Capital, laws and State. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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]

Tags: , , , ,

Amsterdam: Oops we did again! Amstel 45 squatted.

By: fawda - October 1st, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

Sunday, 22-09-19 we successfully squatted the building at Amstel 45. The owner of this building is the biggest real-estate owner of Amsterdam and an speculator. There have been buildings owned by Veldhuijzen squatted before, Amstelkade 20 (2016), Admiraal de Ruijterweg 76 (2008). Johannes Cornelis Martinus Veldhuijzen is the owner of 512 properties in Amsterdam, he has more buildings on his name than Prince Bernhard van Oranje Nassau! (see for details the Parool article mentioned below). We know the building has been empty for 2 years and currently there is a building stop, which means the owner is prohibited to work on the building any further and he also doesn’t have any plans for the building at this moment.
We are against vacancy, leaving buildings empty and left to rot, and we squat because of vacancy! During the first week of occupation, we didn’t have any contact with the owner. Wednesday the 26 of September, we received the court papers for a fast civil procedure. His story had a lot of inconsistency and no concrete plans and because of this and the new squatting law that is coming, we decided it’s a good time to fight back! We went to court on the 1st of October and now we are waiting for the verdict, the 15th of October. The owner himself did not show up in court and he still has shown no willingness to communicate with us in any way. Will keep you guys updated!
[Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , ,

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]

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Barcelona: We reoccupied Ca La Trava

By: fawda - July 27th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

We have returned to Ca La Trava, now an empty plot, and we are not planning to leave. This space, until now closed, will again be open to the neighborhood, and we will defend it as we have defended our houses. We want it to be again a trench from which to resist the onslaught of the speculators and give war to all those who are destroying our neighborhood. If in Ca La Trava they make luxury flats we all lose, and we can’t allow that.

These are times of empty phrases, of euphemisms, of symbolisms without content and of politicians contradicting each new declaration. For this reason, we want to make it clear that when we say “Ca La Trava will never be luxury flats” we say it as seriously as possible. The struggle of Ca La Trava is not a lost struggle, and resquatting is not an improvised decision or the fruit of sentimentalism. Our goal is to win and we are convinced that we will. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Wassenaar: Living in a Haunted Palace

By: fawda - May 20th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

King of Slums

Early in July 2018, the rapidly decaying historical manor house and the surrounding wooded park Ívicke at Rust en Vreugdlaan 2 in Wassenaar were squatted. Built as a little paradise — degraded to a real estate speculator’s plaything. His name is Ronnie van de Putte: a man with an eye-catching reputation in the world of real estate, infamous for speculating with prime locations and deliberately letting cultural heritage rot away for decades. In the seventies and eighties he acquired the nickname the ‘King of Slums’ and ‘Van de Beerputte’ (‘beerput’ is Dutch for ‘cesspool’). Van de Putte made a fortune buying real estate and reselling it for profit, but he never built or developed anything. For decades, Bever Holding (the real estate fund held by Ronnie and his wife Ria) has left a trail of slums and urban voids throughout the Netherlands and Belgium. Among Van de Putte’s most noteworthy achievements are the total deterioration of a former monastery in Zeeland (abandoned for thirty years) and inviting the collapse of an old horse stable in Noordwijk, creating quite a stir in March 2018, after the place burnt for the third time and the owner still refused to clean up the mess. Also his “Void of Palace” (where the Palace Hotel was located) and the Vuurtorenplein are an ongoing subject of conflict between Van de Putte and the municipality of Noordwijk. In Leiden, a little further south, Ronnie played the same game with the ‘Void of Van de Putte’, right in front of the train station. In 2005, during the kick-off of the nationwide Woonstrijd! Action Tour (‘Woonstrijd’ means ‘Fight for Housing’), the void and the neighbouring office building were squatted and turned into Vrijplaats Multipleks († 2015). Due to clerical errors, the municipality failed to expropriate the building from Van de Putte, which, in 2010, resulted in councilman Van Woensel (VVD: the liberal party) acquiescing to the ‘King of Slums’ and rewarding him handsomely for twenty years of deceiving the municipality: to the tune of 17,9 million euros! [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , ,

Berlin: Squatted Bizim Bakkal store violently evacuated without eviction title

By: fawda - April 8th, 2019  Filed under: Communique, News

Today (April 6th 2019), after the Mietenwahnsinn (rent madness) demonstration, the empty Bizim Bakkal shop was squatted, which had been empty for 4 years. Berlin police evacuated without a valid eviction title, without contact to the owner and using massive force against activists, journalists and parliamentary observers.

Last year, we occupied several houses, apartments and shops, all of which were evicted by the Senate and the Berlin police except one apartment in Großbeerenstraße. We see ourselves as part of a movement that is defending itself against Berlin increasingly developing into a city for the rich. A city in which social participation and place of residence depend on income and in which every square centimeter is used. The city is losing its open spaces, and Berlin’s neighborhoods are increasingly shaped by tourism, consumption and property speculation. Despite many promises regarding housing policy, the Senate is only watching or even actively helping in this process of displacement.

Today, 40,000 people took to the streets in a demonstration against rent madness and displacement. How have the demands, which were also supported by parts of the Berlin Senate, been put into practice and how have we begun to get our neighbourhood back? Many demonstrators joined this project on the spot in Wrangelstraße. [Read More]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,