English | Bond Precaire Woonvormen

Launch European campaign against the financialisation of housing

Posted on 24 January 2018 by renk Posted in Actie, In de media

De BPW is ook lid van The European Action Coalition. De coalitie lanceert een internationale campagne tegen het op grote schaal tot koopwaar maken van wonen. Het is het resultaat van de uitgebreide neo-liberaal kapitalistische koers die in elk Europees land, het leven op alle mogelijke vlakken tot koopwaar maakt. Of het nu pleinen zijn, de openbare ruimte of de meest elementaire basisbehoeften als wonen en leven. Het dereguleren van de woningmarkt, stelt commerciële belangen boven die van ons allemaal en staat die partijen toe om wonen en woningen tot ordinaire koopwaar te maken. Het zijn niet alleen makelaars en woningcorporaties die hier aan mee werken, grote zichtbare of onzichtbare investeerders en hedge funds, behandelen huizen als koopwaar, niet als plekken om in te wonen.

” The European Action Coalition is launching a campaign against the financialization of housing.

The financialisation of housing is the result of the expansion of neo-liberal capitalism and its propensity for the commodification of all spheres of life. Neo-liberal deregulation favors the private sector by appropriating housing and transforming it into a commodity.

The complete transformation of housing into goods, not only a commodity in the real estate markets, but also in the financial markets. This transformation allows speculation as well as the reduction of the social function of housing, both as an essential social need and a fundamental human right.

In addition, a mixture of new laws and deregulation facilitates the possibility for the private sector to financialize and allow speculation.

Against the power of finance in housing and in cities. We decided to have a broad-based campaign that talks about the many forms of financialisation, and gave a lot of scope for member groups to push on their own issues. Though this there was general agreement to have an awareness-raising campaign that included local struggles. ”

#HANDSOFFOURHOMES

BRON: European Action Coalition

Lees hier het campagnerapport.

Housing campaigners protest against EU urban policies in Amsterdam

Posted on 27 May 2016 by abel Posted in Nieuws

Housing organisers from across Europe are coming together this weekend to protest against the adoption of the EU Urban Agenda by the 23 Housing Ministers of Europe in Amsterdam. Three protests and an alternative conference are planned by the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City, a network of groups fighting for housing justice across the continent.

On Saturday 28th at 1pm CET the European Action Coalition will join Amsterdam’s Fair City coalition in a critical mass bike ride demanding an end to the sell-off and commercialisation of the city.

On Monday at 9.45am CET a visually compelling demonstration will be held as the European ministers for Urban Development arrive by boat to their meeting at the National Maritime Museum (1). A press conference will be held at 10am with speakers from a number of countries severely affected by both EU austerity policies, and by urban regeneration projects conducted using European structural funds. Campaigners are calling for such funds to be used to build social housing, rather than to displace the urban poor through partnership with private developers.

On Monday at 1pm CET the headquarters of Stadgenoot, a major Dutch housing corporation, will be visited with local partners the Bond Precaire Woonvormen (The Union of the Precariously Housed). Stadgenoot has been instrumental in lobbying for the new Dutch housing law that reduces tenancies to between 2 and 5 years, and destroying tenant protections [2]. Similar ‘flexibilisation’ laws are in train in many countries across Europe, such as the UK’s Housing and Planning Act. Several housing groups and renters will participate in this public solidarity action. Together they will reclaim this public institution and open the dialogue on the privatisation, flexibilisation and the sale of Dutch public housing in the European context.

The EU Urban Agenda has been developed since 1997 by the European Commission and the European Council in order to “remove unnecessary regulation” and “create more workable financial instruments”. The Pact of Amsterdam is being signed during the Dutch Presidency to streamline urban cooperation, without attempting to confront the privatisation occurring across the EU.

Rita Silva, a Portuguese organiser with Habita! said “The Urban Agenda is overflowing with buzzwords on sustainability and innovation, but the hidden agenda is to create profitable cities for private capital. There is a choice – the money could be used to house poor communities who are being forced out of their cities – but instead the EU is becoming a driver in gentrification in many places in Europe. We demand access to affordable public housing all over Europe. Housing is right not a privilege! We invite everybody to join us.

Notes for the Press

————————————-

Contact : Rita Silva, Jacob Wills

Telephone : 00351916419605, 00447954341365

Email: housing@riseup.net, emaildaritasilva@gmail.com

For Dutch Speakers

Contact: Abel Heijkamp

Telephone: 0031647686543

Email: contact@bondprecairewoonvormen.nl

Defend the Right to Housing and to the City – Call for International Action Amsterdam – 28th to 30 of May

Posted on 9 May 2016 by abel Posted in Actie

Join the international Action and confront the meeting of the 23 EU housing ministers. Don”e;t let them talk behind closed doors about the future of our cities!

On the last weekend of May, the housing ministers of all EU countries are meeting in Amsterdam to start work on the first EU Urban Agenda, linked to the UN Habitat 3 mega-conference. This agenda will be lead by the neo-liberal politics of those who create it, and proposes to techno-fix our cities for their benefit, with “e;Smart Infrastructure”e;, and “e;better data monitoring”e;. These false solutions do nothing to curb the wholesale privatisation of our cities and our housing that is taking place across the continent.

In the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City, we have decided to begin denouncing and organising against the EU”e;s role in developing the housing crisis. As a grassroots coalition across the continent, we will be supporting our Dutch members, the Bond Precaire Woonvormen, in taking action, as well as joining an action with other allies in Amsterdam. Come and join us over the last weekend in May to help build a European housing movement. Get in contact with housing@riseup.net to discuss logistics – our resources are limited but we want to support participation as far as possible.

In targeting an international institution, we are building true internationalism from below, while disavowing any nationalistic and xenophobic critiques of the EU. But what has the EU got to do with housing?

The EU has had a direct impact on housing conditions, as it promotes privatization and the deregulation of finance, housing and all kind of public services. This market competition paradigm undermines all EU regulations. The EU openly forced the liberalization of rental marketin Southern Europe and the broadening of the mortgage market in both southern and eastern European countries, and forced the sale of public housing in other member states, while austerity reduces the money available for social services and housing through national and local budgets. At the same time, urban regeneration programs in southern and eastern European cities, enabled through EU structural funds, are meant to raise property prices and so expel the working classes from urban centres to the fringes. The liberal solution to a lack of housing is Public Private Partnerships – the continuation of profit-driven intervention which denies people”e;s right to the city and to good affordable housing. And who are these solutions for, with the EU responsible for the permanent violation of the right to housing of migrants and refugees?

Movements from the Netherlands are organising a protest that denounces this politics and links it with the problems faced since the privatisation of Dutch housing corporations in 1993. For twenty years these corporations are increasingly forced to operate as profit-motivated companies; then in 2010 the EU demanded that the Dutch government restrict access to social housing to households with incomes below 33,000 euros, in order to stimulate the creation of an investors market. As a result, from the early 90’s until now, public housing and security of tenure have both decreased. Housing corporations and private landlords are mainstreaming the use of temporary 2 and 5 year contracts, which allow landlords to evict people with short notice, and without any obligation to relocate them. These tactics are being used all over Europe to prevent the potential for building long-term community power, and while we still hold some of this power, we must fight to defend it!

Our target will be announced on May 15rd on www.housingnotprofit.org.
Local and national organisations from many countries are going to join the protest and denounce the politics that tries to deny the right to housing and to the city across Europe.

There are limited accommodation spaces available from Friday 27th-Monday 30th. The ideal is for people to travel on the evening of Friday 27th ready for a bike demo on Saturday at 13-16 Sunday May 29th will be both an alternative conference at Paradiso and action planning for Monday. On Monday 30th we will be occupying a key target with responsibility for mass evictions and the weakening of tenants”e; rights, and denouncing the doublespeak of the EU Urban Agenda.

JOIN US!
housing@riseup.net

Check more info on the Month of activities organized by Faircity http://faircity.amsterdam/ or connect through Twitter or Facebook:

Read more about the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City in the Rapport “Resisting Evictions across Europe”.

Guardian Property: Freedom at Another’s Expense

Posted on 20 April 2015 by renk Posted in Nieuws

While the use of property guardians as a development tool is problematic, several (contradictory) lessons can be drawn from their sporadic freedom to transform the dwellings assigned to them.

Living in a Guardian Property is not a noble act. Property guardians are tools. Their primary purpose is to maintain the value of an empty property and the land it stands on by protecting it from squatters. In doing this they help facilitate a wider process which seeks to change the social makeup of an area so as to increase the rents that can be drawn from it. And all the while, they have barely any rights: neither exclusive possession of the property nor a specific period of tenure and no identifiable landlord. For fear of falling to the bottom of the long waiting list, prospective guardians are forced to take on properties that are often dilapidated and at times downright dangerous. And while the rules are enforced with little consistency, the contracts drawn up by the guardian property companies demonstrate an almost tyrannical attention to detail.

It’s a situation that has been a long time in the making. Deregulation and fragmentation of the UK housing market began in the 1970s and has gathered pace ever since. As a hyper-precarious form of tenant the guardian could be said to be a direct culmination of this process. Their existence would not have been possible were it not for a slew of housing legislation that has progressively eroded the rights of private tenants, removed social housing from public oversight, deregulated housing finance and generally transformed domestic properties from homes into a means of accumulating and storing wealth. Since a house is now increasingly seen as a commodity then its protection from squatters is vital. Profiting from that protection is naturally an added bonus. And the diminished rights seem perfectly normal given most of us are already encountering an ever more precarious housing regime in any case.

Every article I’ve read on the subject concedes some downsides. But none highlight perhaps the most serious concern: that in London (and elsewhere) the property guardian is being used to protect former social housing while councils seek to decant the previous tenants (on the grounds that the homes don’t meet the Decent Homes Standard) and open up the highly valuable land to private development. And while much is made of the guardian’s free rein over an empty property, no article explains that this freedom comes from their brief usefulness to this process of “state-led gentrification”. Yet it is in the tension between these two aspects of the phenomenon that something really interesting is happening. Due to often deliberate under-maintenance these social houses have become seriously dilapidated. Many are relatively ordinary buildings. What makes them extraordinary is the property guardian’s proclivity for rejuvenation using highly personalised makeshift solutions.

Shooters Hill Road, Blackheath
I should start by admitting that I myself lived in a guardian property for two years, a crumbling Victorian coach house on Shooters Hill Road owned by Greenwich Council and formerly inhabited by council tenants. Throughout our time living there my housemates and I expressed ambivalence about our role in relation to the property. On the one hand, we were there because the dilapidation that had forced the former tenants to leave wasn’t a barrier to us. On the other hand, none of us could have moved to or remained in London as easily without the opportunity it offered. We were tools of exploitation being exploited ourselves through our diminished rights. And while our contract afforded us limited opportunities to change the property this didn’t stop it providing a blank slate to put our stamp on the place.

It’s shabby. There’s no question of that. But we slowly added a hodgepodge of furnishings that followed a rough aesthetic. In an undeniably facile gesture, we eschewed the interior design associated with the flashy young professional. In the words of another housemate “there was something quite juvenile about our existence… part of the attraction of being in the place was this boyish wistfulness.”

Even so, this gesture could not have been so pronounced in a typical dwelling. However juvenile, it offers an example of how an empty property allows for a more personalised interior. Yet this is a trifle compared to the work of other guardians I’ve spoken with.

Del
For four years now Del has been living as a property guardian in a variety of buildings in London. Last summer we sat out in the large, slightly overgrown communal garden of the property he’s currently living in.

We talked about life and the unexpected shocks that can unsettle even the most determinedly settled people. By his forties he’d established himself in a smart five-bedroom house beside a lake. Things changed and when I met him he was living in a single room (mind you, very comfortable and very spacious) in a former teaching hospital in Archway (and only a pond to speak of).

Upon embarking on his life as a guardian, the first property Del was offered was in Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets. In keeping with councils’ disregard for maintenance, it was filthy and completely uninhabitable. He refused it and held out for an only slightly more promising flat in nearby Anderson House. He reflected that his aim upon moving into the flat was to negate the dirtiness: “dark and dirty became clean and white”. He took two weeks off work, slept on the sofa and “just got up and rolled my sleeves up, painted all day, took my overalls off, slept and then got up again… And then it was clean and white and it was this… lovely… space.” Del knew that Anderson House was due to be demolished but was content with this, saying: “that’s part of the price that you pay… In my mind generally I couldn’t sleep for one night without knowing I was going to clean the place up.”

Anderson House
From the beginning, the unusual circumstances prompted Del to think carefully about how he could make-do and minimise expense. Consequently, as he moved from place to place, he became embedded in a second-hand furniture economy. In addition to assisting other guardians by offering his 4×4 to help collect furniture, he has also acquired and given away furniture in equal measure. Initially he kept surplus furniture in storage, but he now has it distributed amongst his friends and fellow guardians. His diminished concern for his possessions was self-evident. In his own words, “…if someone screws up one of those sofas, I’m beyond worrying about sofas. I haven’t lost my grip altogether. In terms of what’s important, it’s not possessions”

While we talked I can remember the issue becoming less clear in my mind. In the midst of a wilful neglect and corruption of London’s social housing stock, there was something pretty special about what Del’s activity had done for him and what it had done to the properties he’s lived in. To feel a part of a community of people seeking to maximise home comfort at minimal cost makes for an incredibly fertile environment for sharing and re-using things creatively. And to have licence to reshape a property and yet to be unsure for how long the efforts can be enjoyed makes for an intriguing opportunity to produce an idiosyncratic and sustainable design vernacular. Something well represented by another person I spoke with.

Terry
Practically all Terry’s furniture is second-hand: from the street, from sites like Freecycle and from friends. The rest he’s made himself. Like Del, he said this is in large part because his living situation encourages a desire to salvage and to think carefully about his possessions. In furnishing his flat Terry described his main concerns as: “Does it fold up compact? Is it easy to move?” Because “at any moment,” he said, “I get two weeks’ notice.”

When I spoke to him Terry lived in the place pictured. Before he arrived it was derelict. The council had moved out the previous tenants and placed sitex screens on all the windows, leaving it empty for several years. In his words, inside was black mould and grease and grime everywhere.

Terry’s Bedroom
In spite of such constraints Terry has clearly been able to impose a distinctive aesthetic. He is very selective over what furniture goes into his places. It has to have a particular form and look, very modernist. “The places I live in, they’ve got my stamp on them. I have a specific arrangement of my space… and you can tell that.” After he moved from one property to another a friend commented on the new surroundings that “It’s like your old place, you’ve just unpacked it”. Facing demolition, these former social houses afford Terry an incredible freedom to create a home to mirror his nomadic personality.

Useful-doing
Something that stands out about how both Del and Terry have decorated their guardian properties is that their activities are free of any concern for resale value. I’d argue that this is the precise opposite of another phenomenon prevalent in the capital: the overused Georgian townhouse template which tends to turn houses into commodities rather than, as they ought to be, expressions of their inhabitants.
The Marxist sociologist John Holloway describes this kind of activity as “useful-doing”. To overcome the dehumanising features of our market-dominated society, Holloway argues that we should as much as possible try to do things because they are useful in themselves. The difference between the homes of Terry and Del and the mock-Georgian townhouses produced entirely for their appeal to an impersonal market underlines the appropriateness of this perspective. Most people would like to have total freedom to decorate the place they live in. Indeed this is a major reason why so many people aim to be owner-occupiers. But even owner-occupiers are inclined to decorate their home with one eye on its potential resale value. The temporary free rein of the property guardian goes beyond this.

As such, I’ve spoken to a guardian who used an entire floor to operate a bicycle repair business, one who built a studio for his band, another who painted the entire property in primary colours, and someone else who plastered the London A-Z all over their bathroom walls. There are countless anecdotes of this sort. But these are extremes. The more basic effect is that these people have been given often dilapidated dwellings and given the freedom (though not the resources) to bring them back to life. It is an unusual phenomenon where those typically forced to rent in London are afforded the chance to shape their home more after their own heart’s desire, and not only that, they are invited to do so in dilapidated former public buildings.

Conclusion: A Simple Difference
It’s easy to get carried away and forget that these openings are incredibly momentary. They also fly in the face of the fundamental truth that such experiments are taking place at the expense of the former inhabitants. I don’t mean to whitewash this reality. Rather I mean highlight what could be done if only the market didn’t have such a hold over things.

The difference between the guardian and the social tenant is simple. As useful tools of development, guardians are briefly given a degree of freedom. In this fleeting window of opportunity they behave as anyone would in the circumstances, doing things to their house because they are pleasurable without concern for whether their efforts are marketable. As barriers to development the previous social tenants were never going to be so fortunate.

A little more free time, financial support and a more permissive attitude by those managing the housing would most probably have allowed the previous social tenants to fix up their houses cheaply and yet according to their own tastes. Moreover, it might have curtailed the propensity to decant on the grounds that the homes are uninhabitable.

In this context, the property guardian is like a spectre haunting the spaces they inhabit, acting out the unrealised lives of social tenants freed from the shackles of a market that could never countenance the presence of truly free housing.

All names have been changed.

About the author:
Charlie Clemoes is a UCL Urban Studies MSc graduate and subeditor at Failed Architecture
Follow on twitter: @ClemVP
Original article can be found here.

TTIP: a threat to social housing, land rights and democratic cities

Posted on 20 April 2015 by abel Posted in Nieuws

By undersigning groups and persons, on April 17th, 2015

Housing Action Groups in Europe, Friday, 17th April 2015

The undersigning organisations, united in the struggle for the right to housing and to the city, strongly support the protests against the planned free trade agreement TTIP (“Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” between EU and USA) and the already negotiated CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement). All over Europe protests will take place at 18th April.

Environmental groups, consumer associations, trade unions and other civil society organizations since years have been warning that the free trade regulations discussed as TTIP will undermine environmental standards for agriculture, health standards for food and labor standards for services. Because TTIP is negotiated in strict secrecy and because of the plan to introduce extra-static arbitral tribunals for investor protection (“investor-state dispute settlement”) many critics fear that the agreement will dispend national sovereignty and democracy. Anti TTIP-campaigners also expect negative consequences for the protection against fracking, for public education, municipal services and for regulation of financial products. We fear that TTIP will also have disastrous consequences on urban development, real estate, housing and land markets.

Because TTIP is discussed behind closed doors we cannot know the details and concrete consequences of TTIP on housing and cities so far. We do not know if these aspects are an issue i the negotiations at all. But we did not notice any signal from the negotiating parties that an exclusion of real estate, public/social housing or a regulation of financial investments will be discussed, and such an exclusion also would be difficult to implement. Thus, we have to fear the worst. TTIP and CETA can have much impact on housing and cities in our countries.

As far as we can figure out from scarce and confusing information TTIP has four targets: (1) reduction of non-tariff trade barriers, (2) protection of transnational investors, (3) harmonization of industrial standards, (4) introduction of commercial arbitral tribunals. Each of these targets can affect housing, land and cities in various ways.

(1) The planned reduction of non-tariff trade barriers may disallow existing or demanded national restrictions of transnational capital mobility and transactions, including regulations of trade with houses and land. So far, some countries in Europe still limit the right of foreigners to own (agricultural) land and houses. Others exclude parts of the land and housing from markets, i.e. through systems of social or public housing. Everywhere national property registration regulations could be interpreted as trade barriers. In the TTIP negotiations such market restrictions could be questioned. Consequently, more property could become targets for transnational financial investors. National or European regulations on mortgage systems can be seen as a trade barrier for the financial markets too. Because of stricter regulations mortgaged homeowners in the U.S: could be the first victims. All this can lead to an even faster globalization of housing finance. Besides the transnational concentration of capital the consequence will be an increased risk of new real estate and financial bubbles.

(2) The discussed protection of transnational investor rights can directly affect national or local policies towards housing stocks, which are owned by financial funds or by joint stock companies with international shareholders and subsidiaries. This sector includes the wide-spread private-public partnerships in social housing and public infrastructure, even joint-ventures which have been pushed by the European Commission, i.e. in Italy. Any limitation of the commercial exploitation of the property – i.e. through improved rights for tenants, new urban planning obligations or taxation of transactions – can be interpreted as a violation of property rights and of investor security.

This is especially true if governments want to introduce new regulations. The introduction of private insolvency regulations or the requisition of empty flats for social housing, which are realistic expectations in possible progressive governments after elections in Spain, could be attacked by funds like Blackstone or Goldman Sachs, which have already invaded the domestic housing and mortgage market. As a consequence even countries which already have private insolvency regulations (many) or allow requisitions (i.e. Italy and France) could be under pressure. Necessary improvements of the security of tenure could be attacked by U.S. shareholders as well. The introduction even of a little stricter rent regulation, as just happened in Germany, could be understood as a threat of the investor security if US or Canadian shareholders in German housig compenies, like Blackrock or Sun Life, think that the fair value of the housing companies is affected.

(3) The harmonization of industrial standards potentially affects the whole range of consumer rights and may lead to a weakening of standards for construction and building material, for facility services and architects, for financial products and mortgage contracts. Regarding construction products it can become a threat on ecological standards (i.e limitations of tropical woods), health standards (i.e use of unhealthy substances) and social production standards (i.e. working conditions). Because public authorities at the same time will be forced to take the cheapest offer from company, global competition will push the already existing race to the bottom.

(4) The planned arbitral tribunals (“investor-state dispute settlement”) will judge violations of the free trade agreements without being bound through national laws, constitutions or international human rights. In many countries they will simply be extra-constitutional. According to the constitution of many European countries, property leads to social obligations. That is not the case in free trade agreements. In this context it is important to note, that already the risk of a high claim for damages by big companies will have strong influence on legislation. (“chilling effect”) Governments will not dare to improve rent control or limit building permission on a territory if they have to fear a claim of billions of dollars because of the financial losses of investors.

We don’t know, if any exclusion of housing and real estate from TTIP will be discussed in the secret negotiations. However, it is hardly possible to reduce TTIP on specific branches or investor seats and exclude such central sectors as real estate and its finance, if free trade with services and material is the aim. If there is a free trade with agricultural or extraction products construction material cannot be excluded from that free trade. In all branches companies can have transnational shareholders, specific subsidiaries or financial investors in funds and bonds, who can claim to be affected by any national regulation. Transnational investors also can easily change the composition of their trust and holdings if that is necessary to avoid taxes or regulations on specific branches. I.e. a private equity firm, so far indirectly invested into agricultural land, renewable energy, cinemas and housing could easily construct a multinational company which combines the energy, land and property business and therefor claims transatlantic investors’ interests in all these branches. Banks simply can use existing subsidiaries or set up special vehicles in Europe or the U.S. to attack national regulations at the arbitral tribunals. Even smaller landlords or other investors could build joint ventures in the U.S. or Europe in order to be able to claim transatlantic investor rights. For sure, national lobbies of the real estate sector will think about such solutions if that gives them power in national disputes on housing policies.

This all will have deep effects on local urban development and master planning. A transatlantic firm which has bought land in an development area could claim a violation of investment security if the city council later decides to reduce the commercial building density, increase the portion of social housing construction or green spaces, or stop the project. This will give much more power to private developers in the master planning of large urban development projects like water fronts, factory outlet centers, or urban cleansing of traditional neighborhoods.

Local democracy will be lost. This is even true for local housing policies and public building. Local plebiscites for alternative urban plans or better social housing, as currently on the way in Berlin, could be confronted with the option that transatlantic commercial courts will stop the implementation. Municipal building standards – like the obligation to use environment friendly products or to pay minimum wages to foreign construction workers – would be under pressure as well.

Finally, TTIP and CETA will heavily influence policies at the European Union level. In the construction, facility and financial industries many consumer and product standards could be under pressure if they do not harmonize with those in the U.S. Demands for stricter regulations of hedge and private equity funds, of stricter taxation on cross-border transactions, for binding housing rights standards and for social housing obligations would have to face another strong challenge. Then the attacks of the European Commission against public/social housing in many countries had only been a foreplay of what can happen with TTIP. The handing over of Europe to the global financial markets would be completed.

Thus, as organizations of local tenants and inhabitants we have to fear that the planned agreements will cause another heavy push towards privatisations and investor-control in our cities and villages. TTIP can trigger another tsunami of dispossession of people from their land, housing, social infrastructure and democratic territorial management, in Europe, Northern America and beyond. Instead of learning the lessons from the 2007/08 crashes and it’s aftermaths it will continue the globally destructive path of neo-liberalisation, which gets backed by so many governments and agencies, including – in the field of housing and cities – the preparation of the UN-conference Habitat III.

We must stop them.

We need strong alliances between European and North American social movements, including organizations of inhabitants and tenants, demanding governments not to approve the TTIP.

No TTIP!

signatories

AK Kritische Geographie Frankfurt a.M. (critical geography group), Germany

Bündnis Zwangsräumung Verhindern (Alliance Stop Evictions) Berlin, Germany

Droit au Logement (Right to Housing) and No Vox, Paris, France

Eisbrecher Wuppertal (Right to the city group), Germany

Encounter Athens, Athens, Greece

Habita – Associação pelo Direito à Habitação e À Cidade, Lisbon, Portugal

Housing Action Now, Dublin

International Alliance of Inhabitants

London Group of participants in European Housing Rights

MieterInnenverein Witten u. Umg. e.V. (Tenants Association) and Habitat Netz e.V., Witten, Germany

Mieterforum Ruhr (Ruhr Tenants Forum)

Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), Spain

Solidarity for All, Athens, Greece

Tribunal des Evictions (Genève)

Bond Precaire Woonvormen (The Netherlands)

————————————

De BPW ondersteunt dit initiatief van verschillende “Housing Action Groups uit Europa” tegen TTIP.

De Nederlandse situatie.

Uit Kamervragen blijkt dat in 2014 al zo’n 10.000 sociale huurwoningen zijn verkocht aan buitenlandse beleggers, waar dat aantal in 2013 nog 0 betrof. Deze toename is met dank aan minister Blok die de verkoopregels voor sociale woningen eind 2013 versoepelde en diverse buitenlandse vastgoedmarkten is afgegaan om het corporatiebezit aan te prijzen. Ook maakte hij enorme huurverhogingen in het sociale huurbezit mogelijk, waardoor het een interessant beleggingsobject is geworden voor buitenlandse partijen.De minister heeft de verkoop van de duizenden sociale huurwoningen door laten gaan, ondanks weerstand tegen de verkoop van diverse gemeenten en andere woningcorporaties, die er bezwaar tegen maakten en zelfs naar de rechter stapten om de verkoop tegen te houden.

Poor fetishes, poor critiques: gentrification as violence

Posted on 28 March 2015 by abel Posted in Nieuws

Hating on hipsters is not the answer to gentrification. If we want to reclaim our cities, we should organize for genuinely affordable housing in common.

Recently, ROAR published an article entitled The Poor Fetish. The piece argues that in cities like London, bored and alienated middle-class people working in ‘bullshit jobs’ are driving gentrification because they pursue and participate in the commodification of ‘working-class’ and minority cultural pursuits and spaces. While I agree that this process of commodification exists, I want to counter some of the ways in which the author uses general observations about class and culture to draw incorrect conclusions about the social and cultural exclusions and enclosures that occur in major cities today.

As someone who researches and organizes around the displacement and immiseration of those of us on low incomes, I think that at least a basic understanding of the political economy of cities is essential for the effort of formulating an appropriate answer to gentrification and displacement.

Hating on hipsters

The article, like several others that have been doing the rounds recently, follows some of the common themes of what I call the ‘hating on hipsters’ critique of gentrification, according to which it’s the consumption patterns of individuals that are ultimately to blame for the displacement of working class communities. I don’t have any substantial dispute with the claim that people often practice a form of cultural tourism (while at the same time trying to keep other cultures at arm’s length) or that for most people in the cities of the Global North work is emotionally demanding, demeaning and pointless. However, a critique of forms of consumption and affective labor doesn’t get us very far in correctly and powerfully understanding the violence of gentrification.

It is true that people who are not poor get off on poverty chic and it is also true that that this appropriation can be hurtful if you happen to be poor (and I mean poor in many senses, rather than just having little money). It is also true that people make money from that desire for a certain kind of consumption; this is a form of commodification. But we should avoid the assumption that we profess to despise: that there is somehow an ‘authentic’ culture which can only be produced and consumed by the poor, people of color, and the underclass. The logical extension of some of these arguments can be fairly damaging.

For example, alongside some persistent, intersectional and effective organizing around social and private rents in Berlin (another hotspot for both cultural appropriation and gentrification), there have been attacks on middle-class students and foreign workers in the name of ‘anti-gentrification’. These incomers represent a ‘hipster’ dweller resented by those who see themselves as ‘indigenous’ and authentic to the area, and rightly or wrongly see their claim to that area under threat. Here we see that even in the multicultural cities of the Eurozone, culture-based analyses of gentrification can lead to xenophobia.

In another example, a recent US blog on gentrification in West Coast cities recommended its middle-class, incomer reader to combat gentrification in their neighborhood by shunning culturally appropriative spaces like chic lo-fi coffee bars and instead stick to ‘mom and pop’ shops that had existed in the neighborhood before they moved in.

The problem is that a consumption-based analysis of gentrification leads people to attempt to preserve the ‘authentic’ nature of a particular area. If only all of us had lived long enough to understand that in no meaningful way are cities ever like they were before. As this excellent piece on aesthetics and gentrification puts it, “the failure to challenge the formal identity between aestheticisation and commodification makes any attempt by first-wave gentrifiers to somehow ‘stay true’ (on an aesthetic level) to the spirit of the areas they are gentrifying seem ludicrous, if not… downright offensive.”

The urban middle class: privileged or precarious?

My main issue, however, is with the author’s claim that “with intimate knowledge of how the other half live comes an ugly truth: that middle-class privilege is in many ways premised on working class exploitation. That the rising house prices and cheap mortgages from which they have benefited create a rental market shot with misery.”

Here, the author equates ‘middle-class’ with ‘property-owning’. Yet many fully middle-class professionals on higher than median wages can only ever dream of buying property, especially in London and the South-East. On the other hand, many older working-class people own their own homes. Indeed, the ‘right to buy’ council housing has been a specific policy driven by the ideology that cities must be ‘regenerated’ — in other words, placed in the hands of private (individual and business) ownership — in order to promote and expand the ‘home-owner’ class.

The class analysis of the article thereby manages to exclude practically everyone I know. The author claims that “never will they [the middle-class consumer] face the grinding monotony of mindless work, the inability to pay bills or feed their children, nor the feeling of guilt and hopelessness that comes from being at the bottom of a system that blames the individual but offers no legitimate means by which they can escape.” With the growing precarization of even previously stable forms of ‘middle-class’ labor (medicine, law, teaching, especially in higher education), few of us are really immune from these anxieties and risks. Yet according to this piece, the middle-classes never suffer wage repression, retaliatory eviction, redundancy, battles with the JobCentre, and so on.

Secondly, even if this class delineation were correct, the power over property ownership in cities like London does not primarily lie in the hands of middle or higher-income workers, but in the hands of private developers, large-scale landlords, and government itself. Gentrification, as Rachel Brahinsky puts it, is “capitalism playing out in the landscape. It is essentially our economy’s urban form.” It is a process involving time, land and rent, and it cannot occur without a planning and governmental framework to support it. The root of gentrification is the ability of landlords to command higher and higher rents after a ‘rent gap’ has been established in an area that has experienced less investment than other areas (or, in London, just that it’s not as expensive as everywhere else).

It’s capitalism, stupid!

Gentrification is therefore complex and cyclical, and undoubtedly the presence of coffee shops allows landlords to charge more to (housing and business) tenants. It also concurrently involves wholesale privatization of public spaces, especially retail. But if poverty and culture are sometimes commodified, buildings and land always are. The Poor Fetish article identifies gentrification as “different kinds of shops opening up,” but apart from its odd presentation of the significance of property ownership, it doesn’t actually talk about housing. Espresso Bars are symptoms of gentrification far more than they are the underlying causes.

The problem, of course, is that the causes of gentrification are hard to spot — by the time the coffee shop has opened, or the big art gallery, or the enormous utopian hoarding has gone up, a lot of its processes have already taken root in the area. Contracts have been signed. Money has moved. Investment funding has been leveraged. Visible and objectionable as they may be, cultural appropriation or ‘fetishisation’ is not what’s violently displacing low and middle-income people in the capital; it’s capitalism, stupid!

In my work on traditional retail markets and city center regeneration, I see how the consumption and culture-based analysis of gentrification I am critiquing here quickly becomes an argument about changing consumption preferences. This argument is then repeatedly used as a reason to privatize, reduce and displace small businesses, despite them being popular and profitable. In other words, local government and the private sector use the very arguments made by ‘hating on hipster’ critics to entrench socio-economic divisions and displace low-income businesses and consumers.

Yet even as a critique of retail gentrification, the piece fails, because it pins consumption patterns on the preferences of individuals and cultural groups, and not on the way in which regeneration and commercial rents are largely controlled by state and private actors. Indeed gentrification (in its guise as ‘regeneration’, which usually involves retail, business, leisure, other amenities and housing destruction and redevelopment) is often at its most vicious and comprehensive when conducted by these actors in the name of ‘regeneration’ and ‘renewal’.

The Elephant and Castle regeneration scheme in South-East London, a partnership between a large local authority and a large international property developer, is perhaps the most outstanding example of this in London at the moment. Have a look at wonderfully comprehensive web archives like Heygate Was Home or Ward’s Corner Community Coalition and tell me whether you still think it’s the art students shopping at small businesses and markets and entrepreneurs opening up coffee shops who are the problem here.

Reclaiming our cities as commons

Perhaps the most unhelpful aspect of articles like this one (and they are, as I have indicated, all too frequent) is that they give no indication that this situation can be changed. In the ‘hating on hipsters’ vision of gentrification, the middle classes are bound to live boring lives and their escape from these boring lives is fundamentally doomed. The working class, meanwhile, can only look on in horror as their authentic culture is destroyed. No one has any agency. Indeed the article itself, like the system it identifies, serves mainly to blame the individual while offering no legitimate means by which they can escape.

For few years now I have been working on, organizing around and thinking about how we can reclaim and rebuild cities that are, for want of a better phrase, held in common; and I see a great deal of inspiring action and a very effective push-back against these gentrification phenomena, especially in London. Thanks largely to committed, cross-tenure, networked organizing, condemned social housing is being re-occupied, tenants are staying in their homes, community-led regeneration plans are receiving planning permission, and some local authorities (mainly due to the pressure from below and their appallingly long housing lists) are actually building social rented housing.

Networks of organization around the principles of the right to the city are forming, recognizing that we are all people who live, work and purchase things and experiences. There is not always a simple class struggle in this process, but there are alliances and commonalities around the principles of displacement, community and the public housing system which bring together huge numbers of people who are realizing what they share. Those who stand in the way of these commons are now being named: large private developers, politicians and unelected council officers, and complex multi-actor mechanisms known as Private Finance Initiatives (PFI).

The answer to gentrification is not agonizing over where you sip your coffee, snort your coke (if you must) or choose your cauliflower. If we actually want to build a city for everyone, we should support and participate in those organizing efforts against displacement, against privatization, for housing held in common and at rents everyone can afford. Those of us writing about the misery-inducing phenomena produced by capitalism have a constant responsibility to understand and explain these issues in terms that allow us the possibility to destroy, re-form and transcend them.

Gloria Dawson is a writer and researcher, focusing on housing (particularly precarious and temporary housing) regeneration and social movements. Originally from London, she now lives in Leeds, UK. She blogs at trespassingassemblies.tumblr.com.

Say No to MIPIM and AUSTERITY, Yes to Housing Rights! Actionweek 15th to 20th of October London.

Posted on 3 September 2014 by abel Posted in Nieuws

Ben je BPW lid en wil jij deelnemen aan deze actieweek in London? Neem dan op korte termijn contact op met de BPW. Er zijn nog reistickets beschikbaar voor mensen die willen deelnemen aan dit internationale protest! Lees voor meer informatie onderstaande oproep

COME TO LONDON on the 15th to 20th OCTOBER!

This is a call to housing activists across Europe to come to London this October 17th-20th to oppose austerity policies and the financialisation of our homes and cities, and to create the networks of resistance necessary to defeat it. From the 15th-17th MIPIM, one of Europe’s biggest real estate fairs, will be taking place in London. Landlords, real estate speculators and politicians are meeting to discuss how to make more profit out of the misery of housing and other urban consequences of the global crisis.

The London Radical Housing Network is inviting all those fighting housing privatisation, rent increase, housing shortage, evictions, gentrification, and profiteering urban transformation regeneration to join the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City at MIPIM UK this October. Protests and actions are planned throughout 15-17; a strategy meeting of the European Coalition will occur on Sunday and Monday 19-20th.

In London we are a network of 16 groups fighting for better housing. We need to build on all our local strengths to build international strength to force change. Because crises cross borders, and the speculators profiting from our misery cross borders, our organisation needs to do the same. As an international investment event in London, the heart of global capital, MIPIM UK provides an opportunity to do this.

We accused MIPIM profiteers for the first time this March in Cannes, France; developers, investors, landlords. This time we are focusing the lens on local and national governments, municipalities who are failing to provide social housing solutions, who are denying the necessary protection for tenants and mortgage holders, and who continue to sell our cities away to the highest bidder while evicting our communities. In London they feed the bubble by trying to destroy all alternatives to private renting and home-ownership, while evicting social housing through state gentrification.

Recently, in many European cities new struggles have begun against evictions, which have been caused by mortgage defaults,loss of jobs and income, rent increases, demolitions and privatisations. At the same time there are various other forms of struggles for housing and urban rights, such as anti-demolition insurrections, anti-gentrification coalitions, protests against the criminalization of homelessness, demands for rent control and struggles for new forms of self-organized social housing and land management. All these struggles have a common foundation in the human right of everybody to have a secure place to live, and in the demand for cities which should be designed and managed for and by the inhabitants and not by authoritarian governments for the profits of few property owners. In most of the countries these struggles also have a common enemy: national austerity policies, backed and enforced by supranational institutions and treaties like the Troika and the European Fiscal Compact. Ultimately there can be no way out of the social crisis of housing and urban life without overcoming this neoliberal EU-constitutionalism by alternatives which are based on the right to housing and land and on the democratic treatment of housing and land as a commons for all.

We want to gather these struggles to learn from eachothers’ strategies against our states, and build a coalition capable of acting on a
European level.

We are not willing to let our cities become the preserve of the rich. We are not prepared to lose our right to have our homes here. Across Europe we have seen an unprecedented financial crisis, caused by housing speculation, which we have had no role in causing. Yet we are beingforced to suffer, whilst those who were responsible go on to profit even further.

We will be protesting during the Mayor of London’s opening speech on Weds 15th, who has played a key part in the social cleansing of inner-city London. We invite you to join us from the evening of Thursday Oct 16th in preparation for an alternative conference on the financialisation of our homes, and an internationally focused action on Friday 17th, 5pm. On Saturday 18th we will join the Trade Union Congress march or and the anarchist bookfair, and will prepare for a residential meeting on Sunday and Monday the 19th-20th.

We will provide accommodation, and have secured a budget to help with travel expenses. Please send responses and queries to
londonnotforsale@gmail.com and emaildaritasilva@gmail.com so that we can book travel in early September. We aim to have translation provided. The agenda for the meeting will be finalised in the days preceding, though proposals should be in by mid-September.

A draft schedule is below:

Tuesday 14 – first arrivals
–
Wednesday 15, 9:30 AM – demonstration at beginning of day of action
against MIPIM, as the mayor of London makes the opening speech.
–
Thursday 16– potential ‘house of the Commons” event in Oxford, more arrivals and networking, agenda planning for meeting
–
Friday 17, 11am-4pm – potential London alternative conference onfinancialisation of housing
5pm – demonstration at MIPIM with international guests
–
Saturday 18 – the Anarchist Bookfair, with a slot on the European dimensions of the housing crisis Trade Union Congress mass march against austerity
more agenda planning for meeting
–
Sunday 19 – meeting of European coalition
–
Monday 20 – proposals, decisions, and action points of European coalition, to be completed by 5 PM.

Foto’s Cannes 2014

Camelot Europe en Metropoolregio Amsterdam aan de schandpaal in Cannes

Posted on 12 March 2014 by abel Posted in Nieuws

Dit jaar zijn de zakenmannen op het jaarlijkse vastgoedfestijn Mipim in Cannes (11 tot 14 maart) niet alleen. Voor het eerst in 25 jaar van ongestoord vastgoeddeals sluiten in het lentezonnetje aan de Côte d’Azur, zullen ze een aantal van hun ‘eindgebruikers’ ontmoeten: De slachtoffers van megalomane projectontwikkelingen, ontheemden en uit huis geplaatsten die hun betaalbare woning tegen de vlakte zagen gaan voor een hotel, voetbalstadion of dure torenflat, en de mensen die gedwongen worden om rechteloos en in onzekerheid te leven.

De ‘Europese actie coalitie voor het recht op huisvesting en de stad’ waar de BPW deel van uit maakt, organiseert op woensdag 12 maart een internationaal protest tegen grootschalige speculatieprojecten, die veelal worden voorbereid (en gevierd) op Mipim, de jaarlijkse megaconferentie van de wereldwijde vastgoedbusiness.

Groepen uit diverse plekken in Europa zoals Amsterdam, Athene, Barcelona, Geneve, Istanbul, Lissabon, Londen, Milaan, Padova, Rijn-Ruhr-Metropool, Utrecht, Wallonië en verschillende Franse steden zullen aanwezig zijn om hun afkeuring uit te spreken over speculatie.

In een ‘tribunaal’ zullen zij aan de hand van kwesties uit hun land, een aantal Mipim-bezoekers aanklagen. Het gaat daarbij om vastgoed- en financiële bedrijven die met hun activiteiten het recht op huisvesting en de stad geweld aan doen. In de aanklachten zullen de gevolgen van ernstige en actuele situaties omtrent privatisering van huisvesting en steden, aan de orde komen. Met name de de impact daarvan op het leven van mensen.

Ook verschillende Franse vakbonden, ATTAC, buurtorganisaties en huurdersorganisaties zijn bij het protest aanwezig.

Vanuit Nederland zijn de Bond Precaire Woonvormen en speculatie onderzoekskollektief SPOK aanwezig om een aanklacht uit te spreken tegen respectievelijk leegstandbeheerder Camelot Europe die een buitengewone bijdrage levert aan de steeds verdergaande precarisering van het wonen in Nederland. En tegen de Metropoolregio Amsterdam wiens bestuurders niets te zoeken hebben op een internationaal vastgoedfeestje: zij zouden beter thuis blijven om aan echte oplossingen te gaan werken voor de schrijnende woningnood in Amsterdam en de gigantische (kantoren)leegstand.

Het tribunaal vindt plaats op woensdag 12 maart om 15:00 uur op de Marché Forville te Cannes. Vanaf 17:30 uur zal daar ook live muziek zijn. Voorafgaand aan het tribunaal, om 11:30 uur, is er een persconferentie door de Europese actie coalitie op de locatie: 15, Avenue du Prado te Cannes.

Verdere informatie:
De aanklacht tegen Camelot (in engels)
De aanklacht tegen Metropoolregio Amsterdam (in engels)

Video/animation antimipim van de Europese coalitie (English):

Twitter: #antimipim