Gentrification: The House on Florianska

 

Florianska Street is at the heart of the gentrification process.

The House on Florianska Street

   

The third house on the left in this photo is 8 Florianska St. It was built in 1911-1912. After the Second World War, it was a public housing tenement.

In 1995, a fire broke out on the roof of the building. Over the next 15 years, we can see that, although much of Praga is falling apart, and most old houses desperately need repairs, it often "takes a fire" on the roof to move people out of attractive property - which is then often repaired, sold or developed in record speed.

Death in Praga: The Stadium Construction Takes its Toll

The State Labour Inspectorate presented its findings concerning the death of two workers at the construction site of the National Stadium in Warsaw. The Inspectorate found that basic safety measures were not adhered to and this was the direct cause of their deaths.

The workers died when the crane basket they were riding in fell off and they plunged almost 20 meters to their deaths. The baskets shouldn't have been used at all as they did not meet a number of standards. The chains used were also broken.

The workers did not even have the proper permission to work in high places, so they shouldn't have been given this task. There should have also been a special supervisor overseeing the attaching of the basket to the crane but there wasn't. The crane also shouldn't have been used because it did not have the technical clearance to do so.

More about the problems at the construction site can be found here in the English section of the portal:
www.pracownik.net.pl

A Human Story Behind this "Spectacular" Renovation

There is much press support to the gentrification of Praga. The liberals croon on and one about just how beautiful everything could be... which is true. The only thing that they forget to tell you about is that this usually goes on at a very high human cost, with the displacement of many local residents.

The building below belongs to the Fire Department.

Prior to its "spectacular renovation", there were flats there for the employees of the fire station and it looked like this:

This project was awarded money for "revitalization" as gentrification is called locally.

Of course, there is a sad story behind it all.

In the middle of July, the Tenants' Defence Committee received an urgent phone call from a tenant in this building. She had arrived home to find that the gate was locked and she was being evicted. People quickly gathered to go help her.

As it turned out, most tenants there had already been kicked out - but there were three left: the woman who called (an employee of the fire department) and a retired woman and her handicapped brother who had lived there practically their whole lives.

Thanks to our intervention, they were not thrown out like that, but the situation proved to be quite tragic.

The woman who was still working for the fire department was constantly being harrassed and mobbed at work to get out of her apartment. In the PRL era, besides public housing, many, many people lived in houses owned by their workplace. Many of these flats were privatized, offered to the tenants. Some people however were not given a chance to buy such flats or could not afford them. They remained tenants. If the building was then sold to somebody else, they were sold along with it.

Local Residents Confront Yuppie Artists.

Today in Warsaw's Praga district there was a first: a protest which turned into a mass confrontation of local residents with yuppie scum / artists.

Tenants activists have been holding bonfires as a way of both encouraging networking and drawing attention to the fact that we are cold. Many residents of the Praga district do not have heat in their houses. In most of the houses built before the war, there were stoves instead of central heating and the city never bothered to change this. For many people, this means the use of either expensive electrical heating, or self-installed gas tanks and heaters, many of which become a fire hazard. Other people had heat but have had it cut off by either the city or slumlords who are trying to drive out the tenants they inherited with their buildings.

Living conditions get quite harsh for many Praga residents during the winter. What does the city have in mind to make life easier for people?

Art.

The city is most concerned about real estate speculation and gentrification. The residents of Praga are in the middle of gentrification, with the city promoting the neighbourhood for a few years as a potential bohemian paradise. To this effect, and in accordance with its official plans to gentrify the neighbourhood, it tries to bring in artists as the avantgarde of gentrification, often offering them cut rates to rent commerical space in the area, while at the same time raising the rents for tenants and speeding up reprivatization and evictions. It is becoming more and more clear to the local residents that the poor are to be replaced by artists and their yuppie sponsors and a certain tension is developing.

There was a  bonfire in a vacant lot across from the place where some politicians and artists were to show up to unveil a controversial new statue - a rubber statue of a neighbourhood alcoholic who used to stand and beg for money in front of the shop where the monument is to stand.

The creepy artist, who really convinced himself that he is somehow in soldarity with the local people, estimated the value of the giant piece of rubber at 100,000 euros and the city decided to pay to put in cameras and guards for it -- since the local riff-raff might destroy it. Of course they had the damned thing insured as well.

Local Protest

ZSP members took part in organizing a local protest in Praga where the authorities want to liquidate overground pedestrian crossings, make more space for cars and force pedestrians to use underground tunnels. Although the city pays a lot of lip service to making Warsaw more "green", or promoting public transport, everything it does is oriented towards cars. 

The protest was called during a "consultation" with the public, which was a farce. Almost nobody was invited except a few people from NGOs - and only because they demanded the meeting and called other people. Only a couple of local people came, on our invitation, because the city only confirmed the meeting the day before. The city is building a metro station on the main intersection of Praga, currently one of the busiest in the city. While building the metro, they want to totally liquidate pedestrian crossings. Despite the fact that all gathered there were against the plans and that several architects already made alternative proposals, two which were presented at the meeting, it all doesn't matter because the politicians announce that it's "too late" to change their plans, that they consulted with nobody. No competition for the plans were even announced. 

Empty buildings

On the main street of Praga you can find at least 5-6 buildings which have been empty for quite some time. The city does nothing to repair them. Next to this empty building on Targowa St., you can see the results of a famous gentrification project on Zabkowska St. But only the facade of the building was repaired. Inside, it's the same shit standard.

Staircases

There are many formerly beautiful staircases in Praga, but for many, getting up to your flat can be a bit of a horror.

Wooden staircases are to be found everywhere, many of them sagging terribly, often with holes or even missing steps. Sometimes the tenants themselves are forced to make makeshift repairs.

The entrances of buildings are often falling apart and haven't been painted since the Second World War. In the worst cases, the entrance become used by drunks as public toilets. Many entrances also have no light, and some residents thus are often afraid to go out in the evening.

This is my friend's staircase. There are a number of terrible fire hazards in this building.  When the TV station came and did a report on the state of the building, they went to visit the head of the local housing authority. Since much of the hazard related to stray electrical wires in the entrance, if there was a fire, the wooden stairs would likely burn, preventing residents from getting out. When asked if what the residents should do in case of a fire, the head of the housing authority said that people could always jump out the windows.

These stairs on Zabkowska 13 don't look as tragic as most in Praga. But that is because this house was renovated a couple of years ago as part of a very famous renovation program. Lots of public money was spent to renovate a number of houses on historic Zabkowska St. Recently, it turned out that there were a number of serious problems in the house and the city wanted to move out the tenants. But they refused fearing that the city would turn the buildings into luxury housing and they would wind up in much worse conditions, never to come back.

Unfortunately you can find racist graffiti. Maybe a crew needs to go out one night and deal with this.

 

Falling Apart

Some photos from a walk around the neighbourhood.

A huge piece of facade fell off this building. A film about it is on the Tenants' Defence Committee webpage. This building is a famous Praga landmark which was reprivatized and wound up in the hands of shady property speculators. They are trying to sell it. 

I used to live here and that was my view out the window. The brick was not exposed before the Second World War. Around Praga there are still plenty of traces of Nazi bullets.

 

The price of being in the EU. According to regulations, new mailboxes had to be installed everywhere so that postal services other than the Post Office could have access. These are the so-called "Euroboxes". They are great for leafletters lke myself who can now put anything I want in people's mailbox. Of course mostly they are jammed up with junk mail and people hate it. The boxes are also generally of really crappy quality and in many houses the majority are already destroyed as local hooligans try to steal people's mail. I still have the old kind of mailbox, which I could get a fine for having.

There are lots of windows missing in Praga. This only makes things more miserable in the winter.

The water keeps leaking in at my friends' house.

The stairwell at my old place keeps getting worse and worse.

One of many dozens of buildings boarded up. When these flats got bricked up, they were still liveable by local standards. The longer they stand like this, the worse they get and eventually the houses will become disaster areas and be destroyed. This is what the city wants. In the meanwhile, in some cases people who are denied housing squat such places which help not only to house them, but to maintain the buildings.

In a lot of photos you can notice stray wires. These are common all around Praga and often are quite dangerous. There are often wires quite close to the ground, which makes them an attractive object for kids to try to grab on to.

Another common site. Mysterious holes everywhere and some "repairs" to keep kids from falling into them.

Bullet holes again.

At a friend's building. Rain went through this hole and it has grown since this picture was taken.

This building will be repaired and will house a museum.