GREAT! New York City funds a DIY-crime-training enterprise masquerading as a non-for-profit to the tune of $240,000 in taxpayer money just so city-owned properties can be broken into, commandeered, and turned into drug houses and gathering places for prostitution!
B.
City-funded activist group teaches homeless how to invade apartments
By Michael Gartland
The New York Post
Last Updated: 9:48 AM, March 25, 2012
Posted: 2:01 AM, March 25, 2012
It’s breaking and entering for dummies.
Picture the Homeless, a Bronx nonprofit that has received at least $240,000 in taxpayer money in the last five years, is giving a crash course on squatting — and city-owned buildings are a prime target.
Two weeks ago, board member Andres Perez held a teach-in on how to wrest “control” of vacant apartments. He called it “homesteading.”
“The best time to enter a building is in the late hours,” he advised a group of about 20, who gathered in front of the half-empty East New York housing complex Arlington Village.
“You make sure you have your proper tools. You remove the chains and padlock, and then you go in.”
He then led them through the next steps — including filling out a change-of-address form at the post office and setting up utilities. After that, “nine out of 10 times the courts will allow you to be able to have control of the property,” he said.
But squatting school outraged legal residents of Arlington Village.
“I can’t let nobody squat where I live,” said Pete Rolon, 64, a 35-year resident who claimed pimps had grabbed two apartments in the complex. “There were hookers. They were smoking crack. There were condoms all over the floor. There were hundreds of them.”
He remembers when the complex of 12 two-story, red-brick buildings was filled with families and children playing.
Police and residents eventually forced the sex-trade squatters out last fall, according to Rolon.
Mohammed Hossain, the super at Arlington, where pads go for $600 to $1,000 per month, said complaints about homeless people breaking in to steal pipes and metal fixtures are common.
“The homeless people, they have no right to be squatting here,” he said. “If they pay rent, that’s different.”
Residents also aren’t happy about city tax money going to a group that preaches squatting.
“That’s not right,” said one longtime resident. “That these guys are teaching classes on this — that’s ridiculous.” ...
Remainder of article @ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/squat_the_heck_PkPnYm4W9CFGWgSg6gpHiL
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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