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May 23, 2019 01:26 pm PDT

The Oliver Twist workhouse is becoming a block of luxury flats with a "poor door"

The incredible human misery on display at the workhouse attached to central London's Middlesex Hospital inspired Charles Dickens to write "Oliver Twist"; now, Camden council has granted a developer permission to develop the site into luxury flats (just in time for the luxury flat crash!), in exchange for a commitment to build some below-market-rent social housing flats, which will be accessible through "poor doors."

Poor doors were the inspiration for my novella "Unauthorized Bread", the lead story in my new book Radicalized: these are separate entrances that developers build for luxury properties that have attained planning permission due to a promise to build below-market units. These separate entrances -- a cross between Jim Crow segregation and a Victorian servant's entrance -- ensure that the full-rate people don't have to ever encounter the subsidy people, but more importantly, they serve as a constant reminder to the subsidy people that they don't really belong there, they are mere charity cases. As I write in Unauthorized Bread: "even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it," or as John Siman paraphrases, "Free markets is a euphemism for fuck you."

I've been writing about poor doors for years, and this isn't even the most vile, guillotine-inspiring example of the genre (that would be this one). But the irony of turning a site that inspired a social revolution over performative cruelty to poor people into a place where such performative cruelty happens again? Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_WWbuwn2mgk/neovictorian-dickens-larpers.html

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