3Cs weblog

The new housing rights movement:

We already commented on the difficulty of finding an apartment for rent in Madrid. The prices have sky-rocketed repeatedly in recent years. There’s a ton of financial speculation going on and a lot of it is tied in with politicians trying to make a buck off of gentrification- thus the politicians will help change zoning laws or the qualification of lands (as in from “industrial land” to “urbanizable land”) to build luxury apartments. In the last post on this we mentioned how this is leading to a huge degree of inaccessibility of housing especially for young folks facing precarious labor conditions. The UN commissioner on housing, in a recent trip to Spain actually denounced the situation and the degree of urban speculation.

There are a whole series of factors going in to this situation. We don’t know enough yet to explain in any detail- a lot of factors tie in- including the change to the Euro, the freeing up of real estate markets, the very thin market for renting apartments, local political corruption, etc. All this has resulted in some very weird factors such as: this generation in Spain is the one that will take the longest to be able to leave their parents’ house (partly due to these high housing costs and temp jobs, thus you see 30-somethings living at their parents’ place- couples putting marriages and children on hold, etc.- thought this isn’t only b/c of the housing situation it is exacerbating it). Also, apparently Spain (or maybe its specifically Madrid) currently has the most expensive housing costs as compared to local salaries in the world second only to Japan (or maybe just Tokyo- we’ll try and verify)- i.e. the percentage of earnings being destined to mortgage payments, rent, etc.

In the past year this situation has given rise to a very interesting movement for access to housing. Although it is becoming increasingly complex and many actors are getting involved what is interesting is the spontaneity of the movement’s emergence. Rather than particular organizations, unions, community groups, well-defined activist networks taking on the issue- it was much more informal in its beginnings. Most people seem to define it as coming from a series of discussions in internet chat rooms, SMS messages, and blog posts. Several sit-ins were called for and grew in size regularly leading to the formation of the Assembly against Precarity and for Housing with Dignity (another large platform is called just Housing with Dignity but this made up much more of already pre-defined social movement and community groups).

Many who began participating here are not life-long militants but people who got active on this issue in particular. The other interesting factor is how precarity is tied in- both labor precarity but also what someone from the assembly mentioned as “precarity of rights” that is currently being forced on people.

Much of the movement has grabbed onto the “V” for vendetta symbol. The one from the blockbuster movie with a circled “V”. The movie’s logo has been appropriated by many in this city and you can see the graffiti all over our neighborhood. This is because the word for housing (vivienda) also starts with a V so the movement is sometimes referred to as the V for Vivienda movement. We’re attaching some photos here of the graffiti. Around carnival there were a bunch of folks (including us for a while) dressed up in the movie’s costumes as a way to get the word out about the housing movement. This March 24th there are going to be a series of national demonstrations about this issue. We’ll keep you posted.

P.S. please send word around about this movement- we’ve heard that folks here are looking to contact other housing rights groups internationally.

We’re including a link here that describes some more about the movement in English (has some errors, oh well) as well as couple of links to some of the platforms that are emerging

Introduction to Housing Movement in English

http://www.euromovements.info/yearbook/index.php/Housing_movement_in_the_Spanish_State

Movement platforms

http://www.vdevivienda.net/

http://www.viviendadigna.org/

The 3Cs drift with Maggie Schmitt started at 3:57 PM on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 2 in a crowded Carrboro coffeehouse, Open Eye. 3Cs commandeered an unused corner of the cafe for our homebase, and started with a discussion of what themes we wanted to explore in the drift. Themes proposed were:

• How much do we work (as student/in other roles)?
• How much is our time worth?
• Soft exploitation and self-exploitation (what forms do they take in our daily lives)
• Where does UNC happen on a Sunday?

It was a rainy day, and we spent some time trying to decide what methodology to use for the drift. Should we walk to campus and visit workspaces (likely to be empty, except for lab buildings)? Visit places around Carrboro? We started off with a group interview on the question: what do you do on a Sunday? (In these notes, I’m going to include only responses, no names)

Sunday activities:
• working occasionally at UNC Planetarium (funded by Union Carbide); avoiding work/trying to work at home
• at home; working on the couch at a friend’s house, working at Weaver Street or Open Eye (need other people around to concentrate)
• working (always at home)
• Sunday morning mass, brunch with friends sometimes, working at home, phone call to parents, dinner with friends (make a point of not going to campus)

Opting to stay at Open Eye and delve further into the topics of University work on a Sunday, we started a discussion about the nature of University work, workplaces, and the intersection of social space and labour space.

Open Eye has been described as Carrboro’s living room — a place people visit to meet friends and to relax and to do work, more often all three. On the day of the drift, we counted 75 people in the cafe, and 45 laptop computers. Only three people weren’t working (or, weren’t trying to look like they were working). Work permeating the social environment to such an extent is something we realized we’d often taken for granted, and the discussion which ensued focused on the relationship between work and social space.

Sebastian: “One of the cute/destructive things about this sociality is that whenever we see each other, we’re reminded of work we haven’t done. We [married couple with a young baby] used to come to Open Eye and bring work, and it’s interesting that there’s no barrier between work and café. You only have to be at the University for so many hours, but you’re expected to do hours of other work.”

Maggie: “Things are very different in Spain”

Maribel: “Agreed”

Maggie: “Right.. work doesn’t happen in cafes, it happens in the overcrowded libraries. The whole notion of a café for workers doesn’t exist. You go to a café to hang out/smoke/drink/play cards.”

Liz: “Still, there are some benefits to having this collective space – I remember one time all of the folks in one of my seminar classes happened to be here at the same time before a big due date for a paper, and we all collectively decided not to do the assignment”

Sebastian: “But you were all anthropologists; that’s important – only certain departments come here. Lab sciences have to be physically in the lab to work, and they’re there most of the weekends.”

Tim: “Yeah, so all of South Campus [the medical/sciences complex] is busy on the weekends, while North Campus is quiet.”

Maribel: “Maybe it’s a political/cultural thing?”

Maggie: “There’s also this added value of networking – you can’t read everything but you can know enough people who have. Does this space become important as a site for affirming casual relationships?”

Tim: “It’s not just University work though. Weaver Street Market [a co-op grocery with café, down the road] is sort of a creative class hub. You see architects meeting clients there, business meetings, job interviews.”

Maggie: “So does the quality of the work people do change at Weaver Street or Open Eye? Why go there instead of home or the office? What is that choice about?”

Maribel: “There’s also the issue of public space – we don’t have much of it.”

Maggie: “If this is our plaza, what does it mean that everyone is plugged-in and focused on their own work? Why come here?”

Liz: “One of my friends and I used to make plans to come here and work, and not talk to each other.”

Reno: “I kind of feel like this is the way life happens. You don’t go outside your bubble, you use a laptop as a shield to help protect your bubble. Or, maybe, the laptop creates a feeling of isolation and you come to a public space to help mitigate that?”

Craig: “One of the other cafes around here bans laptops at night. My old roommate used to be a programmer, he got really mad at that.”

Maggie: “What is the history of the café workplace? Coffee shops go back to the 1980s, right? Why cafes as workplaces?”

All (chorus): “Now we have laptops! Digital labour!”

Maribel: “What a strange object! The laptop is a digital workplace, a portable workplace, and yet we all associate good feelings with it.”

(Sebastian runs out to count laptops and engage in an informal survey of laptop work. Results, 45 laptops in the building; many of them in groups of people working together, each on their own laptops. We also discover biologists, environmental scientists, and medical students all working at Open Eye. End scene.)

Maggie Schimitt has been in Chapel Hill/Carrboro in Nov.30-Dec.4

She fascinated us with her energy and her talks sharing the experience of Precarias a la Deriva in Madrid. Our group has been following the steps of this Madrid-based group, been always very inspired by their method of feminist/precarious derivas.

Following her advice and the Precarias a la Deriva quasi-obsession for documenting every day events and collective itineraries, we could start our blog by remembering Maggies step-to-step description of drifing and recapitulating our fist attempts of carrying on one while her stay with us. These are the different activities we did with Maggie about drifting (maybe each could be the themes for following posts):

-Brainstorming axes/themes and possible locations @ Mediterranean Deli

-Collective discussion on spaces of labor/no labor on Sundays @ Open Eye Coffee

-Step-to-Step guide for drifting & Mapping discussion @ Weaver St. Market