"Need decent housing?" Why not Occupy! [View all]

[truedelphi]

Full text at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13037/no_vacancies_squatters_move_in/

Need housing - why not Occupy?

After three years of staying in her sister’s living room, Tene Smith decided to move her family into a home that had sat
vacant on Chicago’s South Side for more than two years.

With the help of Liberate the South Side, a Chicago-based organization that targets vacant homes for re-occupation and after spending months renovating the house, Smith and her three children moved in during a public ceremony attended by community members and the media in January 2012. “I was fearful when I first made this commitment,” she told In These Times, “but as the days passed I had a sense of independence that had eluded me before."
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I live in a neighborhood (mostly rural) that has forty some homes. Between the main drag and the left turn that takes me to my home, there are eleven houses. Only three, including mine, have been occupied by permanent residents for the past five years. Six are now vacant, due to mortgages deeply underwater and families simply leaving or else due to foreclosure.

It's a shame that the banks aren't seeing to that someone lives in the homes. Should out and out derelicts end up "crashing" in the homes, I worry about fire danger. And then you have things like rodents, unwatered yards with dying vegetation (it doesn't rain at all in the summer in California) and it seems to me that if bankers had insight and self preservation, they'd be doing something about getting empty houses occupied. So I really enjoyed the article above.