{"product_id":"ours-to-lose-when-squatters-became-homeowners-in-new-york-city-9780226399942","title":"Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City","description":"Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict-an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and '80s Manhattan. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. \u003ci\u003eOurs to Lose\u003c\/i\u003e tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAmy Starecheski \u003c\/b\u003eis co-director of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. She won first prize in the 2016 SAPIENS-Allegra competition.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50318482112786,"sku":"9780226399942","price":33.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_75774ae0-d312-491f-b982-9127b528c013.jpg?v=1727555986","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/ours-to-lose-when-squatters-became-homeowners-in-new-york-city-9780226399942","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}