There's
a nonprofit organization called Friends of Occupy Portland (FOOP),
which rents the "Occupy office" at St. Francis. So, what if FOOP were
also to rent warehouses and/or other buildings where people could live and sleep?
At this moment, thousands of people in our city are without a room of
their own, a condition that carries with it obvious difficulties:
difficulty staying warm, dry, and rested; lack of privacy; lack of a
place to store material objects.
There seem to be several, maybe dozens of, vacant warehouses in Portland at any given time, along with many other vacant habitable buildings. We might ask, what has kept them from being converted into living space?
In some ways, this solution has probably been mitigated against by
Most of the seven billion of us
Such a question could lead to a discussion of some basic assumptions of society:
addressing objections can come nth
0, tanstaafl, tina, nimby
1, difficulty, uncertainty
2, shelters are available
3, zoning
100%ism,
With FOOP we have an entity in whose name the
property could be put, potentially allowing space to be made available
for occupancy without giving legal control/ownership to anyone but an
entity explicitly dedicated to assisting the Occupy movement.
We can spread this idea with the hope that it may
reach someone with extra cash, or an extra warehouse, who's sympathetic
to the cause and eager to help get some people into a friendly, free,
warm, dry, safe space. There are lots of unhoused people who could get
immediate, substantial relief from this, not to mention the wider
ramifications - it would be great to make it happen before we get very
deep into the winter.
