There was no ‘for sale’ sign, but that hardly mattered, because Kit simply planned to move in

I once lived in a London flat which had been squatted for so long that the city had granted legal ownership to the squatters, who now had a lovely co-op which they paid for, in part, by renting rooms to visiting students (and, in part, by growing certain kinds of salable plants). On the other side of London, a group calling themselves The Brixton Poets performed in the back rooms of pubs, in backyards, in parks, and at least one time in an abandoned swimming pool and its related cavernous hallways. The pool was filled with tents and little rooms made from curtains and building materials, and sparsely populated with people living collectively, or semi-alone, in this abandoned public space.

So today, seventeen years after I had that experience (to say nothing of the parallel experience of say, the East Village pre-1993), Jake Halpern of the New York Times calls those squatters Freegans, and tells their story, in Buffalo, NY.

Freeganism is a bubbling stew of various ideologies, drawing on elements of communism, radical environmentalism, a zealous do-it-yourself work ethic and an old-fashioned frugality of the sock-darning sort. Freegans are not revolutionaries. Rather, they aim to challenge the status quo by their lifestyle choices. Above all, freegans are dedicated to salvaging what others waste and — when possible — living without the use of currency. “I really dislike spending money,” Kit told me. “It doesn’t feel natural.”

Read The Freegan Establishment by Jake Halpern here.