[van-discuss] Fwd: [IWW-list] BLF and squats

[Pat S]

Fwd:

I normally wouldn't forward from a mass-mailing list, but the post below
mentions the effort that John Clarke, who spoke at our panel at the General
Assembly in Ottawa, is involved with.  The Center for Popular Economics
sends out thoughtful articles about once a fortnight.  Somehow I got
subscribed to their list, and a good number of their articles have prompted
me to check out the groups they mention.

Folks who know me will know that right now my "big kick" thing is the BLF of
New South Wales, Australia, in the early to mid-seventies.  It's captured my
imagination in a way that few things do, and the perspective below harkens
to it, not from a labor perspective exactly, but from the perspective of
people who would chose to reclaim their communities instead of turning them
over to business interests who might sit on property until it became
valuable for big business to redevelop it.  The BLF were construction
workers.  They took a real interest in working class communities, refusing
to work sites that would gentrify neighborhoods and displace working class
people.  In the course of their "black bans" protests (black bans were
whenever the union would ban a particular kind of construction, like during
a major fight for workers' comp, they put a ban on building any buildings
for insurance companies), they would help working people renovate their
homes.  How cool is that?

In solidarity,
Alexis

----------
From: Liz Stanton <programs at populareconomics.org>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 10:34:30 -0400
To: econatrocity at mlm.populareconomics.org
Subject: Econ-Atrocity: Squatting

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Rent is (Inefficient) Theft!
by Suresh Naidu, CPE Staff Economist

During the recent G8 protests in Ottawa, one of the outstanding actions was
the takeover of an abandoned building for use as social, affordable
housing.  For close to a week, activists held the building, renovating and
improving a house that had been vacant for close to a decade.  After
Canada Day celebrations, however, the police moved in, smashing down the
barricaded doors and brutally arresting the residents.  Now, with the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty still holding another squat in Toronto,
and the NYC Lower East Side squatters having secured their buildings from
the city, it may be useful to look at why squatting and expropriating
landlords is not just sound politics, but sound economics.

One of the activists demands were for a "use it or lose it" law, whereby
buildings unused for a certain number of years would become social
property, and turned over to people needing housing.  This eminently
reasonable request is also backed by recent economic research, despite the
Ottawa Citizen's editorial wail, "Ottawa's housing crisis will not be
solved by violating private property rights".

Housing is a productive asset, in that property values can be increased
through labor.  But tenants know and appreciate the value of their housing
better than landlords, and landlords want the tenants to improve or
maintain the quality of their property.  Property values comprise not just
the land and the building, but also the quality of schools, community
support, crime levels, and other ingredients of good living.  These things
are often provided by the residents themselves, by volunteering for school
activities, watching out for suspicious strangers, and generally building
good community with neighbours.  Even on a purely physical level, house
maintenance is best undertaken by the people who live there, as they know
what they need. However, the economic benefits of this - increased property
values - do not all go to the tenants, but rather a large portion is
appropriated by the landlord.  Why would a tenant try to improve the
quality of the residence when the lasting benefit goes to the landlord?

Home ownership is a much better mechanism for making solid communities and
better living conditions.  People look out for one another, participate
more in community events, contribute more to children's schooling, engage
in home improvement,  and make generally good neighbourhoods when they own
their houses.  As a nice side-effect, they increase the property values in
the neighbourhood.

If it is so much better to be a homeowner than a tenant, why don't tenants
just buy out their landlords?  Obviously, if it is better for both landlord
and tenant to have the tenant purchase the house at its market value, then
they should exchange:  house for money .  However, there is the not so
little detail of wealth.  Tenants generally can't afford to buy their
homes, and also lack the collateral to secure a loan or mortgage.  All of
this points to the squatter's solution: expropriation.  This won't help the
landlords, but it will help both tenants and their home-owning neighbours.

A use-it-or-lose-it law would turn abandoned houses over to citizens too
poor to afford home ownership.  By giving people a real, material stake in
housing, we can count on much better home maintenance and community
building than in the state-owned housing projects that rankle so many
people, rich and poor.  Asset redistribution, not just income
redistribution, is necessary for social changes that are autonomous and
self-sustainable.  Since government won't do it, people are going to have
to do it themselves, in the time-honored tradition of squatting.


Sources:
http://www.ocap.ca/ (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty)
Village Voice Article on NYC squatting
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0235/ferguson.php
"Efficient Redistribution" by Bowles and Gintis, Politics and Society.

© 2002 Center for Popular Economics

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based in Amherst, Massachusetts.  CPE works to demystify economics by
providing workshops and educational materials to activists throughout the
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