Survival Without Rent is a short archival documentary about community members who rehabilitated abandoned city-owned properties in the 1980s and formed a vibrant community of artists and activists.
Survival Without Rent traces the history of the squatters' movement from the 1970s, when a financial crisis in New York triggered a wave of building abandonment, to the mid-1990s, when the Giuliani Administration launched an attack on lower Manhattan's squats.
The film also explores broader topics of government disinvestment, anticapitalist critique, extralegal activism, and the intersection of community arts and urban resistance movements.