A Primer In Guerilla Housing Tactics

Max Rameau and other homeless occupied and set up homes on an empty lot in Miami for six months in 2006. Development had forced the city's homeless population out, so Rameau and his organization Take Back the Land decided to make use of the unused. While the settlement is no longer there, the group now finds homes for people in government-owned, abandoned and foreclosed houses.

Rameau explains his unique strategy in an interview published in Real Change News last week:

Where do you think the movement for housing justice should be focused now?

I think it’s important for social justice movements to identify core, root problems, and not lose the forest for the trees. Not to get so caught up in the individual scenarios that are going on in the individual communities that you lose sight of the bigger picture. And I think the core issue here that we’re dealing with as we approach the post-gentrification phase, in which gentrification is no longer an effective economic cycle, is the importance of land and community control over land.

The issue of community control over land really transcends the issue of gentrification, transcends the issue of housing, because land is used for more than just housing. Land is really that core, fundamental issue that those other issues sit on top of. We need to keep that big fundamental issue in mind, so we don’t lose track of what we’re really fighting for, particularly as material conditions dictate changes in our strategies and tactics.

Five years before Rameau and others occupied the abandoned lot in Miami, writer and musician Eric Lyle led other San Franciscans to take over a large building on Market Street and set up a free breakfast cafe and concert space. The building had been empty since 1997, and though police removed them from the building one month later, the building remains empty and unchanged.

Lyle explains his reason for leading the takeover in his book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, released this year:

I'm just saying that I'm tired of being expected to self-identify as someone under attack, someone who is powerless and who is being forced out. We wanted to do shows that asked, 'What do we WANT the city to look like? How can we make it happen? If we really had all the space everyone says they need to do stuff, what exactly WOULD we do with it?' We wanted to do shows that remind people of the power that they actually DO have.

Seattle seems to be behind other big cities in the gentrification cycle. Do these two advocates have something to teach Seattleites about creating accessible space?