This week, on a whim, I went to look at an apartment. Usually I just scroll through listings but this time I made an appointment, just to see. We don’t want to move, have no intentions of leaving the garden level one-bedroom we’ve called home for the past 8 years, feeling so deeply enmeshed with our building, our neighbors, our community. The rent is still aggressively under market, despite our landlord raising it every year… hence why I still have a search saved for rent-stabilized apartments. The dream would be some place not too far away, at our original rent price, maybe with a second bedroom, that would allow dogs, with a limit on the rent increase. In other words, a dream. The apartment I went to see was definitely a bust, but it made me consider where my ongoing low-level panic comes from.
“Most of us are closer to eviction and the streets than the deck of a yacht” writes
from. Today I burned a bundle of wild sage a friend in California foraged from the trail behind her house. Her landlord made her leave so she’s now living with other friends, swapping childcare for housing. Another friend who has been in her apartment for 13 years is getting kicked out and is packing up everything she has, figuring out her next move. Yet another just moved from one high-rise to another, because the rent was too damn high. All of these moves came out of necessity, not choice. I have the same anguished housing conversations with friends who are on food stamps and friends who own multi-million dollar homes.The brilliant Astra Taylor wrote the best thing about this that I’ve read in a long time, to the point that Jonathan and I have been texting back and forth about it most of this morning. One passage in particular that stood out — “manufactured insecurity is far from inevitable, and yet it is intensifying. The same developments that have supercharged inequality in recent decades — including the deregulation of finance and business and the decline of the welfare state — have heightened insecurity and left no one, wealthy or working class, unscathed. While the relatively privileged seek ways to shield themselves from risk — and even turn periodic shocks to their advantage — the fact is they’ve rigged a game that can’t be won, one that keeps them stressed and scrambling, and breathing the same smoke-tinged air as the rest of us. Which means they, too, have much to gain from rewriting its rules, including reimagining what new forms of security might entail.”
Zooming out, there is a global situation of people on the move, shuttled around with no real sense of where to go next. They are being displaced due to acute reasons (war, droughts, dictatorship) and protracted ones (colonization, slavery, capitalism). I’ve been fielding daily WhatsApp requests from the men who migrated here over the last two months and are now stuck, with no way or desire to return — even if it means never seeing their families again. One man from Senegal who has been on the road for three years confided he would do it all over again just because the circumstances he escaped were so much more dire there than they are here. He was finally able to get a phone and connect with his mother who thought he had been dead this whole time.
who writes connects the dots between the climate crisis and housing, saying “the size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller”. He also writes:“But even if we do everything right at this point, there’s already extraordinary quantities of human tragedy inexorably in motion. So along with new solar panels and new batteries, we need new/old ethics of solidarity. We’re going to have to settle the places that still work with creativity and grace; the idea that we can sprawl suburbs across our best remaining land is sillier all the time. Infill, densification, community—these are going to need to be our watchwords. Housing is, by this standard, a key environmental solution. Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.”
Moms 4 Housing is a housing activist group in Oakland, California started in 2019 by three formerly unhoused Black women who decided to move their families into a vacant three-bedroom house. They reclaimed it from the real estate redevelopment company that owned it, one of the city’s most prolific house flippers. Oakland recorded an 83% increase in homelessness from 2017 to 2022 yet there are four times as many empty houses as there are people without homes. The moms moved in with their kids, cleaned it up and started paying the utility bills. A year later, they were ordered to vacate the building and when they refused, they were met by the sheriff's deputies wearing riot gear and “peacefully” arrested. A few days after the eviction, the governor and the mayor reached a deal with them and the Oakland Community Land Trust bought the house for its appraised value. Now called "Mom's House" it serves as transitional housing for other mothers, with services on-site to help with jobs, credit readiness and permanent housing.
I’ve been working on a list of resources for our newest New Yorkers, combining the efforts of Gowanus Mutual Aid and the South Bronx Mutual Aid who built Ayuda.NYC. It’s reminded me of the delight a good spreadsheet can bring. Alex writes Scraps of Favor and made this list of New York spots for friends who recently moved from LA.
’s pandemic life recommendations remain the best. This crowdsourced GoogleMap of Mexico City street vendors was started by Baruch Sanginés, a freelance Mexican data analyst and visualizer. Do you have a lurking file? Please share it in the comments or by writing back to this email…Mackenzie sent me this quote from the novelist Michael Cunningham: “One of the things I love about living in the city is that you can’t really go out and walk for 10 minutes and look at the people you are passing on the street and imagine that you are, in any way, a typical member of the human species.” I was reminded of this TikTok I sent to Mike, to soothe a potentially big life transition. Really applies to everyone, everywhere, all the time.
I just finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and in all honesty was racing to the end because of how painfully bleak the story was. She transposes Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield to 1990’s southern Appalachia, showing how we are still contending with the same institutional poverty, child labor and addiction so many generations later. Kingsolver was born and continues to live in Appalachia, where she wants to push back against the deep condescension the region faces.
In her conversation with Ezra Klein she says: “How many people, well-meaning people, have asked me, how could I live there, in the middle of nowhere? People, this is my everywhere. This is my everything. I live on a farm that grows food where water comes out of the mountain among trees that make oxygen. City folks are depending on us for a lot of things that they routinely discount or make fun of. It’s been a very long program in the development of the world that economies and governments have urged people into the cities, away from the countryside, tried to get land-based people into the cities because — there are a lot of reasons, but it boils down to this — people in the money economy can be taxed. People in a land economy produce a lot of what they consume on the spot. So if you’re growing your own food and eating it, there’s no way to pull taxes out of that.” I think there’s a missing piece around how so many people were actually driven out of their lands and forced into cities for work but her thoughts on Appalachia as essentially an internal colony, exploited for its resources and its people, are worthwhile.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tunnels this week, trying to find a new way into a screenplay that I wrote a couple years ago that grappled with a future of rising tides and population displacement. There’s a lot of excitement around burying infrastructure underground, and I’ve been researching survival strategies that involve going under (Earthships, catacombs, mole people). That’s how I learned about Phil Piratin, a Jewish organizer during World War II who later became the Communist Party MP for Mile End.
In the first two weeks of the Blitz alone, 25,000 people lost their homes. The emergency shelter conditions were horrifically subpar and the government was intent on maintaining life as normal. Piratin led a group of fifty East End activists to the posh Savoy hotel, where only guests had access to the most luxurious air raid shelter. They occupied the basement and the hotel manager had no choice but to let them stay till the “all clear” siren. The act of civil disobedience and subsequent outrage in the press led the city to finally relent and open the London Underground tunnels to anyone sheltering from the bombings, a practice they had previously ruled out. In his 1948 book Our Flag Stays Red Phil Piratin wrote:
“That night tens of thousands sprawled on the tube platforms. The next day, Mr Herbert Morrison, solemn as an owl, rose to make his world-shattering announcement: the Government had reconsidered its opinion in the matter of the Tubes being sued as shelters. From now onwards, they would be so employed. They were expected to accommodate 250,000. Arrangements would be made for refreshment and first-aid facilities. Later, bunks were being installed. ‘The Government had reconsidered the matter.’ They had indeed! They had been forced to by the resolute action of the people of London which they had been powerless to prevent.”
It’s time to order your free daffodils! I’ve written about the Daffodil Project before (started in 2001 as a living memorial in the aftermath of 9/11 when Dutch bulb supplier Hans van Waardenburg and the City of Rotterdam sent NYC a million daffodils, a gift facilitated by public garden designer Lynden Miller). You can request your bag here (between 50 and 1,275 bulbs!) to be picked up end of September/early October across all five boroughs.
This week’s field trip…
What: A concert by Rosa (mermaid star of one of my first shorts)
Where: Pete’s Candy Store
When: Tuesday August 22 at 10:30PM
Till next time,
ASK