Amsterdam: No eviction for hotels! The squatting collective ‘De Mobiele Eenheid’ stays!

By: fawda - November 21st, 2018  Filed under: Communique, News

Building squatted
The squat collective De Mobiele Eenheid has squatted the Gedempte Hamerkanaal 86 / Spijkerkade 2 building a few weeks ago and has started a non-commercial social centre with a program of activities almost every day. After only a few weeks that the collective released the building from the control of real estate violence, an end to this freedom was threatening: The owner, Uri Ben Yakir, stepped to court because he intends to turn the building into a hotel.

The judge ruled yesterday, November the 20th, that the squat collective Mobiele Eenheid can stay until February 1, 2019. The collective demands action from politicians and considers to appeal the decision in court and oppose the eviction.

Overcrowded with hotels
Amsterdam is full of hotels and overcrowded with tourists. There is little to show of the so-called Hotel stop that announced the previous city council. The owner of the squatted building in the Gedempte Hamerkanaal 86 / Spijkerkade 2, a diamond merchant, also knows that real diamonds nowadays have two legs, enter through Schiphol and pull roll-up luggage. If it is up to De Mobiele Eenheid, no hotel in the city will be added. As long as politics does not succeed, squatting is necessary. [Read More]

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Amsterdam: 15 december, demonstration against the eviction of Amsterdam!

By: fawda - November 7th, 2018  Filed under: Communique, News

15 december 2018, 15:00, Daniel Meyerplein, Amsterdam

We are angry about the sale of the city: tourism, Airbnb, gentrification, sale of the social housing stock, segregation of neighborhoods and neighborhoods, the hunt on social centers and non-profit organizations, small businesses get into trouble because of extreme rents.  The city is becoming unaffordable. Young people and students can’t find an affordable place anywhere. Amsterdammers no longer know where their children should live. Teacher shortage because there is no affordable housing for new teachers, nurses, anymore. Tenants’ rights are being eroded. More and more temporary rental contracts, good housing disappearing from the social stock, waiting lists are endless. Properties are bought up to be used as Airbnb hotels. As the city becomes more commercial, free spaces disappear to make way for monoculture. All of Amsterdam has an interest in the preservation of the ADM, as the largest international sanctuary. 150 residents and countless small businesses and initiatives, unique events and festivals that cannot take place anywhere else in Amsterdam have to make way for a nonsensical and unrealistic business plan. But that doesn’t matter because once vacated, the land and port will increase in value enormously and that’s what it’s all about. Precisely to prevent speculation, the city council decided that only a shipyard may be built on the site, but now the city suddenly does not have a hard time. [Read More]

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Amsterdam: De Mobiele Eenheid goes to court!

By: fawda - November 5th, 2018  Filed under: Communique, News

Three weeks ago, the collective De Mobiele Eenheid squatted the building Gedempt Hamerkanaal 86, Spijkerkade 2 in Amsterdam Noord. To counteract the commercialisation, mass-tourism and precarious housing market, we have created a social centre offering a weekly program. Soon after the building’s occupation in opposition to an all-encompassing property-based violence, the end is near. Following dangerous threats, the owner of the building is summoning the collective to court, based on his supposed plan to turn the building into a hotel.

Amsterdam contains a disproportionate number of hotels and is completely over-crowded. The hotel stop decreed by the previous city government, is hardly noticeable. But the owner in question, a diamond merchant and property speculator, knows that real diamonds nowadays have two legs, arrive in Schiphol and pull wheelie bags.

His presented plans are not only problematic, but also highly questionable. In 2006, the building was squatted for the first time and already then, the plan was to build a hotel. Besides an environmental permit in 2013, the owner has undertaken little to no action hinting at reconstruction of the building. Overall, the greatest part of his property has been standing empty for many years. [Read More]

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Madrid-Barcelona: Estate agents attacked in solidarity with the CSOA La Gatonera and the CSO Ka La Trava

By: fawda - November 2nd, 2018  Filed under: Communique, News

Thursday September 27, the windows of estate agency Tecnocasa in Vallekas were shattered. The agency was also covered in paint. This action aims to encourage the comrades of the CSOA La Gatonera (Carabanchel-Madrid) and Ka La Trava (Gràcia-Barcelona), as well as all the people who struggle in defence of squats as a revolutionary tool.
Neighbourhoods are being transformed by capitalist speculation, gentrification being a tightening of screws in a cyclical process that affects all the cities of the world. Real estate agencies and other capitalist entities such as banks and speculators are responsible. Let’s spread the attack against them and build bridges based on solidarity and attack.
Refusing to negotiate with the State, the town hall or private property and resisting the scoundrels and the police must have an echo of solidarity in the form of seeking and spreading the struggle. This is only the beginning and we call for the reproduction of the attack, overcoming any path of mediation and negotiation with power. We do not negotiate with the State and capital. [Read More]

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Wassenaar: Huize Ivicke squatted

By: fawda - July 5th, 2018  Filed under: Communique, News

Wassenaar, july 5th 2018 – This week, the rapidly decaying mansion Huize Ivicke, at Rust en Vreugdlaan 2, was squatted. Built like a little palace – stripped by a real estate speculator.

His name is Ronnie van de Putte: a man with a remarkable reputation in the real estate world, notorious for speculating with A-locations and deliberately letting monuments rot away. Bever Holding, the real estate fund in which Ronnie van de Putte owns the majority of the shares, owns the mansion and lets it rot for years. It has therefore been given the appearance of a haunted house, which it is to some extent as a ‘letterbox’ for a range of Ronnie affiliates.

The sad fate of Huize Ivicke is a perfect example of speculation. Because the owner renounced his social responsibility for this special monument and the government seems incapable of changing this (1), we as a group of people looking for a house, squatted the mansion. With the help of friends and family we want to do some work around and on the house in the coming weeks and start a creative living-group here. By living in Huize Ivicke and taking the necessary care of it, we hope to save the monument from further decay. [Read More]

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From Shanghai to San Fran, the rent is too damn high

By: fawda - October 28th, 2015  Filed under: essay

Fueled by years of record-low interest rates, a new housing crisis is rearing its head from London to L.A. This time, however, it will not go uncontested.

Capitalism is a strange beast. Though incredibly resilient in the face of systemic crises and remarkably adaptive to ever-changing conditions, it never truly overcomes its structural contradictions. As the Marxist geographer David Harvey often points out, it merely displaces them in space and time.

The global financial crisis of 2008-’09 has been no exception in this regard. In fact, the very response to that calamity has already laid the foundations for the next big crisis. And just like its immediate predecessor, it looks like this one will be centered, at least in part, on a massive speculative housing bubble. [Read More]

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Resisting the next wave of real estate speculation in Spain

By: fawda - October 22nd, 2015  Filed under: essay, video

Stop_BlackstoneA new speculative bubble may be taking shape as global investment firms buy devalued real estate in Spain. Will they beat a new path of dispossession?

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Spain was flying high. After extensive economic liberalization and adoption of the euro in the late 1990s, all indicators pointed up. Spain boasted the highest use of cement in the European Union, fifth worldwide, as close to a million houses were built in 2006 alone — more than France, Germany and Italy combined. Many were convinced that prosperity was here to stay.

But the boom was built on an asset bubble, where skyrocketing housing prices and unprecedented amounts of credit for developers and homeowners — and thus vast indebtedness — created the perfect storm. While more than six million new homes were built and house prices increased by over 200 percent from 1996 to 2007, in the years since then Spain has seen millions of vacant properties accumulate, housing production at a standstill, price declines of over 65 percent from their peak, and hundreds of thousands of home repossessions. [Read More]

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Netherlands: Camelot is using people in need of housing as ‘real estate pawns’ and as ‘out-sourced dwellers’ that only serve to facilitate speculation

By: fawda - March 12th, 2014  Filed under: News
Camelot_antisquatted_castle

Accusation of Camelot Europe by Bond Precaire Woonvormen

Camelot Europe is an international vacant property management company, that started in the Netherlands. Their business is vacant property management services to provide real estate clients with a ‘cost effective, high quality and flexible solution’ to protect vacant properties against vandalism and such. Camelot provides these services in the UK, Ireland, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium and is now attending Mipim 2014.

Its ‘services’ to the real estate sector are in fact a way to maximise profit from vacant properties by exploiting people in need of a house. Camelot was one of the first Ductch ‘antisquat’ companies that came up with the idea of having people in need of housing live in empty buildings as ‘property protectors’ on temporary flex-contracts and without any tenants rights. These dwellers can be kicked out of their house on a two weeks notice, are deprived of privacy as Camelot will randomly inspect their premises to see if they ‘behave properly’, and are forced to agree to a set of conditions that constrain their freedom of behaviour and mobility. [Read More]

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Amsterdam Metropolitan Area has no place on Mipim

By: fawda - March 12th, 2014  Filed under: News

Accusal of Amsterdam Metropolitan Area by speculation research collective SPOK

The Mipim is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. As all previous years, a lot of Dutch companies and local governments will be present, the latter also paying € 1600,- for an entrance fee probably paid for from our taxes. One of the local Dutch authorities present for the Mipim festivities, that really should have stayed at home to work on solving the serious housing shortages in its area, is the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area.

Despite the continuing Dutch policies promoting home-ownership, in Amsterdam alone 270.000 people are searching for an affordable house to rent. They cannot afford or are not interested in buying a house. Nor can they rent on the liberalised (expensive) rental housing market in Amsterdam where prices have become extremely high, as one of the results of the home-ownership promotion policies. [Read More]

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