20th century
A01=Amy Starecheski
abandoned
american culture
Author_Amy Starecheski
buildings
Category=JBFD
cities
class
condos
cooperative
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
historical
home
homeowner
house
housing
kinship
labor
laws
legal ownership
legality
Lower East Side
manhattan
movement
New York City
occupancy
oral history
property
settlements
spaces
squatters
squatting
temporality
united states of america
urban homesteading
usa
Product details
- ISBN 9780226399805
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 07 Nov 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Amy Starecheski is associate director of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University.
