99% Invisible - 261- Squatters of the Lower East Side

Episode Date: May 31, 2017

In 1987, three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Wrigley found herself on the edge of homelessness. She was trying to figure out where to stay, when she heard about an abandoned tenement building on the Lower East … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. 9 Roman Mars. Three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Riggly found herself on the edge of homelessness. It was 1987. She and her boyfriend at the time had been living in a warehouse in Brooklyn. But their landlord was shady, and they didn't trust him. We weren't going to stay and pay him all this money, and you know, he got kind of crazy and violent. We didn't really know where we were going to stay and pay him all this money and you know he got kind of crazy and violent. We didn't really know where we were going to go.

Around that time they heard about an abandoned tenement building on the lower east side. It was owned by the city, but it had been left empty and unmentained. A friend told them a group of squatters had taken it over and started to fix it up. It was a place they could live without paying rent to a landlord. And he said there's an open space. If you want to come, it's rough. You know, you've got to go through these meetings to get in. They got to approve you. It's pain in the ass.

We were like, we need a place to go. So, Riggly and her boyfriend packed up their belongings and drove their old car from Brooklyn into Manhattan. In fact, the day that we drove here to move in our axle broke on the car just just fell apart literally. It's like right outside the front door. So it was like, okay, yeah, so we moved in. The building was a four story structure, with mostly boarded up windows.

That's producer Delaney Hall. And Maggie and her boyfriend discovered that when their friends said the building was rough, he wasn't kidding. The building was full of rubble. Some of the walls were rotten and falling down. There wasn't any running water. You got to open a hydrant with a wrench and then fill up these water buckets and carry

them back into the house and it wasn't fun. And it was also winter time when Wrigley moved in. My dogs bowl would freeze, my shampoo would freeze, my, you know, everything would freeze in the house, the toilet would freeze. It was like living in a refrigerator. It wasn't just the building that was falling down. The whole lower east side, which today is filled with expensive boutiques in high-end condos, was struggling in the 1980s.

It was pretty dire. I mean, it was a broken, brutal neighborhood. You sort of forget how astonishingly derelict it was. There were empty lots filled with trash and falling down buildings everywhere. In fact, Riggley's building wasn't the only property in the neighborhood that had been taken over by squatters. By the late 1980s, squatters would come to occupy more than a dozen old tenements on the lower east side.

All the misfits in the outcasts and the people that didn't have any other place to go could come here and make a community. And these misfits and outcasts would eventually manage to do something kind of incredible. They'd resist eviction by the city for almost two decades. Holding on to many of the buildings has the neighborhood around them rapidly gentrified and as the properties grew more and more valuable and as the city tried harder and harder to kick them out. To understand why there were so many abandoned buildings in New York City in the 1980s, you need to understand how a usable building can become economically worthless.

In the 1960s and 70s, New York City began hollowing out. The city lost many of its manufacturing jobs, and people with means started moving to the suburbs. In many neighborhoods, like the Lower East Side, property values started to slide. When landlords couldn't make a profit anymore by renting out their buildings in low income neighborhoods to low income tenants, they would start what's called milking them. This is Dr. Amy Starchesky. She's an anthropologist and an oral historian, and she's conducted dozens of interviews

with the lower east side squatters, some of which you'll hear in this story. Starczeski says that when landlords quote unquote milked their buildings, they do all they could to extract maximum profit from them. So they were trying to continue to collect rents but increase their profits by not spending any money on the building. First, they would stop providing services,

heat, hot water, stop making repairs. They would also stop paying taxes. The landlords would basically make a financial calculation. When the money coming in from rents wasn't enough to cover the cost of a mortgage or property taxes, some landlords would just walk away. They'd stop maintaining the building and stop paying the taxes they owed. When that happened, the city could take possession of the building. So as property values in New York City tanked, and as more and more landlords walked away from their buildings, the city ended up owning off services to some parts of the city.

It was an intentional strategy. They called it planned shrinkage. So what that meant in practice was that the city. It was an intentional strategy. They called it planned shrinkage. So what that meant in practice was closing fire stations in poor neighborhoods, withdrawing services, not making repairs on public infrastructure. And so neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, like the South Bronx, ended up largely depopulated and just full of abandoned and burnt out buildings and vacant lots. All of which meant terrible housing conditions

for the people that remained and lots of opportunities for squatters. The freedom of squatting also meant that you got people who were sort of already rolling and tumbling through American life. There were people who would kind of come loose in some way or another. Peter Spenuelo is a poet who moved into one of the lower east side squats in 1988. The building he lived in was filled with artists, punks, transients, activists, and displaced

locals. There were also a fair number of squatters with mental health issues and addiction problems. People who weren't able to hold down regular jobs or make monthly rent payments for one reason or another. It was often hard to tell the difference between people like, is this person actually a psychotic on their own or are they just a little eccentric because they've been pissing in a bucket for five years and having a windows on their rooms in its January and New York. The squatters set about fixing up their decrepit buildings, clearing rubble, building stairs,

reinforcing walls and replacing windows. They illegally tapped into the city's electric grid and water system. Everybody worked together. Maggie Riggley again. I mean, I built this house. You know, I raised my floors, You know, I raised my floors. You know, I wired electricals. People built out their spaces in highly personalized ways.

One guy's apartment was furnished with cabinets salvaged from an old Pan Am airplane. One apartment was done all in shades of purple with purple stained oak floors. They built big open spaces for art galleries and punctures. For a lot of people, it was thrilling to live in a place that allowed for so much freedom. And many of the squatters saw themselves as activists for cheap or free housing and a neighborhood that was plagued by homelessness. You saw it everywhere you went in New York City, every neighborhood.

It was especially true on the lower east side in the neighborhood, you know, east of Tompkins Square and north of Tompkins Square. Spenulo and some of his friends would make brochures and go hand them out to homeless people in Tompkins Square Park. And the brochure was basically like, you don't have to live like this.

Within two or three blocks of this park, are dozens and dozens of abandoned buildings, you know, get together with your other folks who are living like you are and go take a building. From the early to mid 80s, the squatters didn't face much active resistance from the city. From time to time, city officials would come by and brick up their windows and doors. But the squatters would just smash through the bricks. I frankly thought that as long as the economy of New York remained kind of iffy or dodgy, we would be left alone.

You know, if the economic cycle started to go back into a cycle of investment, reinvestment in the city, I figured we were probably screwed. When the squatters took over the buildings on the lower east side, they were tapping into a long American tradition, a blame claimed to land by occupying and developing it. In 1862, the federal government was trying to encourage westward expansion and settlement, and so Congress passed the Homestead Act. It opened up millions of acres of land in the American West to settlers. If the settlers farmed the land and improved it,

then after five years, they could file for a deed from the government and take legal ownership. At least legal in the eyes of the US government, not necessarily the native peoples who lived on the land for thousands of years. By the 1960s and 70s, the idea of urban homesteading had taken hold in cities. Local governments would offer cheap or free houses to low-income residents, provided they worked on the buildings and brought them up to code.

This was known as SWET equity. And some of the squatters in New York basically saw themselves as providing a kind of SWET equity, even if it wasn't under any officially sanctioned program. Many squatters may have lived outside the main stream, but in some ways they were tapping into mainstream American values that go way back in history. Values of self-sufficiency, entrepreneurialism, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, individual responsibility, and so squatting fits in with that story too. But the city government didn't necessarily see it that way. And as time went on, the squaders' renegade methods would draw more critical attention in a city that was rapidly gentrifying.

By the late 1980s, New York City had turned a corner and was gradually starting to come out of a long economic slump. People were moving back into the city, real estate prices were once again starting to climb, and the city was beginning to reinvest in neighborhoods it had long neglected. The issues of homelessness and housing on the Lower East Side were becoming more and more tense. Both squatters and homeless people felt like they had to fight to hang on to whatever spaces they had claimed. Do not try to kick the homeless out of the park because if you do, you got a war on your

head, sir. A lot of the tension focused on Tompkin Square Park in the Lower East Side. The park was close to many of the squads and was the place where Spenulo had passed out his pro-squating pamphlets to homeless people. In the summer of 1988, the New York Parks Department implemented a 1am curfew at the park. They were hoping to reduce the number of people living and sleeping there. The curfew sparked protests which turned into riots. Many squatters were part of the altercations.

The rubber ball was thrown and hit part of the altercations. The rubber ball was thrown and hit one of the cops in the head. Photographers being pushed by police. The Tompkins Square Park riots were a turning point in the relationship between squatters and the city that brought a lot of the tensions around gentrification and displacement and class in the neighborhood to a head. More than ever, the city wanted the squatters out of the neighborhood.

Local politicians and even some other affordable housing activists accused the squatters of not playing by the rules and of occupying buildings that were badly needed by other low-income residents who had deeper roots in the neighborhood. Hundreds and hundreds of our families are living double-dub, tripled up, and sometimes quadrupled up, and substandard housing while these yuppies squatters are stealing from the poor, leaving rent and tax free. This is an old interview from WNYC of a controversial city councilor named Antonio Pagan, who represented the Lower East Side. He was a housing developer, turned politician, and he emerged as a particularly fierce critic of the squatters. And they're standing in the way of the development of our community by the community. As criticism mounted, the city began working harder to evict the squatters.

And in response, the squatters began devising creative ways to resist eviction. Here's I didn't know fire, no con it, no nothing. That was one of the things that came out of that period was this real sort of siege mentality. And when the police did show up, the squatters had developed a plan for how to quickly mobilize the eviction watch. The eviction watch was an organization of squatters throughout the neighborhood. Here's Peter Spagnolo.

And having your name on this telephone tree meant that in the event you were called, you would come to a squat to do what you could to oppose an eviction. Squatters would physically block police from entering the building. They'd link arms and stand in front of the door. Sometimes they'd defend the buildings from the inside,

throwing paint and garbage down on the police or buckets of urine. Sometimes they'd hide inside, so that cops couldn't clear the building. They would have little secret compartments and hiding places to go and physically occupying the building was always the best strategy. The city was always very quick and eager

to demolish a squad. But they couldn't demolish a squad with people inside. So it would at least slow things down. The squatters weren't just fighting the city in the streets. They also began devising a legal strategy. We had developed, among ourselves, the idea of adverse possession. It's a legal theory. It's something you can use. Squatters love adverse possession law.

The details of the law vary state-by-state. In New York, it says that if you occupy a piece of property for 10 years and the legal owner doesn't force you out, you can claim the legal title. Adverse possession is an interesting law because it seems to destabilize some of the things that we say that we value about private property and ownership. Namely, that if you own a property, you have a right to it, and it's yours forever. Adverse possession means owners have certain responsibilities, too. If you abandon your property and leave it unused for long periods, you risk losing it.

To successfully claim adverse possession, the squatters would need to meet a number of conditions, like proving they had lived in the buildings continuously, for example. Some of the squatters were wary about getting tangled up with the legal system, but others sought as their chance to gain ownership. They hired a lawyer and started putting together a case. The judge who heard their claim found they were likely to make a successful case against the city, and he granted them an injunction against eviction until the case was decided. But before the case could be settled in court and in spite of the injunction, the city

evicted the residents of two of the buildings. City inspectors said that they were in danger of collapse. Here's Mera Neville, a spokeswoman for the housing department from an archival interview. The occupants of the five city-owned buildings on East 13th Street are squatters, and whether they've been there for five minutes, five years, or 15 years, the fact of the matter is they broke into vacant city-owned buildings that were sealed. These evictions provoked the biggest showdown yet between the city and the squatters, in May of 1995. Everybody was on edge and everybody was on the lookout. And I remember somebody called me one

night and they said, okay, this is like a hundred riot cops have arrived and they're like four blocks away. And then the number grew. They was sending in basically a small army. The police had brought a tank repurposed from the Korean War. Officers took up positions on the roofs of neighboring buildings. Meanwhile, squatters patrolled the neighborhood with walkie talkies, reporting on the growing numbers

of police. They welded bicycle frames to their fire escapes, so it would be impossible for police or firefighters to climb them. They packed their staircases with rubble to make them impossible. They poured tar on the street so police would have to march through it on their way to the buildings. And again, creative responses, you know, chaining stuff to the building. You use your piss bucket and nobody's gonna try and come to you know, it's like, it's vile, but it's like, hey, you got guns, we got piss buckets.

The police presence went on for months. They sealed off the ends of the block and required people to show ID before they'd let them through. Still, the squatters wouldn't leave. And I think that that expense and inconvenience and embarrassment is part of what led the city to eventually decide that this wasn't the way to go and they were going to have to find some other way to deal with the squatters that were left in the buildings. Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of the city at the time and he was a vocal critic of the

squatters, but astonishingly in 1999, a secret negotiation between the city and the squatters started to unfold. They began to discuss what had once seemed impossible. Legalization. I remember being surprised by the fact that we were going to have this discussion. And it was Giuliani administration, which just made it weirder and weirder, and it was just hard to fathom. A new plan started to develop, separate from the adverse possession case. The city would sell the squatters buildings to a third party, a nonprofit organization called U-Hab, the urban homesteading

assistance board. Since the 1970s, U-Hab had been helping low-income New Yorkers gain ownership of distressed properties. U-Hab would then turn the buildings over to the squatters and help them get loans so they could bring the buildings up to code. After years of negotiation, the deal went through. In 2002, the city sold 11 buildings to you have for $1 each. And you have began working with the squatters to turn their buildings from squats into legal, cooperatively owned apartments. The process wasn't easy, and it raised some hard questions in from squats into legal, cooperatively-owned apartments. The process wasn't easy, and it raised some hard questions in the squats.

For one thing, there was the issue of resale. Many squatters were committed to keeping the buildings affordable. They wanted to cap the resale price on each apartment, so that people couldn't flip their units for massive sums of money. But there were others who felt like they'd invested so much time and energy into the buildings that they wanted to be able to cash out. There was a bunch of people who, you know, basically the line was, well, if we're not going to be anarchists anymore, we might as well be capitalists. It was like, a rock? Yeah, what?

As the squatters rehabbed the buildings and brought them up to code, some of the more unique and hand-built elements of people's apartments had to go. Some of the buildings became less wild, more uniform. Fewer handmade mosaics, more boring drywall. A few of the buildings haven't managed to get through the legalization process, even 15 years later. There have been hard trade-offs. Some squatters didn't want to take on debt for the building renovations, and they've moved out. But for many, like Maggie Riggley, the legalization has been a victory for affordable housing,

in one of the most expensive cities in the country. And it's offered a kind of stability at the end of nearly two decades of drama. We were accused of everything, you know, speculation, trying to steal these buildings of profiteering. And that's the beautiful thing about where we are today. It will always, these buildings will always be affordable housing. Maggie's building was the first

to finish the legalization process in 2009. It's still full of artists and activists. Many of the people who live there have been there for years and years. People are starting to have kids and start families. There's not that sense of constant threat. The fear that police might come by and break up all their windows.

Maggie's not a squad or any more. She's something else. I am Mahal Mah, and it's incredible. And, you know, as long as we keep our act together, then nobody can put us out, you know. And that's it. We got it, you know. It's our building. It's ours to lose. This week's episode is part of a special radio-topia-wide project welcoming a new radio-topia podcast to the family.

Ear Hustle, which is coming soon, shares true stories of life in San Quentin State, present, told directly by and from the men living there. The show won radio-topia's podcast contest last year, beginning out 1536 other entries from around the world. In support of your hustle, all radio topia shows are releasing an episode in response to the theme, Do-ing Time. In our case, we took it as Do-ing Time in a place to make a claim of ownership. Be sure to subscribe to all the radio topia shows as they interpret Do-ing Time.

I'm really excited to hear how all the other shows handle it, and stay tuned through the credits of this show to hear a special, extra long, sneak preview of your hustle. 99% of the show was produced this week by Delaney Hall, mixed in tech production by Sheree Husef. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the production staff includes Avery Trollflin, Emmett Fitzgerald, and me Roman Mars. Terry Maza is the office manager and Sean Rial composed original music for this episode,

alongside music by Melodium and Okakumi. Thank you to Dr. Amy Starchesky, who provided us with oral history interviews with the lower east side squatters. This episode is based on her book called R's to Lose, when squatters became homeowners in New York City. Thanks also to Alex Vasudeván, author of The Autonomous City. Thanks to Paul Dureenzo for his tape of the Topkin Square Park riots recorded for WBAI and WNYC for additional archival tape. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too, which are always welcome at our place at 99pi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.