Out of curiosity, is there such a thing as an anarchist homeless shelter? (Which of course would be structured differently from the typical ones)
@gsuberland @joepie91 i was referring to the catholic worker movement in the usa, associated with the radical newspaper. as far as i can tell there's no connection between that and opus dei. am i missing something?
@joepie91 at least in the 90s/00s, squats filled that role to some extent. I suspect one difficulty (even in many parts of Northern Europe) is running a legal shelter requires dealing with a lot of legal stuff/bureaucracy (including valid health and safety regulations) and things like insurance, anarchist groups often lack the resources or understandably may not want to comply to conditions such as shelters being expected to discourage drugs/alcohol use
@vfrmedia Right. I'm not thinking of *legally recognized* shelters, necessarily, more just in the "a place that provides reasonably stable housing to those in need" sense. That seems like a more viable thing to do, and at least in NL I've historically been disappointed by the stance of squats on this matter.
@joepie91 that is exactly what we did with the squats, from about 1997-2004 in a fairly affluent town in SE England called Reading, a mix of homeless folk and partypeople from the rave scene, often we would take two buildings, large commercial one for a party and smaller one for folk to live in and the homeless folk would alternate between the two to keep them occupied. It worked well for quite a while, until too many "bros" at the raves vandalised parts of the buildings and cops clamped down >>
@joepie91 the bizzare thing is we got many of the ideas on how to take and hold the spaces, plus expanding the use of them for such things as bike workshops, mini hackerspaces using computers and electronics abandoned in the trash as well as the weekend parties from squat groups in the Netherlands who had set up the early websites about the subculture!
@vfrmedia Yeah, NL used to have a very vibrant squatting culture, unfortunately it didn't fare well over the years so there's not much left of it 😕
@joepie91 in Nijmegen, there's "De steeg" (not sure whether that's explicitly anarchist, but it does have lots of anarchist ties), and a bunch of homeless folks here have been sheltered through squatting
@joepie91 That reminds me of something that happened a while ago: i was chatting with a homeless bloke, he told me his life story, with many ups and downs. In the middle of a long conversation he took a brief phone call, and announced with a huge grin that "they squatted a building for us", he did not specify "they" but it clearly referred to some local anarchist squatters
@joepie91 the catholic worker houses were sort of like this, historically. not sure what they're like/to what extent they still exist these days though.