World Homeless Action Day 2013

Today on October 10th, World Homeless Action Day 2013, San Francisco Homes Not Jails has chosen to highlight two egregious examples of wasted space in a city with about 7500 houseless and approximately 35,000 vacant housing units, and to remember and celebrate the active creation of autonomous resistant spaces in them.

Homes Not Jails is a squatters collective built upon mutual aid. We expropriate houses left vacant and abandoned and convert them into safe homes for those disenfranchised, exploited and abandoned by capitalism. We cannot remain complacent and watch these buildings lay empty while thousands live and die on the streets outside of them.

1950 Mission Street
The city government and San Francisco Unified School District have sat on this empty land, formerly the Phoenix School, for 12 years while new luxury condos rise around it. In the heart of the Mission, the front lines of gentrification in the city, police constantly harass those sleeping on the sidewalk on this block while rich tech workers are actively pushing out the working class families of color that have lived here for generations. There are 2,200 homeless children enrolled in San Francisco public schools, while the city keeps this land empty and locked up behind a fence.

888 Turk
Owned by the Archdiocese of San Francisco, previously a free clinic, school, and apartment building, this quarter city block has been left empty for over 6 years. When it was reclaimed and temporarily turned into a community center on April 1st and May 1st, 2012 by the San Francisco Commune, the Church falsely asserted that the space would be utilized in short order. A year and a half later the space still remains vacant and The District Attorney's office is still prosecuting nineteen of those arrested. The church is land-banking, merely waiting to sell them after property values have increased, taking advantage of their tax-exempt status. To the church, these buildings are nothing more than an investment, a tool of capital, and they are more than willing to enforce that view by calling for state repression of anyone who acts otherwise.

Both of these sites are former open occupations, where people demonstrated their strength and ability to solve their problems through acting directly together. During these actions, they attempted to create and hold their own autonomous space despite and against the dictates of the Church, the State, and Capital, who all benefit from homelessness and empty properties. These institutions use police violence in order to maintain this untenable situation.

While Homes Not Jails has historically celebrated World Homeless Action Day with open, public occupations of vacant homes, in the wake of increasing state repression and the disappearance of affordable housing from San Francisco, we have decided our efforts are best spent in our day-to-day struggles to help people survive. For us, every day is Homeless Action Day.