The Sofia Solidarity Centre Squat Exposed a Housing Crisis Past Breaking Point
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Squats are intense by nature. Leave the door open and not only cold winds but cops will sweep through: security and sanctuary are contingent not on the coin toss of making rent, but on the all-but-certain edict of a county court judge.
Opened on Great Portland Street as London temperatures dropped to minus ten during the bitterest of the Beast From The East, the Sofia Solidarity Centre was no exception. It was housing a hundred rough sleepers within a week and close to two hundred by the time its residents were driven out a fortnight later by court order and the threat of bailiffs, the thermometer still hovering below zero.
More precisely, during my two weeks living and working in Sofia, I saw how squats serve to intensify pre-existing conditions. Compressed into the briefest of periods and closest of spaces, tempers sometimes flared and relationships boiled over. But more personal, social and political change was achieved in the pressure-cooker of Sofia than across many months of more pedestrian direct action campaigns.
Most of all, the Centre served as a vigorous embodiment of the very worst of the housing crisis, an ineluctable challenge to the government, Sadiq Khan’s council, and left activists alike.
The lethal cold spell which killed a rough sleeper directly outside the Houses of Parliament came on the heels of a furore around plans to fine, bully and socially cleanse rough sleepers out of Windsor ahead of the Royal Wedding. Both have fed into a general rumbling-round of public consciousness toward the skyrocketing numbers of homeless people living on Britain’s streets, which came to one crux in Sofia. (No UK squat has attracted such widespread and uniformly positive media attention in recent years).
Across the last seven years, the amount of government-funded social housing being built has dropped by 97%. Benefits have been slashed across the board, and private-sector evictions have skyrocketed. Nationwide, rough sleeping has tripled in the same period.
Comrades who cracked the building deliberately chose a property held empty as an investment by mega-rich, tax-dodging property developers. We offered shelter there to serial convicts, crack addicts and beggars not only to keep them alive through the cold, but because of the ugly question they insistently asked of a country where “there are ten empty commercial buildings for every person registered as sleeping on the streets,” as one homeless activist at Sofia growled into an ITV camera.
Only about 10,000 of the 300,000 homeless people in London are actually sleeping rough – those who’ve lived sofa-to-sofa or in B&Bs know how close the street can seem. The miseries suffered by Sofia’s residents during their days, years, decades on the street are a distillation of miseries suffered by countless Londoners every day.
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