STORY about Housing posted on June 18, 2011 by isaac
"I'm 33 and haven't paid rent ever in my life"
London squatters in Vancouver
Image sole property of Tami Starlight
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"...and it scares me," continued Connie when I asked her about her statement about never having paid rent.
Connie was one of three Londoners that breezed through Vancouver at the beginning of the year as part of their trip through turtle island. She and the other two were part of a crew that had been squatting in London prior to their trip.
"In Austria you choose what job you will do for your whole life, and so I had issues with my parents," Connie explained about herself. "I settled at 19 in London. It was '98 and I didn't know what a squat meant, but moved in to a small squat with people from my pub job."
The crew had made their way through Russia and Korea to finally land on the west coast.
"There's so much empty property, why not live with people together?" asked Connie. "It's for people who like to live with people."
It is by no means an easy lifestyle though.
"You need to sacrifice," summed up Radka. "Sometimes you need to take a day off work (to defend the house or find a new one). A lot of people don't know how squatting works. The house is not already set up. You cannot live life the way you want to. You have to make arrangements to accommodate everything. You cannot do what you want to all the time."
"I often think it's a job," agreed Connie. "You forget the hard parts: that you have to go to court, look for another house when you get evicted."
England is one of the few places in Europe with squtters' rights. Vancouver itself has a solid history of squats, including those that took place on Frances Street and the original Woodwards building. There are however, few rights for squatters here. And in London too, rights are being quashed.
"It's not so easy anymore to squat," said Connie. "Over the years some rights have been taken away. The government boroughs that had a lot of squatters have injected money so they can fix up the houses and take squatters to court."
Court is a tough battle altogether.
"When you go to court in london you don't need to show your passport," explained Dunya. "So we'd go in with all sorts of names: Disney characters and so on."
Fighting the police is another matter.
"In a lot of squats in Europe you spend a lot of your time defending the house," said Connie. "You stay on the roof since the cops won't come up and get you."
From there stories flowed: of being part of the first squat in the Czech Republic after squatting was briefly made legal, having men with baseball bats trash a squat when no one was home.
So why squat with all these barriers?
"There's just more freedom in a squatted place," concluded Radka. "Otherwise you pay all this money but whatever you do you cannot make your place feel like home. In a squat you have the freedom to be creative and really make it home for you."
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