The Freegan Establishment
Gregory Halpern for The New York Times
Published: May 31, 2010
I cruised through the West Side of Buffalo last summer with a young man named Kit who was looking to acquire a house. Kit was a 20-year-old Las Vegas native who had just arrived in Buffalo. He had the look of a mountain man fresh off the trail: his face was tanned, his brow was covered in sweat and his hair was pulled back haphazardly in a ponytail. He wore a bandanna around his neck, and his shorts and T-shirt looked as if they were his only set of clothes. He was also barefoot. Kit looked poor — destitute, even — but he was very excited about a grand, old house that he had his eye on.
Multimedia
Slide Show
What a Freegan Calls Home
“It has a beautiful backyard with a lot of blackberry bushes!” Kit told me. It was a three-story house, he explained, and the first floor alone had 1,224 square feet. Kit had researched the house online, and he knew that the place had four bedrooms, two full bathrooms and two kitchens. “It’s totally stunning,” he gushed.
The house had one other outstanding feature: It was just across the street from a convenience store, and behind the store was a Dumpster, which Kit said he hoped would provide an endless source of meals.
Kit is a freegan. He maintains that our society wastes far too much. 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.”
Eventually, Kit and I arrived at the house that he’d picked out for himself. It was a tall, narrow structure, with boarded-up windows and a front lawn in desperate need of mowing. There was no “for sale” sign, but that hardly mattered, because Kit simply planned to move in. Buffalo is fertile ground for squatting. Kit’s house was one of 10,000 such abandoned structures in the city. As far as Kit was concerned, this rust-belt city, hit hard by foreclosures, was a veritable Eden for freegans.
“People throw away houses,” he told me. “It’s ridiculous.”
As it turns out, a group of Kit’s friends have enjoyed great success as squatters in this same neighborhood. In 2005, they took over a palatial old home, and this was where Kit was temporarily living when we met. The property is a sprawling turn-of-the-century mansion with six fireplaces, a cavernous dining room, a library, several enormous bedrooms, servants’ quarters and an in-ground swimming pool. The place, it must be said, is in serious disrepair. Shingles are peeling off the exterior, the front lawn is littered with bicycle parts and the swimming pool contains so much soil that it might more aptly be called a landfill. But it has electricity, running water and even a phone line. Those who live here often say they are living in “decadent poverty.”
The mansion is situated near the Niagara River, whose shores are lined with old warehouses and factories. This part of Buffalo was once home to working-class Italian-Americans, who worked in small factories, on the docks and in railroad yards. The homes, with notable exceptions, tend to be modest. In recent years, there has been an influx of new immigrants from Burma, Somalia and Sudan. Like the freegans, many of these immigrants came to take advantage of the city’s overlooked housing stock, though they acquired their homes in the more traditional way.
The freegans’ mansion is populated by a small number of residents who live there year-round. They ride out the winters in a single room equipped with a wood-burning stove, and when necessary, they use an auger to drill through the ice that forms in the toilets. In the summer, though, the mansion’s population swells, as drifters, backpackers from as far away as Europe and traveling musicians arrive almost daily. A few harder cases pass through, too. One visitor I met was a former drug addict who had tried to kill himself more than once; another was an anemic-looking young woman who had been living under a bridge for four months. The majority, however, seemed to be iconoclastic young people from middle-class backgrounds living some version of the freegan dream. They Dumpster-dive for food, mend their clothing with dental floss and brew dandelion wine. Postcards from former guests adorn the walls. One is signed by a visitor from Plymouth, England, who writes: “How’s the house and how’s the whole project working out? I hope a lot of guys are taking advantage of the situation you have.”
Most visitors are welcome to stay at the mansion for a day or two, but to stay longer, they have to help fix the place up. There is a “probationary period,” one longtime resident explained, in which newcomers must “bottom line” a project — that is, they must see it to completion. During my visit, the veterans were considering the candidacy of a young woman who’d bottom-lined a few projects. Her chances looked good. “She showed me a bunch of tricks on filling and masonry and how to best use Spackle so that you don’t waste it,” one veteran told me. He then added: “Who knows? Maybe there’ll be a bunch of drama with her, and she’ll wind up getting into some big fight, or there’s something that we didn’t know about.”
On my first visit, I found several groups of young people busy at work — painting the interior, mending a fence and building an outdoor stone patio. The house is, in some ways, a giant learning lab where residents teach one another the basics of carpentry, plumbing and electrical work. Many embrace this do-it-yourself mentality with an almost evangelical fervor. A young woman named Lee put it this way: “These are all a bunch of punk kids who got in trouble at school and just at life.” But once they arrived at the house, they set into a routine gathering food, gardening and working on the house. “Nobody has time to get in trouble anymore,” she said.
One neighbor observed that some residents live at the mansion for a year or two and then move on. I met one former resident, Natalia, who came to Buffalo as an acrobat with a traveling circus. She moved into the mansion and became the resident herbalist; eventually, however, she enrolled in nursing school, cut her dreadlocks and got a place of her own.
Outside the mansion, by a stone patio, I met Tim, a 22-year-old dressed in a black shorts and a T-shirt. He wore a buzz cut and had leather bands around his neck and wrists. He told me that he’d been living in the house for four years. Tim stood barefoot in the mud and was shoveling vigorously. He explained that he had already unearthed quite a few used condoms and hypodermic needles — vestiges of the days when the abandoned house was used by prostitutes and drug dealers. (Tim, concerned that the house would be overrun with passers-through this summer, asked that his last name and the exact location of the house be withheld.)
Tim grew up in a quiet neighborhood in North Buffalo. His father, Mark, is a financial planner, and his mother, Ruth, is a high-school English teacher. Tim was a rebel from a young age. He was always striving to “stick the fork in the electrical outlet,” Ruth recalls. Tim later attended a prestigious magnet school, City Honors, where his contrarian goal was to achieve a grade-point average just one point above failing.
Tim said that he struggled to “find a way out of what looked like a really cloned and synthetic world that people get plugged into.” And just before graduating from high school, in the spring of 2005, he found it. He met some young people who had found the boarded-up mansion on the West Side of Buffalo, which they hoped to take over and convert into a utopian safe haven for freegans and other dropouts. Mark and Ruth remember their son’s departure vividly. “That Friday night he came downstairs with a backpack, hugged, kissed us, got on his bike and moved,” Ruth says. “There was no stopping him.”
The property seemed like the perfect place to squat. One of the group’s founding members, a 25-year-old named Rich Majewski, had gathered as much information on the mansion as he could. The owner on record was deceased, and his heir, who lived in the suburbs, appeared to have no interest in the place.
Majewski’s strategy was to be as brazen as possible. “The facade of legitimacy was our main goal,” he told me. “We pried the boards off and did it all in broad daylight. That’s what ownership comes down to — everyone believing that you actually own it.” When he introduced himself to the neighbors, Majewski told them that he had the heir’s permission to move in. This wasn’t true, but the neighbors took Majewski at his word.
The mansion had clearly once been a place of great wealth. The original owner, J. E. Rebstock, built it in the early 1890s. Rebstock was the founder of Crystal Beach, which was once known as “Buffalo’s Coney Island.” But by 1960, the house had become a nursing home. The mansion’s current residents led me down to the basement, where, from boxes of dusty medical records, they had unearthed creepier aspects of the mansion’s past. One record noted that a patient was “awake all night tearing bed apart.” Another read: “Yelling loudly. Still scratching.”
When Majewski and his fellow squatters arrived, the house was still filled with the bedpans, walkers and knitting needles that had belonged to the nursing home’s residents. There were also rotting furniture, burned couches, dead birds and so much other garbage that some rooms had debris from the floor to the ceiling. Cleaning up took the better part of a year.
Eventually, one of the city’s “board-up crews,” which seal off abandoned homes, discovered the squatters and reported them to Judge Henry Nowak at the city’s housing court. At first, Nowak didn’t know what to make of the situation. Then, one evening, while the judge was attending his son’s Little League baseball game, he was approached by a group of neighbors who lived near the mansion. They said they wanted to discuss the squatters. To the judge’s astonishment, the neighbors praised the young people, saying that they had kept the thieves, drug dealers and arsonists away. What’s more, they attested, the squatters were fixing up the place, making it less of an eyesore. Their presence, and the fact that the mansion was now occupied, had made it easier for people on the block to get homeowners’ insurance. Odd as it seemed, the freegan kids helped stabilize the neighborhood, and the concerned neighbors wanted them to stay. “They said, ‘Don’t you dare kick those kids out of the house!’ ” Judge Nowak told me.
After this encounter, the judge found himself in a difficult situation. “I was left with two options essentially,” he told me. “One would be to put the house in receivership, where I would tell all of these children that if they want to stay, they have to now pay rent.” This option was problematic, Nowak said, because the squatters were “enamored with the fact that they moved into a house that wasn’t theirs,” and given their freegan sensibilities, they would not consent to paying rent. Or, Judge Nowak explained, “I could essentially let things stay as they are and trust that the children are going to make the repairs to the property.”
For the time being, the judge decided to let the squatters stay. “It was a close call,” he told me. “It was an awfully close call.”
When he was done working on the patio, Tim gave me a tour of the house. On the first floor, there was a spacious kitchen laden with food taken from various Dumpsters, a brew room stocked with homemade beer and dandelion wine, a dining room that had been converted into a performance space for bands and a computer room equipped with a PC that one of the mansion’s residents had built entirely from found parts. The computer even had Internet service thanks to a “cantenna” (an antenna made of cans) that picked up a wireless signal from a college nearby. There was also a library, furnished with old couches that looked as if they might be vestiges of a 1920s speakeasy, and a vast collection of books and periodicals organized by subject headings like “Sex and Sexuality,” “Prisoner and Crime” and “It’s Not Theft.” There were bedrooms on the second floor, and the third floor was a bunkroom for the many drifters who passed through. Several bunks were made up with dusty Thomas the Tank Engine bed sheets. On the wall above the bunks, travelers had scrawled messages like “Thanks a lot! — Fred from Belgium” and “Escape while you can.” The third floor also was home to the mansion’s Craft Room, which had supplies for stenciling, bookbinding, silk-screening and sewing. In the basement there was a wood shop loaded with carpenters’ tools and a repair shop where residents could fix their bikes. Perhaps the most interesting nook was a very large closet dubbed the Free Store. It was stocked with racks of secondhand clothing that visitors were welcome to take. One day I happened to witness the Free Store being restocked. Paul, one of the long-term residents, returned home with a huge bag of clothing that he obtained from the lost-and-found at a local laundromat. “I got a thousand dollars’ worth of designer jeans!” he boasted. A crowd soon formed.
“You got a washcloth?” someone asked.
Paul tossed a washcloth up into the air.
Soon everyone was rifling through the clothing. “I haven’t worn underwear in eight years,” declared Tim, as he clutched several pairs of boxers with a grin. “I am feeling fancy as hell!”
The line between this help-yourself mentality and a more freewheeling spirit of communal property isn’t always so clear. One resident, Brianna, remarked to me that her stuff often goes missing and that “everyone just thinks everything that’s here is up for grabs.”
One morning, after I had been hanging out at the mansion for a few days, we were about to have breakfast when someone noticed that all the forks and spoons were missing.
“What happened to all the silverware?” someone asked.
“They got turned into a wind chime,” someone replied nonchalantly. Sure enough, moments later, we could all hear the sound of forks clanging in the breeze.
Once a day or so, a foraging party visited the best local Dumpsters. I accompanied a man named Rick on a mission. At 53, Rick — who also goes by Uncle Rick — was the mansion’s oldest resident by two decades. Rick is a kindly, softspoken, white-haired man who often donned an old sport coat. He described himself as someone who had struggled with addiction. His stay at the mansion, he insisted, had been his unofficial rehab treatment. “I am kind of new to this food Dumpstering,” Rick told me. “I never did this in my life, until I moved in with these kids.” Nonetheless, he proved quite adept at it, and after crawling through just one Dumpster, we obtained almost two dozen cellophane-wrapped sandwiches that had not reached their expiration date. We returned home to a heroes’ welcome. “This is the modern hunter-gatherer society,” Rick told me with a smile.
When everyone had eaten enough, Rick placed the leftover sandwiches in the refrigerator alongside several cellophane-wrapped packages of vegetables that were salvaged from a grocery store’s Dumpster. Food in the house was surprisingly abundant. One longtime resident, Dan Zogrephos, told me that besides beer or occasional snacks, he had not bought any food in roughly eight years.
One evening, a foraging party visited a nearby bike path and gathered several hundred snails. They stuffed them into mushrooms and cooked them in butter. Occasionally the menu at the house also included roadkill like duck, deer or raccoon. Tim was fond of this cuisine. His father told me, “It just hurts his heart to see an animal lying on the road not being consumed if it’s already dead.”
Freeganism is often described as a recent phenomenon, but its premises date back at least to Gerrard Winstanley, a 17th-century English cloth seller. In the 1640s, Winstanley’s business failed, and he resettled in the Surrey countryside, where he herded cattle. These were tough times in England, marked by violence, famine and low wages. Winstanley decided that the solution was to form a community without money. The poor would till the soil and fill communal warehouses with their crops, which would be distributed to all. Winstanley, who abhorred waste, eventually took over some uncultivated public lands along with his followers and founded what was known as a Digger colony.
The colony didn’t last long, but Winstanley wrote extensively about his utopia. Centuries later, in the 1960s, a group of radicals in San Francisco were inspired by his writings and dedicated themselves to creating a society without money. They called themselves the Diggers, and they opened free stores, distributed free food, set up free housing in squats, offered free medical care and even organized free concerts featuring the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
The Diggers’ philosophy influenced the thinking of a young man named Keith McHenry, who would go on to become one of the most important figures in the freegan movement. McHenry, who is now 53, came from a family with a prestigious pedigree; his ancestor, James McHenry, was one of the signers of the Constitution. Keith McHenry, however, was a nonconformist almost from birth. Throughout his 20s, McHenry traveled the country, Dumpster-diving and crashing with artists and hippies. The pivotal moment in his life came in 1980, when he was working at an organic-food store in Cambridge, Mass. “At the end of each day, I was throwing away these crates of produce — apples, lettuce, cabbage — stuff that had been bruised or was slightly imperfect in shape,” McHenry told me. So he asked his boss if he could distribute this produce at shelters, churches and soup kitchens. McHenry’s efforts were a success, and he helped found Food Not Bombs, a nonprofit whose mission was to salvage discarded but edible food and feed the poor. Today, the organization has more than a thousand chapters around the world and has probably been the most active force for spreading the ethos of freeganism.
One main gripe that freegans have with American society is just how much food we waste. In his book “Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal,” Tristram Stuart writes that American households, retailers and vendors waste about 40 million tons of food each year. Stuart, who is also an activist, does not identify himself as a freegan. “What I want to do is end the possibility of freeganism because I want the whole food business to stop the waste that makes freeganism possible in the first place,” he told me. Stuart says that freeganism serves a purpose, because it draws attention to a problem, but it does not offer the solution. And this observation reveals a quandary inherent in the freegan movement. Freegans maintain that by salvaging waste, they diminish their need for money, which allows them to live a more thoughtful, responsible and deliberate existence. But if they succeed in their overriding goal, and society ends up becoming less wasteful, the freegan lifestyle will no longer be possible.
As far as I could tell, the two driving philosophical forces at the Buffalo mansion were freeganism and hedonism. The freegans were making a statement and having a hell of a good time doing it. It was a social experiment worthy of Henry David Thoreau, a place buzzing with industry, self-reliance and eco-consciousness; but, at times, it was also a rollicking frat house. Mornings could be dead quiet when the freegans were sleeping off their hangovers.
One responsibility that the freegans carried out faithfully was showing up in court, which they had begun to do regularly by the spring of 2006. “When we would go to housing court,” Rich Majewski recalled, “it would be a bunch of landlords and 12 dirty kids dressed in three-piece suits from a secondhand store. It was always like, Maybe we’re getting evicted today.”
Judge Nowak remembered the unkempt appearance of the squatters. “They looked like they hadn’t bathed in a little while,” he said. “They would look at the ceiling as they were talking to me. Frankly, they all looked like they were high.” He was won over, however, by the squatters’ respectful attitude, both inside and outside the courtroom. When the judge ordered a housing inspector to visit the mansion and assess how much work the squatters had done, the squatters welcomed the inspector into the house and proudly showed him around. The squatters’ politeness, the judge concluded, “probably gave them an unfair advantage that they shouldn’t have had.” One of the judge’s community liaisons also reported back to him that the squatters picked up garbage around the neighborhood and cut the lawns of vacant properties and that one resident even became president of the local block association.
Starting in the spring of 2007, however, there were signs that the squatters were letting things go. In June of that year, a liaison for the judge inspected the property and reported that the place looked like “a flophouse” and that “I do not think the structure could survive another winter.” And despite support from most of the neighbors, there were complaints. One neighbor told me that the long-term residents were generally very “cordial and polite,” but the drifters who passed through could be loud, disrespectful and drunk. This neighbor once spotted someone urinating out of a window.
At one point, in the summer of 2007, Judge Nowak temporarily evicted everyone from the mansion because of bad behavior. The eviction was a turning point in the house, showing the residents how tenuous their arrangement was. Tim was forced to crash with friends and occasionally with his parents. He began discussing the matter with his father. Mark, ever the financial planner, told his son that if he wanted to do as he pleased within the mansion, then he had to get ownership of the place.
Tim was uncertain of what to do. The squatters had already paid off back taxes and were paying utility bills — not the most orthodox of freegan practices — but, as they saw it, they were still beating the system. Ownership would, arguably, catapult them into the ranks of propertied classes.
“Many of us in the house see the whole system of private property as being something that oppresses people,” Tim said. “And if we owned the place, suddenly we’d be the ones kicking people out or the ones calling the cops.” But, in the end, Tim said, ownership was “a necessary step to keep the project alive.”
The problem was figuring out who actually owned the place. The heir to the last owner named on the deed had taken no responsibility for the property and appeared not to want it. Tim eventually tracked him down and persuaded him to sign a quitclaim deed, which transferred ownership of the property.
Right away, Tim had to deal with a $52,000 outstanding bank lien against the house. For help, he turned to Harvey Garrett, one of Judge Nowak’s liaisons. Garrett says that Tim and the other squatters were more responsible than they let on. While the freegans eschew currency, they recognize they can’t entirely live without it, and Tim and others take occasional handyman jobs for wages. The long-term residents now contribute a small sum to a house fund. “They make it sound like they are big bohemians living off the house for free, but that’s just not true,” Garrett says. “They worked their butts off and paid the back taxes and the utilities. They are more conformist than they want you to think they are.”
Tim worked with Garrett and a local community organizer named Aaron Bartley (who is a friend of mine), and they appealed to the bank to forgive the lien. They argued that, given the condition of the mansion and the neighborhood that it was in, the bank’s ownership stake in the property was more of a liability than an asset. In the end, the bank transferred ownership to Tim.
Tim’s parents were impressed by their son’s determination and the coup he pulled off. “We’re damn proud of him,” his mother told me. Even the judge seemed proud, praising the squatters for “an awfully impressive effort on their part.”
Tim seemed less excited about his new status as a property owner. After all, he is the one liable if someone gets hurts at the mansion or if the city assesses fines on the property. “If bills go unpaid, it comes back to bite me,” he lamented. I asked Tim if his newfound responsibilities stressed him out. “Without a doubt,” he replied. Tim spent some time last fall doing farm labor. “I was in California — 3,000 miles away — and I was having the power company calling me about the electricity.”
Tim got into some legal trouble on his way home from that trip. According to his lawyer, Tim and several friends were working for a farmer who compensated them with marijuana. It was a quintessential freegan arrangement — no money was exchanged. While driving back to Buffalo with his friends, Tim’s car was stopped in Illinois and searched by the police. There were two pounds of marijuana in the vehicle, and Tim was charged with two felony counts. He is pleading not guilty.
Back in the house, Tim has to play the enforcer. Ruth, Tim’s mother, says that it irks her son that he has to be the one to tell visitors, for example, that their pets need to be walked. “He was really beside himself that he had to sit people down and say, ‘The rule is pets go outside to poop.’ He suddenly saw himself as the father figure, and that just turned his head inside out.”
Rich Majewski had a similar experience. After he had been living in the house for less than a year, he took an extended trip to New Orleans with his girlfriend. Upon their return they found the place trashed — beer cans on the floor, cigarette butts everywhere, piles of unwashed dishes, rotting food on the kitchen counters. Majewski and his girlfriend, who was also living at the mansion, suggested that the place needed to be cleaned up. “People started calling us Mom and Dad,” Majewski recalls glumly. “That wasn’t the dynamic I was looking for.” Shortly after that, they moved out.
During my time at the mansion, I heard more than a few guests and visitors marveling at how the squatters had managed to get themselves a mansion for free. Kit, the Las Vegas native, was one of them. He had become increasingly excited about the abandoned house that he had found, and one day, he asked me if I’d like a tour. He assured me that he’d already befriended the neighbors and that they wouldn’t mind us poking around.
“The neighbor to the left of the house is a sweet older lady with a fat, chubby dog, and she’s invited me over for tea,” Kit explained. “And you have a Filipino gentleman that’s across the street that’s so nice.”
We slipped around back and sneaked in through one of the few windows that wasn’t boarded up. Technically, we were breaking and entering, but this didn’t seem to worry Kit. As I strained to see through the murky darkness, he pointed down at the filthy wall-to-wall carpeting and said cheerfully, “We would probably pull everything up and have wood floors.” I nodded appreciatively. Kit explained he wouldn’t be living here alone. His plan was simply to get the house started, and then he’d hand it over to a group of female friends who were hoping to start an all-girls squat.
Kit and I walked through the house all the way up to the third floor. The rooms were strewn with junk — empty peanut-butter jars, a discarded sink, old underpants, even a trashed payphone. Kit pointed toward a broken window. “I don’t mind a breeze here and there,” he observed.
After leaving the house, Kit spotted two young women across the street who appeared to be his future neighbors. He sauntered over them. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asked. “We’re looking into this house; do you know who the owner is?”
The women shook their heads.
“Can I ask you a question?” asked one of the women.
“Sure,” Kit replied.
“Why are you walking around barefoot? Are you crazy? With all the crack vials and needles here?”
Kit glanced down at his bare feet and then explained with a smile that he always watched his footing.
Afterward, I asked Kit what he usually told the neighbors about his plans for the house. “I keep it vague,” he replied with an air of confidence. “Just be nice to people. Just make connections. It’s all about connections.”
Jake Halpern is the author of “Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction,” among other books.
JB06.6.10 - 12:03 pm
reply
-->
Ridazz Roulette!
