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Ours to lose : when squatters became homeowners in New York City
- Author / Creator
- Available as
- Online
- Summary
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Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict--an emblematic examp...
Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict--an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and '80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.
Details
- Creator
- Amy Starecheski
- Format
- Books
- Language
- English
- Publication
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- Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016
- Physical Details
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- 1 online resource
- data file
- ISBNs
- 9780226400006, 022640000X, 9780226399805, 022639980X, 9780226399942, 022639994X, 9780226399805, 022639980X
- OCLC
- ocn960701429
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Introduction ; Casa del Sol; Why study squatting? ; The research and writing: oral history and ethnography ; Structure of the work -- From drug murder to door ceremony: claiming buildings, building claims ; April 1984: Opening 539 ; Disinvestment, abandonment, and the social roots of squatting ; Urban homesteading: property, labor, and rights -- Who deserves housing? The battle for East Thirteenth Street ; Life on East Thirteenth Street: 1984-94 ; Low-income housing versus the squatters ; Making claims through adverse possession -- Making the deal: debating the values of housing ; The negotiations ; The details of the deal ; The debates -- Why work? The values of labor ; Building community: labor and value ; Bureaucracy, labor, and power -- Making claims on the past and the future: debt, kinship, history, and the temporality of homeownership ; Claims on the self: debt, freedom, and social personhood ; Claims on one another: from family to co-op ; Claims on the neighborhood: history, space, and identity ; Conclusion
Subjects
- Squatter settlements -- New York (State) -- New York.
- Squatters -- New York (State) -- New York.
- Occupancy (Law) -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 21st century.
- Occupancy (Law) -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 20th century.
- Occupancy (Law) -- Social aspects.
- Home ownership -- Social aspects.
- Squatters -- New York (State) -- New York -- Attitudes.
- Manhattan (New York, N.Y.) -- History -- 21st century.
- Manhattan (New York, N.Y.) -- History -- 20th century.