The U.S. squatting movement grows

Squatting in vacant buildings, subsequently known as cortiços in Brazil, is a both a common solution for needy families and a political strategy to press for larger policy changes on housing rights. In recent history, this was largely unheard of in the U.S., which traditionally has stronger laws against such activity and a smaller low income housing deficit than exist in Brazilian cities. But the housing crisis is pushing the needy and their activists into a similar strategy state-side. First in Miami, now Minneapolis, and soon in up to 24 more cities.

The first I heard of this was from a Miami, Florida group called Take Back the Land. They link the housing crisis with the historic struggle of African Americans to access land and property rights:

People of African descent have been systematically denied control of land in their communities- from slavery to sharecropping to segregation to the current gentrification and displacement of our communities…. We assert our right to the land in our community and to use public space for the public good- specifically, to house, feed and provide community space for the poor, particularly in low income black communities. As such, we are Taking Back the Land and empowering the black community, not the politicians, to determine how to use land for the benefit of the community.

- from the TBTL mission statement

Though their philosophy is unique, they share a strategy with the rest of the groups in this post: moving poor families into government- and bank-owned properties. Here is founder Max Rameau on CNN. He makes some excellent points, noting that letting houses sit vacant is not only bad for their now homeless former occupants, but harms the bank's investment (via looting, use as a refuge by drug addicts, and weather damage) as well as the quality of life for surrounding residents:



Just yesterday poverty activists Cheri Honkala and formerly homeless Dwayne Cunningham appeared on Democracy Now! Detailing similar efforts in Minneapolis. There, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign recently helped move homeless individuals and families into 13 foreclosed and vacant homes. They are calling for a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions, and short sales in the city. Watch the full story here.

We’re about the business of bringing the neighbors back into the neighborhood, as opposed to throwing them out onto the streets…. We teach people how to reclaim housing as a human right. We’ll teach you how to move into an abandoned government-owned property, to house families. We’ll teach you how to hold a sit-in, to hold a house that’s in the process of foreclosure.

– Cheri Honkala, PPEHRC

In raw numbers, the actions of these two groups only amount to less than 30 occupied homes. But it serves as a significant model that could expand as the crisis deepens, as well as a strong political statement that could ferment action on the part of policymakers to take stronger steps and protect homeowners and homeless families.

Finally, ACORN is now advocating homesteading for foreclosed families – simply refusing to leave your house. They are also recruiting volunteers to join their Home Defenders network. Home Defenders will be trained and then called upon on short notice to help peacefully defend ACORN homesteaders in their city. You can sign up to be on a Home Defender team - cities organizing include Cincinnati and Cleveland, OH. Do it!

Municipal Elections 2: Incomes and Outcomes

In response to my first post on São Paulo’s municipal elections, I got a few questions from a friend about how incomes affected the outcomes. Here are my answers:

Do the non-poor outnumber the poor in SP?

Yes. But by how much is difficult to say. The poverty line in the city is one-half the monthly minimum wage, which is an extremely low figure. Let me illustrate: starting this month, ½ the minimum wage is R$232.50 or about $100 U.S. dollars. Considering that two bus rides per day, M-F, cost R$92 per month alone, this leaves only R$140.50 (U.S. $60) for food, rent, and all other expenses. Riding the bus to work consumes 40% of your income! Also, the city is moving to raise bus and metro fare, so this number could prove even higher in the future.

A better line for poverty in the city would be the full minimum monthly salary, at least. When you consider that a person can qualify for most housing support programs with a family income up to 3 or more minimum salaries, I think one minimum salary as the poverty cut-off is more than reasonable.

Using the low ½ minimum wage line in 2000 (when the last census was taken), 12% of the city’s population was poor, or 1.1 million people. This number reaches 20-38% of the population in the poorest peripheral areas. If you use the full minimum wage as your poverty line, entire sub-municipalities have an average wage that dips within one minimum salary of poverty level. This means that majorities in these electoral districts would live in or near poverty.

This is not to say that the majority of all Paulistanos live in poverty today, but it does mean that a lot more do than official numbers would suggest. For example, a 2003 IBGE study names poverty at 28% versus the 12% census number from 2000.

Remember too that the city also has the highest concentration of rich and super-rich in Brazil, as it is the industrial and financial capital of the country. This group is enormously important for both city and country GDP, and they are very influential.

Was that what gave Kassab the edge and allowed his party to grab five additional City Council seats? [In other words, what effect did income distribution have on municipal elections?]

Yes, this was probably a strong factor. Now there is never a single determining variable in any election, and to prove that income was THE THING or even a BIG THING scientifically would require regression analysis. But from my perspective as an enhanced laywoman, it’s no accident that the districts with money went for Kassab at high margins while Marta only carried the poorest districts. Looking closely reveals two even more interesting questions.

First I'll show the wealth-win correlations - this first graph is some older data (2000 is the most recent census) on income distribution in the city. Now compare this to the graph I posted earlier showing district wins for each candidate. The first is divided by sub-municipal district while the second is by electoral district, but the general correlation is strong and clear. Click on the images to view larger versions.

PER CAPITA INCOME BY SUB-MUNICIPALITY in 2000
source: Atlas de Trabalho e Desenvolvomento de São Paulo

Bounds:
Red = highest income, R$894.77 or more
Light Cream = lowest income, R$275.32 or less



[The upper and lower bounds on this graph hide the extremes of income difference. Monthly incomes in the highest earning districts are actually in the thousands, while the bottom 5th of residents of peripheral districts earn about R$50 per month.]

RESULTS OF THE RUN-OFF
source: Folha de São Paulo

See how most of the red and orange areas in the first graph went for Kassab in the second, while the lighter areas went for Marta?

Not only did Kassab win the richer districts, but he did so at higher margins than Marta was able to carry the poorer ones. For example, Kassab took chic Jardim Paulista (84%), Pinheiros (80%), and Vila Mariana (82%). In all he carried 21 districts by at least 70%, while Marta only carried two. These - Parelheiros (77%) and Grajaú (75%) – are both in the extreme south. The next closest win she claimed was in the public-housing filled Cidade Tiradentes (69%).

Also, the PT lost districts they previously carried in 2004, many in the mid-zones between the poverty of the far periphery and the most concentrated wealth of the center and center-southwest. Examples of this are Capela do Socorro to the south, where Marta won 57%-42% in 2004 but lost 51%-48% in 2008, or Itaquera to the east, where she won won 52%-48% in '04 but lost 58%-42% in '08. Marta increased her support in the last 4 years in only 5 of 57 electoral districts, all of which lie in areas that absorb the city’s highest numbers of poor rural-urban migrants. Four are in the extreme south and one, Brasilândia, is an area to the north where I saw huge expansions of new slum settlement into formerly untouched countryside firsthand.

This begs the questions: why did the PT lose these mid-zones from 2004-2008, and why didn’t the poorer districts back Marta as strongly as the rich ones backed Kassab?

At first I wrote long speculative paragraphs about why this may be: rising incomes over the last 8 years and how these map onto the city today, the rising consumerism and de-politicization of the middle class, increasing concerns over crime, the “pasteurization and professionalization” of social movements, some weaknesses in Marta as a candidate, and the ability of the incumbent Kassab to use city resources to co-opt influential people in poor and transitioning neighborhoods. But reading over them, I don’t have the data to demonstrate national trends in the space of São Paulo, and new census data is still a year away.

Was there a green candidate who siphoned off votes?

Not in the second round, which was the decision-maker. Only Marta and Kassab were left standing for that one.

A squatter's movement in Ohio?

Toledo Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is telling residents to squat in their own homes and get legal representation if they are being foreclosed upon. The strategy:

(1) Stay in your home. Possession is 9/10ths of the law. And if you live in Wayne County Detroit or Cook County Chicago, the police department will refuse to enforce the foreclosure sale.
(2) Get quality legal representation - Legal Aid and many non-profits offer this at free or reduced charges.
(3) Tell your bank to "Produce the Note." With the rush of sub-prime lending loans and the following rash of bank bailouts and mergers, it's very possible that the party claiming to own your mortgage has no idea where the paperwork is. If they can't prove they hold the deed and show the paper trail, they can't back such a claim in a court of law. At the very least, requiring them to produce the paperwork will slow foreclosure proceedings.

Municipal Elections 1: Results

Bad news for favelados, cortiço dwellers, and other Paulistano citizens in “informal/irregular/precarious” housing: results of the municipal elections came in at the end of October and Gilberto Kassab beat out Marta Suplicy to continue as the mayor São Paulo. While I am not crazy about either candidate, Marta was clearly the better choice on housing issues, and was endorsed by all the housing and social movements I have contacts with in the city.

You can see the dichotomy of support best in this graphic from the Folha de São Paulo. The poor peripheral regions of the city, which house the majority of favelas and loteamentos irregulares, voted Marta while the wealthier residential and commercial districts went for Kassab.

See full-size graphic here.

Candidate Info

Marta
Marta, of the left wing Worker’s Party, was mayor from 2000-2004 and is known for implementing an Orcamento Participativo (participatory budget), creating a system of Unified Education Centers that serve many favelas and poor neighborhoods, and integrating public transportation fares with the Bilhete Único electronic fare cards. To her discredit, she failed to make promised transportation infrastructure improvements and left the city with a pile of debt and unfinished programs. I also have qualms with the OP and education centers in practice, but they are great strides over having no programs at all.

Also critical, the city launched its first Plano Diretor under Marta’s administration, a voluminous legislative package designed to wield some pretty radical urban policy tools made legal by the federal government in 2001. These tools include special zoning protections for low income and irregular communities, processes for disappropriating under-utilized private lands for popular housing, legal instruments to regularize land tenure, and the creation of participatory councils for urbanization projects in irregular areas. Many elements of Marta’s Plano Diretor never left paper under Serra-Kassab, who later used this as an excuse to argue that the Plano should be re-written to cut out a lot of the tools housing movements were demanding be implemented.

Kassab
As his voting base reflects, Kassab is much less preoccupied with the concerns of the periphery (and not just in the geographical sense of the word). He is focused mainly on the city center and outlying business and residential districts as the engine of São Paulo’s and Brazil’s economic life. As vice mayor from 2004, ascending to mayor in 2006 when José Serra left to become governor, Kassab oversaw a series of policies that have earned him the moniker Mr. Clean, at least in my head. At its best, his penchant for a tidy metropolis is responsible for the Lei Cidade Limpa that banned all outdoor advertising in the city. At its worst, it has promoted a violent program of what housing and social activists call the higenização do centro (hygieni-ciz-ation of the city center).

I already wrote about the protests organized to condemn the inhumane treatment of the homeless population in the second half of this post back in August. But Kassab and Serra are also known for the Nova Luz program, a similar strategy to clean up a historic area of the city and make it into a powerful business district. Perhaps the most notorious part of the program is a 400-man police raid on the portion of Luz known as Cracolândia, literally Crack Land, that had the predictable consequence of simply driving drug users and traffickers west to República and Santa Cecília, while battering the homeless and forcing them to look elsewhere to improvise shelter. Kassab recently announced that revitalizing the city center on the Nova Luz model will be the principal mark of his second administration. In Luz he will further the program by attempting to give private interests power to dispossess property, identified as run down or under utilized in the Nova Luz legislation, for their commercial possession and use. He might just be successful – the municipal elections saw the city council move slightly to the right, with the Worker’s Party losing 2 seats and Kassab’s Democratas gaining 5:

Composition of São Paulo City Council, 1996-2008

PT = Worker's Party
DEM = Democratas

Full interactive graphic available from Estadão here.

Obama-Biden Urban Policy Agenda

This just showed up on Change.gov, the online office of the president elect. (Since when do you get an online office before being inaugurated? Eh, anyhow, the info is extensive). It's the Obama-Biden urban policy agenda.

I am wrapping up my time here in São Paulo and getting ready to continue work on housing and urban social justice in the States. This means learning as much about urban politics and housing policy back home as I did down here. I'll be studying this with interest in the days to come.

Everything I ever needed to know about capitalism and democracy, I learned from pirates

Great (but too short) interview with the author of a new paper on pirates, where he shares some parallels between 17th century pirate organization and modern democracy-capitalism. Says a bit about the current financial crisis too.

Dangerous inequality in U.S. Cities

A new United Nations Report "State of the World's Cities 2008/2009" finds economic inequality in American cities to to be above an internationally recognized "alert level" used to warn governments of possible negative social, political, and economic consequences. Race was seen as a central factor in the economic divide.

Unfortunately the report itself is not up for free download, but media stories on it give the general idea.

This comes on the heels of the last State of the World's Cities report from 2006-2007 which found evidence that slum dwellers in urban areas are worse off than poor rural populations.