Yesterday,
people from the Tenants' Defense Committee and ZSP confronted the
Vice President of Warsaw, Michal Olszewski and a some „urban
activists” who are involved in projects connected to gentrification
in the Praga neighbourhood of Warsaw. The confrontation with the
activists primarily involved Joanna Erbel, a well-known and
well-promoted liberal and former Green Party candidate for the office
of Warsaw city President (and other posts). It took place at an event
held in the neighbourhood and was preceded by a number of articles,
in particular her piece on the „Opinion Daily” site run by
„Political Critique”. Her article drew the ire of many tenants
organizations, left activists and in particular myself. Prior to the
event, l published a response which stirred some feathers in the City
Hall and amongst the liberal urban activist community.
The
subject of our protest was the fact that the area is being
gentrified, that many low-income residents are losing their houses
and being replaced by better situated newcomers. There are several
ways that the people are displaced. One is through privatization of
public housing, which leads to unaffordable rents, resale of
buildings or their distruction. Another is the resettling of people
who live in buildings in poor state that need to be repaired. This is
a large part of the public housing stock in this area, which was not
totally destroyed by the Nazis like most of Warsaw and has older
buildings which were not maintained for many years. It is also common
that the housing needs to be modernized and it usually has no central
heating, sometimes no bathrooms in the flats and is usually not very
accessible for people with limited mobility.
The
city plans on socially engineering the district, which is in an
attractive location and a potential bonanza for real-estate
developers. People were displaced in the Port Praski area to make way
for luxury high-rises. And more and more people are being moved, with
their former homes being renovated and reassigned to artists or
middle class people.
The
city works in extremely pernicious ways and has sold many young and
ambitious liberals on their spiel. After years of ignoring
maintainence, houses are falling apart. Those that are in the best
locations are declared disasters and people relocated. Those in less
attractive areas still house municipal tenants, even if the technical
state of the building is much worse.
The
Act on the Protection of Tenants' Rights states that if repairs are
cumbersome and tenants need to be moved, they should be given
temporary replacement housing and come back to the renovated building
within the year. But in fact, after people are relocated, the
renovations usually are not even started for years and, when they
occur, they take a longer time than necessary. The city claims that
this is all normal and necessary, but the fact is that when people
are already gone for 5 years or more, they already have started life
elsewhere and resigned themselves to their loss. In such a way,
through general negligence and stalling, buildings which are declared
„unliveable” are excluded from the public housing stock, or at
least from the flats intended for low income families.
When
l say low income, this is where the class reality of the politicians
and liberals begin to show. Some of the housing is being converted to
a TBS, which is a form of „low-income” housing run by a company
owned by the city, but working under different regulations. To
qualify for public housing (so-called komunalne), your income should
be well under 2000 zloties per month, whereas for a TBS, it can be
over 7000 – in other words, more than 350% higher. (The actual
limit is just under 1900 USD a month.) Rents are more than double the
rate for „komunalne”.
I
am pretty sure that the politicians make more than 7000 zloties a
month. I am not sure what the liberals earn, whether they have other
jobs or just live off foundations and grants. I certainly don't make
that kind of money and a lot of the people we deal with have salaries
or pensions more in line with 1000-1500 a month. In our union we have
nurses and other professionals who don't get 2000 zloties, never mind
7000.
The
newspaper „Banker” writes about the meeting and protest,
reporting that the city is going to make 23 buildings into TBS
buildings. That is 23 addresses which are for rather high-income
people. Despite this, „Banker” also reports that these are
„low-income” buildings. I suppose for the banker/investor target
readership, this is also a low income.
„Urban
activist” Erbel, who runs a foundation, is involved in the pilot
project, which was presented yesterday. Erbel has had an interesting
career having been a chosen person, promoted by the mainstream
liberal media as an activist who should go into office. Not having
had too much activity on her account (being quite young), she engaged
in various social protests. She came to a couple of protests or
eviction blockades and promoted herself as being sensitive to tenant
issues. However, her politics on this were recently exposed when she
criticized another tenants organization, which had written a
statement in response to the great Warsaw reprivatization scandals.
Repeating the propaganda statistics of compromised city officials,
she painted a fantasy image of a city dealing well with its housing
crisis and doing the best it could to increase the housing stock.
Amazingly, she stated that within a few years, the lines for flats
would be over and everybody would have housing. This is in stark
contrast to the reality that thousands are waiting in line and many
times more cannot even get into the line. And the public housing
stock is all the time being depleted.
Although
the project she is currently promoting does not involve too many
units on its own, it is a prime example of low-income housing stock
being reassigned to higher income people. And as the Vice-President
explained, the city can even decide exactly who lives there. A
troubling statement in light of many recent revelations of cronyism
during the reprivatization scandals.
Olszewski
is a highly skilled person when it comes to PR and it is perhaps this
reason why he is one of the few on his level who survived the
reprivatization scandals. Of course, he shouldn't have. We met many
times with him and passed information on about the theft of public
housing property and even it's been shown that when he knew there
were fishy privatizations, probably based on fraudulent claims, he
turned a blind eye. The President is hugely unpopular and most
activists of any kind says she has to go but through a combination of
personal skills and ties, several prominent urban activists defend
him in more or less overt ways. He in turn is quick to use this to
project an image of being „socially sensitive” when in fact, he
is highly placed in the neo-liberal local government and has an
important role in the harsh neo-liberal policies that have ruled over
the last years and lead to a huge worsening in the public housing
sector.
How
does it happen that liberal people get on the side of the better
situated classes and ruling elites? This is a good question, but l am
afraid the truth does not allow us to pose just one possible
scenario. Those involved are different people, ranging from
careerists who just want some positions to themselves, to those who
really want to do „something good” and can't figure out what's
wrong. There are those who want to be close to people in power to get
money for their projects, or those who many honestly thing that
bringing in yuppies and artists will make the place more attractive.
In any case, a seemingly common thread seems to be their own class
position or access to cultural capital. These are often people who
will look a poor person in the eye and ask „what is the problem”?
Finding
themselves on this side of a real life class struggle, these people
lose their credibility with those who are denied access to affordable
public housing. What is worse is the often arrogant attitude
displayed by young, mobile educated elites when confronted by people
who are usually poor and sometimes without much higher education. The
Vice-President and liberals participate in a Commission on fighting
the „social exclusion” of tenants, which we are boycotting. Since
there is no sense in speaking to somebody who is heavily involved in
the process. The Vice-President is used to being able to bullshit
people and thinks he can throw lots of statistics and nobody will be
able to check them or understand what he is talking about. Even when
people with better knowledge and presentation skills present facts,
they are dismissed as not knowing what they are talking about. The
liberals act in the same way or even worse, some of them complaining
that tenants protest against gentrification when they came to hear
about the gentrification project, which they consider very nice
indeed. In respect of my articles (there were two), we were told that
things are not what we say and that „experts” will explain it to
us. Yes, we heard the experts' explanations and are not satisfied.
Poor
people on the tough side of the class struggle view these people
without at much subtely as some middle-class activists. For many of
them, these are people who come from privelege, taking over the
neighbourhood with their feel-good projects that help them build
their activist careers, but do nothing to help them in their main
problem: to get access to housing they can afford. Some of these
people l have known for years and for a few, l can see they are just
confused. But the confusion comes from their more comfortable
position and access to cultural capital and people in positions of
power and the better-situated classes. In any case, they cannot be
spared criticism for their role in supporting the gentrification
process.
Lots
of people wonder about the situation of the left in Poland and why
the politics took their present course. Is Poland a country of
fascists?
I
won't deny that there is a big attraction to nationalist rhetoric,
but the situation is more complicated. The left that was in power was
a complete disaster. They focused on bringing in neo-liberal reforms,
some drastic reforms of the labour market, introduced evictions to
the street and vetoed bills that would have drastically limited the
effects of privatization in the 90s. With such an anti-social left,
right-wing populists started to fill the gaps. In recent years, the
liberal community, many of whom are also economic liberals or in
favor of some weak social state, have also made a bad impression on
working people. This is because of the perceptions, often justified,
that liberals represent an elite group in Poland that looks down on
poorer and less educated people. Sometimes justified criticism of how
the society is behaving made from liberal pundits comes with such a
dose of arrogance that the actual criticism is not heard. Lastly,
liberals have, at very misopportune occasions, alligned themselves
publically with political forces which are despised by most poorer
people. Such is the case of those in City Hall, who the liberals have
unfortunately cosied up to in recent times. While the city was rocked
by scandal after scandal over the summer and people called for heads
to fly, some only seem to have come closer to those in the ruling
faction.
The
issue of how public housing programs need to be projected to meet the
needs of that part of society which needs help the most is a longer
topic, but one thing is clear: what is happening now is not the right
direction. The fight against gentrification is not only against the
bankers, developers and city officials that are managing it, but also
against the activists who are co-managing it.