"It's ridiculous to think that these perfect flats are being boarded up and left to rot when there are people out in the streets with nowhere to go," says 20-year-old East Londoner Sam Middleton.
She's sitting with her friend Jasmin Stone in an apartment in the Carpenters Estate housing project, an easy javelin's throw from London's Olympic Park. A few weekends back, the flat lay empty and barred, waiting to be demolished and redeveloped, partly as luxury housing. Now the apartment and its neighbors have become an unofficial social center, with its own food bank, free shop, and program of workshops on housing rights.
The apartments weren't even broken into—they have been occupied by a group of local activists who simply opened the windows.
These activists don't fit the usual stereotype. They're neither seasoned campaigners nor attached to a major group like Occupy. Instead, they're a 29-strong group of mothers from the neighborhood, first-time activists who got together because they found themselves threatened with homelessness.
[For more of this story, written by Feargus O'Sullivan, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...sing-complex/380993/]
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