Madison Occupy site lingers as haven for homeless

Madison Occupy site lingers as haven for homeless



11:47 PM, Apr. 6, 2012 |
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The sun sets over the two main tents at Occupy Madison camp at an abandoned car dealership's parking lot on E. Washington Avenue in March. This encampment was born out of the Occupy political movement, but it has become a mostly apolitical haven for the homeless. / Lukas Keapproth/Wisconsin Center for Investigative


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Lukas Keapproth

Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism




About the Occupy Movement


Occupy Wall Street activists launched an ongoing series of demonstrations Sept. 17 against economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of the financial services sector over government. The demonstrations spurred similar movements worldwide. The Occupy Appleton Movement started in October in solidarity with the international movement. The Occupy movement's slogan — "We are the 99 percent" — refers to the fact that 1 percent of Americans control about 40 percent of the nation's wealth and take in nearly 25 percent of the nation's income.

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On an unseasonably warm day in March, Dave Peters cleaned out his tent, removing old newspapers he had been using for insulation. The papers are gone now, but Peters and about 40 other people are still holding their ground.
"We're part of an ongoing movement," said Peters, one of the organizers of Occupy Madison. "This thing is going to ebb and flow, that's to be expected. But the movement itself will continue."
The Madison camp, which is slated for shutdown by April 30, has evolved mostly into a haven for homeless residents, rather than a centerpiece of Occupy's original goal of giving voice to the "99 percent" of residents who supposedly were being ignored by policymakers.
Occupy Madison has maintained a nominal presence eight blocks from the Wisconsin state Capitol, the site of protests that have drawn tens of thousands of people as recently as mid-March. The site's leaders are optimistic they will find a new location and firmly believe in their movement's staying power.
Yet it's clear the Occupy movement, including the Madison encampment, is struggling to maintain relevance.
"Once this (occupying) becomes a ritual, it's harder and harder to provoke the non-participants to care," said John Sharpless, a University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor.
Bob Ostertag, a professor of technocultural studies and an expert on the Occupy movement at the University of California-Davis, whose campus was the site of a controversial pepper-spraying of student protesters by campus police, agreed the movement's initial exuberance has passed.
"The first chapter was marvelous, but I don't think that can be repeated," Ostertag said. "You can't do the same things in the first chapter and expect to have as big an impact."
Occupy organizers in other cities across Wisconsin have abandoned the movement's early rhetoric about the necessity of physically occupying a space.
"It was never just about occupying a space," said Peter Rickman, an organizer for Occupy Milwaukee, which has shifted its attention to organizing rallies instead of permanent occupation. "The 99 percent includes a lot more than just people who sit in a park