BEFORE: Ahadzi’s home when ‘Occupy’ took over in December. (J.B Nicholas / Splash News)
On Dec. 6, nearly 300 members of the Occupy Wall Street movement flooded into East New York to begin what they considered phase two of their efforts. A few weeks earlier, they had been rousted from Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, where they had camped for three months — attracting worldwide attention and forcing politicians to take notice.
But for all the hype, Occupy was being criticized — even from the left — for being vague in its goals. The signs railed against bailouts and the greed of the 1%, but protesters coalesced around no legislation, no candidate, no reforms. Everyone agreed that inequality is bad, but what to do about it?
“Occupy Our Homes” was that idea. The group would take over an empty house, foreclosed on by a bank, fix it up and provide shelter to a homeless family.
For those sympathetic to the Occupy movement, it was a brilliant strategy. Foreclosures touched almost every neighborhood in America; an estimated 1.2 million homes were repossessed in 2011. In East New York, the hardest hit in the city, the foreclosure crisis struck 16.8 homes per thousand. Occupy Our Homes would alleviate neighborhood blight, provide shelter to the poor — and put banks on the defensive.
PHOTOS: ‘OCCUPY’ TRASHES B’KLYN HOME
The atmosphere was giddy that overcast December day. A swell of people hung banners (“Foreclose on Banks, Not People”) and chanted on Vermont Street, waiting to welcome new neighbors to 702, the two-story rowhouse Occupy had taken over.
The excitement reached a crescendo when Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) knocked on the door, decorated with a pine wreath for Christmas, and out came the homeless man who was moving in with his family, Alfredo Carrasquillo.
Barron raised Carrasquillo’s arm in victory.
Last week,Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York.
Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.
Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.
“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dishwashing system.
In a first-floor bathroom, Christmas lights dangle from a shower curtain rod. The only thing separating a toilet from the elements outside is a thin veil of paper.
As he leaves the wreckage, Ahadzi pauses in front of a tiny Dora the Explorer chair. “Remember that?” he asks his daughter.
This is the Occupy house, more than two months later. A scarred symbol of what the movement has become.
Ahadzi, 28, was the man Occupy didn’t want the public to know about.He owned the Vermont house but was forced to leave in 2009 when he couldn’t make the mortgage payments to Bank of America.
The single father knew he couldn’t raise his two girls, Kwazha, 9, and Imani, 3, with the threat of eviction hanging over him. They found a lower-cost rental in Brownsville while Ahadzi negotiated with the bank to get his house back.
But instead of helping Ahadzi, Occupy cast Carrasquillo as the man to move in, because he was a homeless advocate some of the members knew.
During the December event, Ahadzi was pulled aside and made assurances by Barron and others — we know your predicament, we’ll make it better.
Ahadzi was content with that answer for a while, until it was obvious Occupy wasn’t interested in him.
They didn’t seem interested in the house, either. In January, The Post found squatters in the house instead of the family.
“They only stay here sometimes,” a protester explained. “There’s not enough room for the kids.”
Ahadzi thought about calling the police, until the embarrassed Occupy movement promised him that they’d repair the house and leave.
Two weeks have already gone by since without any progress. Occupy hasn’t even offered to pay him for the damages.
They tore down many interior walls but did not put them back up. A neighbor said that mold corroded one wall, but a complete gutting of the house was unnecessary.
Even in this condition, protesters are still squatting on the floors, cooking using a bunsen burner and walking around guided by candlelight when a generator is not up and running.
Their efforts have actually made the neighborhood worse — because what used to be an empty house is now a hovel of squatters and probably should be condemned.
Things have gotten so bad that Barron,who once praised the movement, said that Occupy has worn out its welcome.
“The bottom line is that they have to leave,” he said.
Neighbors, who initially welcomed the ragtag bunch into the area, now stay away. Local Doyle Coleman tried to get other homeowners on the street to participate in a street cleanup with the Occupiers, but they all just said, “I don’t want to get involved.”
Another neighbor stood across the street from the house and shook his head, imagining how extensive the damages were inside considering the revolving cast of characters living inside. “It must be in shambles,” he said.
Occupy protesters like to take pride in how organic the movement is.
Adbusters Media Foundation, a Canadian group known for an anti-consumerism magazine, is credited with coining the term “occupy” last summer, but no group wholly dictates what happens.
Instead, Occupy gathers for General Assembly meetings held twice a week in a corner of Zuccotti Park. Members sign up to speak or pitch proposals. The crowd “twinkles their fingers” to support things or wriggles them pointing down to stand against them. Consensus is reached by a sea of dancing fingers.
While this is socialist by design, it makes decision making difficult. The group would debate endlessly how to use the $700,000 it raised, and even when it would spend some of that money — on bail or food — it would be accused by some members of misappropriation.
A group of 20 actually controls the money but were constantly saying they weren’t the “leaders” — more to avoid backlash from other Occupy members than anything else. When a protest becomes a live-in and not a march, meanwhile, the line between activists and freeloaders blurs.
Zuccotti Park, and its promise of free clothes, free supplies and free meals, attracted the city’s homeless. Rumors began to spread inside the park that shelters even recommended Zuccotti’s hospitality at intake.
Many of those freeloaders stuck with the movement long after the collapse of the encampment, because OWS has provided shelter to its members at two city churches. Until, that is, someone at a Manhattan church stole the lid of the baptismal font. The Rev. Bob Brashear told his guests that the theft was like “pissing on the 99%.”
OWS has often hurt the same people it says it wants to help. During the Zuccotti days, a mom and pop cafe’s bathroom was ravaged and its owner was left with thousands of dollars in damages.
The movement’s lack of leaders only made things more chaotic and confusing as the months have gone on.
There were marches, arrests and plenty of YouTube videos of protesters getting pepper-sprayed. In the end, though, it appeared that eliciting these kind of moments—provoking the police until they overreacted — was the movement’s primary, if not only, goal.
Occupy Wall Street will no doubt dismiss this article as just another media attack. But the truth is their initial rhetoric had more resonance than they might think— from many political leanings.
Ask someone at a Tea Party protest if they supported the bailout of Wall Street banks. Their answer would be the same as the bandanna-wearing protester on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The most popular book among conservatives these days is “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray’s analysis of the widening gulf between classes.
It’s hard to find anyone who disagrees with Occupy’s prognosis of what’s wrong. A Gallup poll conducted in January found that 83% of Americans were dissatisfied with the economy. Where people differ is the solutions.
To that end, what are Occupy’s solutions? In the New York Times Review of Books earlier this month, writer Michael Greenberg, obviously sympathetic to the movement, couldn’t contain his frustration with protesters unwillingness to get involved in issues such as the Keystone Pipeline because “it didn’t matter what laws you pass.”
Greenberg called their goals “morally abstract, with little visceral impact.” And demanding economic justice was a “vague and sweeping term that invites both personal grievances and broad interpretation”— of which Occupy has plenty.
Since the group does not support any political candidates, Democrats are free to ignore Occupy — which many moderate members are happy to do. Without any leaders, the occupation’s small work groups and offshoots are also just too unpredictable and risky to support.
The 2012 election, in fact, is shaping up to be the inverse of the 2010 midterms. In those congressional races, Republican candidates mostly had to embrace and praise the Tea Party movement to avoid incurring its wrath. In 2012, Democrats, especially in swing states, will likely be spending their time making sure they’re not too closely associated with the Occupiers.
Occupy promises a return to larger protests in the spring, under the general banner of “raising awareness about inequality.”
But is any American really unaware of inequality? Does anyone need to be told that more people need jobs, that the middle class and the poor are suffering?
With banners and signs and slogans, Occupy “raised awareness” of the inequities of foreclosures. Then they left a wretched a house in Brooklyn, with an owner wondering who’s going to clean up the mess.
“I’m pissed off,”Ahadzi said. “I’m trying to get my house back, and they’re trying to take it from me.”
Occupy has shown it’s good at tearing things down. What happens if it had to fix them?