Ours to Lose When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City [Paperback]

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 Losetells 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.

The Narrators
The Eleven Buildings
IntroductionChapter 1: From Drug Murder to Door Ceremony: Claiming Buildings, Building ClaimsChapter 2: Who Deserves Housing? The Battle for East Thirteenth StreetChapter 3: Making the Deal: Debating the Values of HousingChapter 4: Why Work? The Values of LaborChapter 5: Making Claims on the Past and the Future: Debt, Kinship, History, and the Temporality of HomeownershipConclusion

"Ours to Lose chronicles the decades-long struggle of urban squatters in a cluster of buildings on Manhattan's Lower East Side to win legal control of their homes. Using oral history and ethnography, the author recounts the squatters move into the buildings during the mid-1980s when lsn