Over the past several weeks, residents of the Ethelred Estate – a 900-unit housing estate situated just south of the Thames river in the London area of Vauxhall – have been mobilizing to resist the government’s sell-off of their estate to a housing association. This “stock transfer” of public housing to a housing association has become a common story in England since the government began privatizing public housing in the 1980s. Today, local governments are continuing the trend by using the government’s austerity measures as a justification for selling off their estates to registered social landlords. And tenants here at the Ethelred Estate know exactly what that means: higher rent prices, less secure tenancies in the long-term and for many, displacement and the destruction of their community.

The above cartoon is by “Tim” for Defend Council Housing. The caption reads “It’s a bargain but you’ll have to make some minor changes – like the tenants.” There is a for sale sign on the estate.

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Below are three very different dipatches from friends in London about what’s going on in the streets and in the media:

• DEPTFORD UNITED, a Lewisham activist.

• ANDREW SANCHEZ, an anthropologist.

• DAVID HARVEY, the well-known radical geographer.

DEPTFORD UNITED

The mass media reports are, as usual, not telling the whole story. The latest developments appear to be a result of a combination of factors; policing, state racism, unemployment, poverty, lack of opportunities, the increasing cycle of desperation which so many people find themselves in and of course the public sector cuts. I read in Socialist Worker online that one witness saw someone looting nappies and toilet rolls.

All of this needs to be put in some perspective. Apparently there was some looting in our local High St. but this was unconfirmed, I went to take a look–there had been no looting but I believe there was some looting in the centre of the borough. There has clearly been some disorder, burning of cars, some buildings and some looting etc. at various locations across London & some other British cities. Terrible for those people burnt out above stores, small shopkeepers affected and so on but affecting relatively small numbers of people. Disorder appears to involve relatively small numbers of young people at present. The mass media have been hyping up a disorder situation in some streets in some boroughs into “mayhem in borough x” as if the whole of borough x is affected. Disorder broke out about a mile away from me so some bloke said “don’t go up there this afternoon mate!” as he was calmly walking along the road to probably get a pint of milk or something like that. Unless it generalises into clear political demands over the next 2 days I think it will fizzle out. What counts now is justice for the murdered man’s family and social justice for the rest of us.

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Today is the premier of the movie The Help, which places African American domestic workers at the center of a major motion picture – a first for Hollywood. It’s not every day that the stories of those who usually remain invisible move to the center of the screen.

But there’s another story, told in the above 2-minute video by the National Domestic Workers Alliance.  Fifty years after the stories told in the Hollywood film, a workforce of over 2.5 million domestic workers go to work every day to take care of the most precious elements of their employers’ lives – their homes and families. But today, domestic workers still remain an unprotected workforce, without access to basic rights that other workers take for granted. Mostly women of color, far too few domestic workers receive overtime pay, meal and rest breaks, sick leave or vacation. And far too many of them work for less than minimum wage.  Too little has changed.

Support the National Domestic Workers Alliance campaign for respect, recognition, and labor standards for all domestic workers, and all of us win.

And for you movie lovers, here is the trailer for The Help.

Check out a critique of The Help from our friends at Colorlines; and remember that history is a debate.

Is the lack of recreational space making us fatter? Probably. (Among other things)

Americans are getting fatter every day. I’m sure there’s a statistic out there pointing to how every x number of minutes, a person somewhere out in America is determined to be obese. Despite the fact that the City and County of Los Angeles are vast, there is a serious lack of parks to ensure that people have spaces to create community, stay active, and most importantly, stay healthy. Obviously, the problem of obesity in the United States, and especially in communities of color, will not be resolved by simply creating more spaces for recreation, as access to fresh, affordable food is also a key factor, but it would sure help if people in Los Angeles, and other urban cities throughout the country had places to run, walk and play.

In the meantime, as there is less and less available land in Los Angeles for parks, people that are able to get have easy access to open space (and can stay healthier) are those with large yards (keep in mind  that about 60% of City of LA residents are renters), can afford a gym membership of some sort, or are fortunate enough to live near open space (there’s very few of us).

As a kid growing up in South Los Angeles, it was much easier for me to get to Popeye’s and McDonald’s than to Rancho Cienega Park, which was about 4 long blocks from my house, but I had to walk across the train tracks (where the Exposition Line will soon run) and walk Exposition Blvd, where you found a wide assortment of furniture and trash dumped before you got to the park. Keep in mind, the 1990s were a tough time in South LA (i.e. 92′ Civil Unrest and and subsequent years of blight).

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Estate
by Fugitive Images, Paul Hallam, Victor Buchli, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson, Tristan Fennell
Paperback, 152 pages
Published September 24th 2010
Please buy direct from Myrdle Court Press
ISBN: 0956353924

This is an incredible book that will move you deeply, even if the true meaning of home and the trauma of losing it hasn’t been burnt into you by life itself. As someone who has experienced eviction and poverty and loss, I confess I have strong feelings about how people write about it, document it, photograph it. But here it is done with a beauty, love, and respect that comes closer to capturing the many shades of what it means and how it is experienced than almost anything I have read. There is no sentimentalization here, no glorification of the working class or a home that after years of landlord neglect has become much less than anyone would wish. Instead it is a deeply felt exploration of meaning from many angles, a teasing out across perspectives, a contextualization of loss and change through words and images and theory.

My favourite section is the first one by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johannson, the experience of living on Hackney’s Haggerston West Estate and watching it slowly emptying of people, introducing the incredible series of photographs from Haggerston and Kingsland Estates, with captions that add another level of depth to what the images make so vivid. Followed by a more literary piece by Paul Hallam, exploring estates in the plural and the singular, winding around the meaning and making of place and poverty, extracting quotes from residents that I confess made me shed a tear or two on the tube. There is much to ponder in Victor Buchli’s Archeology of the Recent Past, and a clear contextualization of the particular within the broader history of Britain’s social housing by Cristina Cerulli.

They come together in a thought-provoking, moving whole. No one can ever have the last, the final, the entire say of what estates mean to those who live in them, what it is like to live in them, what it is like to lose them. That is the point. Estate is simply a gift to those who read it, the gift of a view, a taste, an experience that will make you think and feel deeply.