City-funded activist group teaches homeless how to invade apartments

It’s breaking and entering for dummies.

Picture the Homeless, a Bronx nonprofit that has received at least $240,000 in taxpayer money in the last five years, is giving a crash course on squatting — and city-owned buildings are a prime target.

Two weeks ago, board member Andres Perez held a teach-in on how to wrest “control” of vacant apartments. He called it “homesteading.”

“The best time to enter a building is in the late hours,” he advised a group of about 20, who gathered in front of the half-empty East New York housing complex Arlington Village.

Yeah this has been going on for a while...  

On many real estate websites now days you will see things like "property is OCCUPIED and being sold only for the land value"

get up early and go surf - it'll make that hangover go away and/or make the workday more tolerable :)

So you come back from vacation and some bums have taken over your house and you are ok with that?

You can whine about things. Old men are good at it. Bob invented whining during the Great Depression. 

Have a surf. It's good for you. 

How is this thread back on the front page 5 months after the fact? 

In a city like New York, where demand for apartments far exceeds supply, the fact that vacant apartments even exist can only signify one thing: market failure.

No one is advocating for the homeless to move into people's homes that are currently occupied, but rather the massive numbers of homes that are empty while good honest folk wallow in the street. I really don't see the problem with a homeless person moving into a foreclosed home, for instance, the banks already recouped their losses from the public.

One of the biggest problems in NYC is the governments involvement in housing. At present, a renter must make a yearly salary of 40X the monthly rent, and have a cosigner who makes 80X the monthly rent. A one bedroom in the BX, even in the worst parts, will be $1,400+. So, a young adult would have to make more than 50k per year and have a cosigner in the top income bracket. That is not a realistic possibility for most people to live in one of the most crimed ridden areas of the country. This makes it hard for employers to find people who can work at a low wage, so the price of products increases, which in turn raises the cost of living virtually unaffordable for low income people.

Meanwhile, public housing is offered to those in need, yet is not viewed as something temporary solution by most inhabitants of the NYCHA.  Furthermore, people in public housing are given the incentive to work off the books: if they work on the books, a quarter of their income is garnished as rent, yet if they sell drugs or bootleg loosies, they live rent free. The demand for subsidized units far exceeds supply: there have been cases of women faking domestic violence in order to jump the line in NYCHA placement.

Now, new developments are required to have a certain percentage of their units for middle and low income people, yet the odds of winning one of the lotteries are not unlike a state lottery: one should not bank on it. If a person is lucky enough to be place in a low income unit in a new development, they will sublet that shit in an instant and retire as an upper income person in Florida.

Picture the homeless advocates commandeering city and bankowned properties that are otherwise unoccupied, i.e. those being held idle to the detriment of the surrounding community. Ideally, the banks would be smart and come to an agreement with the squatters in exchange for monetary or sexual compensation.

In summary, don't move to New York unless you make more than 150k a year, and you will still be poor. And the surf sucks.