Max Rameau first drew national attention with his outspoken advocacy for the residents of Umoja Village, an emergency shanty town in Miami that housed people who couldn't afford a place to live or who had been displaced from public housing. Rameau published the book Take Back The Land: Land, Gentrification, and the Umoja Village Shantytown, which chronicles the struggles that he, other organizers, and the people who lived in Umoja faced in their efforts to achieve housing equality in Miami. The shantytown was eventually destroyed and its inhabitants displaced and forced into even more precarious living situations.

This didn't deter Rameau, in fact, he is stepping up efforts to house people in many of the houses that have been lost due to the sub-prime mortgage collapse and the violent downturn in the global economy. The article below appeared earlier this month. Rameau's continued work is deeply inspiring, and sadly necessary in more places than just in Miami.

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Max Rameau says he's "matching homeless people with people-less homes." (By J. Pat Carter -- Associated Press)


Published on Monday, December 8, 2008 by Associated Press
Homes with No People, People with No Homes
Activist Moving Homeless People Into Foreclosed Houses in Miami

by Tamara Lush

MIAMI - Max Rameau delivers his sales pitch like a pro. "All tile floor!" he says during a recent showing. "And the living room, wow! It has great blinds."

But in nearly every other respect, he is unlike any real estate agent you've ever met. He is unshaven, drives a beat-up car and wears grungy cut-off sweat pants. He also breaks into the homes he shows. And his clients don't have a dime for a down payment.

Rameau is an activist who has been executing a bailout plan of his own around Miami's empty streets: He is helping homeless people illegally move into foreclosed homes.

"We're matching homeless people with people-less homes," he said with a grin.

Rameau and a group of like-minded advocates formed Take Back the Land, which also helps the new "tenants" with secondhand furniture, cleaning supplies and yard upkeep. So far, he has moved six families into foreclosed homes and has nine on a waiting list.

"I think everyone deserves a home," said Rameau, who said he takes no money for his work with the homeless. "Homeless people across the country are squatting in empty homes. The question is: Is this going to be done out of desperation or with direction?"

With the housing market collapsing, squatting in foreclosed homes is believed to be on the rise across the country. But squatters usually move in on their own, at night, when no one is watching. Rarely is the phenomenon as organized as Rameau's effort to "liberate" foreclosed homes.

Florida -- especially the Miami area, with its once-booming condo market -- is one of the hardest-hit states in the housing crisis, largely because of overbuilding and speculation. In September, Florida had the nation's second-highest foreclosure rate, with one out of every 178 homes in default, according to Realty Trac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties. Only Nevada's rate was higher.

Like other cities, Miami is trying to ease the problem. Officials launched a foreclosure-prevention program to help homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments, with loans of up to $7,500 per household.

The city also recently passed an ordinance requiring owners of abandoned homes -- whether an individual or bank -- to register those properties with the city so police can better monitor them.

Elsewhere, advocates in Cleveland are working with the city to allow homeless people to legally move into and repair empty, dilapidated houses. In Atlanta, some property owners pay homeless people to live in abandoned homes as a security measure.

In early November, Rameau drove a woman and her 18-month-old daughter to a ranch house on a quiet street lined with swaying tropical foliage. Marie Nadine Pierre, 39, had been sleeping at a shelter with her child. She said she had been homeless off and on for a year, after losing various jobs and getting evicted from several apartments.

"My heart is heavy. I've lived in a lot of different shelters, a lot of bad situations," Pierre said. "In my own home, I'm free. I'm a human being now."

Rameau chose the house for Pierre, in part, because he knew its history. A man had bought the home in the city's predominantly Haitian neighborhood in 2006 for $430,000, then rented it to Rameau's friends. Those friends were evicted in October because the homeowner had stopped paying his mortgage and the property went into foreclosure.

Rameau, who makes his living as a computer consultant, said he is doing the owner a favor. Before Pierre moved in, someone stole the air-conditioning unit from the back yard, and it would be only a matter of time before thieves took the copper pipes and wiring, he said.

"Within a couple of months, this place would be stripped and drug dealers would be living here," he said, carrying a giant plastic garbage bag filled with Pierre's clothes into the home.

He said he is not worried about getting arrested.

"There's a real need here, and there's a disconnect between the need and the law," he said. "Being arrested is just one of the potential factors in doing this."

Miami spokeswoman Kelly Penton said that city officials did not know Rameau was moving homeless people into empty buildings -- but that they are not stopping him.

"There are no actions on the city's part to stop this," she said in an e-mail. "It is important to note that if people trespass into private property, it is up to the property owner to take action to remove those individuals."

Pierre herself could be charged with trespassing, vandalism or breaking and entering. Rameau assured her he has lawyers who will represent her for free.

Two weeks after Pierre moved in, she came home to find the locks had been changed, probably by the property's manager. Everything inside -- her food, clothes and family photos -- was gone.

But late last month, with Rameau's help, she got back inside and has put Christmas decorations on the front door.

So far, police have not gotten involved.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/08-6

UNHOUSED has been quiet for some time. I have been busy with other work. I am pleased to announce a new book we, Temporary Services, just published called Public Phenomena.

There will be new entries and a lot more to share in the coming weeks. There are new movies about slums, tent cities popping up all over the U.S. because of the home foreclosures and the tanking economy. Sadly, things in the U.S. are getting more difficult for the current UNHOUSED population and those that are now joining their ranks.

More soon.

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Dear Friends,

It has been a while since we last wrote you and we have some exciting things to report.

Temporary Services has started our own publishing house and online store: Half Letter Press.

With that, we have just released our first self-published book. It is titled Public Phenomena and let us tell ya, it looks beautiful! 152 glossy full color pages. We can't wait for you to see it.

This book is the result of over ten years of photographic documentation and research on the variety of modifications and inventions people make in public. From roadside memorials to makeshift barriers, people consistently alter shared common spaces to suit their needs, or let both man-made and natural aberrations run wild. The result is a new kind of public space – with creative and inspiring moments that push past the original planned design of cities.

Images and text by: Temporary Services, Polonca Lovšin, Joseph Heathcott & Damon Rich, Boštjan Bugaric, Ana Celigoj, Maša Cvetko, Marko Horvat, Meta Kos, Darjan Mihajlović, Danijel Modrej, Maja Modrijan, and Sonja Zlobko

You can purchase the book directly from us for $15.00 using Paypal. Go here to do so.

Half Letter Press takes its name from the half of a "Letter"-size sheet of paper printing format that we have used for nearly ten years and 80
publications. In addition to publishing books, which will include books by other authors in the future, Half Letter Press was created to better distribute our own work and the work of other creative people whose work we admire. We have created a online store toward this end.

This endeavor is just getting started. We hope you'll check back regularly. The store is the first step in building long-term independent infrastructure for supporting the work of others. You can read more of our ideas about this here.

Half Letter Press offers volume discounts for multiple copies of Public Phenomena. We also offer a variety of alternative payment methods including trading. Please consider telling your book and booklet-loving friends about us!

If you make something you feel we should sell, or if you would like to help us distribute our new book Public Phenomena, please get in touch.

Thank you and all the best,

Temporary Services / Half Letter Press
(Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer)

Temporary Services
P.O. Box 121012
Chicago, IL 60612 USA
http://www.temporaryservices.org
servers@temporaryservices.org

http://www.halfletterpress.com


P.S. Coming soon!

New Temporary Conversations interview booklets with The Dicks, Tim Kerr, and Jean Toche of Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG).

Temporary Services goes to Austin, Texas.

Temporary Services celebrates their 10th anniversary in December with a book release and party in Chicago!

More information to follow.

It seems that more than one person works as JR, and who or what JR is isn't made clear by the web site. Regardless, JR is doing amazing work calling attention to the plight of women living in conditions of extreme poverty, violence, rape, and other challenges in Africa and South America. The images below are from a month of taking photographs and working in a Rio de Janeiro favela. JR photographed the faces of women from the area, enlarged the photos, and then put them up giving the hills of the favela the women's giant watchful gaze. The image on the steps is one of my favorite. Truly amazing!











This, and other versions of the project, can be found here: http://28millimetres.com/

This is a follow up to an earlier post about the U.S. government's recent unbelievable claims that chronic homelessness is dropping. Michael Stoops, in an interview with Melinda Tuhus of Between the Lines, squarely dismantles the report and points out that it, by design, under-reports homelessness based on its definitions of who is UNHOUSED and who is not.

Stoops also predicts a vast increase of the number of people without homes because of recent down turns in the economy, higher unemployment, the mortgage crises, municipalities unprepared to deal with the increases so they oppress rather than help, and more.

Homelessness is caused by structural inequalities in our society, ones that we have exacerbated – or elected officials to do so on our behalves – and done little as a nation to fix. And don't expect Barack Obama (or any other political leader) to solve this problem – don't expect a public accounting for all the brutal greed unleashed on this country by Ronald Reagan and neoliberal politicians and the resultant lack of social support infrastructure. Their putrid hateful ideology so thoroughly suffuses how we treat our fellow citizens that we should collectively be ashamed that we have allowed more than 1.6 million people to live without homes.

---



Interview with Michael Stoops,
acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless,
conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Listen to the interview.

According to a Bush administration report announced in late July, the number of chronically homeless people living on the nation's streets and in shelters has dropped by about 30 percent -- from about 176,000 to 124,000 -- from 2005 to 2007. Chronically homeless people make up 18 percent of the total number of homeless in the U.S. Officials at HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said the drop was largely due to implementation of its Housing First policy, in which hard-to-house individuals are placed in permanent shelter - apartments, halfway houses or rooms -- and provided services for drug addiction, mental illness and health problems.

Some housing advocates hail the reduction, but others are skeptical that more of the chronically homeless have, in fact, escaped homelessness. Many are also concerned about individuals and families who may be homeless for shorter periods of time or are not counted as homeless at all. Nationally, the government estimates the total number of homeless people in the U.S. has dropped to about 666,000 in 2007, from 754,000 in 2005.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He addresses different definitions of homelessness that are used by the federal government and by advocacy groups, and predicts a coming wave of homelessness due to the home mortgage crisis.

Contact the National Coalition for the Homeless at (202) 462-4822 or visit their website at http://www.nationalhomeless.org

I have been meaning to re-post this article from the folks over at Airoots for some time now. They first posted it on their site in May. It is some of the finest thinking on self-made cities within mega-cities that I have ever come across. It points out that traditional forms of western urban planning and language used to understand these vast social-political-economic formations is wholly inadequate and that people are taking care of themselves beyond limited concepts such as "affordable housing for all." I can't wait for more from them along these lines. Make sure you play the Natty Congo track as you read this. Enjoy!

---

Junglist City
May 14, 2008


View of Mira Road, in the outskirts of Mumbai


The moisture spreading all over Mumbai’s buildings gives us hope for the future. It won’t be long before the weed that’s cracking through the pavement becomes trees extending their aerial roots through our asphalted streets and concrete walls. One could say that nature will takeover if the city was not already a jungle of its own kind. The city has grown and developed for decades outside planning and control. Urban ecosystems have been regulating the flux of migrants forever. Informal settlements are human beings’ natural response to the city, and its most sustainable form in the face of uncontrollability. No more informal than a forest, the unplanned city is our urban future - for the best if we are willing to engage with it.

Mass housing, even “affordable”, will never accommodate the flux of rural-urban migrants. Just as mass food production won’t solve the world food crisis. In fact, these engineered “solutions” are the root cause of the problem. On the other hand, the junglist city has an unlimited capacity to absorb and regulate transient populations. Incomers have an unlimited capacity to respond to their own needs and their collective imagination that cannot be matched by that of any architect or planner. The variety of solutions and habitats emerging from the junglist city can only be compared to the diversity of species and plants one can find in the forest.

Planners and architects’ irrational faith in formal solutions to a problem that they have invented for themselves seems to come straight out of the dark age. It perpetuates a cycle of institutional breakdown and injustice that can only be ended by acknowledging that Reason lies not in their theories, aesthetic values and moral imperatives, but in the decentralized action of hundreds of thousands of people producing the junglist city day after day. Here is the leadership that the architectural professions should follow. Imagination is required not to invent new top-down solutions, but rather to understand and support the intrinsic logic of spontaneous urban development.



This social housing built in Dharavi under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority scheme less than 8 years ago exemplifies the unsustainability of industrial-age building constructions in the social and ecological conditions of Mumbai.

The so called order that we desperately try to impose on our cities is ultimately unsustainable. The European and North American models of urban development have no future. This is maybe why an increasing number of students come and visit Indian slums. They teach us not only about the history of Western cities but also their possible future. Just as they are being aggressively promoted and developed throughout the world, more and more suburban shopping malls are closing in the US because they are too expensive to sustain and commute to. US inner-cities, which were for long left to the poor and excluded are gentrifying and densifying rapidly. European medieval city centers are being celebrated by tourists from all over the world for their charming pedestrian streets and human scale. Could the pre-industrial city be our urban future?

It is time wannabe planners and architects get off their school bench and office desks and start learning from people who actually develop livable cities. Let illegal migrants, slum dwellers, encroachers and squatters be the teachers. It is time our shadow cities get reclaimed and retrofitted with new intentions and imagination. There is no reason modern amenities should only be available in the unsustainable industrial age model. Technologies have become more flexible than ever before and can easily adapt to the malleable logic and evergrowing structures of the junglist city.


Social Nagar in Dharavi. Ever changing, ever developing Dharavi epitomizes the resilience and the endurance of the Junglist City.

U.S. reports drop in homeless population, by Rachel Swarns, International Herald Tribune, July 29, 2008

The article linked above appeared this week in the IHT and New York Times. It states that the Bush administration is reporting a 30% decline in the number of chronically UNHOUSED people living on the streets and in shelters between 2005-2007. This is hard to believe for several reasons. The Bush administration lacks all credibility and can't be trusted as anything it states is hard to not take as manipulated, controlled information generated by political appointees. We have seen a systemic erosion of the functioning of our federal government under the Bush administration from FEMA to the EPA. Recording the number of homeless persons is notoriously difficult given the precarious ways in which folks live. Counting the people who use shelters is never going to generate an accurate number; it is always going to be understated whether for logistic or political reasons.

I met several men in Chicago who refused to stay in a shelter citing a range of personal and safety issues. They had several friends who also refused to live in shelters, and instead lived in cars or in parks. Counting the rural homeless is next to impossible given their near invisibility. And, we know that city and national government agencies consistently under report statistics like the number of people living below the poverty line, especially when that line is set by ideological reasoning rather than the real impact of not having money. There was also a group of men that moved from the streets to jail and back again in a dizzying cycle that they could not break because they had no support when they got out, nor was it easy, or possible for some, to get a job let alone housing.

With nearly 1.6 million people still living on our streets, this “reduction” hardly comes as good news. This number is absolutely appalling and is infuriatingly close to the number of people incarcerated (which currently is around 2.3 million people). And these numbers are directly related. This is the brutal, disgusting legacy of Reaganomics and corrosive right-wing ideology and greed that has plagued our country and eroded the necessary infrastructure for taking care of citizen no matter how indigent. There was an exponential increase of UNHOUSED persons that began in the 1980s given Reagan’s simultaneous push to deregulate, cut taxes and public spending, and in general make this country more unlivable for working class, poor and UNHOUSED people. This vicious turn in the U.S. is well chronicled by Gregg Barak in his book “Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in America.”

If you follow the link above, read it with caution. It is short on a critical analysis and does a disservice to the people who really need our help and support. There should be no people living on our streets. That would be good news.

This video is a bit over the top in terms of the melodramatic music and the ridiculous number of wipes and cheezy image transitions, but it does show some harrowing images of a shanty town in southern California that make it worth the watch.



Here is a BBC report on this same settlement. These are not typical UNHOUSED folks, but people who have lost their housing because, in part, the giant mortgage collapse. That people have to live this way in this country is unconscionable:

Here are a some recent stories related to the plight of various kinds of refugees that may be of interest to UNHOUSED visitors:


Resident Alien, by designer Andrew Dahlgren

[1] PREFAB 4th of July: Housing Beyond Borders, by Bryan Finoki

Most Americans have little idea that their food is subsidized by exploitation, intimidation, and Modern-Day Slavery. If Americans had to pay what they should for their food – the real cost of decent living wages - then they would quickly shift their attitudes about migrant workers and do what they could to accommodate them.

This article about migrant housing in the U.S. gives a brief overview of the struggles for housing that migrant laborers face when they come to our incredibly hostile country. It also looks at some of the organizing done on behalf of migrant workers through the lens of applied design. The need for housing that is more that “countryside slums” ¬– shacks made of scavenged garbage – is beyond desperate for this primarily invisible population. Good design can generate excitement and the engagement with a range of issues surrounding housing migrants, though the potential for abstraction is great if one doesn’t talk to the actual people s/he is designing for.

This article celebrates some of that abstraction that is potentially harmful in thinking that design will solve problems without working with the actual people you hope to help. The image above – the project is titled Resident Alien - is an example of this thinking that is farfetched, overly romantic, and disconnected from the brutal realities of migrants’ lives. It is a mobile, modular housing system made of, you guessed it, shipping containers – a frequent material used in thinking up housing solutions for all kinds of UNHOUSED situations. Migrants can buy these systems together and travel around the country from farm to farm. The author the article writes of Resident Alien:

The architecture becomes a poetic response to fact that migrant workers are “in a way ’shipping’ their lives, belongings, and homes across the country.” And because the units “can be pulled by a truck or van and could be purchased by the workers themselves,” the Resident Alien gives workers a sense of ownership and control of their lives in a context, which would otherwise treat them as nomadic serfs.

It is only a poetic response, and little more. This system would make migrant workers an easy identifiable target given the current law enforcement hysteria that is sweeping over the U.S. Many vicious, ignorant communities are rounding up thousands of migrant workers, treating them as criminals, and then expelling them. Migrants need a greater deal of visibility in the U.S. but systemic change needs to come before it is safe for them. Ideally, they could have a house in the place where they worked, free from fear of raids and if they were paid well, they wouldn’t have to be migrants. The owners of the farms aren’t.




[2] Against All Odds

This game was created by the UNHCR (The United Nations Refugee Agency) as an education tool to teach children, and adults, about the harsh situations people face when politically persecuted and forced to become refugees.

This game is very rough and stressful and conveys a small amount of what it must be like to be faced with interrogation, fleeing your home in a moment’s notice, and other severe experiences of being a political refugee. You can start the game at any place. Each segment is self-contained. I started playing the section where my character was interrogated. What you see is a sheet of paper and you are asked to agree with statements that are impossible to agree with like, “I give up the right to vote.” You move your hand with a pen in it to select a “yes” or “no” reply to the question. When answering the questions incorrectly, you hear a smack and then drops of blood fall onto the paper. If you answer all the questions incorrectly, then you are locked up.

One section of the game, where you read the stories of several individuals and decide whether they are a “refugee” or “immigrant” is a bit ham-fisted in that it only considers political persecution as a legitimate reason for being a refugee. Economic refugees maybe shouldn’t be helped with as much urgency as political refugees, but it seems like the conversation can be expanded to many more situations and peoples’ basic existence and desire for something more than subsistence should also be addressed. If the money and multinational corporations can go anywhere they want to extract profit, why can’t people move with the same freedom, privilege, and lack of fear?

There is also the question of being a refugee in your own country. The U.S. has marginalized large numbers of its population whether they are homeless, living in public housing and oppressive cycles of poverty, or among the 2.3 million living in prison. The UNHCR should expand its definitions and find ways to link up all kinds various kinds of refugees.



[3] To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD, by SUDHIR VENKATESH, The New York Times, Published: July 25, 2008

Sudhir Venkatesh has been working with issues around public housing for many years. This excellent OP ED for The NYT calls for the dissolution of HUD and the creation of a federal agency to deal with recent shifts in where poor people are forced to live and seek housing. HUD was intended as a response to an earlier form of housing discrimination and lack of affordable solutions for large numbers of urban dwellers. In Chicago, it was notoriously corrupt and partisan, eventually displacing many people from the city and scattering them all over the area. People are being pushed to the margins of cities – the inner suburbs - and are increasingly found in the unwanted interstices in regions between economic centers. Venkatesh’s call is timely, but is also made against an infrastructure that has wallowed in cronyism (with developers and unaccountable mayors) and ineffectiveness for decades.

The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) has been doing the really hard and amazing work for many years now of creating public theater and performance art with folks from Skid Row. This exhibition is a history of Skid Row as seen through the lives and voices of many of its residents. The exhibition and events that are planned during the show are some of the most exciting cultural work around UNHOUSING that I have seen in a long time. I am going to try and go out and see the show and attend some of the talks and events.




Los Angeles Poverty Department presents
Skid Row History Museum, A Gallery Exhibition

June 28 - August 2, 2008 | Opening Reception June 28, 6-9pm

This exhibition will explore the history of Los Angles’ Skid Row through the stories of those who live, work and inspire others there. It will also celebrate those who have created positive change in this community. The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a non-profit arts organization that connects lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty.
Important Dates

OPENING RECEPTION
JUNE 28, Saturday, 6-9 pm
Live From Skid Row: Jeff Dietrich and Catherine Morris of the Catholic Worker and the Hippie Kitchen remember remarkable people and initiatives. Music from Ron Taylor and Oscar Harvey. Performances by Ibrahim Saba and Kevin Michael Key. Food & drinks.
PERFORMANCE & PUBLIC CONVERSATION

JULY 18, Friday, 6-9 pm
@ Lamp Community Art Project Gallery, 452 S. Main St. LA 90013
Live From Skid Row: Public discussion with Pete White and Becky Dennison of LA Community Action Network (LACAN). Music from Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky. Performance by Michelle Autry and Sunshine Mills. Food & drinks.
WORKSHOP

JULY 25, Friday, 2-6 pm
@ The Box Gallery, Chinatown, 977 Chung King Road, LA 90012
Live From Skid Row: Workshop for Skid Row residents from Lamp Community and the Downtown Women's Center. Food & drinks.
PERFORMANCE & PUBLIC CONVERSATION

JULY 26, Saturday, 6-9 pm
@ The Box Gallery, Chinatown, 977 Chung King Road, LA 90012
Live From Skid Row: Public discussion with Mollie Lowery, founder and first executive director of Lamp Community. Music from Code Zero. Performance by Tony Parker and Charles Porter. Food & drinks.
CLOSING RECEPTION

AUGUST 2, Saturday, 6-9 pm
@ The Box Gallery, Chinatown, 977 Chung King Road, LA 90012
Live From Skid Row: Public discussion with Ted Hayes, founder of Dome Village. Music from Ron Taylor, Church of the Nazarene Gospel Choir. Performance by Riccarlo Porter. Food & drinks.


A map of Skid Row will be on the floor of the front gallery, marking significant sites where these stories have unfolded. This exhibition will also include images and videos highlighting the community’s efforts and strides. These videos feature speakers at public meetings and performances by LAPD. In the back gallery visitors will be invited to contribute their ideas for Skid Row’s own “Walk of Fame,” which seeks to honor those people and organizations that have bettered the community. In this area there will be inspiration booklets for visitors to draw out their ideas of whom they believe should be honored. The ultimate vision behind the Skid Row History Museum is to create a series of permanent public artworks, (plaques, signs, and the like) actually installed in the streets of downtown for this eventual “museum without walls”.

This exhibition has many goals; one is that it will enable the public to better understand the Skid Row community and the challenges that they have endured. The second is to empower the Skid Row population with work that confers the often-denied respect that this community and its members deserve.

As a major part of this exhibition there will be multiple events, including public discussions with key figures of the Skid Row community, musical and dramatic performances and workshops for members of Lamp Community and Downtown Women’s Center. See above for list of events.

Funding assistance for this project has been provided by the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA).

About LAPD:

The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD is a non-profit arts organization that was started in 1985 by activist John Malpede. LAPD’s mission: creating performance work that connects lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD is committed to creating high-quality, challenging performances and artworks that express the realities, hopes and dreams of people who live and work on Skid Row.

About CRA/LA:

CRA/LA (www.crala.org), a public agency, is regulated by the State of California and operates within the City of Los Angeles. It attracts private investment into economically depressed communities to eliminate blight, revitalize older neighborhoods, build housing for all income levels and create and retain employment opportunities. CRA/LA manages 32 redevelopment projects areas and three revitalization areas in seven regions: East Valley, West Valley, Hollywood & Central, Downtown, Eastside, South Los Angeles, and the Harbor.
About CRA/LA Art Program:

CRA/LA has had a long-standing commitment to the arts, recognizing that they play a significant role in the revitalization, growth and sustainability of our neighborhoods. Beginning in the late 1960's, CRA/LA became one of the first public agencies to set the groundwork for other cities creating policies that require developers to invest in art and culture. In the 40 years that we have invested in Downtown LA we have helped create over 100 traditional and contemporary pieces of public art and cultural facility projects. Highlights include the development of the Museum of Contemporary Art, rehabilitation of the historic neon on Broadway's theaters, and many engaging site-specific public art installations in private developments, streetscape improvements and parks.

As the deeply irresponsible U.S Congress does nothing to stem the tremendous collapse of the subprime mortgage industry and help individual homeowners, the fiasco continues to pile up personal tragedies on top of tragedies. People are not only losing their homes in large numbers, but they are also losing the contents of their storage units. Here is a link to a story in today's NY Times:

Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: May 11, 2008

Of particular interest to UNHOUSED is the increasing number of people who are trying to use storage units as temporary shelters. From the article:

A “residential unit” is one where the renter tries to illegally live in the unit. “We used to see one or two residential units a month,” Mr. Reger said. “Now I’m seeing 6 or 8 or 10. At one facility in D.C. the other day, we had three residentials.”

I saw evidence of this in Chicago. There was an elderly man living in a storage unit in the facility where the art group I work with, Temporary Services, has a large locker for storing some of our art work. He had made a partially concealed place to sleep. I think I surprised him when I was leaving the building. I got a glimpse inside his unit and saw that he had clearly been living there.

I spoke on several occasions with clerks who worked at the facility and they had many stories of people trying to make the units into homes. There was one family that would urinate in jars at night, as there were no toilets amongst the storage units, and then dispose of it during the day. He told me he found their mini-apartment filled with places to sleep and these jars of urine.

This is absolutely harrowing and speaks volumes to the terrible lack of affordable housing in the U.S. It is unconscionable that people have to live in this way. This is the brutal truth about free markets and how they chew up people and don't take care of the needs of everyone.

It would have been really great to see some images of peoples' temporary homes with this article, but I imagine it is something that is terribly difficult to document and that the companies that own the storage units don't really want people to know about this. I am going to try and document some of these shelters that people create in storage units, both out of my own curiosity about how people house themselves during housing crises, but also to try and make this more visible.

Mumbai from air + view of Asia's largest slum area - Dharavi

It is difficult to find very much information about the word "slumsploitation." I doubt it gets much use. I first came across it in an excellent article in Mute magazine: "Slumsploitation – The Favela on Film and TV," By Melanie Gilligan.

http://www.metamute.org/en/Slumsploitation-Favela-on-Film-and-TV

Slumsploitation - the exploitation and disempowering of slums and slum dwellers for the entertainment of outsiders - films present favelas, slums, informal settlements, as extremely dangerous places filled with more or less undesirable people who are highly sexualized, and the victims of their respective unjust societies because of where they live. There is also the contradictory glamorization of the violence that exists in these places. These films tend to include a hero from the slum who fights his/her situation and aspires to a middle class exit from the slums or somehow for the salvation of his/her fellow slum dwellers.

This safe consumption of the other of the global slums from afar seems to be expressing itself - in what also can be called slumsploitation - in the surprising number of drive or ride-by home made video recordings of slums that one can find on youtube. They are from all over the world. These videos show slums from the safe distance of a plane, car, or train window. There is often little introduction or narration and we are to understand that just the existence of these places, and the shock that they exist, is the subject matter and narrative.

A search of the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) for "slumsploitation" yielded these results:

Keywords (Approx Matches) (Displaying 9 Results)
1. bumsploitation (1 title - Bum Hunts: Tales from the Bum Cage (2003) (V))
2. nunsploitation (41 titles - Shoot 'Em Up (2007), ...)
3. drugsploitation (1 title - The Pace That Kills (1935))
4. blaxploitation (500 titles - Training Day (2001), ...)
5. sexploitation (274 titles - Showgirls (1995), ...)
6. sexploitation-film (2 titles - Hideout in the Sun (1960), ...)
7. scixploitation (1 title - Sex Galaxy (2008))
8. sexual-exploitation (21 titles - Cruel Intentions (1999), ...)
9. animal-exploitation (9 titles - Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007), ...)

Titles (Approx Matches) (Displaying 7 Results)
1. Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation (2007)
2. That's Sexploitation (1973)
3. VH1 News Presents: Hip Hop Videos - Sexploitation on the Set (2005) (TV)
4. Boxoffice Bonanza of Sexploitation Trailers, Volume II (????)
5. Harry Novak's Boxoffice Bonanza of Sexploitation Trailers, Volume I (1992)
6. Sultan of Sexploitation, King of Camp (1999) (V)
7. Pimp & Ho: Adventures in Queersploitation (2001)

An interesting set of results, but no entry for slumsploitation. However, it gives us a sense of what the word could mean when put in relation to other films that have been designated as somehow exploiting the very people or subjects that they are about.

Films that could be described as slumsploitation:
• Bus 174, directed by José Padilha, 2002
• Carandiru, directed by Hector Babenco, 2003 )(See Melanie Gilligan's article for an explanation of why this film should be included in this list)
• City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002
• City of Men (Telenovela - a spin off of City of God)
• Favela Rising, directed by Matt Mochary & Jeff Zimbalist, 2006
• Lower City, directed by Sérgio Machado, 2005
• Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, 2005

Your help in adding films to this list, and a better articulation of this emerging genre of films, would be greatly appreciated.

Tsotsi, 2005, directed by Gavin Hood, set in a Soweto slum, near Johannesburg, South Africa.

Media portrayals of people who live in "slums" have an impact on how those who live outside of them perceive their inhabitants. Mass media mainly reinforce stereotypes that have very little to do with peoples' actual lives. These stereotypes can have a real impact when people on the outside, who consider themselves decent and sympathetic, fail to support the struggles of slum-dwellers, in part because of manufactured opinions about them (that they are dirty, lazy freeloaders, always committing crimes, etc.). Politicians, private developers, and those who seek to benefit in displacing people who have built their own homes and sections of major cities, benefit from an ignorant populace. Bad media representations misdirect sympathies away from the people who need them the most.

The still emerging international genre, commonly referred to as “slumsploitation,” has a mixed role in how these communities are perceived by the many people who will never actually visit them in person, but only through a trip to the movie theater or by renting a DVD.

I had a first hand experience of peoples’ manufactured attitudes about slum-dwellers repeatedly while staying in Dharavi (Mumbai's largest incremental settlement). I told Mumbaikars and Indians from other cities, whom I met, that I was staying in Dharavi. Their first response was always shock, then disgust, then outright contempt for the people who lived there. When I asked if they had ever visited these, or other areas, and talked to the people who live there, the response was always no. I was warned by one man, on my flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai, that Dharavi was an incredibly dangerous place and that I would have a lot of troubles. His ideas about Dharavi only came from the media, he admitted to me. I found Dharavi to be incredibly safe at all hours. People were friendly and generous. It was when I visited the tourist areas, like Colaba, of the city that I felt the most unsafe.

Tsotsi is intended as a film about one man’s redemption from a brutal life of crime. This film falls on its face immediately failing to create even the smallest amount of sympathy with the main character who is just too fake and too stupid – too inhuman – to believe. This is a combination of bad writing and equally bad acting.

Tsotsi, the title name of the main character, means "thug" we learn very quickly into this abysmal film about a poor, aspiring gangster who lives in the periphery of Johannesburg, South Africa. Tstosi and his gang take the train into central Johannesburg from their ramshackle slum and rob people on the trains. The first victim we see is an older middle class black man. The crew rob the man, and Tsotsi - in an example of the stiff writing of the script is when the film tries to show us just HOW BAD he is - unnecessarily stabs the man to death. This takes away any possibility that we are going to sympathize with Tsotsi. He is a murderer, and a frivolous one at that. Somebody should have explained to the writers how this undermines the premise of their film.

Watching this movie was an endurance test. Not since my early film studies days of sitting through unbelievably tedious video art, have I felt what I was watching to be such a pain in the ass and not worth my time. The plot of this film just doesn’t make sense.

Tsotsi gets in a fight in a bar and brutalizes one of his underlings. He wanders off and finds himself near the heavily fortified home of a middle class couple. A woman pulls up in her nice car and can’t get the automatic gate to work. She gets out of her car and calls for her husband. At this point Tsotsi steals her car. He then realizes that her very young baby is in the back. Thus begin a bunch of ridiculous capers, not intended to be funny (and they aren’t but might have been better if this were made as a comedy), that are difficult to believe.

Slum life is an important context for this film and helps to describe Tsotsi’s character. But this component of the film is handled just as poorly as the rest. I feel ambivalent about what the impact of this film might have been in its native South Africa or on those of us who consume it out of context.

The script is based on a novel, by the same name, by the mighty playwright Athol Fugard, who has done many devastatingly powerful plays some of which have been made into films; “Master Harold and the Boys” is probably one of his best known plays made into a film.

The acting, especially by the main character, is uneven to poor, with supporting characters often outdoing him. It is difficult to believe that Tsotsi won the awards that are boasted on the film's official web site: http://www.tsotsi.com/english/index.php

Equally baffling is the critics' consensus at Rotten Tomato, which gave this film a ridiculously high 81% rating: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tsotsi/

If you are in the mood for slumsploitation, I highly recommend watching Lower City (2005), directed by Sérgio Machado. This film is the complete opposite of Tsotsi in how good the acting, story, and compelling drama are. I will make a post about this movie in the future. I need to watch it a few more times. If you do watch it, make sure you check out the special features to see how intensely the actors and director prepared for shooting this film.

Cidade Baixa (Lower City) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0456899/

I plan on completing a long site report on my trip to Dharavi, Mumbai, India, in the coming month or so. For now, I will post some of the images I took while there with brief annotation that will be developed more in the site report.

I was in Mumbai attending a workshop organized by the amazing folks at Urban Typhoon. More about that in a later post as well.

Dharavi is a massive area in Mumbai made up of informal housing, businesses, and city management. Estimates of the number of people who live there have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people!

Note: click on an image to enlarge, then click again to get a full size image.

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Street scene near the Shivar Guest House, where I was staying, as were many from the Urban Typhoon workshop


Street scene in the Koliwada neighborhood of Dharavi


This street borders Dharavi and is constantly filled with market stalls, pedestrians, and all sorts of vehicles, carts, animals, and more.


This street market takes up two lanes of the road (depicted above) that runs along Dharavi. You can see that businesses and houses are built right up to the edge of the road leaving the road itself as the only space that can be used for markets such as these. There is an amazing abundance in these markets, like the vegetables you can see here.


Koliwada buildings and a rooftop


Dharavi is known to many who live outside it or who visit Mumbai by air, by the seemingly contiguous rooftops that are common in the area.


Remains of a smaller, self-built structure typical of Dharavi architecture, in front of a larger apartment building in the back. These larger buildings are made when owners of buildings, like the one in the front, decide to get together, and finance them as a replacement for the smaller, informal buildings... perhaps in anticipation of official, government "redevelopment" of the area


This image shows a settlement just outside of Dharavi. You can see several levels of building from the informal houses in the front, to the larger apartment buildings of increasing scale behind.


This is along the same street as the image above. You can see a small mosque built on top of one of the buildings.


Animals can be found tethered to poles, carts, or wandering around Dharavi, and greater Mumbai.


Goat on a car


Goats help to reduce the amount of solid, food waste that is generated every day in Dharavi.


Waste handling is a giant problem for Dharavi. Not only does it pile up, but it also affects the way people who don't go there, or who aren't sympathetic to the Dharaviwallas' situation. This was often the first thing people brought up when I asked them what they thought or knew about the area.


Human waste is handled in different ways throughout Dharavi. Here is an open trench that carries human waste, waste water, and garbage out of the area. The facades of these buildings are absolutely amazing!


Here is a relatively closed waste water trench. These are very common throughout the area.


Freshwater comes from wells dug beneath Dharavi, or from private sources that are tapped into and split an unbelievable number of times. Often, the freshwater pipes run just above, or through the waste water channels.


This image is confusing, but I wanted to put it in. It shows the waste water trenches opened up. Several men were cleaning the trenches out by hand. They were pulling roots, paper, plastic, human waste, and other unknown substances out and making piles like these. I saw this maintenance of the waste trenches happening all around Dharavi. This image is from Koliwada.


This is one way of managing excess water. Trenches are dug and filled with small stones.


Here you can see an open trench of waste water, fresh water pipes, and wires providing electricity to the local buildings.


There are no city services provided for Dharavi: no water service, no waste handling (both solid and liquid) and no electricity. Electricity is pirated and shared in truly stunning ways like this hub.


Electricity being shared between these two high rise apartment buildings in Dharavi


These boys bathed in public, then filled containers with water to take home. A lot of bathing takes place in public in Dharavi as there are not spaces in peoples' homes, nor are there many facilities for indoor bathing. People bathe with their clothes on.


There are very few public spaces in Dharavi. This one is in Koliwada and is used for cricket, holiday celebrations, and public gatherings.


This image, and the one that follows, shows the narrow paths between the buildings in Koliwada. This actually helps to keep the houses cool in Mumbai's sweltering, humid climate.




Mumbai is an intensely dense city. No space goes unused. Spaces near the train tracks are off limits to people building houses. This doesn't stop them from using that land for farming. This, and the next two images, is of an urban farm at the Sion train station. The vegetables and herbs raised here were being sold on the street market (depicted above) just less than 100m away.






People in Dharavi work extremely hard, from sun up to sun down, in ways that make those of us familiar with a western "Protestant work ethic" blush with a sense of laziness. There are many small districts in Dharavi. Here is an image from the pottery district. The stereotype of Dharaviwallas as lazy people who want to freeload is so completely false that you know it is not true the minute you step out of Mumbai and into the area.


Men bending metal in an outdoor factory.

http://www.skidrowthemovie.com/

If you want a firsthand account of an UNHOUSED person's life, strike up a conversation when you take him to eat at a local diner. Or buy a bottle of whiskey and share it on a park bench. This is the simplest way to meet someone who you probably have ignored or walked by rapidly because it is too uncomfortable to give him a pittance from your pocket for his survival. Whenever I hear someone complain about panhandling, or homelessness in general, this is usually my first response: "Have you ever talked to someone who lives on the streets to get his story?" The answer has almost always been, "No." I have met several, really amazing men who live on the streets of Chicago and LA just by slowing down, and not being afraid, to listen to what they have to say. Try it sometime. Overcome the fear and hatred you have that is not yours alone, but comes from the culture around you. Why do you have such deep contempt for a person who doesn't have a home?

Films like "Skid Row The Movie" where a famous, well off person pretends to be homeless, are irritating at best. This shit is unnecessary. Go out and get a copy of "Dark Days" or grab a bit torrent of it. It is a respectful, beautiful movie made by Marc Singer, who was himself without a home for at one point, about people living in the tunnels under Penn Station in NY. In "Skid Row The Movie" hip hopper Pras Michael lives on the streets for 9 days. This is enough time to get an introduction to the miserable conditions that we have constructed - society, in this case Los Angelenos, construct these situations as it is in our power to end them by providing support for everyone if we want - for a staggering number of men and women living in LA's Skid Row. Nine days on the streets?! What a fucking joke. I want to see the famous person who decides to spend a year on the streets, cuts himself off from living in a home, any source of money, maybe loses touch with family, and in general descends into the hell that is being without a home in this country. And, he should do it without any cameras until after a full year. Then, maybe the movie would be worth watching.

Please, don't rely on the flimsiness of well-intentioned filmmakers and hip hop stars to tell you that it is fucked up that people live on the streets, dangerous for them, and if everyone could get some badly needed help (even if they made poor life decisions that lead them to the street), they would be off the streets as fast as possible.

I admittedly haven't seen the film, but am ordering a copy right now. I have many deep suspicions about this film given the micro-genre of homeful-person-pretends-to-be-homeless-to-show-us-how-bad-it-is movies. This is one of many films and "hard hitting news reports" that are a part of this micro-genre - people with good or not so good intentions tell the rest of us how bad homelessness is and that we need to pay attention. The recent interview (http://www.alternet.org/movies/82014/?page=entire) of Pras Michael by Alternet gives us a clue that this is more of the same within in this micro-genre. The interview, for the most part, is inane and offers no insights, where an interview with someone living on the streets would provide a great deal more in less space. Why do we need to create these artificial layers of mediation to address the vast inequality that our society relies on to function. If you want to know about housing crises, and people who live on the streets, check out the sidebar and some of the groups, movies, and books that there. Taking action to improve even one person's life is better that sitting and watching movies like this one or numerous other ones like it.

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Here is a previous post about this film and a Chicago sleaze ball journalist, Walter Jacobsen, who pretended to be homeless and then reported on it. It is worth watching for just how condescending and disconnected the man is from the reality of being homeless.

http://unhoused.livejournal.com/12198.html

I plan on posting an extensive, very long report from the Urban Typhoon Workshop in Koliwada-Dharavi. I had initially thought of just writing something brief, but there is so much to tell and say just to begin to give a sense of the context and what happened there, that the short report is already 7 pages long and probably will end up being around 20. Until then... here is a nice little article in the Mumbai Mirror about the workshop and the celebration party at the end of the week.

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The Urban Typhoon event proved that residents themselves know how best to deal with the challenges in their lives.

Blue Frog Leaping
By Rahul Srivastava

Last week Mumbai’s night-club Blue Frog was hit by a storm. Philadelphia-based DJ Paul Devro had whipped up a frenzy that left everyone screaming for more. But it was not just a regular Mumbai weekend. The Blue Frog had leapt over a very high wall that night. Their clientele included special guests from Koliwada-Dharavi who would not have ordinarily stepped into such a space on their own. And not just because of the money question.

That night however, together with their new friends from abroad, India and some from Mumbai, they danced together to create a special cosmopolitan energy the city had not seen in a long time. And they danced to music that evoked other vibrant urban traditions - US Ghetto-tech, Brazilian favela-funk, Argentinean Cumba, UK Grime Rhythms, Jamaican Shanti-bass, Bollywood, and their very own re-mixed Koli-based rhythms, which will soon be heard on every global dance floor.

What made this possible was an unusual event - the Urban Typhoon. Paul Devro was part of a large troupe of artists, architects, planners, media-practitioners and social scientists who had spent a week with the residents of Koliwada-Dharavi to evolve open-ended participatory plans, visions and charters through their conversations and dialogues.

The participants had come from places as far-apart as Lithuania, Chile, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the US and UK. They overcame linguistic and cultural barriers within minutes and forged bonds and friendships with residents of Koliwada through the workshop, to collectively develop pragmatic and people-evolved visions for their future.

This was a different sort of political event. One without rallies and speeches, without the heavy guilt-inducing over-serious mood of the activist. No wonder the residents didn’t want anyone to leave, international, national or local. And they got completely absorbed in the concerns of the workshop itself. During the final day of presentation, Koliwada-wasis walked through each stall and asked critical and penetrating questions.

Yet in Mumbai, everything beyond a point depends on the political arrangements between power and resources. Everyone also knows that eventually only the completely insipid, commercially motivated and anti-people plans are the ones that make the day.

It is easy to dismiss a workshop such as this is as a fairy-tale moment, to see it through cynical eyes.

However, whatever I saw and experienced convinced me more than ever that if you let people look after themselves, things can only get better. And that ordinary residents have the best knowledge about how to deal with the challenges in their lives.

The ideas, visions, questions and challenges that the residents of Koliwada-Dharavi threw up were practical, sensible and far more doable than any fancy top-down plan that the city periodically throws at their face.

All the visiting workshop participants did was organise and complement them with their professional skills. That’s exactly what the approach of the government should be. There’s nothing more or less to the task of setting up a decent life in the city for everyone.

According to Bhau Korde, a Dharavi resident and co-organiser of the workshop, what made him such an enthusiast was the simplicity of the vision - clearly expressed in the words of Matias Echanove, the chief organiser and visualiser of Urban Typhoon: “It’s all about trusting people and what they are capable of. Just try it once to check it out.”

Indeed. Let’s do it. Mumbaikars have nothing to lose.

Link to the article