transcendentalhobo
Well-known member
Hi everyone--I've been on and off of this website a few times over the years, so I dragged my feet doing a re-introduction. But seeing as StP will be closing shop soon, here it goes.
I started Traveling by myself when I was 19 in May of 2000. I like the idea of being a semi-retired Traveler, a concept I've borrowed from Matt Derrick on here, as my Travels have slowed down over the years. But after about a year and three months spent mostly in Olympia, Washington I should be headed back to the midwest soon.
Long story short, in what may be the height of my Travels, circa 2011-'15 or so, I met Matt squatting in Oakland, California. I've edited a couple 'zines about that part of my life. One of them is about to go out of print as Little Black Cart is stopping publishing at the end of the year. Below I'll paste my article from it, and would appreciate any feedback as I'm thinking about getting a second edition together for another print project.
Thoughts on Squatting in the San Francisco Bay Area
The 1970s to 2015
As I hitchhiked, rode freight trains and walked from the White Castle Timber Sale Blockade near Myrtle Creek in Oregon to the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 2013, I had two objectives in mind. One was to work with the Slingshot Collective on the 114th issue of their newspaper, and the other was to squat in Oakland.
As I gazed upon the North Star from an open field trying to fall asleep after a failed early evening attempt to catch rides south on the 5 somewhere south of Myrtle Creek and north of Ashland, Oregon, then again two days later from an open boxcar that must have been heading east before going south from Dunsmuir to Roseville, California, I thought of escaped slaves following the North Star to freedom. This gave my trip an even more magical than normal feeling.
Both of my goals had roots in a brief visit of mine to the East Bay in the fall of 2010. I had come to Berkeley to teach a weaving class at the Long Haul Infoshop through the East Bay Free School. I was working a farm job in Sheepranch, and was offered hospitality at a housing co-op, Fort Awesome. All these sorts of things were common place to me by that time, until the person who gave me directions to Ft. Awesome from the Long Haul made a point of saying she used to live there when she would pay rent, but now she was a squatter. I couldn't help but be intrigued, though I didn't ask anything about this since I had housing elsewhere, and we'd already talked a fair amount about other things.
That day I also visited another Berkeley housing co-op, the Cat Haus, to talk with one of its members who was both a co-founder of Slingshot and the Infoshop, and was still active with both of them. That was when I got the sense that getting involved with Slingshot seemed like a fun and easy thing to do, and I went on to submit a few articles in the next couple of years from out of town, two of which were published. Co-ops and Infoshops had been mainstays of my Travels since 2002, but the Lower Case Collective in Logan Square, Chicago had been the only squat I'd ever been to and it was a unique case in other ways.
As I Traveled elsewhere and occasionally read Slingshot, I'd sometimes see articles on squatting in the East Bay such as Questions of Race & Resistance - Oakland House Squat Evicted by Heather Wreckage and Taking Space by Samara Steele. I had only recently left Cali for Arizona when I read Wreckage's article, and was able to have good conversations with comrades from the Dry River Radical Resource Center and No More Deaths about the situation and its politics. Personally, I was pretty bummed about what I read on a few levels, and was glad I wasn't around for the Safe House's eviction that she described. I felt like the author was very brave to admit that some of the squatters had acted in a racist fashion, but I felt like it was false dichotomy to write that the Black family who owned the house was being racist, and this reminded me of accusations of reverse racism that I've heard and read elsewhere that drove me nuts.
I also had some apprehension because of gentrification in Oakland, which was also a big problem in Chicago and large part of why I wasn't spending much time there anymore, after over seven years on and off primarily in Uptown.
But after a chaotic series of events in the summer of 2013, I found myself headed back to the East Bay after all. To make matters more interesting, Slingshot #113, which I had read in Portland en route to the White Castle Timber Sale Blockade, included articles on squatting not only houses such as Fava Bean Haus and Hot Mess in Oakland, but even a storefront being used as a lecture hall and music venue also in Oakland, RCA, and land in general on the Albany Bulb. Though I wanted to squat in Oakland, I hoped to check out the Bulb to at least write about it for the floundering editorial collective I was a part of which printed the newspaper, People Not Profit, and maintained a website.
Through an old Traveler Friend from Chicago living in the North Bay, I got back in touch with a mutual comrade who we both knew from Chi, but had moved to Oakland. He put me up briefly before suggesting I start to cook Food Not Bombs (FNB) on Thursdays, where I could meet a friend of his who was a squatter. This turned out to be the second time that year I ended up staying at a collective house of some sort through FNB.
Often mocked as politically juvenile, I maintain FNB can be critical infrastructure precisely because it generally, simultaneously decentralizes this sort of information along with its stated political values of free food, non-violence and consensus decision making. Even as I write this, I continue to try to Food Not Bomb at least twice a week when I'm in the Bay Area, and it's something I seek out as I Travel.
I only stayed at the first squat I visited in Oakland for about a week because it was pretty full. But I had another great Chitown re-connect there, and the comrade who welcomed me in brought me to Hydra House, a new squat at the time. Hydra turned out to be my home for the most part when I was in the Bay Area for the next year and a half or so.
Hydra was the third of three squats to come out of the Stay Away (AKA Fava Bean Haus) after it was evicted, the figurative third head growing back after decapitation. This sort of naming process alone could clue anyone in who knows me well as to how I fit right in even though most of my housemates were inclined towards the whole Drunk Punk thing and I'm fairly square for a Traveler.
Like many other places I've stayed over the years, even though I didn't have too much in common with my housemates at Hydra, they respected my politics and work outside the House and they made me an honorary member even though there weren't any rooms left, nor unclaimed space in the yard. This enabled me to work on Slingshot #114, help send out the 2014 Organizer, write for #115, do artwork for the 2015 Organizer and work on #118 among other things such as going out to the Albany Bulb a few times, and providing a place for rest and camaraderie in the Bay Area for about a year and a half of comings and goings to and from Eugene, Oregon to Flagstaff, Black Mesa/Big Mountain and Tucson, Arizona.
So much more happened in that time, and many squatters from Oakland participated in demonstrations, worked in various organizations, made music and other arts, and none of this was even remotely new!
When asked about squatting, the average person in the U$ probably thinks of it as a European thing, or perhaps something from the 1980s Lower East Side of New York City. But as I found out much to my horror, while reading a U$ history textbook, squatters were a very important part of colonization. A very in depth account of this can be found in An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.
I couldn't help but feel like there was a parallel here with the role of squatters with gentrification in Oakland. But writing of the Bay Area in her Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States, Hannah Dobbz wrote:
"Homes Not Jails drew from the practices of its regional predecessors: the White Panthers of the '70s and Squatters Anonymous of the '80s. The White Panthers sprang from the working class in the Haight/Ashbury. They took over buildings, kicked out junkies, and then barricaded entrances and armed themselves. Much like the Black Panthers, they started food-distribution programs and created a base of support for their long-term occupations. Squatters Anonymous, mostly composed of middle-class youth, was known instead for its mass public squatting demonstrations in 1982 and 1983, where they garnered the attention of hundreds of spectators, reporters, and police."
Also, from what I understand, the Black Panthers frequently squatted the spaces that they used for their survival programs in Oakland. I've never seen this documented anywhere, and think it's an incredibly important detail if it is true.
Some other historical examples of squatting in the Bay Area I've found include articles in Direct Action by the Livermore Action Group in an issue printed in preparation for the 1984 Democratic National Convention (DNC) that met in San Francisco. Writers connected U$ military spending to homelessness, and documented squats from the city and Berkeley, along with elsewhere such as in Latin America, Europe and Asia.
Similarly in Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 2, May 1990, there's an account of a brutal eviction by police in Berkeley of Barrington Hall in March that year. It had been squatted after the University Students' Cooperative Association (USCA) had voted to close it down in November 1989.
The word out on the streets is that many Berkeley radicals at the time had gotten their teeth sharp during the Anti-Apartheid movement, and not only expected police violence at demonstrations, but were prepared to defend themselves. I've also heard that this co-op defense is directly linked to the struggle for Hellarity (AKA Comedia) and against gentrification many years later. A new article with this sort of context would be amazing!
It seems like there is a fair amount of printed material floating around about squatting in the Bay Area. Though Slingshot is a great source for some of it, perhaps a reprints from other, older periodicals and new reflective pieces by squatters young and old, and positive, negative or both could make an interesting book with wide appeal. If you are interested, please write acardweaver at protonmail dot com!
I started Traveling by myself when I was 19 in May of 2000. I like the idea of being a semi-retired Traveler, a concept I've borrowed from Matt Derrick on here, as my Travels have slowed down over the years. But after about a year and three months spent mostly in Olympia, Washington I should be headed back to the midwest soon.
Long story short, in what may be the height of my Travels, circa 2011-'15 or so, I met Matt squatting in Oakland, California. I've edited a couple 'zines about that part of my life. One of them is about to go out of print as Little Black Cart is stopping publishing at the end of the year. Below I'll paste my article from it, and would appreciate any feedback as I'm thinking about getting a second edition together for another print project.
Thoughts on Squatting in the San Francisco Bay Area
The 1970s to 2015
As I hitchhiked, rode freight trains and walked from the White Castle Timber Sale Blockade near Myrtle Creek in Oregon to the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 2013, I had two objectives in mind. One was to work with the Slingshot Collective on the 114th issue of their newspaper, and the other was to squat in Oakland.
As I gazed upon the North Star from an open field trying to fall asleep after a failed early evening attempt to catch rides south on the 5 somewhere south of Myrtle Creek and north of Ashland, Oregon, then again two days later from an open boxcar that must have been heading east before going south from Dunsmuir to Roseville, California, I thought of escaped slaves following the North Star to freedom. This gave my trip an even more magical than normal feeling.
Both of my goals had roots in a brief visit of mine to the East Bay in the fall of 2010. I had come to Berkeley to teach a weaving class at the Long Haul Infoshop through the East Bay Free School. I was working a farm job in Sheepranch, and was offered hospitality at a housing co-op, Fort Awesome. All these sorts of things were common place to me by that time, until the person who gave me directions to Ft. Awesome from the Long Haul made a point of saying she used to live there when she would pay rent, but now she was a squatter. I couldn't help but be intrigued, though I didn't ask anything about this since I had housing elsewhere, and we'd already talked a fair amount about other things.
That day I also visited another Berkeley housing co-op, the Cat Haus, to talk with one of its members who was both a co-founder of Slingshot and the Infoshop, and was still active with both of them. That was when I got the sense that getting involved with Slingshot seemed like a fun and easy thing to do, and I went on to submit a few articles in the next couple of years from out of town, two of which were published. Co-ops and Infoshops had been mainstays of my Travels since 2002, but the Lower Case Collective in Logan Square, Chicago had been the only squat I'd ever been to and it was a unique case in other ways.
As I Traveled elsewhere and occasionally read Slingshot, I'd sometimes see articles on squatting in the East Bay such as Questions of Race & Resistance - Oakland House Squat Evicted by Heather Wreckage and Taking Space by Samara Steele. I had only recently left Cali for Arizona when I read Wreckage's article, and was able to have good conversations with comrades from the Dry River Radical Resource Center and No More Deaths about the situation and its politics. Personally, I was pretty bummed about what I read on a few levels, and was glad I wasn't around for the Safe House's eviction that she described. I felt like the author was very brave to admit that some of the squatters had acted in a racist fashion, but I felt like it was false dichotomy to write that the Black family who owned the house was being racist, and this reminded me of accusations of reverse racism that I've heard and read elsewhere that drove me nuts.
I also had some apprehension because of gentrification in Oakland, which was also a big problem in Chicago and large part of why I wasn't spending much time there anymore, after over seven years on and off primarily in Uptown.
But after a chaotic series of events in the summer of 2013, I found myself headed back to the East Bay after all. To make matters more interesting, Slingshot #113, which I had read in Portland en route to the White Castle Timber Sale Blockade, included articles on squatting not only houses such as Fava Bean Haus and Hot Mess in Oakland, but even a storefront being used as a lecture hall and music venue also in Oakland, RCA, and land in general on the Albany Bulb. Though I wanted to squat in Oakland, I hoped to check out the Bulb to at least write about it for the floundering editorial collective I was a part of which printed the newspaper, People Not Profit, and maintained a website.
Through an old Traveler Friend from Chicago living in the North Bay, I got back in touch with a mutual comrade who we both knew from Chi, but had moved to Oakland. He put me up briefly before suggesting I start to cook Food Not Bombs (FNB) on Thursdays, where I could meet a friend of his who was a squatter. This turned out to be the second time that year I ended up staying at a collective house of some sort through FNB.
Often mocked as politically juvenile, I maintain FNB can be critical infrastructure precisely because it generally, simultaneously decentralizes this sort of information along with its stated political values of free food, non-violence and consensus decision making. Even as I write this, I continue to try to Food Not Bomb at least twice a week when I'm in the Bay Area, and it's something I seek out as I Travel.
I only stayed at the first squat I visited in Oakland for about a week because it was pretty full. But I had another great Chitown re-connect there, and the comrade who welcomed me in brought me to Hydra House, a new squat at the time. Hydra turned out to be my home for the most part when I was in the Bay Area for the next year and a half or so.
Hydra was the third of three squats to come out of the Stay Away (AKA Fava Bean Haus) after it was evicted, the figurative third head growing back after decapitation. This sort of naming process alone could clue anyone in who knows me well as to how I fit right in even though most of my housemates were inclined towards the whole Drunk Punk thing and I'm fairly square for a Traveler.
Like many other places I've stayed over the years, even though I didn't have too much in common with my housemates at Hydra, they respected my politics and work outside the House and they made me an honorary member even though there weren't any rooms left, nor unclaimed space in the yard. This enabled me to work on Slingshot #114, help send out the 2014 Organizer, write for #115, do artwork for the 2015 Organizer and work on #118 among other things such as going out to the Albany Bulb a few times, and providing a place for rest and camaraderie in the Bay Area for about a year and a half of comings and goings to and from Eugene, Oregon to Flagstaff, Black Mesa/Big Mountain and Tucson, Arizona.
So much more happened in that time, and many squatters from Oakland participated in demonstrations, worked in various organizations, made music and other arts, and none of this was even remotely new!
When asked about squatting, the average person in the U$ probably thinks of it as a European thing, or perhaps something from the 1980s Lower East Side of New York City. But as I found out much to my horror, while reading a U$ history textbook, squatters were a very important part of colonization. A very in depth account of this can be found in An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.
I couldn't help but feel like there was a parallel here with the role of squatters with gentrification in Oakland. But writing of the Bay Area in her Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States, Hannah Dobbz wrote:
"Homes Not Jails drew from the practices of its regional predecessors: the White Panthers of the '70s and Squatters Anonymous of the '80s. The White Panthers sprang from the working class in the Haight/Ashbury. They took over buildings, kicked out junkies, and then barricaded entrances and armed themselves. Much like the Black Panthers, they started food-distribution programs and created a base of support for their long-term occupations. Squatters Anonymous, mostly composed of middle-class youth, was known instead for its mass public squatting demonstrations in 1982 and 1983, where they garnered the attention of hundreds of spectators, reporters, and police."
Also, from what I understand, the Black Panthers frequently squatted the spaces that they used for their survival programs in Oakland. I've never seen this documented anywhere, and think it's an incredibly important detail if it is true.
Some other historical examples of squatting in the Bay Area I've found include articles in Direct Action by the Livermore Action Group in an issue printed in preparation for the 1984 Democratic National Convention (DNC) that met in San Francisco. Writers connected U$ military spending to homelessness, and documented squats from the city and Berkeley, along with elsewhere such as in Latin America, Europe and Asia.
Similarly in Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 2, May 1990, there's an account of a brutal eviction by police in Berkeley of Barrington Hall in March that year. It had been squatted after the University Students' Cooperative Association (USCA) had voted to close it down in November 1989.
The word out on the streets is that many Berkeley radicals at the time had gotten their teeth sharp during the Anti-Apartheid movement, and not only expected police violence at demonstrations, but were prepared to defend themselves. I've also heard that this co-op defense is directly linked to the struggle for Hellarity (AKA Comedia) and against gentrification many years later. A new article with this sort of context would be amazing!
It seems like there is a fair amount of printed material floating around about squatting in the Bay Area. Though Slingshot is a great source for some of it, perhaps a reprints from other, older periodicals and new reflective pieces by squatters young and old, and positive, negative or both could make an interesting book with wide appeal. If you are interested, please write acardweaver at protonmail dot com!
