Smoke Trails #14 New York City Squats From all over the world, they came to America's shores, the outcast, the down-trodden; from all over America, they arrive in New York City, the fags and the freaks. And from all of the boroughs and subboroughs of New York, they find their ways to the Lower East Side, the artists, the anarchists. Frank Sinatra sang of New York, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." But if you can't make it anywhere, because everywhere is under the jackboot of empire, then you make your way to the squats. To understand the squats, you have to understand the history of the industrial-era city, and the bitter suburban fruit it reaped. In the 1950's, the captains of capital created cheap soulless suburbs so that white people could breathe cleaner air and be separated from one another, unable to organize a mass movement. But a generation later, the loci of production (and pollution) had been migrated to the Third World, and the American cities were turned into service centers. Now they had to bring the white people back. By law, landlords can't just kick tenants out onto the street so that they can then renovate the apartments and rent them out to others for a much higher price. So instead of breaking the law by commission, they break the law by omission, neglecting their duties to keep the buildings running in working order. Without any political power behind them, the tenants complaints are ignored, and the buildings gradually deteriorate into what looks like bombed-out Baghdad. Comfortable homes turn into crack houses, until they catch on fire, burn down to the ground, and then Mr. Landlord has his excuse to wipe the chessboard clean and build luxury condominiums with the insurance money. It was the perfect capitalist scam. But by the time Ronald Reagan was elected US President in 1980, the farce had gone on for far too long. People from all walks of life began to take up residence in the bombed-out buildings and spend their money, time and energy fixing them up. If you throw something in the garbage can, it sits there for years, and then I pick it up out of the trash, polish it off and use it, I have committed no crime. In fact, you should give me a fucking medal of honour and a good neighbourliness award. But of course, if you passively participate in the shared hallucination that supposes that you own a lot of property, then it's in your vested interests to hold property rights ahead of the human right to housing. A home without people for people without a home? Inner-city homesteaders? Urban permaculturalists? No, they are simple thieves, and it's your right to let the building decay, let the whole barrio crumble, which coincidentally and conveniently jacks up rent rates for all of your other customers in an economy of scarcity. This week I had the good luck to get access to the squatter archives, maintained at the New York University library. I had the honour of interviewing some of the movement's greatest scholars and scribes. I had the privilege of being permitted to enter some of these squats and photograph them from within. They are truly masterpieces of interior design and decoration, and it boggles the mind to imagine the labours of love that these people invested into their apartments. In the end, the squatters and their extended community put up such a principled fight that the municipal authorities agreed to legalize about half of the houses that were being held. Compromises were ironed out, and the so-called squatters were officially named home-owners. One of the occupied buildings was declared a community center that serves the social needs of the residents of Alphabet City, called ABC No Rio. The gentrification of the East Village and urban areas all over the United States and the Western world continues almost unabated, and we fear that soon there will be almost no record of the living, breathing inner-urban communities that once were. But when the oil bubble bursts and the economy comes crashing down, and the profiteers lose their stranglehold on housing, then regular people all over the planet, from Lagos to the Lower East Side, will rise up, crush capitalism, and squat the world. And then we will finally understand the power of community, and give thanks to these post-frontier pioneers.