Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226399942)

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 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.

Author: Amy Starecheski
ISBN-10: 022639994X
ISBN-13: 9780226399942
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/07/2016
Pages: 344
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2017