We are the city!
Reprivatization and struggle for the right to the city in Warsaw
Like thousands of the city's tenants, Jola
Brzeska's building was reprivatized. Previously, it had belonged to the city,
which in 1945 became the proprietor of thousands of empty plots and a handful
of buildings left standing after the massive bombing of Warsaw in 1939 and
during the uprisings in 1943 and 1944. While the new communist government
concentrated on a Stalinist approach to reconstruction (large arteries, giant
empty plazas, colossal monuments, architecture that facilitates crowd control a
la Hausmann in Paris), solving the enormous postwar housing crisis was mainly
an achievement of the people, who took matters into their own hands and started
rebuilding and resettling the city themselves. These squatters' initiative left
the authorities with no other choice but to legalize their effort. Thus, what
became known as Bierut's Decree made formerly private property the city's
property, and emplaced a tenement housing system administered by the city
authorities. Families assigned homes under Bierut's Decree- called communal
housing, mieszkania komunalne in Polish- have for the past 60 years
lived as the city's tenants, paying a fixed rent. Similarly, countless empty
plots were converted into public parks and squares, which also became city
property.
With the ascension of the free market after 1989,
regaining property rights to pre-war possessions through the court system and
more importantly, buying and selling ownership titles became regular practice.
This new trading opportunity gave birth to expert real estate developers, who
have expertly developed relationships with certain city officials, to form
together a veritable mafia of property speculators. For the past 20 years,
buying up titles to the city's tenement buildings, parks and squares has proven
especially lucrative thanks to the good grace of the highest ranking authorities:
to this day, no legal regulation managing the process of reprivatization and
guaranteeing protections for the people who's homes are reprivatized exists in
Poland.
Jola Brzeska knew from
her own experiences that Warsaw authorities manage the city like a corporation,
in utter ignorance of the rights of residents. Her building given away by the
city to the aristocrat duo Mossakowski/Massalski- the first antiquary, the
second lawyer, both infamous for tormenting their "acquired" tenants
across Warsaw- Jola quickly fell into the hole of suddenly rising rent and
soaring debt. Despite her hopeless situation, she fought battles in the courts
with Mossakowski and was the last remaining tenant in her building, that the
developer couldn't remove.
Jola also fought for
systemic change in Poland - the only postcommunist country, in which tenants
have been literally thrown into a shark pool; nowhere else are real estate
ownership claims settled at the cost of tenants. Instead, rather than paying
compensations to expropriated owners or their descendants (in other countries
10-20 percent is compensated), "poor" Warsaw drains its budget paying
100 percent of the property market value, or as occurs more often, simply gives
away real estate worth millions along with people living inside, as if they
were meat stuffing with a tag, "do with them what you want". Jola
realized that changing this situation would require solidarity and initiated
the Warsaw Tennant's Association (Warszawskie Stowarzyszenie Lokatorów).
Besides Jola's "owners", many other
developers in Warsaw have taken example from the authorities; tales of harassed
tenants hound on both sides of the Vistula river. Praga (eastside district).
Letter responding to a plea for turning on the water in the building: There is too much shit, both human and dog.
As soon as the shit leaves the building, all the problems will end. The
building is in deficit so long as there is shit inside. Signed, building
administrator, Kris Kozłowski. Śródmieście (central district). Rent is raised
again. -Can a human being be so suddenly
evicted onto the street, and only two days before Christmas? -But this isn't a
human, responds building owner Anna Ferguson. Jola's situation was similar.
Mossakowski and Massalski broke into her apartment by cutting the door hinges
with an angle grinder. They would come to harass her late at night, they would
threaten her, often in the presence of police officers. Such stories are
countless, but the authorities' reaction is always the same: That's private property, it doesn't concern
us.
` `
On one of Warsaw's main arteries, Marszałkowska
street, more than 40 buildings have already been reprivatized. About 20,000
more in different parts of the city await being "returned". Jan Stachura, another example of a Warsaw
developer, is a lawyer who specializes in reacquiring ownership titles from the
clients he represents in court. This rewarding practice has made him the sole
owner of almost entire streets in Warsaw's city center. According to property
developer's clubs (there are a few in Warsaw) 97 percent of Warsaw property,
following prewar geography, should be returned to private hands. And this might
happen very quickly, as reprivatization is a very dynamic process; the city
government can only guarantee that there are no claims to a building for a
period of 90 days, after which their guarantee expires, because who knows a
claim might appear?
These claims also concern
parks and squares around the city, for which local residents have been fighting
hard to keep. Of course consultations are hardly ever conducted and local
authorities could care less whether a park remains a park, or whether it
becomes a luxurious office building with underground garage. In Łódź (a city in
central Poland), after all the appeals and petitions to maintain a neighborhood
park were ignored by city administrators and the developer, local residents got
together to do round the clock shifts, climbing high up in the park's trees, to
protect them with their bodies against the new private owner's army of
bulldozers. In the limelight of television cameras, the developer backed down
and the local court ruled the park demolition illegal. Thinking the law would
protect them, the residents celebrated their victory. But when the cameras and
residents left the park, the developer came back and cut down all the trees,
knowing that the fine for breaking the court's order would only be a tiny
fraction of the giant stack of cash he would make on his new office building.
So the field for open
discussion on what the city looks like and whom it serves becomes increasingly
limited, and gives way to private fancy. This problem concerns city residents
across Poland on a scale that deserves to be called a collective tragedy, all
the more so because the voices of the "subordinated" residents, the
defenders of parks, squares, small businesses and tenants' rights, fall on the
death ears of those in power. Tenants living in reprivatized homes find
themselves in the middle of the battlefield: each year their rights are further
restricted to make them empty their apartments more quickly to create room for
exclusive investment plans. In Autumn 2011, the government approved a new
regulation that makes it possible to evict people during the winter months
(previously the cold season from November to march, when temperatures range
from -10 to -30 C was protected and no evictions could take place) and further,
made it legal to evict people to garages, basements, homeless shelters and the
street. Earlier, plans to build container housing were also approved and the
first families have already been resettled to such plastic
"neighborhoods" around Poland.
In 2010 there were over 6
thousand families on the waiting list for social or communal housing in Warsaw.
The waiting time on this list tends to be about 8 years. This is because
despite the enormous need, the authorities are not investing in building rent
controlled housing. Instead, the number of people on this list grows each year
because the authorities are decreasing city housing (by increasing private
investment). In effect, those who can't afford private standards are forced out
of the city.
Meanwhile, empty homes in
Warsaw number in the tens of thousands. According to the city government's own
statistics, in Warsaw's central district alone there are over 750 empty
apartments that are city property. As for newly built, privately owned, empty
apartments, in 2010 there were about 25,000 in Warsaw. There is also an
immeasurable amount of homes that stand empty because they are bought by
international investment funds, banks and private entrepreneurs in the aims of
speculating on the housing market. And another classic Warsaw scenario: after
taking over a building, the private developer does everything possible to get
rid of the tenants as quickly as possible. The people are evicted, but the
building stands empty for another 5 years or so while the developer gets his
paper work together, settles co-ownership issues, raises renovation funds or
simply waits for the building to destroy itself to save on renovation costs.
In this context it is yet another slap in the face
that a legal regulation concerning reprivatization has actually been written,
but since 2008 it has been collecting dust in some governmental drawer. Most
recently, a daring reporter questioned Polish prime minister Tusk during his
visit in Brussels on the future of the reprivatization law, would it ever see
the light of day? We must put it off, as such a law would be unfair to the
citizens, he replied. Indeed, replace "the citizens" with
"profit" and Tusk is entirely correct in that only regulations that
ensure more profit are fair and can be written into law. After all, the primary
object and fundamental unit of everything in Poland is profit. Sadly, Tusk
uttered these words on March 11th, 2011, only three days after Jola Brzeska was
found burned to death in a forest outside Warsaw.
Officially, Jola's case
remains "unsolved", although the truth about her death is no mystery:
Jola's murder was a hired job, paid by those with the biggest interest in her
removal. Mossakowski is not under investigation by the prosecution and takes
special care to make sure that neither his name nor face are associated with Jola's
murder. The police technician who examined her body is also dead, an
unexplained suicide, or so maintains the prosecution. But whoever paid to pour
diesel fuel and set Jola on fire is not alone in bearing the burden. The city
authorities, with Warsaw's president Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz at the lead, carry
the greatest responsibility for their incompetence and greed.
In light of the radical
loss of basic rights guaranteeing dignity of life in Warsaw and other cities,
it comes as no surprise that people are taking matters into their own hands and
demanding the right to the city. In December 2011, Warsaw residents took over a
milk bar called Prasowy when rent increases forced it to close (milk
bars are cheap restaurants with proper, affordable, home cooked food) and
started serving meals themselves. In October 2011, for International Tennant's
Day, protesting residents took over a library in the city center and held an
assembly. Over the winter, tenants organized nighttime brigades that patrolled
tenement buildings that were being set on fire by developer’s minions (the most
fortuitous and cost-saving situation for a developer is when an old building,
especially one on the historic sites list, simply falls apart. Often time
developers speed up this process by orchestrating fires, explosions, and the
like). In the summer, residents threw in money to purchase a bolt cutter to
remove the chains a developer used to close down the local park. Throughout the
year, countless people, with assistance from local grassroots initiatives when
necessary, moved into abandoned apartments, effectively squatting them. These
are only the first signs that Warsavians will not tolerate further arrogance
towards their needs. The dramatic call raised in March 2011 by Jola Brzeska's friends,
"you can't burn us all!", is today turned into practice. Reducing the
city to a "limited liability company", and its residents to
"human capital" paves the road to social darwinism, not democracy. To
reclaim the city, we must reclaim its meaning.
Human capital says
enough! We are the city.
Kolektyw Syrena
Warsaw, February 2012
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