Squats

Typology

(from an interview of the co-founder of Communa with the journal EnCommuns)

Maxime Zait:

"To simplify, there are two types of squats. There are artist squats, where people with a high level of cultural capital do this because it’s cool and they can afford to. Then there are migrant squats or underground squats, which may have political demands but sometimes just seek discretion and peace. For this second category, they would love to go through us. They don’t want to squat. For them, squatting is a state of necessity. They would prefer to have more structured support, to have buildings brought up to standard, to have security of tenure. Squatting is extremely precarious. Among the homeless people we house across our sites, some were previously in squats, and they are far happier now to have a compliant apartment, to know they can stay for three years, to have their rights restored, to receive the RIS (social integration income) and, from that income, pay a “rent” three times lower than market prices. It’s a way of reintegrating people into society, and that is exactly what these publics want.

As for the first category—the people who “slum it” in squats because they see it as a life experience—I don’t begrudge them that; I did it too. But when people claim that temporary occupation rips squatters away from their spaces or forces them to pay, that’s not true. People who squat because they can’t afford anything else and because they are politically opposed to property—we leave them to get on with their project, which I find very interesting. However, over the long term, they often end up losing, because you don’t see squatters occupying property indefinitely. Unless they move toward the models we’ll be discussing in a moment, based on anti-speculation or collective ownership, where people pay.

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: So in your view, the opposition between squatting and temporary occupation is a false debate?

Maxime Zaït: The fact that people pay for space is not the most interesting question. The real questions are: how much? Why? For whom? We’re glad that the sites we occupy are safe and brought up to code. The fact that people pay something for that is not a bad thing in itself. Paying is not the problem. The issue is avoiding exorbitant rents. The problem today is not that we pay to access space—we pay for plenty of goods and services. My fight is not that everything should be free. Sometimes people conflate the right to housing with free housing. The real question is how we organize access to that right. Temporary occupation is sometimes accused of contributing to gentrification. You yourselves have often mentioned the question of mixed publics. Is that mix real? How can we make it work? I think programming is a key issue, as is local anchoring from the very start of a project. But above all, I think we need to take a step back on the question of gentrification."