#OWS update

Occupy Our Home working out pretty much as you would expect.

Inequality of income and home foreclosures are bad, apparently, but what to do about it?

From The Post:

“Occupy Our Homes” was that idea. The group would take over an empty house, foreclosed on by a bank, fix it up and provide shelter to a homeless family.

For those sympathetic to the Occupy movement, it was a brilliant strategy. Foreclosures touched almost every neighborhood in America; an estimated 1.2 million homes were repossessed in 2011. In East New York, the hardest hit in the city, the foreclosure crisis struck 16.8 homes per thousand. Occupy Our Homes would alleviate neighborhood blight, provide shelter to the poor — and put banks on the defensive.

Last week,Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York.

Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.

Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.

“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dishwashing system.

In a first-floor bathroom, Christmas lights dangle from a shower curtain rod. The only thing separating a toilet from the elements outside is a thin veil of paper.

Ahadzi, a single father and homeless advocate, appeared to Occupy to be the perfect candidate for Occupy Our Home while he moved into a smaller rental to work on his finances with the hopes of being able to move back into his house.

To date, Occupy has yet to pay for any of the damages to his home.

And what's worse for the neighborhood than a foreclosed, un-occupyed home? A foreclosed, Occupyed one.

Even in this condition, protesters are still squatting on the floors, cooking using a bunsen burner and walking around guided by candlelight when a generator is not up and running.

Their efforts have actually made the neighborhood worse — because what used to be an empty house is now a hovel of squatters and probably should be condemned.

Ahadzi has our sympathy... to a certain point. Out of work and out of your house... but Occupy?

It's beyond all reason how it is this man thought that his house would not turn out like your typical big city Occupy encampment upon letting the same set in.

Mr. Ahadzi, what in god's name were you thinking?

Another Occupy success story.




We're probably going to lay off the Occupy updates for a while. Too easy of a target. Good intentions aside, far too many of them have proven themselves to be counter-productive moral degenerates as demonstrated by the story above. Until politicians, as they did in the beginning, start attempting to align themselves with or co-opt the movement here in the spring and as the political heat starts getting turned up, we're going to give it a break.




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