The Homeless and the Occupy Movement
Michelle Fawcett interviews Occupy organizers and the homeless during her and Arun Gupta’s tour of Occupy protests around the U.S.
This was first posted at Salon.com.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Occupational hazard: Living with the homeless (Salon)
Does the economic justice movement include the chronically poor? How can it not?
By Arun Gupta
Two protesters who identify themselves as homeless, at Occupy Providence in downtown Providence, R.I. (Credit: Stew Milne/AP)
Topics:Occupy Wall Street, homelessness
Tevin Bell is 18 but looks twice his age. Kicked out of his grandmother’s home last year after getting into a fight with his younger sister, Bell has been living on the streets of Detroit, “going from shelter to shelter.” On a brisk October afternoon he is relaxing in a folding chair, snug under a heavy jacket, watching flames lick the lip of a rusted barrel stuffed with burning scrap wood.
He is one of dozens of apparently homeless people clustered around Grand Circus Park, site of Occupy Detroit, which began on Oct. 14. Bell arrived two weeks later and has just spent his first night camping. He says, “I got a tent and a blanket. They said I can stay, ‘but you can’t just camp, you gotta help out.’”
Filed under Economy, Occupy Movement
Visualizing the Rust Belt occupation (Salon)
After reporting for Salon from the occupation sites in three Rust Belt cities suffering from serious post-industrial malaise. Michelle Fawcett and I sent this video, which documents the efforts of one such protest movement, in Youngstown, Ohio.
from Visualizing the Rust Belt occupation – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.
Related articles
- Occupying the Rust Belt (Salon) (occupyusatoday.com)
- How to Occupy Rust Belt Cities (forbes.com)
Filed under Occupy Movement
Occupying the Rust Belt (Salon)
In three deindustrialized cities, protesters find friendly cops, determination and despair
BY ARUN GUPTA
An abandoned building in Youngstown, Ohio
TOPICS: OCCUPY WALL STREET
The surefire method to find occupations in small cities is to head for the center of town. After leaving Philadelphia on our Occupy America tour, we drive an hour north to Allentown. Pennsylvania’s third-largest city at 118,000 residents, Allentown has been weathered by years of deindustrialization in the steel, cement and textile industries that once made it an economic powerhouse.
Along MacArthur Boulevard, one of Allentown’s main drags, tidy but weary brick row homes line outlying neighborhoods. Close to Center Square, site of the requisite Civil War monument, the neighborhoods are heavily Latino and buildings exhibit signs of disrepair.
Filed under Occupy Movement
Arun K. Gupta 