Tenants' Bonfires and Protests. Local Residents Demand Heat, Repairs and 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.

For a bit of background: last week tenants protested in Warsaw, burning the legislation and declaring war on the city. In particular, the Tenants' Defense Committee has been fighting against the city budget since money which was intended for housing repairs was not included in the draft budget and was allocated for other purposes - namely for politicians' salaries and perks. At the same time, the Committee has decided to hold bonfires around the city as a way of getting people out of their houses and networking. Besides the fun of the fires, the Committee would like to draw attention to something else: that 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. At present, when a building is reprivatized, a landlord has to give at least 3 years' notice to a tenant he wants to move. Today the Ministry of the Economy, to make matters worse, announced that it wanted to reduce this notice period to just one year.

During the week there was even one action where the city tried to turn off the gas on 107 families. They would like them to move out of the neighbourhood, in which the house of social flats is surrounded by yuppie housing and new real estate investments. The Committee helped the tenants to block the crew who were to turn off the gas and forced them to fix the installation instead.

The temperatures in Warsaw are already well below 0. Freezing temperatures mean that many families suffer in the winter if they have no heat. On top of no heat, many families also have no hot water or any gas to cook on. In the worst cases, people bring unsafe gas canisters into their houses. Every winter, some houses burn in Warsaw due to accidents with this type of equipment.

While all of this is going on, 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.

Tonight's bonfire was 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.

In the meanwhile. the locals want to know why their houses are not repaired, why the hospitals ran out of money to treat patients and why free lunches were cut at local schools. Tomorrow the city decides on the budget and today the locals got a good taste of what the city considers important to the community.

In fact, there were lots of other reasons that locals, who spoke out during a Hyde Park, said that they were against the statue. Many feel that they are stigmatized as poor people and drunks and that the monument was not a monument to normal people, as the artist claimed, but a monument to the stigma and a stereotype. Many people said that they felt insulted. Others expressed the opinion that artists were some sort of outsiders who were coming into the neighbourhood and looking down on people.

The Committee pointed out that since the role of the artists is ultimately to drive out people like the guy immortalized in the statue, (whose family was vehemently against it), the statue is like a grotesque harbinger of things to come, like how extinct creatures are exhibited in a natural history museum.

The atmosphere at one point got so hot that the politicians who appeared at the scene to unveil the rubber guy ran away. Some local people wanted to lynch the artist, so he ran around the corner and was trying not to be recognized. After some while, when it became clear that nobody was going to unveil the statue, the locals did it themselves and some people started to ... well let's say abuse it slightly. In fact, some people wanted to destroy it, but there were too many police around. Local residents say that rubber man will not last long.

The owner of the shop in front of which the rubber man was placed was not consulted by the city and only found out about it when they appeared with a big white box during the day. It was in front of this shop that the 'model' for the rubber man, an unemployed alcoholic, used to stand all day and beg for money until he died.

Tomorrow the protests continue when tenants will try to force the city to modify the budget to include the 100 million zloties it wanted to misappropriate. Already the city is nervous since the budget has been blocked for weeks. The Vice-President of the city today started to make promises that they will put money back in the budget, especially to give to Praga --- but nobody believes his empty promises.

Photos: http://lokatorzy.info.pl/protest-przeciw-marnotrawstwu-pieniedzy-publicz...

Film (in Polish- from mainstream news): http://www.tvnwarszawa.pl/-1,1634027,0,,menel_czy_model_awantura_o_pana_...