Despite the British government criminalising residential squatting in 2012, squatting remains a defiant protest against inadequate housing and inequality.
Potential to use squatting laws to strengthen trespassing laws.
In England, like any Western country, it is illegal to bust into someone’s house. Chances are police will take you in if they find you breaking in. But a 1977 law made it illegal to use violence to enter a residence when there are people inside resisting. Another law reinforced this protection by requiring a court order before landlords could have an occupant removed by force.
The 2012 omnibus law annuls these tenant protections by undercutting the basic concept of who is a tenant. Instead of a system where any person set up in a building were protected wholesale, the 2012 law pushes the boundaries of criminal law a bit further into tenant law.
In Nevada legislators are currently hearing testimony on issues posed by squatting. The UK 2012 Law appeared to pass without much support from police or property owners. Police in Nevada however have come out strongly in favor of the state’s proposed law. The legislative hearing on Bill 386 is informative, especially the police department’s point of view:
Malcolm Napier (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department): Persons with criminal records are abusing the law and taking over people’s homes. One only needs to do minimal research on the county’s assessor site to figure out which homes are vacant or in foreclosure and to identify the homeowners. Next, a fictitious lease is easily created to p resent to police and real estate agents, bluffing them into thinking the persons inside the home are innocent victims of a crime.
This exchange:
Chair Brower: If an officer is shown a fake lease, the landlord or the property owner is listed on the lease somewhere. If LVMPD attempts to confirm with the property owner listed on the lease that the purported lessee is the legal occupant a nd LVMPD cannot obtain confirmation, is the situation treated as criminal trespass under Nevada law?
Mr. Napier: We can cite for criminal trespass when there are clear -cut circumstances. Part of any law is proving intent. We have to prove the person is knowingly trespassing and he or she knowingly made a fictitious lease.
Chair Brower: When you cannot confirm with the owner of the property that the purported lessee is there legally, does that not show intent?
Mr. Napier: We need a statement from the property owner of proof versus making a judgment call. Without a crime victim, it is hard to make that assessment.
The last sentence makes me thing that squatting is a crime without a victim. But there are so many unique circumstances that I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging any particular crime before everyone getting a fair trial.
My concern is why no mention of conciliation or mediation? The potential for trends, individuals and even workers to cross jurisdictional boundaries is inevitable. In Seattle, for example, the Department of Corrections uses prison labor to clear unauthorized tent cities. So why spend time drawing such stark lines between civil and criminal courts? Mediation would lead towards trying to reconcile fears and find arrangements. It would require an administrative court, which could rule faster than civil or criminal courts but not tie up resources or increase the possibility of losing big, in either the tenant’s or the owner’s camps.
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Awake on Thursday morning, frustrated, I munch on a dumpster bagel at 6:30AM and wipe the sleep out of my eyes getting ready to ride as fast I could to take the light rail down to SODO.
From SODO, I pick my way south through ugly-sized trucks, direction a small green space I guessed would not be occupied. A week earlier, I had been to this site and seen no one. I’m on the scene before any of the city, county or state work crews show up. It is only 8:00AM, the work crews won’t arrive until 9:30.
An emotional night before at the ale house leaves my thinking blurry. I’m more cautious than normal. In the time I have, I explore pathways and make a brief survey of this wetland. It covers at least a few acres. On one end is a large empty basin that looks like a tide flat. Ducks and geese pick through mud there. A gulch, lined with slick mud, honors a stream draining into the Duwamish.
Did you know that in earlier days, the Duwamish was the only waterway into Lake Washington from Puget Sound? It flowed into the Green River (name sounds made up) which came out near Renton. If we hadn’t built the Montlake ship canal, this Wetland would probably be more wet than land. Highway 99 would probably still be there, towering, and the people who live under it.
A week of mostly unimpeded sun made this soggy area burst at its seams. To that point, part of its fence was in ruins, destroyed from the inside. The place is still steaming, and clumps of tiny flies buzz around.
In the undisturbed hour before me, I find five temporary shelters in this wetland that they lie both sides of the stream. One looks west over the stream, its back to highway 99. On the eastern side, two sites seem more permanent. They are complexes, hidden further back, occupied by larger, more improvised shelters. There is clearly someone sleeping in one.
Public employees show up to get to work. Teams force the people living here out. City, county and state employees generally throw everything into waiting pickup trucks. Two machines do most of the work: for the State, a back hoe and a little earth mover, for the county, two department of corrections humps in rubber boots and hard hats.
The area’s to go back to its natural state. The evicted can hold on to whatever is carryable, which is why I realize having a bicycle trailer and bike is so important.
The Wetlands will return to being a greenish blur you can see if you drive north on highway 99 and look to your left right before you cross W. Marginal Way SW.
Tee shirt. I leave my mom’s house, still hot night. A dark tide to ply. House and home two islands and an oily sea road.
At maximum speed, a bicycle flits over dangers. They register, but like blips, scrapes and bumps. A small boat above night reefs.
At night I close my eyes and count: one, two, three, four, five, six... open, correct. Again: one, two, three...
How many for you driver? Two?
My legs are coils. They are made of springs, pumping and popping. My back, the rhythm, under weight of leftovers, rice and quiche, in tune with whining wheel rubber. Hips and hands, not reins but antenna. A bike at night is a bug. Looping, swerving, darting. Naively concentrated on light and sweeps.
Fingers strumming shifters to the tune of a bass guitar. Not lightening quick, but there to set the tempo.
It’s no time to resist. Push on your toes and hover above the seat. The front wheel knows the obstacles, your feet will grab the pedals. This route knows you well. Street lights dance and trees cheer you on. With flared nostrils, smell a world standing still.
No, the pollen, the perfume, even the shit. Everyone is out. Everything tonight is a particle racing to somewhere.
You cursed when I rode by. I brushed your shoulder. I made you scared. No light? No helmet? No brakes?
My arrival literally depends on my intuition. At night, faith is a question of red lights, sharp turns and aching legs. How I want to get home matters so much more than when. Home: this new commodity, worth simply the path I take to reach it.
A bike equals one horse power. No offense to the horse. But a bike is no less animal than man is machine. I am 70% bike, but at night it reaches 90.
Clip from Dori Monson show, 4:15pm on March 2nd, with Todd Herman talking, who sounds a little fascist http://mynorthwest.com/1087/2924815/Homeless-squatters-organize-building-takeovers-in-Seattle
Danny Westneat Op-Ed, that set off all the fireworks on Tuesday night, March 1st: http://mynorthwest.com/1087/2924815/Homeless-squatters-organize-building-takeovers-in-Seattle
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Some of us dream of riding in luxury airplanes or going on exciting police ride-a-longs. Others of us have more civically-minded ambitions, like taking a spin on a street sweeper.
Seriously, confidential to WSDOT: We really fucking want to ride on a street sweeper. Please let us ride on one. Please.
Anyway, if you’re like us and you love giant machines that kick dirt and mud around and maybe (maybe?) also get things clean, have we found a contest for you.
As part of the campaign blitz surrounding the opening of the new 520 bridge, WSDOT is inviting Twitter users to name a street sweeper. Wait! It’s more fun than it sounds!
UNF. Photo: WSDOT
Here’s what WSDOT has to say:
The new floating bridge’s new street sweeper is high-tech, environmentally-friendly and, frankly, adorable. It will clean both the travel lanes and the bridge’s bicycle and pedestrian path, keeping oil and grime out of Lake Washington.
ADORABLE. But whatever shall this cute clutter clearer be named? THAT’S WHERE YOU COME IN.
Submit your best name ideas (max: 3) via Twitter between February 22 and March 2. Mention @wsdot_520 and use the hashtag #520GO when you Tweet. Names must be original and family-friendly.
According to WSDOT, “the winner will receive a test ride in the machine itself and the winning name will be permanently added to the machine. Will the winner be able to have their photo taken in the driver’s seat? But of course.”
AHHHHHHHHHHHH.
You can see all the rules here.
Now, if we’re being completely honest, we actually hope you don’t win because we really want to win. We’re hoping the winning name will come to us in a dream, so if you could find it in your hearts to please only bring your B+ game, we’d appreciate it. OR NOT I GUESS but if you do win the ride on the street sweeper (!!!!!!) can you please take some photos and tweet them at us?
Seattle declared a homelessness emergency, but there hasn’t been much sense of urgent action. City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw has a radical plan to change that — by locating disaster-relief-style stations with pods or tiny houses in every part of the city.
This post is a response to Danny Westneat’s op-ed piece, which appeared this morning in the Seattle Times (February 17th). Westneat comes out in favor of Councilmember Sally Bagshaw’s proposal to ramp up the production of tiny houses in Seattle. “Houses can be like tweets!” the piece’s title could have read, “140sq ft instead of 140 characters.” (NB: actually tiny houses measure more like 80sq ft)
Other ways tiny houses are like tweets: they obscure context. They do not easily transform into a coherent narrative; they remain tiny reproductions, tiny grabs for attention.
In Seattle, we can see pressure building to construct more and more tiny houses. In addition to Councilmember Bagshaw’s proposal, last night I attended a Community Meeting at the New Holly Community Center, where LIHI pitched skeptical South Seattle residents on a plan to allow up to 100 residents occupy a vacant lot (owned by LIHI) on MLK. Tiny houses have sprouted downtown on Dearborn, on Capitol Hill on Union, in Ballard near Market street.
Citizen reactions to the houses, like tweets, also lack depth, albeit they make no economy of emotion. At the New Holly meeting last night, spiteful anecdotes about past experiences with tent cities, with public housing, with city council plans peppered LIHI employees and Nickelodeons present (Nickelsville residents, who are expected to move into the MLK camp once completed). Other residents showed their readiness to welcome the camp, to do their part to end homelessness.
But planners and residents should focus on a different picture and a different narrative playing out. This would mean accounting for two major problems.
First: that tiny houses create mini pockets of concentrated property. Most everyone probably agrees that no one wins when public housing projects concentrate poor tenants into housing projects Why should it be different with the tiny houses? The response, which Nickelodeons spoke well about last night, is “self-governance.” Creating homeless-dense camps make it possible for the camps to self-govern. Yet self-governance does not untangle the complicated factors that lead to stigmatization and ultimately, ostracism. These latter trends seem the most likely fate for residents who, despite their personal qualities, will ultimately be tagged as tent-dwellers, not legitimate stakeholders in the city.
Second: if you could see a tiny house project from atop one of the new 20 or 40 story tower projects going up downtown, they would probably look like a lot of dog houses. Or maybe some bizarre Arizona-esque prison camp. I don’t intend this comparison to demean, but to point out that the tiny houses like the tall towers, contribute to creating two Seattles: glass, steel, well-paid and well-fed employees to dominate South Lake Union and Capitol Hill, particle-board, tent-nylon, haunted and charity-recipients “transients” populating vacant lots south of down town.
Does anyone else see a link between the rapid construction of tiny houses and the dash to slap together tall towers? So long as we pretend these two trends are separate, we treat them as independent. So long as we treat them as independent, we should admit that we are creating the miserable conditions that the homeless confront, not solving them.
A ten-year study of the aftermath of one of Clinton's signature achievements revealed some surprising results.
Bill Clinton, the stealth Republican.
It’s become a political cliché that “red” and “blue” states represent two Americas. But consider how states prioritize programs like health care and education — or how they administer their social safety nets — and the differences are very real. Federal policies help smooth out some of those differences — everyone is eligible for the same Medicare and Social Security programs when they get older — but conservatives have long campaigned to broaden the divide by turning over more and more federally administered programs to the states.
We can see how that might play out by looking to the past. In 1996, Congress “reformed” our existing welfare system in much the same way Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wants to “reform” Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs: they killed off the federal entitlement and turned the money over to the states to implement new models of welfare as they saw fit. It was a central plank in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” 20 years ago and also considered one of Bill Clinton’s signature achievements.
University of Minnesota sociologist Joe Soss spent a decade studying how those reforms shook out in the real world. With Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram, he co-wrote the book, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, explaining how race became a determining factor in how states created their own welfare programs — and how that ultimately led to a system that’s rife with racial bias.
BillMoyers.com spoke with Soss last week. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.
Joshua Holland: Slightly fewer than one in three welfare beneficiaries are African-American. But it seems clear from the rhetoric around welfare that a lot of people think of it as a program for blacks. How did that view play into the welfare reforms of the 1990s?
Joe Soss: In the 1980s and ’90s, a kind of narrative had emerged that I call the story of illegitimate takings. It held that there were white people who played by the rules, and then there were people of color — and particularly black people — who were taking from those people in an illegitimate way.
At the time, there was a lot of talk of the pathologies of the underclass. And many believed that it was really these liberal programs that were to blame for what was seen as a kind of crisis of crime and disorder and sexual irresponsibility and welfare dependence and all of these things.
Bill Clinton ran on this idea that he was going to end welfare as we know it. And he was also going to get tougher on crime. He was attempting to reassure white voters, but once the Republicans took Congress, in 1994, Clinton found that he had painted himself into a corner, because of course the Republicans were willing to go much farther in this game than he was.
After that, for a public that had already learned to think of welfare as a black program — that had internalized these Republican calls to get tough on the welfare queens and whatnot — welfare now became center stage. The public was aroused, so something had to be done.
We looked at public opinion on welfare and racial attitudes, analyzing not just the overall trends, but studying the views of actual individuals over time. And what we found was fascinating. First, not many other factors predicted who would hold those kinds of views of welfare. It was pretty broad. But the one thing that did predict a negative view of welfare was negative beliefs about African-Americans, particularly a belief in black laziness. And also stereotypes of black women as being sexually irresponsible.
Full Show: Ian Haney López on the Dog Whistle Politics of Race
And what we found was that it wasn’t just that the people who had held these negative racial views all along who responded to these kinds of dog whistles but, even more striking, we found that as politicians talked more and more about welfare and what was wrong with the program, they moved people’s racial attitudes. The people who were most likely to start seeing welfare as a big problem were actually those who shifted from not having negative views of African-Americans to steadily responding to this discourse by beginning to see race in a different way and seeing African-Americans in a much worse light.
What’s remarkable about the general association of black people with welfare and handouts in the popular culture — that stereotype — is that it’s almost a perfect inversion of American history. For much of the 20th century, and certainly in the earlier history of this country, we had all sorts of race-specific programs that channeled benefits to whites and excluded everyone else.
So until very recently, in many ways we have this long history of a white-centered welfare state. But after that time, when victories were achieved that actually allowed for some equality of access to those programs, that very equality became the basis for saying, “Oh, this is all about African-Americans and it’s just a handout to this racially targeted group.” It’s a very sad part of American history, very troubling.
Holland: One of the central provisions of welfare reform was replacing the federal welfare system established during the New Deal with a block grant program which gave the states the ability to design their own programs. You wrote that state officials implemented their policies in ways that “proved remarkably sensitive to racial differences.” Can you explain that finding?
Soss: After welfare reform passed, the federal government said [to the states], “Here are a bunch of goals we want to accomplish. We want, first and foremost, for you to put people to work, and we want to discourage childbirth, and we want to promote marriage… You’re now free to figure out how to do these things.”
What happened was pretty remarkable… What you see in this crucial period of recreating the system is that pretty much the only thing we could find that really drove one policy decision after another was the percentage of minority recipients on the welfare rolls at the time.
In other words, people had become so focused on racial issues that race really drove the patterning. They were not necessarily conscious of it; it was race-coded and below the radar for most people. But all of the states with more African-Americans on the welfare rolls chose tougher rules. And when you add those different rules up, what we found was that even though the Civil Rights Act prevents the government from creating different programs for black and white recipients, when states choose according to this pattern, it ends up that large numbers of African-Americans get concentrated in the states with the toughest rules, and large numbers of white recipients get concentrated in the states with the more lenient rules.
So state freedom to make these different choices became the mechanism for recreating a racially biased system across the states, where the toughness of the rules you confronted really depended on your racial characteristics.
Holland: According to your study, just five years after the passage of the Welfare Reform Act, 63 percent of families in the least stringent programs were white and 11 percent were black, and in the most restrictive programs — that is, the ones with the toughest penalties and the most stringent requirements for eligibility – 63 percent were black and just 29 percent were white.
Soss: Yes, and the stringency of the rules matter tremendously for outcomes. The tougher the rules — and the more frequently people are punished for breaking them — the worse the outcomes are for people after they finish the program.
In fact, in the toughest programs, people actually end up in worse shape after they get through them than they were before they got the benefits to begin with. And remember, they were in such a bad situation that they had to turn to a welfare program that’s been so stigmatized that pretty much everyone wants to avoid it.
We also found that people who go through the toughest programs learn lessons about government that lead them to retreat from participating in politics. They become less likely to make their voices heard, and less likely to participate in elections and community organizations.
Holland: About 40 percent of the African-American population live in the Deep South, where there are also very conservative state governments. Is it possible to untangle racial animus from ideology when it comes to designing these programs?
Soss: In one sense the question you’re asking is whether this is all just about how the South is different. And the answer is no. But ideology matters.
Here’s an interesting finding: In our study, we found that, not surprisingly, conservative counties and areas tended to sanction welfare clients much more often — they were much tougher on beneficiaries — than the most liberal counties. But what we found was that almost the entire difference was made up by the different treatment of black and Hispanic clients. For white clients, it actually made no difference whether you were in the most liberal or most conservative county. You’d be treated the same regardless. It was only clients of color who received different treatment in conservative and liberal counties.
Holland: One of the experiments you did was at the level of the program administrator. You used imaginary, “blind” cases to test for administrators’ attitudes towards their clients of different ethnicities.
Soss: We used identical, made-up case files. The only differences between them were that some had what are considered “black names,” and others had “white names.” So one would be like, Emily O’Brien and on another we put Lakisha Williams. We pretested them to show that most people who saw these names, right or wrongly, associated them with white or black people — or Latinos.
And we then presented actual welfare case managers with cases where it wasn’t quite clear whether the person should be sanctioned or not. Again, it was the exact same case, except we varied the name, and therefore, the race they associated with the person.
And then we also varied one other thing, which you can call a discrediting marker. So in one of the experiments, we looked at what happens if you add information that the imaginary beneficiary had been sanctioned before — maybe that would lead the case worker to think they’re a troublemaker. That should have no bearing on the current sanction decision, but it might just change their view. Or we changed the number of children they had — for half of the case managers, the person had one child; for the other half, they had four children and were pregnant.
And we found that, across all of our experiments, for the white client, adding that marker — which invoked a negative image of welfare recipients — had no effect at all. They were still judged the same way on the current matter.
The black client or the Hispanic client, when they did not have this discrediting marker, were also judged neutrally on the borderline problem we gave these managers. So there wasn’t an automatic bias. But when you added that discrediting marker, the likelihood that the person would get sanctioned went through the roof if they were a person of color. In other words, the person might not be discriminated against if there was nothing there that provided a kind of cue, but as soon as you added something that seemed to confirm the negative stereotypes about welfare recipients, it had no effect on the white client, but it made the black client seem like a person who should be sanctioned, and the rates went up.
And the thing that’s really fascinating is that this was equally true for all case managers, regardless of how they self-identified in terms of race and ethnicity. It was equally true of white case managers and case managers of color.
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First thing’s apologies for choosing a provocative title. I’m not a self-selecting radical and far less foreign in this town where United Staters outnumber the local Congolese population. Though, so what if the city’s overlords decided to create a propitious context for inflammatory titles? It’s exactly my place in this disorder that I want to work out.
I’m calling myself radical using my French vocabulary. It can certainly mean someone at one or the other extreme of an ideology. It’s also someone who simply pushes an alternative agenda in his or her surroundings. Among the 65 people I live with for example, it’s fine for us to discuss whether a more “radical” approach to housing the homeless is not needed in these days and times. On this point, my views are among the most radical: my voice goes out in support of finding more space in our house for the poorly housed to sleep, the college educated, the steady working be damned.
Does it occur to me or my housemates what radicality means when it’s a foreigner professing it? In all honesty, I don’t push a radical agenda at house meetings for the sake of joining the opposition’s ranks, for which I am often the sole representative. My views appear self-evident to me. Self-righteous perhaps, but also grounded in how a fairer redistribution of power looks to me. Regardless, I’m rather easy to dismiss. Voices from the exterior always seem to be aclamor. They’re more accustomed to tearing down walls, we say, than to currying favor with the in-crowd.
Being a foreigner does however impose on a person a particular kind of experience in a host country. There’s especially the brutality of trying to integrate fully into a certain place. Some have the privilege of joining a special community abroad, whether among hi-flying management types or a self-sustaining ethnic group. In the middling bunch though, there’s only hope to achieve the same standing as a middling Belgian. On this plane, in local bars or in daily exchanges, the way things are and the way they are done are left unsaid. In the time spent observing, dissecting gestures and reading moods like a hunter animal droppings, one always feels left behind, out of touch, always off a beat. Far from a postulate about how real Belgians are, i.e., the one’s begrudging the loss of their homeland to foreigners, I can attest that this feeling holds even among Brussels’ more radical groups. By which I mean, its squatters, environmental activists, anti-fascists, envelope pushing non-profits and (especially) its lefty professors. Among these former classes, perhaps the foreigner feels his or her foreignness even more acutely. I think the people populating these groups leave much unsaid offers the best chance of not being appropriated, of remaining true to ones beliefs, of being radical. Not to mention paranoia: hearing so often about bourgeois this, fascist that, one cannot escape feeling watched by some unseen but omnipresent judge.
What place is reserved then for the frustrated foreigner who dreams of integration but who’s constantly anxious about the place he or she occupies in a host community? Perhaps his or her place is to be the radical one? Being the radical one comes with the assurance of imposing your own rule and staking out your own place. From there, it is not difficult to choose from among any number of groups on society’s margins to harp for (or on, and who do not necessarily care whether or not you become their advocate, another blow). The next step consists of elaborating a detailed list of grievances, where in fact one’s own frustrations can easily meld with those you radically support. Like with any poison though, or drug, the sought for effect is disenchanting. Finding oneself labelled a radical means narrowing the foreigner’s already limited range of options. So one can either shut one’s mouth and hope to someday forgive, or one can slip into a blissful rage imagining the paradise you tried to create but that others thwarted.
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Cops Roughing Up and Berating Two Black Men Who Were Simply Waiting for a Ride to Work
“Six Apopka police officers are under investigation after video was posted online showing cops roughing up and berating two men who were simply waiting for a ride to work.
A video of the incident shows extremely aggressive and unnecessary actions by the officers involved, which are indicative of the increased calls for police oversight and accountability by the American public.”
source
The man who shot the video, Branden Ocasio, said it shows a female Apopka police officer questioning him and his friend, Keith Niblack, outside a closed Cricket cellphone store around 11 p.m. on Sept. 3.
Initially, the video shows the officer asking the two men to provide identification and explain why they are hanging out at the closed store so late at night. The interaction grows argumentative, several more Apopka police officers show up, and the video ends with what appears to be an officer slamming Niblack to the ground.
source
This really fucked me up. Does anyone here want to be slammed to the ground by police for just sitting next to closed cell phone shop (not really) late at night? What the actual fuck? America turns into prison, you know. You can’t sit here, you can’t walk there. Especially if you are black. What should we do if we DON’T WANT TO BE SURROUNDED BY POLICE SQUAD? Probably, just die?
This really fucked me up. Does anyone here want to be slammed to the ground by police for just sitting next to closed cell phone shop (not really) late at night? What the actual fuck? America turns into prison, you know. You can’t sit here, you can’t walk there. Especially if you are black. What should we do if we DON’T WANT TO BE SURROUNDED BY POLICE SQUAD? Probably, just die?