Street roots., July 29, 2016, Page 7, Image 7

Street Roots • July 29-August 4, 2016
MTITUCION BVAÑ0LA
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Page 7
housing activism was primarily the idea of
squats and squatters. The idea of squatting
was certainly people who needed a place to
stay but, oftentimes, it was very political,
very politicized. What we were seeing in
Spain was definitely ordinary people. We
were seeing people who were occupying
buildings who I don’t think would ever have
thought to identify themselves as activists
or as radicals or any of those things. Like
Sabine was saying, there was more of an
expectation like “Hey, we don’t have
housing, there are these buildings that were
built and many of them are brand new and
unoccupied, why don’t we move into them?”
We were beginning to talk to people who
were becoming politicized and, in some
cases, kind of radicalized. But for the most
part, the occupation movement was very
broad based and it was ordinary citizens
who were part of this crowd.
AWM?
J.P.: W hat kin d o f responses d id they face
fro m the authorities there? Were they facin g
police coming in a n d removing them by force?
IM A G E C O U R T E S Y O F BILL B R O W N A N D SA B IN E G R U F F A T
Boom, bust and rebellion
‘Speculation N a tio n ’ shines a light on Spain’s housing
crisis with lessons for all about what we consider ‘h ome’
BY JARED PABEN
S T A F F W R IT E R
t some point on the train trip between
Madrid and Pamplona, out in the
countryside, Bill Brown and Sabine
Gruffat spotted something strange in the
distance. It looked like a large abandoned
city, but the rail line passed it by, and there
were no obvious highways leading to it.
“It sort of looked like a mirage. I couldn’t
understand what I was seeing out there,”
Brown recalled. “It seemed like maybe a
What: A screening of the 2014 film
movie set or something.”
“Speculation Nation" with an introduction
It was one of Spain’s numerous housing
developments built during the pre-recession
and post-screening question-and-answer
real estate boom. When the bubble burst
period with the co-directors
and the economy tanked, they remained
When: 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Aug. 2
unoccupied.
Where: Northwest Film Center, Whitsell
That sparked the filmmakers’ curiosity,
Auditorium, Portland Art Museum, 1219
eventually culminating in the creation of
SW Park Ave.
“Speculation Nation,” a 2014 documentary
Cost: $9 for adults. $8 for seniors and
exploring the Spanish housing crisis, the
students, $6 for children
proliferation of brand-new yet long-vacant
Information: nwfilm.org/films.-
buildings, and the resulting occupations by
speculation-nation
activists and regular citizens alike.
The 75-minute lyrical documentary, as
they describe it, will screen at Portland’s
yo u r travels, do you have any sense o f why this
Northwest Film Center on Aug. 2.
boom resulted in these alm ost ghost towns?
Co-directors Brown and Gruffat, visiting
from their home in North Carolina, will
Sabine Gruffat: I think there’s a couple
provide an in-person introduction to the film issues. The housing was built more for
and participate in a question-and-answer and
investment reasons than necessarily to be
discussion session following the screening.
lived in. So a lot of this housing was not
The filmmakers talked with Street Roots
where people actually needed housing:
about the parallels between Spain’s housing
outside of the cities, away from the
crisis and similar situations much closer to
infrastructure of the municipal water
home.
systems, outside of the boundaries of the
city with no transportation. And then a lot of
Jared Paben: In yo u r research a n d in
vacation homes were built on the coast. But
B
IF YOU GO
the housing that was actually needed and
the housing that ended up being occupied ...
would be more the houses, the condos that
were built closer to the city infrastructure. A
lot of what’s considered a ghost town,
they’re sort of like a financial deal made
physical. They’re kind of like a symptom of a
financial bubble of European money.
J.P.: As fa r as some o f the people you met,
w hat m ost surprised you with how people are
trying to fin d housing there?
S.G.: I think the thing is that there’s a
safety net in Spain that is expected, and we
don’t have the same expectations in the
U.S. For example, they were talking a lot
about the European constitutional right to
housing. So there was an assumption that
everybody sort of agreed on that basic
premise. Which I think is very different here
when we had our financial crisis, that people
would have a place to live isn’t necessarily a
right in the U.S. system. What was
interesting to us was the assumptions that
are already built into the Spanish idea, or
European idea, of what are the basic
necessities of a human being. Another issue
we thought was interesting was questioning
“What does it mean to have a home? Is it
just a place that you live in? Is it a place that
becomes a home by living in it?” That was
also an interesting idea that people would
talk about. The idea of a home being
something other than an investment,
something that becomes a home over time.
Bill Brown: To add to what Sabine is
saying, my experience in the U.S. with
S.G.: It depended, depending on the city,
depending on the relationship - sometimes
depending on the day. Generally, because
the sidewalk is considered public, one thing
that they were doing that was very
surprising to us is that they would
sometimes set up camp in front of bank
ATM machine spaces and, as long as they
weren’t blocking the entryway, they could
stay there as long as they wanted. The
police would le t th e m stay. I t w as s o r t of
thought that the cops were sometimes on
the side of the activists or the people who
were occupying a bank teller. They were
generally a lot less antagonistic toward the
occupiers in that situation. But then there
were also forced evictions. They would come
and try to evict people from their homes or
occupied spaces. But even so it was very
different than in the U.S., because people
would stage sit-ins to prevent the cops from
evicting people, and it was very infrequent
that the cops would resort to violence. Most
of the time, they’d just give up and walk
away. If they’d tried several times to evict
someone and the situation had gotten really
out of hand, they would carry the people
away one by one. But the cops were a lot
less aggressive than they are here, I think.
B.B.: There are people that asked us,
“Why did you go to Spain?” Obviously, the
U.S. had a housing crisis here and, of
course, the Occupy Movement here. One
response we had was what was fascinating
for us and part of the reason we made the
film: Yes, we were very interested and often
inspired by what was going on, particularly
with the housing activists in Spain. But it
was also interesting to see the Spanish
situation and the response to the Spanish
housing crisis as a sort of funhouse mirror
of what was happening in the U.S. and to
see a country that was experiencing many of
the same pressures and crises as the U.S.,
but the response was, in so many ways,
based on assumptions that were very
different from American assumptions about
what is public space, or what rights do we
have as citizens - what are the limits of
police authority, what can be discussed,
what are some of the basic assumptions that
See FILM, page 12