The War for Living SpaceSpatial Deconcentration
"Spatial Deconcentration" is a US military term for what is an easily understandable concept. It represents the process through which poor people and the debt-ridden "working class," particularly African and Latino communities, are driven from the urban centers of America and "relocated" and "reconcentrated" into even more crowded living conditions, shelters, and private prisons. The means by which this resettlement is implemented are varied and include arson, diminished "fire protection," state sponsored drug-running, police terror, bank redlining, phony "vacate" and demolition orders, perpetual "rent" increases and "legal" evictions. Cut-backs of essential services in the targeted neighborhoods is the general background to a veritable war of attrition against the poor, who are simultaneously stigmatized by the corporate white media and government "think tanks" as "criminals," the "underclass," or worse.More benevolently, the state offers the people housing "somewhere else." They are given the "freedom to choose" to be "voluntarily segregated," dispersed, disoriented, disenfranchised in smaller, less "dangerous" housing "clusters" in the "suburbs," where the white middle class neighborhoods and their local bosses have already designated a suitable "backyard" for the urban refugees, who represent a material source of "human capital" to "law," "homeless," "psychiatric," and "correction" agencies which proliferate in these areas.
The process of spatial deconcentration is in reality the same "hispanic and negro removal" of the 60s, the same "displacement" and "planned shrinkage" of the 70s and 80s, but with one major difference. Whereas most previous discussion on the part of otherwise informed scholars regarding the roots of displacement inevitably conclude with some form of economic motive, e.g. "the privatistic ideology that has dominated housing policy," (Squires, 1994; also Smith, 1996), the process of spatial deconcentration forces us to look at motives centered around militaristic/police logistics of social control, founded upon the racist ideology of white supremacy, an ideology, a faith, a need, which rules the rulers.
The strategy or "logistics" of spatial deconcentration is a central tenet of the new permanent state repression, a modern form of "unconventional war" against US civilians, particularly the poor, whose closely knit neighborhoods threaten always to become resistance communities. The plan is literally of military origin; its motives are derived from a need on the part of the corporate white elite for increased social control, for more "law and order." This need is in turn based upon a fear of rebellion from "below." Accordingly, the oppressor wants to execute popular resistance pre-emptively, before the rebellion has a chance to grow, all the while arming itself to the teeth in order to protect itself and its profits.
The "human costs" of spatial deconcentration are immense. They reflect the suffering inflicted on the poor in an elite driven "class struggle from above." "There is a remarkable parallel between the situation of homeless persons in the United States now and that of slaves in the pre-Civil War South." Establishing that the "homeless are those whose life on the streets or need for shelter in public facilities is primarily due to economic upheaval," it is medically obvious that "homelessness indisputably causes a great deal of physical illness," and that it would "be justifiable to look on homelessness as a remediable condition of the environment that places a numerically large and growing portion of the urban poverty population at high health risk. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a socially defined risk factor that is of greater consequence for a person's physical well-being." And further, "the shelter system itself may well abet the transmission of infectious and communicable diseases." In fact, "homeless men die some 20 or so years earlier than they should given normal life expectancies." Presently, in New York City, 50% of homeless people are families. "A study in NYC revealed the precipitating causes of family homelessness to be 52% from doubling-up, 27% from eviction by landlord, 14% because of unsafe building conditions, and 7% other." Finally, "empirical and theoretical analyses strongly imply that sharply rising levels of violent death, intensification of deviant behaviors implicated in the spread of AIDS, and the pattern of the AIDS outbreak itself, have been determined, by the outcomes of a program of planned shrinkage[italics added] directed against African-American and Hispanic communities, and implemented through systematic and continual denial of municipal services--particularly fire extinguishment resources--essential for maintaining urban levels of population density and ensuring community stability."
"On the ground" the state seeks a deeper social control, a spatial control, intensifying its assault on the body and psyche of the people. It seeks to disenfranchise, destabilize, disperse, disempower, and disrupt poor people's collective self-organization by way of an attack at the base, "where we live," our homes, our schools, our hospitals, our parks. Indeed, the war is for living space! Open, "abandoned," even "private" space has become, in places like New York City, contested terrain, a terrain congested with masses of homeless, underhoused, underemployed, alienated, angry, strong visionary people, ready to "take matters into their own hands." And that is why the neo-liberals and their fascist twins echo the criminalization of squatting. Squatting, or practical self-help housing, direct action for survival, is poison to the state's plan. Actualizing the "human right" to survive, to be treated non-violently, along with the "right" to a home, is what squatting is. Its actuality, the taking of a place to live, to be, is in effect indistinguishable from the "right" to do so. The act generates the "right" by making it real. "Seize-ing the Land" gets at the root of the oppressor's power, setting up popular, grass-roots counter-power. For example, taking possession of abandoned buildings, land, storefronts, clandestinely and openly, throughout Harlem (which endured a loss of more than one third its people in the 70s-233,000 in 1960, 122,000 by 1980) would ensure the ability of the present community to defend itself against these latest plans, creating a wave of anti-displacement strategies, tactics, and actions, including but nor limited to squatting, which would evolve into new struggles for decent "affordable" housing, healthcare, schools, an end to militarist police oppression, etc. Ultimately, the fight for land is the work of struggle. This and more would destroy their genocidal, eugenicist plan. The "joint chiefs" and their corporate backers know this. Giuliani and New York City Real Estate know this. One Police Plaza knows this. The New York Times knows this: "much of New York has become a city of squatters." (5/4/97) Even the so-called "left" housing movement knows this...
The militarization of the struggles surrounding housing, land, "speculation," and social control is the militarization of the entire question of "housing," which implies an increasingly overt police r3epression. Witness Bratton's battalions unleashed against defenseless, innocent Black and Latino youth, with the willing complicity of the rigged courts. Accordingly, the recent shifts in doctrine regarding the US military role in domestic security issues has lead to the collapse of the distinction between police and the occupation soldier. The state criminalizes and targets that which it makes inevitable: popular resistance to oppression. And yet, the oppressor's direct "first-hand" knowledge of this oppression is calibrated to the doom they know is coming. Their fear of retribution, of popular retaliation, of reparations, of revolution, and ultimately, of life, completes the expanding circle of state terrorism and violence. In sum, the "war against the poor" is literally that. The "bombed-out" areas of the South Bronx, Harlem, etc. are literally that...
Originally published in pamphlet form by ReSearch and Destroy, 1997
