Some Personal Observations On The Focus E15 Protests

[Zaune]

Their Facebook page

A good summary of what's going on in rt.com

Basicaly, a group of single parents who got forced out of emergency council housing by budget cuts have pried open an allegedly uninhabitable apartment block to draw some attention to the desperate housing shortage.

I've been here since yesterday lunchtime, and a few things jump out at me:

* There are two entire tower blocks standing empty (or nearly so), not just a couple of little apartment buildings like the one in the picture. Nobody seems to know why but apart from loaning some of the top floor apartments to the BBC for Olympic events filming they've been abandoned for several years. (I've heard rumours that there might be an asbestos contamination problem, but if there is the council are showing a marked disinclination to do anything about it.)

* People were unironically ooh-ing and ah-ing at my decision to take a ninety-minute train ride to come see what was what down here, like I was a visiting delegation of sympathisers from New York or something. This should tell you everything you need to know about public transport in this country, and go a long way towards explaining why we're in this mess.

* The Evening Standard are complaining about the protest being 'hijacked' by 'activist groups', which is utter cobblers; some people from existing homeless advocacy organisations and Occupy veterans have shown up in sympathy but the original 29 are still a majority at the meetings.

* There's a bunch of council-employed private security guards hanging around, none of whom seem very interested in being more of a nuisance than they're contractually obliged to be; I guess it can't be much fun renting in London on their wages either. Likewise the police.

* Stand-up comedy is an amazingly effective way of pulling in members of the public, even if the opening act was a bit crap.

[General Zod]

We've got a similar problem in NYC where there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 24k apartments that could potentially be developed into middle and low income housing, but the city doesn't want to make the effort because they'd rather develop for the high-end.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/ ... -warehouse