Laura Gottesdiener published a marvelous article on the Waging Nonviolence website about home liberation developments in Chicago.

“…A housing liberation movement is brewing in Chicago. The idea is simple: Tens of thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of vacant, bank-owned homes are a large part of what is making the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago into semi-forsaken tracts ridden with crime and blight. These houses are so bad that Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced that he’d spend $4 million just to tear some down. Meanwhile, there are more than 20,000 homeless adults and tens of thousands of additional homeless youth in the city fighting through life as capitalism’s refugees. (They aren’t receiving any additional mayoral funding.) The supposed truism of supply and demand seems to have gone haywire. Many no longer recognize the banks’ claim to ownership. The only definition of these so-called assets that makes sense is their immediate capacity to serve as homes for families….”