“As you can see, it needs a little work.” Yes, we could see that. For one thing, there was no staircase (it was a seven-story building), and we peered from the first-floor landing up to the sky, through six stories of filth and old beams and swathes of rotted metal that seemed to hang precariously above our heads. It was not dark, because there were huge sections of wall missing, through which we could see the abandoned building next door. To get from the first floor to the second you climb a long, thin ladder from a fire escape that has been propped up against the second-floor landing under all those suspended palm leaves of metal. To get to the upper floors you go to the back and climb (prayerfully) up the tilting fire escape itself. Amidst all the rubble and dirt and holes in the floors were several “apartments” people had cleared out for themselves.
Nobody wanted to hear the word “winter.” October is bad enough. When you wake up in the morning, you feel like you never want to get up. The cold air and the dust blow across your face, and you slink deeper under the blankets, or into your sleeping bag if you have one (which means you have money, or did once). There’s plenty of fresh air because of the gaps in the walls and the holes in the floor, and of course there are no windows—at most you may have put up some plastic or an old sheet to keep out the wind. To wash up, you go down to the hydrant. For food, there are soup kitchens. For companionship, there are fellow squatters scattered in dozens of similarly gutted buildings nearby, places that, once you’ve seen them, will make it a lot harder to use the word “uninhabitable” in a sentence.
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