Ours to Lose : When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City / Amy Starecheski.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Starecheski, Amy, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Squatter settlements--New York (State)--New York.

Squatter settlements.

Squatters--New York (State)--New York.

Squatters.

Occupancy (Law)--New York (State)--New York--History--21st century.

Occupancy (Law).

Occupancy (Law)--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century.

Occupancy (Law)--Social aspects.

Home ownership--Social aspects.

Home ownership.

Squatters--New York (State)--New York--Attitudes.

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)--History--20th century.

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.).

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)--History--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (327 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

The Narrators

The Eleven Buildings

Introduction

1. From Drug Murder to Door Ceremony: Claiming Buildings, Building Claims

2. Who Deserves Housing?: The Battle for East Thirteenth Street

3. Making the Deal: Debating the Values of Housing

4. Why Work?: The Values of Labor

5. Making Claims on the Past and the Future: Debt, Kinship, History, and the Temporality of Homeownership

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226400006

022640000X

OCLC:

960701429