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

Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it spent decades as 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 into something 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.

Product details

• Authors: Amy Starecheski
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.11.2016
• EAN: 9780226399805
• ISBN: 978-0-226-39980-5
• No. of pages: 344
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Social structure research; New York, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty & Homelessness, Housing & homelessness, Housing and homelessness, New York (state)