Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City - Pape

Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City - Paperback

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by Amy Starecheski (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Amy Starecheski is co-director of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. She won first prize in the 2016 SAPIENS-Allegra competition.

Number of Pages: 344

Dimensions: 0.7 x 9 x 5.9 IN

Illustrated: Yes

Publication Date: November 07, 2016

Name : Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City - Paperback
Vendor : BooksCloud
Type : Books
Manufacturing : 2025 / 09 / 23
Barcode : 9780226399942