“Ours to Lose is an extraordinarily powerful, vivid, and multi-layered investigation of the contradictory meanings of home ownership as seen through the eyes and experiences of squatters on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s. With a deep respect for the squatters whose stories form the book’s core and with a bracingly realistic analysis of housing politics, Starecheski demonstrates how alternatives to the dominant property regime can emerge out of the creativity and persistence of people who refuse to accept its rules. Ours to Lose is both a wonderfully rich history of the forces that transformed New York’s working-class neighborhoods and a profound inquiry into what it means to treat housing as a commodity in the twenty-first century.”

Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University

“This is oral history at its best: a skillful weaving of narrative and analysis, subjectivity and hard data, passion, and theory. Starecheski achieves brilliantly the goal of representing all the nuances of a complex, even contradictory, but all-important movement and process in the struggle for democratic rights and a livable city.”

Alessandro Portelli, author of The Death of Luigi Trastulli

“Ours to Lose chronicles the experience of squatters who labor against formidable odds to claim space and citizenship within the neoliberal city. Combining oral history and ethnography, Starecheski offers a remarkably candid account of how our private property regime operates to enrich the wealthy, indebt the majority, and exclude the vulnerable—yet how alternative possibilities can nonetheless take root within the interstices of capitalism itself. This is a hard-hitting and important book.”

Kathryn Dudley, Yale University

“This original ethnography of a successful group of Lower East Side squatters in what is considered the ultimate luxury city—downtown Manhattan—turns the right to the city into an ambivalent struggle to gain property rights.  It examines how residents’ political commitments to collective and inclusive values are confronted by difficult choices and hard work in an effort to retain abandoned housing that is home to poor and otherwise homeless friends and families. The social dynamics of squatters transformation into owners is described with compassion and pride as Starecheski faces the contradictions inherent in this housing conversion.”
 

Setha Low, City University of New York