Housing

If you had strolled one Saturday afternoon through the Park Plaza neighborhood in Fridley, Minn., you might have thought you were at just another block party. The residents were milling around a picnic buffet on folding tables on the street in front of their houses and the American flag. Kids were tossing beanbags and shouting. Neighbors were delivering Jell-O and marshmallow salad, and a pot of pork, cilantro and beans.

But this was not an ordinary picnic. Residents were celebrating the fifth anniversary of a major achievement that could inspire similar communities across the country: The day they began to take more control of their lives.

Special to Infoshop News
October 21, 2016

By Jacob Harper
VICE
July 21, 2016

One of the best subplots of HBO's Silicon Valley this season was exploring how broke people manage to find housing in one of America's most expensive cities. The answer, as it turns out, is squatting: In one episode, an Airbnb guest declines to move out of an expensive condo; later, a tenant simply decides to stop paying rent, announcing that he can stay there for one year before being forcibly evicted.

While those plots are obviously fictional, there are plenty of broke Americans who are struggling to pay their rent every month. Which raises the question: How long, and under what circumstances, can someone live on a property, rent-free, without penalty of the law?

By Two Toronto Members
Linchpin
June 2013

I. Defining Gentrification

No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success—but they appear again immediately somewhere else, and often in the immediate neighbourhood.
- Freidrich Engels, The Housing Question

by Joe Conlon
Worker's Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Notes From the Black Cat
January 13, 2015

If there is one thing that has marked the libertarian tradition, at least in the classical sense, it has been the focus on transformative organizing. This may simply appear as rhetoric to some people, and in many cases it is. The phraseology is often employed simply to celebrate tactics that are cartoonish or illogical, while at the same time allowing people to decry more traditional tactics as “too reformist.” This loses the fundamental nature of the term and its roots in direct action. As part of the anarchist dictionary, direct action can act as a type of dogma for many people in movements. Its use is for its own sake, as if this is the foundation of transformation both for the individuals and the community. This misses the context for how to approach tactics and what will make them truly transformative.