September 3, 2021 • 44 mins
In the wake of the Supreme Court's shadow ruling to block the eviction moratorium and allow mass evictions to proceed, Robert, Mia, and Garrison discuss historical and contemporary eviction defense.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
What's evicting my people who didn't want to die? Serving
lattes to anti mask activists. That's actually one of your
best I was like, where are you going? I was like,
oh no, they pulled it off. Great job. So this
(00:25):
is it could happen here. It's a show about collapse.
And speaking of collapse, Um, the Supreme Court just issued
a shadow ruling, which we should probably do a whole
episode about this practice of like Supreme Court decisions that
are it was a Supreme Court decision that was not
a Supreme Court decision, So they don't have to issue
like a whole justification. They don't have to like explain
(00:45):
where everyone landed. They just said, hey, you know the
eviction moratoriums that the Biden administration just pushed through Again, Nah,
it's not not constitutional. We're not going to say anymore.
Uh start kicking people out of their motherfucker and homes
and boy, how did that process is started? And we
don't know. I mean, I think the the you'll get
(01:06):
very different numbers when you try to figure out like
how many people are going to get evicted or at
risk of being evicted. Like the highest deal here is
like thirty to forty million Americans at risk of eviction. UM.
I think it was UM. I think it was Bank
of America's numbers that anticipated as many as seven hundred
and fifty thousand households. Goldman, it was a Goldman gold
(01:30):
anticipated about seven and fifty thousand American households losing their
homes getting and that's obviously more than seven fifty thousand people. Now,
when we talk about like how many of those folks
could end up homeless, UM, it's going to be a
less than that total number of households because whenever you
have stuff like this happened, like in two thousand and eight,
a decent number of people who lose access to their
(01:50):
homes wind up kind of CouchSurfing, bunking with family. You
wind up with two or three families in one home,
which is obviously particularly a problem during a pandemic. Right
Like if you have families doubling or tripling up in
the same house while there's a plague, that's um that
introduces additional complications. But it's it's possible, in fact, very
likely because about the s the kind of conservative estimate
(02:13):
for the number of people who are homeless on American
streets right now is a little over five and fifty thousand,
So there's a pretty good chance that the number of
homeless could essentially double in the next you know, not
quite overnight, because evictions it's not like a thing where like, okay,
the Supreme Court said you can evict people. Now, everybody's
out on their ass the next day. It's it's a
process of evicting people. There is like a legal process.
But in the near future, we could see a doubling
(02:35):
of the number of Americans who are without homes, if
not even potentially more than that. So it's pretty high stakes, um,
which I think necessitates everybody be thinking about not just
ways to fight the Supreme Court ruling or whatever, not
just ways to get the government to provide support to people,
but also eviction defense. Um, because kind of historically and
(02:56):
today we're going to kind of give a little bit
of a historic overview here. Um. Historically, eviction defense is
it has not in American history solved the overall problems,
but it solves it can provide necessary Uh, it can
be a necessary like tourniquet for a lot of people
and for communities. Um. Before kind of more long term
(03:17):
solutions to these problems get get get brought up, and
I think it behooves this to talk about eviction defense
kind of from that standpoint. UM So I found a
really interesting article when you when you start reading about
eviction defense, a lot of the eviction defense like articles
kind of talking about the Great Depression are going to
come from the International Socialist Review or other kind of
(03:39):
socialist or outright communists like websites. Um. And there's there's
some good reasons for this, which is that the organizations
during the Great Depression who were doing most of the
anti eviction organizing were communist organizations. Now, I found some
kind of scholarly analyzes of some of the reporting on
that that will point out that they especially if you're
kind of like report if you're if you're studying eviction defense,
(04:02):
based on kind of the documents at the time, and
it was a lot of like Socialist Worker, UM and
Unemployed Citizen and whatnot newspapers with titles like that. UM,
A lot of those would kind of tend to deliberately
under count the efforts of of non communist anti eviction
organizations because there was a whole political fight going on then. UM.
(04:24):
So keep that in mind that said, it is kind
of worth reading, uh some of these some of these accounts,
and I think one that is particularly uh noteworthy is
what happened in New York City starting in nineteen one
nineteen thirty two, UM. And this was in the Bronx
Park East and Allerton Avenue UM. And it started obviously,
(04:45):
like the Great Depression kicks off, like nineteen thirty, nineteen
thirty one. UM. By January of nineteen thirty two, you've
got a huge number of people unemployed and increasingly desperate,
and you've got these landlords trying to evict and kick
them out. UM. And the communists in the Bronx started
an eviction defense network that was very noteworthy, and it
(05:07):
kind of it initially crystallized around this series of communist
co ops, which were these two buildings in the Bronx
that were populated by communists UM. And that had included
like a cooperative housing experiment, like some cooperative gardening that
sort of stuff. And they were mostly Eastern European uh
Jewish like workers, like people who had come over from
(05:28):
Europe and in a lot of cases had been socialist
activists in Europe, many of whom had like had to
flee Europe to the United States because of their activism
UM and in January of nineteen thirty two, they organized
rent strikes at three larger apartment buildings at Bronx East
Park UM and one of the things that they created
(05:50):
was what they called the Upper Bronx Unemployed Council. And
this kind of was part of a series of decisions
that led to the creation of an organization called the
Unemployed Citizens Committees I think is they called them UM.
And kind of one of the ideas there was to
point out that, you know, despite kind of the focus
within the capitalist system on people needing to have a job,
needing to make income in order to be like citizens,
(06:13):
unemployed people were citizens too and embody and imbued with
like the full rights of an American citizen UM. And
so they were kind of taking ownership of the term
unemployed rather than accepting it as a slur UM that like, no,
we're like, we're still citizens, and we we have rights
in power and will UM will organize in order to
enact our power on or in order to UM in
(06:36):
order to kind of forcefully try to make the changes
that we need. And so these these communists in the
Bronx organized three buildings worth of tenants into a rent strike.
They were refusing to pay rent until they got their demands,
which were a fifteen percent reduction in rent and into eviction,
repairs and apartments, and recognition of the Tenants Committee as
(06:57):
an official bargaining agent. So they were trying to effectively unionize,
like in the same way that workers had just four
tenants in a building. UM. Now, these like this rent
strike set off a rent riot that eventually more than
four thousand people participated in city marshals and the marshals
were the people the city would hire to to force
(07:18):
homeless people out of their houses. UM, marshals and police
showed up to evict seventeen tenants and yeah, about four
thousand people showed up to oppose them, and that started
this massive street fight. UM. And it was largely and
and this would be the case with most of these
rent strikes in the early thirties, it was largely women
who would do most of the fighting and would do
(07:40):
most of the the the like the actual like physical
organizing against the police. And some of this was because
they recognized that like when their men were there, the
cops would beat the ship out of them and arrest them.
And so there was a lot of times where they
were like, okay, you guys, get out of the house,
like the women are going to organize. We'll get up
on the fire escapes and balconies. We'll like we'll throw
ship at the cops, you know. Um. And these were
(08:01):
also very like and I don't want to like be
be ignoring this either. These were extremely communist uh like events,
Like they would be singing communist songs, they would be
like making carrying out communist chance. It was communist papers
that did a lot of the organizing. Um. I want
to read a quote from that International Socialist Review article
(08:22):
that I found kind of like laying out how this
particular strike went. Quote. Bronx property owners moved quickly to
try to contain the movement. At first, they tried arbitration.
Following the evictions at six six five Allerton, landlords in
Bronx Park East asked a Blue Ribbon committee of Bronx
Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute, convinced that an impartial
examination of the buildings books would show that the landlord
could not meet the striker's demands without operating at a loss,
(08:44):
but the strike leaders contemptuously rejected arbitration and indeed the
whole notion that a reasonable return on one's investment represented
a basis for negotiation when times were good, Strike leader
Max Kim a Wits declared, the landlords didn't offer to
share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money
off us when we had it. Now that we haven't
got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less. Faced
(09:06):
with this kind of bargaining positions, landlords felt they had
no choice but to pull out the stops to suppress
the movement. By the second week of February nineteen thirty two,
two major organizations of Bronx landlords had formed rent strike
committees that offered unlimited funding and legal support for any
landlord facing a Communist led rent strike. Using the considerable
political influence and legal expertise at their disposal, that developed
(09:26):
a strategy that included wholesale issuance of dispossessed notices against
striking tenants, efforts to win in junctions against picketing and strikes,
agreements by judges to waive normal delay periods and evictions,
and efforts to ban rent strikes by legislative enactment. The
situation has become much graver than most persons suppose. When
Landlords spokesman declared the strikes are spreading rapidly and scores
of landlords are facing financial ruin or loss of their
(09:48):
properties as a result of them. Former State Senator Benjamin
Anton told landlords, this is a peculiar neighborhood. It is
the hotbed of communism and radicalism. The people in this
neighborhood are mostly communists and Soviet sympathizers. They do not
believe in our form of government. Now, one are the
things that's interesting about this. So in a lot of
cases particularly, there was like this this first big set
(10:10):
of riots that kind of ended when the police kind
of pushed the rioters back. But because of how many
of them there were, they came to an agreement and
like the landlords gave concessions to the people in those
three buildings. But the next set of strikes were pretty
much crushed and the majority of the rent strikes they
start popping up in buildings kind of all around this
part of New York. In the period they don't win
(10:31):
the initial strike um by which I mean people get evicted,
the marshals come in, they take these people's furniture out.
But what the communists started doing, because they had the numbers,
is they would show up after the cops and the
marshals left and they would lift like they would put
together police systems and lift people's furniture back into their apartments, um,
and move them back in. And so part of the
(10:53):
understanding was it cost the city money every time they
send marshals out because the city was paying to evict people,
So will just move them back in after they're evicted, um,
And that's going to like make the situation untenable for
the city. UM. So that led to the police setting
up like temporary police stations outside of some of the
buildings that were like most active as part of a
(11:14):
long term solution to try to suppress the revolt. UM.
The one issue of the Daily Worker noted quote cops
patrol the street all day. The entire territory is under
semi martial law. People are driven around the streets, off
the corners and away from the houses. Um. And so yeah,
it you know, kind of this went on for weeks.
And there's one of the criticisms that even this this
(11:37):
International Socialist Review right up, I found will make of
the of the initial rent strike is that because kind
of the a lot of the hardcore communist activists came
to relish sort of these clashes with police as a
result of the evictions and had this belief that they
would radicalize the masses um, whereas there was I think
among the masses more of like a well, we we
(11:59):
mostly want to lose our homes. And when it became
when you hit this like they kind of hit this
wall where they would come out and fight the cops,
but the cops would win and push people out in
the end, and the evictions would still happen um. And
it it kind of led to this uh kind of
loss of of of momentum within the movement UM. And
(12:21):
that didn't change until the communists kind of altered their
organizing strategy um, and so they started carrying out They
started like mobilizing all of the different sort of left
wing networks that were in the area to not just
do eviction resistance, but to pick it rent striking buildings,
to hold street rallies and protest marches. When a protester
(12:43):
was killed by the police, they got like fifty people
out in the streets and it was just it was
this matter of number one, keeping huge numbers of people
in the streets, which is you know, expensive for the city,
was bad for business in a lot of cases. UM.
But they also started organizing unemployed people in to uh
like kind of a quasi union sort of situation that
(13:06):
didn't just organized stuff on the street, but started reaching
out to the government when because this is right around
the time that the Roosevelt administration started pushing protections UM
and including like eviction protections and like funding to help
people stay in their houses. And that was kind of
you could you could argue like a lot of those
protections came about as a result of all of the
(13:27):
people who were doing eviction resistance on the street. But
these these unemployed councils they called them, would basically help
people go to the government, help people like file for benefits,
help people and help people stay in their houses, and
kind of in the end, through a variety of different tactics, UM,
they were really successful in uh stopping large numbers of
(13:48):
people from being dispossessed and keeping a lot of these
communities UM together. And the Home Belief Bureaus, which is
kind of the government agencies that were formed from like
the fund the emergency funding here UM worked with the
the unemployed councils to keep people in their home. So
it was this you saw this situation where you had
it's what started with kind of like physical force confronting
(14:11):
the eviction UH teams and confronting the police, and that
helped to organize and galvanize people, but it had its limitations.
UM and that eventually evolved into a broader sort of
series of strikes and marches that were disruptive enough to
life that they in the city that they helped to
UH to provide kind of UM impetus for government benefits
(14:33):
to keep people in their homes. And then once those
benefits were there, a lot of these organizations kind of
pivoted towards helping people UH like file and get benefits
in order to keep them in their homes. And in
the end of it, it was just kind of this
very multifaceted UH movement that had its missteps and went
through a variety of tactics over time, but in the
(14:54):
end was largely successful in keeping communities from being forced
out their homes. UM and UH, I don't know, I
think it's it's an interesting story and it's it's kind
of you see when you when you hear eviction events
talked about, you people tend to kind of hone in
on just the big fights against the police, which were
clearly important, or they tend to hone in on stuff
(15:16):
that happened elsewhere in the country, like organizations of farmers
and sharecroppers who would show up in eviction courts and
like threatened police and uh stop you know, sheriffs from
evicting widows from their homes and whatnot. And these are
important stories, but I think the broader story about like
why these eviction resistance networks functioned was that they they
(15:39):
pivoted regularly. They didn't just stick with we're going to
fight the cops when they try to evict people. They
formed these Unemployed Councils UM. And these Unemployed councils were
communist organizations, but you didn't have to be a communist
to join UM or to benefit from them, and they would,
you know, lobby the government on behalf of these people.
They would help them get benefits UM and in the end,
all of this was really successful in you know, what
(16:02):
was the most important battle, which was keeping families in
their homes. UM so I don't know. That's that's that's
kind of like the what will include a couple of
links in here, but um, that's kind of the overall,
uh story of what happened in a particularly in New
York in the thirties, which is kind of the best
(16:22):
documented series of eviction resistance movements. Yeah, quick break, go
pee and then continue peeing because you can pee and
listen to a podcast. We're back. Um. And before I
(16:48):
move on to to Chris's, I wanted to make a
note that I've come across a couple of times in
my in the readings that I found that like kind
of talk about eviction resistance in the thirties, but within
the context of either what was happening in two thousand
and eight after the financial crash, or what's happening now,
which is that evictions are way more common now than
they ever were during the Great Depression. Um, both as
(17:09):
a percentage of workers and in absolute numbers. UM, it
is enormously common. In One of the statistics I found
in a New Yorker article about the eviction epidemic is
that in Milwaukee, a city which has about a hundred
and five thousand renter households. Landlords legally evict roughly sixteen
thousand adults and children every year, um. And that's like
(17:32):
that that is a significantly higher rate than they were
dealing in this period. And because evictions are so commonplace,
they don't really attract much attention. One of the reasons
why those early eviction defense networks where you get so
many people out in the streets, is that the idea
that families would be evicted, um, particularly any kind of
significant numbers, was was fairly new, and so it drew
(17:53):
a lot of attention. People were outraged, um, Whereas today
it's something that happens all the time, UM, and it's
something that uh, they're a significant amount of infrastructure has
been built up to allow evictions. So there are full
time sheriff squads in large cities whose only job is
to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving
(18:13):
companies that specialize in just evictions, and the crews for
these companies work all day long, five days a week.
There is there's so much of this going on in
every major city in the country, UM, that there's a
significant amount of there's you're not just competing with you know,
these these kind of ad hoc teams of marshals and
cops showing up to like pile furniture out on the street.
(18:36):
You're dealing with years worth of infrastructure to enable evictions.
Um so yeah, that sucks anyway, Chris, you why don't
you go on? You know, well, okay, what one thing
I will say though, is that you know, still even
to this date, like the landlords rely heavily on people
self evicting people just sort of yeah, you know, the
(18:57):
you had an division does as people's leave, right, and
so they do not even even with all the certic
capacity they built up, they don't actually have the ability
to like if everyone, if literally every tenant, I mean
you know, like and peopuilt a lot of tenants have
started showing up in corporate like if it would be
genuinely difficult for them to actually evict every single person
like by force, even even with the infrastructure they've built up.
(19:22):
But you know I were talking about before before I
go into some more resistant example of how we got here,
which is, you know, there's there there's a lot of
stuff that happens in the seventies and eighties that are
sort of important to this um on on a sort
of macroeconomic level whose even seems all the way out right.
You know, if there's some of these eighties this is
(19:42):
a normous economic sort of collapses. There's all these problems,
there's mass inflation. And one of the big things that's
happening here is that, you know, profit rates and manufacturing
are collapsing. It's like, okay, well, what does that have
to do with housing? What what I has to do
with housing is that you know, we'll zooming on your
hand for a second, because you're like, the US were
just like guts Japan's manufacturing economy in the eighties through
(20:04):
some sort of complicated currency stuff. But Japan's solution to
this is interesting. They you know, they're like, okay, so
our manufacturing sectors in ruins. How do we maintain the economy?
What if we just give a bunch of credit, the
very cheap credit to banks and let them buy houses,
and so they do, yeah you know, and you know,
and yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we'll they'll buy houses,
and they'll and they'll you know, they'll buy houses, and
(20:26):
they'll buy stocks, and the value those assets will just
keep it like keep increasing and keep increasing, keep increasing.
Nothing will ever go wrong. With this, uh about maybe
like eight years later you get the East Asian but
we're collapsing, and you know, that's that that's a big
part of what that was. But the important part about
this for US is that so in order to save Japan, right,
the US government guts its own manufacturing sector. And so
(20:47):
this means you're in the nineties. You know, you have
Clinton going, Okay, how are we going to save the economy?
And Clinton looks at the Japanese bottle and was like, wait, no,
hold down, we can do this too. And so you know,
the first the first collapses causes you know, Clinton, Clinton
gives the banks and credit, they buy stocks with it.
You know, they give like us a bunch of cheap credit,
and you know, we buy houses and we buy stocks
(21:07):
with it. And then you know, the tech bubble implodes,
and then this all leads to thousand eight, where you know,
all of the all of the sort of all the
bad mortgages, the banks that I'm passing out just implode
and and some a couple of banks go under, a
couple of like two, like three banks go under, but
the ones who survive suddenly, you know, there's all these
(21:27):
four closed houses and you know, they just they just
start buying them up. And part of the story is
Obama just starts just think called robo signing, where they
they just start signing like for closure notices, just random houses,
like people who were keeping up on their payments. They
just like they just take their houses. Like tens tens
of thousands of these houses just get taken and get
back to the bank, given back to the banks. And
this is you know, this is this is how the
banks are covered from thous and eight is they took
(21:48):
about they stole a bun people's houses at gun point,
and what what you see from there? And you know,
and this is this is this this is a long
range trend that's been happening in the economy since, you know,
since seventies and the eighties. Is that you know, Okay,
so the sort of the institutional investors people with a
bunch of money. They can't get returns from manufacturing anymore
in the way they used to. So instead they're like, okay,
(22:11):
what if you know, what if what if instead of
making money by making things, we just take the money
from you at gunpoint and we invest in you know,
we we we built, we built anormous police force, and
we buy everyone's houses. And now you know there's you know,
if you like we we you know this is this
is how we get this sue with that's even worse
than what was happening in the thirties, which is that,
like you know, enormous portions of the world economy are
(22:32):
just completely dependent on on these banks and these these
giant landlord firms owning these buildings and then you know,
putting a gun to your head and saying, hey, you're
going to give us money, and if you don't give
us money, you lose your home. There are periods where
people mount sort of effective resistances to this. One of
them is in so in Spain after thousand eight, you know,
(22:52):
spends one of the country's worst hit by by by
the whole sort of collapse, and you know, so normal
some of people get evicted, but they realize that, you know,
there's just a bunch of these houses that are just
sitting there empty, and so, you know, very slowly and
it's sort of accelerating after thousand and eight eleven, people
(23:15):
start just squatting in them, and you know, and and
a lot of these people like these people, some of
a lot of times's they're going back to the homes
that like the bank's attaining for them. And you know,
they they form these basically they formed these like enormous
I guess you can. They're just sort of the parts
squad organizations, part um like anti fiction organizations. And what
(23:40):
what what they're basically able to do is they can Yeah,
the biggest one is called uh ps p ah UM
And what what what they're basically able to do is
they can get enough people together that when the when
the police show up for an eviction, they can bring
like five thousand, six thousand people. And this makes it
(24:01):
just almost this makes it almost impossible, you know, unless
unless the police can like I can specifically isolate one
squat squad doesn't have community support, it become almost impossible
to evict people. And so they have these you know,
there's there's, there's, there's there's you know, and they they
lose some battles, they win some battles, but you know,
they're able to hold be because because they have these
(24:21):
these sort of enormous organizations of of you know, people
who are squatting, and then they have you know, they
have a bunch of communities support, they have support. They said,
this is something I think, you know, talking about how
the commun strategy works in the thirties, this is something
that we're gonna see with a lot of these is
that like the renters, a bunch of like renters, or
a bunch of sort of a bunch of people who
are squatting in houses, a bunch people who are draining
(24:42):
to division defense because they're being evicted. You know, there's
there's kind of a limit to what they can do
on their own to some extent. And the way that
they you know, the way that they start winning is
when they're able to sort of well a a when
they stop fighting you know len Lard's individually and be
you know, and you start getting these large reverstations. The
second read and the second thing that changes when they're
(25:02):
able to bring in the rest of the community. And
so you know, one one of the another sort of
example of this is seen, you know it really from
from you know, seventeen across or North America. You start
to see a sort of resurgence of tenant of tenant organizing,
and you know, one of one of the most sort
of famous examples is Parkdale, which is a it's it's
(25:26):
it's it's a place in Toronto and in Parkdale, a
whole bunch of you know, several several hundred tenants and
across a bunch of buildings, organizing for a long time.
And eventually, you know, the the you know, they keep
getting rent increases, they keep getting rent increases, and you know,
a bunch of these people are going in danger losing
their homes because they can't aford them anymore. And so
(25:49):
they start doing rents tricks and they start going for
building the building to building, and you know, they're they're
not fighting the cops as much as sort of the
communists were. A lot of what they do is so
a lot of people, you know, these park Deals working class,
community rights. It's also a largely immigrant community, and you know,
it's it's sort of rapidly being gentrified. But you know
(26:09):
a lot of people who are in these you know,
a lot of the tenants are are people who you know,
had had been in like labor actions, right, have been
have been in strikes, have been in sort of other
kinds of labor organizing, and so they're able to pull
together and they're able also to importantly, they bring in
like a bunch of the teachers at the local elementary
(26:32):
school because you know, a bunch of the buildings that
they're striking in their own but these landlords are right
around an elementary school, and you know, the teachers who
you know teaching these schools are you know, they're they're
also seeing the effects of these kids losing your family,
like you know that the kids losing their houses. Kids
just appearings and lost their houses, dealing with these fancial struggles,
and so they, you know, the teachers start backing them,
(26:52):
and you start getting this bunch of community support and
they're able to basically to force the landlords to negotiate
and they get a settlement. It's like the way they
describe there's a really good documentary about this called Welcome
to park called This is Parkdale, And you know, the
way the way they describe it is that the deal
they got from from all the all this organizing all
(27:13):
these men strikes was so good that the government that
like the company, put a gag order on them so
they can't talk about the numbers. Right before the pandemic started,
I think some people probably have heard of this. There
was a group called Moments for Housing that was in
Oakland that you know was was had had taken back
houses that have been taken you know, by by the
banks that were just sitting there empty. And you know,
(27:35):
at the very beginning of like the police show up
with tanks, they show up with you like full ripe
police stuff. It's like, yeah, like there, you know, and
the moms are sort of like Griffin from the house
and this starts. You know, this this is this is
a continuation of this whole sort of battle they've been
having with the Lendlers and with the city over it.
And eventually, you know, they're not able to physically retake
(27:59):
the building, but they're able to put so much pressure
on the city that the the Lendler companies basically forced
to sell the house to a community land trust, which
is one of the other solutions people who sort of
come come up and try to deal with that this
this crisis were broadly, which is that you know, instead
of instead of having buildings that are like owned by
landlords and so you know that the reason there they
(28:19):
have this property is to make money for you and
they kick you out of you they can't make enough money.
You have you know, you have these buildings owned by
the community instead, and you know, and this this, this
has been I mean there's limits to it, like you
you need to have enough money to actually be able
to like buy these buildings. But you know that that
this this that's that's one of the other things that's been,
(28:39):
you know, being done to sort of fight this crisis
is by having the communities themselves just directly take control
of the buildings. Thanks Chris, We're gonna take a quick
break and then we'll be back to hear from Garrison
and Sophie become the president of Transitions. I've always been
the president. What do you? What do you? What do you?
What do you? What do you? What are you? Why
are you? Why you Well, here's adds m. All Right,
(29:13):
we're back and we're gonna hear from Garrison last. So
I'm gonna be bringing up one of the more recent
kind of cases of eviction defense that kind of that
captured um a bit like a bit of national media attention.
This was back uh in December with the Red House
(29:34):
in Portland kind of kind of riding off the trails
of the of the BLM protests. This kind of had
the inertia to keep this situation. I'm active with people,
you know, willing to kind of do the thing where
you actually go out and fight the cops. Um, although
that did not happen tons with this situation, UM A brief, brief,
(29:57):
brief overview of what happened. So there was this family
who's been in this specific whose own specific home, like
over fifty years, um, and in the two thousands, they
went into a series of financial hardships. UM. They they
took out some kind of predatory loans, um, and just
they kind of just kept getting they kept they kept
(30:19):
running into problems with their home. UM. There they tried
to have one of their sons do like litigation, but
he was like a sovereign citizen type person and it
made things kind of worse and it wasn't really ideal.
But but you know, but that all of so all
of that is like is like a part of this,
but the important part for everyone who decided to actually
(30:41):
show up was like we're in like like this was
like during like November and December when the plague was
like the worst it was ever at and just except
we like there was like there was there was there
was no vaccinated people in November, right, it was like
like like the the death rates were like super were
super high. So and that's when the cops decided to
(31:04):
evict this family. Um. The the other the other side
of this is that the company that technically like bought
the house from the banks, it's also a pretty shady
developer company. Yeah, so there was there was a lot
of like weird it was are you going to go
into you can? You can go into that. Yeah. So
(31:26):
basically just for an example how shadies they had they were,
it was some when the national attention started, they immediately
backed out of wanting to take the house in such
a way that because of kind of some of the
connections with people involved, everyone's like, oh it was an
organized crime thing like it was. It was a criminal enterprise.
They got attention, We're like, well this is not worth it.
(31:47):
We don't we don't want anybody looking in on our
ship it. We're just giving up right away. It was
a very very very sketchy company slash person had had
bought the house from from the bank, which the bank
you took it from this family. But so anyway, in
like from September to December, the cops kept trying to
(32:09):
kick people, to kick the people out of this home.
Sometimes they did, and then sometimes the people were just
like went back um. And this kind of all culminated
around like December five, I think, is the date that
that cops like really tried to to like you know,
go in there with like rifles, riot gear and like
like drag people out. Um. And even though it was
(32:30):
super early in the morning, a lot of like the
people who have been protesting for like BLM in Portland
all showed up really quickly and they chased the cops away. Um.
And then everyone got super tense because they just chased
away like I don't know, like twenty I think it was.
It was mostly sheriff's I believe, um. And yeah, so
(32:52):
then they did what everyone in Portland does is just
build barricades. For some context, on those Portlanders had been
building barricades for months, generally to no effect. Like it
would be like there would be a moving protest, somebody
would throw a barricade in the street and the police
would immediately shove it aside. But this time it worked.
This time it absolutely worked. They built This time it
(33:13):
worked like gangbusters. They've they've built very thick barricades over
like like five different sides of this house. Because like
this this house is like in the middle of a
city block. It's it was it's a super interesting property
that just like sits in the middle of a street. Um.
So they built barricades all around this whole this whole
(33:34):
section of this neighborhood. They had like they had like
cow trops. They had like sw trips are spiky balls
basically that are meant to funk up generally tires, but
you don't want to step on them either. They also
had um uh I think they're called like they called
they're called check headshogs. Um. They're basically kind of like
(33:55):
cal trops a giant and they're meant to like mess
at the undercarriage of a vehicle, make it hard for
vehicles to plow through. So we we had we had these.
There was there was all this you know, all this
kind of impromptu weapons. Um. There was like behind all
the barricades people like lined up like bottles and eggs
to like help to throw out people if they tried
to rock. There's various various projectiles like just like laid
(34:19):
out behind all these barricades. But the barricades were thick,
you know, they like they actually had like multiple layers
UM and they had like binding to keep them together.
It would have been like it would have been difficult
to get a couple hundred people and heavy equipment, especially
if the bear if I mean if they weren't manned.
Obviously you could just walk through, but if the barricades
had been manned, it would have been um an intense
(34:41):
uh effort in order to force your way through them.
So yeah, within like within a few hours, these barricades
started to come up, and they kept growing over the
course of a week. UM and there was always like
they were between like fifty to a hundred people like
camping out in this spot, sometimes even more people. UM.
There was like multiple kitchens got set up, people try
(35:01):
to like there was like they tried to do like
COVID safe protocols in certain areas. UM. And yeah, it
became this kuyke relatively relatively like um complicated like network
of like people like rotating shifts, manning different spots to
always make sure people are watching all the different entrances UM.
And basically this this lasted for like like over a week.
(35:25):
The mayor was very was very pissed. UM. He was
not thrilled that this situation was happening because one it
made the sheriffs look bad and two it made it
made the protesters actually look effective. Um. And now that
that now, like all of these things we've talked about
this before, there's there's always runs into problems with sorts
(35:46):
of things. This is they're never perfect. There was instances
of people who appointed themselves security doing like you know,
like like attacking people for like doing graffiti on like
random walls, um of like like like like pavement in
other like apartment buildings or whatever. Like. There there was
there was there was there was like problems specifically around security. Um.
(36:10):
But that that that that that happens in a lot
a lot of these things, and that that's kind of
worth discussing on a whole in a whole another episode. Um.
And And there were attempts from fascists, like like like
street fascists not cops, to like to like attack the
barricades and they didn't really succeed because there were just
so many people there. Um. So that was kind of
that that was kind of what happened. Now, people didn't
(36:31):
know what the end game was for this type of thing,
right because like we're just like they're just doing this
thing where like, we don't know how long it's gonna last.
But as as this was happening, other people were setting
up like a go fund means to raise money for
um the family, And eventually the kind of idea that
was decided on by the family and a few other
like people involved was like, what if we can just
(36:54):
get enough money to actually buy the house back um.
And after like a week and a half they raised
three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars was the number. And
because the developer was so shady, he was he like
like a Robert said, he like backed down immediately. He's like,
you know, we can, we can find some other solution
to this. Just stop talking about it. We stopped talking
(37:15):
about me and my business. So I have to say,
like we said, probably an organized crime thing. I prefer
this guy and whatever he's doing a thousand times to
a bank absolutely, So, so that that was kind of
the result is that the family made a deal with
both the city and this developer that they would try
(37:36):
to basically use some of the fundraised money to buy
back at this spot. But that this would have been
totally impossible if it weren't for the militant display of
defense that activists UM deployed in this in this street
in Portland, because I mean there's like a lot of
a lot of you know, like the Portlandia liberal Portlanders
(37:59):
who weren't also tappy with this. It's like like a
lot of people wanted this situation ended. UM. So as
soon as this thing became, you know, a possibility, the
mayor was like quick was quick to jump on this
as as a way to like stop this from happening,
because they did not want this to continue, and because
it would have been pretty difficult for the cops to
(38:19):
push through like it we would have turned into quite
the ship show. And there's I think too really important
takeaways in terms of why it was able to succeed.
And I think most of the ultimate success of it
was was resultant on the first twenty four hours really
even maybe the first twelve because once the sheriffs tried
their first push and got pushed out, if they had
(38:42):
done what generally happened in protests, which is, you know
you have sometimes you would have a push where the
cops would like back off, they would bring in more forces,
and if they had in an hour or two, they
probably could have cleared people out and done the eviction,
but they were so surprised, and the fact that it
had happened in broad daylight was a big factor. It
was kind of early in the morning when this kicked
off that they didn't come back, and so immediately people
(39:05):
started to bringing more folks in. Within six hours or so,
they were pretty potent barricades. By the time night fell,
they were significant already, and they just by the time
I got there that night, they were it was already
too much, too easily handle. Um. And because of what
happened in that first twelve hours, by the time the
city kind of had adapted to what was happening, it
(39:25):
was already a huge story. The level of defensive infrastructure
was massive. Like it did. It was because of how
quickly people came together and got barricades down that they
were able to get the police off balance. We talked
a lot about the ode loop, right about how you
kind of disrupt an opponent, and it is it is
about stopping them from making a decision, right, um. And
(39:47):
so step one was kind of once they forced the
police out, there was something of a blackout about like
what was like people would talk about what was going on,
but there wasn't a lot of footage from inside or
video from inside, so would stopped the cops from observing
as well as they might otherwise have. And of course
they couldn't physically observed because they were blocked out of
the area. Um, they weren't able to kind of because
(40:09):
of how quickly the media around it drummed up, they
weren't able to sort of orient a response, find a
way to villainize the protesters easily. There were attempts made
after that to attack them personally, like the family and
the house personally, but they didn't get on that quickly.
Um And overall, because of how quickly things developed and
how quickly it got much larger than they were prepared
(40:30):
to deal with, they were not able to decide and
act in a timely fashion, and that left kind of
the momentum on the side of the protesters, and ultimately
they were successful as a result of that. And I
think if you're trying to study what about Red House
is replicable, you know, there's a lot of barricade tactics
and stuff, but a big part of it is just
the speed with which people took action and how that
(40:54):
push the city and the police off balance and allowed
a victory. Yeah, so you know, the city made the city,
the developer and the family made a deal that if
they saially, if the barricades came down, the cops won't
mess with them. Um As this process of signing over
the house and doing like financial stuff would go on
and and and and that is that is still no
(41:15):
gooing process. That that's that's still something that's still it's
still being dealt with. But the cops haven't messed with
the property since December five, Um, so that is that
is you know, and this this isn't a perfectly reputable
This isn't a perfectly um like, you can't you can't
replicate this specific strategy always, like you know, it's not
(41:36):
always possible to raise two dollars to buy to buy
back a property. Um, you know, because especially if especially
if you're renting. Um you know, there's there's all these
things that can't be replicated exactly. But the general idea
of very quick sudden mobilization that catches powers at be
(41:59):
off is something that it can be useful in a
lot of different scenarios. Right. It's so the kind of
the reason because basically the barricades and the testmnizlation created
more options. So if you want to create more options,
this is something that that can do that, right, This
is something that can put more things on the table.
It may not be the same result, but there's going
(42:21):
to be other things that that could happen. And I
think the other thing that's important here, you know, you know,
the red haws is sort of interesting because the cops,
to some extent, we're expecting just since they just were
expecting this much. But you know, again, like as we're
saying earlier, landlords like are basically relying to to a
very large sound of people invating themselves right there. They're
(42:43):
not expecting resistance. And this is why, you know, like
this is why it tends to be. You know, if
if you if you do one of these things, you
get this like like one enormous police response, right, Like
you know, they show they show up, they you know,
trow up a tanks, right, And the reason they do
that is because you know that what what they can
do is they can make an example out of people, right,
(43:03):
but they can't actually stop everyone. Right, Like they're they're
they're they're not, they're not they're not they're not equipped
for you know, dealing with three million people just saying no.
And so you know, if if you organize fast enough
and if you catch them by surprise, and you know,
if if you bring the stuff that they're doing like
to light, like you know, you show up to their houses,
you show up to like you show up to the banks,
(43:24):
you show up to their offices right like they're not
you know, and you keep going right there they're they're
not they're not expecting this, they're not prepared for it.
And you know, and you know there's also a park there.
Like they'll lose, right like they they will a lot
of times. Like they will negotiate, they will settle. They
will not effect you like in order basically to you know,
deal with all the attention, the fact that they can't
(43:46):
drive you out. Yeah, all right, and I think that's
going to uh call it a day for us here
at it could happen here, um the podcast that is
this one. So go out and I don't know, eat
an entire seven thirty seven piece by piece or do
(44:10):
something else. Goodbye. You can follow us happen here on Twitter,
on Instagram, and allegedly allegedly allegedly Sophie by Everybody. It
Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
(44:31):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zone media dot com or check us out on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could
Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com,
slash sources, and just as a heads up, we'll be
back next week on Tuesday instead of Monday, as we'll
be taking the day off for Labor Day by not laboring,
(44:54):
so catch up on an old episode or cleanse yourself
of our voices.
What's evicting my people who didn't want to die? Serving
lattes to anti mask activists. That's actually one of your
best I was like, where are you going? I was like,
oh no, they pulled it off. Great job. So this
(00:25):
is it could happen here. It's a show about collapse.
And speaking of collapse, Um, the Supreme Court just issued
a shadow ruling, which we should probably do a whole
episode about this practice of like Supreme Court decisions that
are it was a Supreme Court decision that was not
a Supreme Court decision, So they don't have to issue
like a whole justification. They don't have to like explain
(00:45):
where everyone landed. They just said, hey, you know the
eviction moratoriums that the Biden administration just pushed through Again, Nah,
it's not not constitutional. We're not going to say anymore.
Uh start kicking people out of their motherfucker and homes
and boy, how did that process is started? And we
don't know. I mean, I think the the you'll get
(01:06):
very different numbers when you try to figure out like
how many people are going to get evicted or at
risk of being evicted. Like the highest deal here is
like thirty to forty million Americans at risk of eviction. UM.
I think it was UM. I think it was Bank
of America's numbers that anticipated as many as seven hundred
and fifty thousand households. Goldman, it was a Goldman gold
(01:30):
anticipated about seven and fifty thousand American households losing their
homes getting and that's obviously more than seven fifty thousand people. Now,
when we talk about like how many of those folks
could end up homeless, UM, it's going to be a
less than that total number of households because whenever you
have stuff like this happened, like in two thousand and eight,
a decent number of people who lose access to their
(01:50):
homes wind up kind of CouchSurfing, bunking with family. You
wind up with two or three families in one home,
which is obviously particularly a problem during a pandemic. Right
Like if you have families doubling or tripling up in
the same house while there's a plague, that's um that
introduces additional complications. But it's it's possible, in fact, very
likely because about the s the kind of conservative estimate
(02:13):
for the number of people who are homeless on American
streets right now is a little over five and fifty thousand,
So there's a pretty good chance that the number of
homeless could essentially double in the next you know, not
quite overnight, because evictions it's not like a thing where like, okay,
the Supreme Court said you can evict people. Now, everybody's
out on their ass the next day. It's it's a
process of evicting people. There is like a legal process.
But in the near future, we could see a doubling
(02:35):
of the number of Americans who are without homes, if
not even potentially more than that. So it's pretty high stakes, um,
which I think necessitates everybody be thinking about not just
ways to fight the Supreme Court ruling or whatever, not
just ways to get the government to provide support to people,
but also eviction defense. Um, because kind of historically and
(02:56):
today we're going to kind of give a little bit
of a historic overview here. Um. Historically, eviction defense is
it has not in American history solved the overall problems,
but it solves it can provide necessary Uh, it can
be a necessary like tourniquet for a lot of people
and for communities. Um. Before kind of more long term
(03:17):
solutions to these problems get get get brought up, and
I think it behooves this to talk about eviction defense
kind of from that standpoint. UM So I found a
really interesting article when you when you start reading about
eviction defense, a lot of the eviction defense like articles
kind of talking about the Great Depression are going to
come from the International Socialist Review or other kind of
(03:39):
socialist or outright communists like websites. Um. And there's there's
some good reasons for this, which is that the organizations
during the Great Depression who were doing most of the
anti eviction organizing were communist organizations. Now, I found some
kind of scholarly analyzes of some of the reporting on
that that will point out that they especially if you're
kind of like report if you're if you're studying eviction defense,
(04:02):
based on kind of the documents at the time, and
it was a lot of like Socialist Worker, UM and
Unemployed Citizen and whatnot newspapers with titles like that. UM,
A lot of those would kind of tend to deliberately
under count the efforts of of non communist anti eviction
organizations because there was a whole political fight going on then. UM.
(04:24):
So keep that in mind that said, it is kind
of worth reading, uh some of these some of these accounts,
and I think one that is particularly uh noteworthy is
what happened in New York City starting in nineteen one
nineteen thirty two, UM. And this was in the Bronx
Park East and Allerton Avenue UM. And it started obviously,
(04:45):
like the Great Depression kicks off, like nineteen thirty, nineteen
thirty one. UM. By January of nineteen thirty two, you've
got a huge number of people unemployed and increasingly desperate,
and you've got these landlords trying to evict and kick
them out. UM. And the communists in the Bronx started
an eviction defense network that was very noteworthy, and it
(05:07):
kind of it initially crystallized around this series of communist
co ops, which were these two buildings in the Bronx
that were populated by communists UM. And that had included
like a cooperative housing experiment, like some cooperative gardening that
sort of stuff. And they were mostly Eastern European uh
Jewish like workers, like people who had come over from
(05:28):
Europe and in a lot of cases had been socialist
activists in Europe, many of whom had like had to
flee Europe to the United States because of their activism
UM and in January of nineteen thirty two, they organized
rent strikes at three larger apartment buildings at Bronx East
Park UM and one of the things that they created
(05:50):
was what they called the Upper Bronx Unemployed Council. And
this kind of was part of a series of decisions
that led to the creation of an organization called the
Unemployed Citizens Committees I think is they called them UM.
And kind of one of the ideas there was to
point out that, you know, despite kind of the focus
within the capitalist system on people needing to have a job,
needing to make income in order to be like citizens,
(06:13):
unemployed people were citizens too and embody and imbued with
like the full rights of an American citizen UM. And
so they were kind of taking ownership of the term
unemployed rather than accepting it as a slur UM that like, no,
we're like, we're still citizens, and we we have rights
in power and will UM will organize in order to
enact our power on or in order to UM in
(06:36):
order to kind of forcefully try to make the changes
that we need. And so these these communists in the
Bronx organized three buildings worth of tenants into a rent strike.
They were refusing to pay rent until they got their demands,
which were a fifteen percent reduction in rent and into eviction,
repairs and apartments, and recognition of the Tenants Committee as
(06:57):
an official bargaining agent. So they were trying to effectively unionize,
like in the same way that workers had just four
tenants in a building. UM. Now, these like this rent
strike set off a rent riot that eventually more than
four thousand people participated in city marshals and the marshals
were the people the city would hire to to force
(07:18):
homeless people out of their houses. UM, marshals and police
showed up to evict seventeen tenants and yeah, about four
thousand people showed up to oppose them, and that started
this massive street fight. UM. And it was largely and
and this would be the case with most of these
rent strikes in the early thirties, it was largely women
who would do most of the fighting and would do
(07:40):
most of the the the like the actual like physical
organizing against the police. And some of this was because
they recognized that like when their men were there, the
cops would beat the ship out of them and arrest them.
And so there was a lot of times where they
were like, okay, you guys, get out of the house,
like the women are going to organize. We'll get up
on the fire escapes and balconies. We'll like we'll throw
ship at the cops, you know. Um. And these were
(08:01):
also very like and I don't want to like be
be ignoring this either. These were extremely communist uh like events,
Like they would be singing communist songs, they would be
like making carrying out communist chance. It was communist papers
that did a lot of the organizing. Um. I want
to read a quote from that International Socialist Review article
(08:22):
that I found kind of like laying out how this
particular strike went. Quote. Bronx property owners moved quickly to
try to contain the movement. At first, they tried arbitration.
Following the evictions at six six five Allerton, landlords in
Bronx Park East asked a Blue Ribbon committee of Bronx
Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute, convinced that an impartial
examination of the buildings books would show that the landlord
could not meet the striker's demands without operating at a loss,
(08:44):
but the strike leaders contemptuously rejected arbitration and indeed the
whole notion that a reasonable return on one's investment represented
a basis for negotiation when times were good, Strike leader
Max Kim a Wits declared, the landlords didn't offer to
share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money
off us when we had it. Now that we haven't
got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less. Faced
(09:06):
with this kind of bargaining positions, landlords felt they had
no choice but to pull out the stops to suppress
the movement. By the second week of February nineteen thirty two,
two major organizations of Bronx landlords had formed rent strike
committees that offered unlimited funding and legal support for any
landlord facing a Communist led rent strike. Using the considerable
political influence and legal expertise at their disposal, that developed
(09:26):
a strategy that included wholesale issuance of dispossessed notices against
striking tenants, efforts to win in junctions against picketing and strikes,
agreements by judges to waive normal delay periods and evictions,
and efforts to ban rent strikes by legislative enactment. The
situation has become much graver than most persons suppose. When
Landlords spokesman declared the strikes are spreading rapidly and scores
of landlords are facing financial ruin or loss of their
(09:48):
properties as a result of them. Former State Senator Benjamin
Anton told landlords, this is a peculiar neighborhood. It is
the hotbed of communism and radicalism. The people in this
neighborhood are mostly communists and Soviet sympathizers. They do not
believe in our form of government. Now, one are the
things that's interesting about this. So in a lot of
cases particularly, there was like this this first big set
(10:10):
of riots that kind of ended when the police kind
of pushed the rioters back. But because of how many
of them there were, they came to an agreement and
like the landlords gave concessions to the people in those
three buildings. But the next set of strikes were pretty
much crushed and the majority of the rent strikes they
start popping up in buildings kind of all around this
part of New York. In the period they don't win
(10:31):
the initial strike um by which I mean people get evicted,
the marshals come in, they take these people's furniture out.
But what the communists started doing, because they had the numbers,
is they would show up after the cops and the
marshals left and they would lift like they would put
together police systems and lift people's furniture back into their apartments, um,
and move them back in. And so part of the
(10:53):
understanding was it cost the city money every time they
send marshals out because the city was paying to evict people,
So will just move them back in after they're evicted, um,
And that's going to like make the situation untenable for
the city. UM. So that led to the police setting
up like temporary police stations outside of some of the
buildings that were like most active as part of a
(11:14):
long term solution to try to suppress the revolt. UM.
The one issue of the Daily Worker noted quote cops
patrol the street all day. The entire territory is under
semi martial law. People are driven around the streets, off
the corners and away from the houses. Um. And so yeah,
it you know, kind of this went on for weeks.
And there's one of the criticisms that even this this
(11:37):
International Socialist Review right up, I found will make of
the of the initial rent strike is that because kind
of the a lot of the hardcore communist activists came
to relish sort of these clashes with police as a
result of the evictions and had this belief that they
would radicalize the masses um, whereas there was I think
among the masses more of like a well, we we
(11:59):
mostly want to lose our homes. And when it became
when you hit this like they kind of hit this
wall where they would come out and fight the cops,
but the cops would win and push people out in
the end, and the evictions would still happen um. And
it it kind of led to this uh kind of
loss of of of momentum within the movement UM. And
(12:21):
that didn't change until the communists kind of altered their
organizing strategy um, and so they started carrying out They
started like mobilizing all of the different sort of left
wing networks that were in the area to not just
do eviction resistance, but to pick it rent striking buildings,
to hold street rallies and protest marches. When a protester
(12:43):
was killed by the police, they got like fifty people
out in the streets and it was just it was
this matter of number one, keeping huge numbers of people
in the streets, which is you know, expensive for the city,
was bad for business in a lot of cases. UM.
But they also started organizing unemployed people in to uh
like kind of a quasi union sort of situation that
(13:06):
didn't just organized stuff on the street, but started reaching
out to the government when because this is right around
the time that the Roosevelt administration started pushing protections UM
and including like eviction protections and like funding to help
people stay in their houses. And that was kind of
you could you could argue like a lot of those
protections came about as a result of all of the
(13:27):
people who were doing eviction resistance on the street. But
these these unemployed councils they called them, would basically help
people go to the government, help people like file for benefits,
help people and help people stay in their houses, and
kind of in the end, through a variety of different tactics, UM,
they were really successful in uh stopping large numbers of
(13:48):
people from being dispossessed and keeping a lot of these
communities UM together. And the Home Belief Bureaus, which is
kind of the government agencies that were formed from like
the fund the emergency funding here UM worked with the
the unemployed councils to keep people in their home. So
it was this you saw this situation where you had
it's what started with kind of like physical force confronting
(14:11):
the eviction UH teams and confronting the police, and that
helped to organize and galvanize people, but it had its limitations.
UM and that eventually evolved into a broader sort of
series of strikes and marches that were disruptive enough to
life that they in the city that they helped to
UH to provide kind of UM impetus for government benefits
(14:33):
to keep people in their homes. And then once those
benefits were there, a lot of these organizations kind of
pivoted towards helping people UH like file and get benefits
in order to keep them in their homes. And in
the end of it, it was just kind of this
very multifaceted UH movement that had its missteps and went
through a variety of tactics over time, but in the
(14:54):
end was largely successful in keeping communities from being forced
out their homes. UM and UH, I don't know, I
think it's it's an interesting story and it's it's kind
of you see when you when you hear eviction events
talked about, you people tend to kind of hone in
on just the big fights against the police, which were
clearly important, or they tend to hone in on stuff
(15:16):
that happened elsewhere in the country, like organizations of farmers
and sharecroppers who would show up in eviction courts and
like threatened police and uh stop you know, sheriffs from
evicting widows from their homes and whatnot. And these are
important stories, but I think the broader story about like
why these eviction resistance networks functioned was that they they
(15:39):
pivoted regularly. They didn't just stick with we're going to
fight the cops when they try to evict people. They
formed these Unemployed Councils UM. And these Unemployed councils were
communist organizations, but you didn't have to be a communist
to join UM or to benefit from them, and they would,
you know, lobby the government on behalf of these people.
They would help them get benefits UM and in the end,
all of this was really successful in you know, what
(16:02):
was the most important battle, which was keeping families in
their homes. UM so I don't know. That's that's that's
kind of like the what will include a couple of
links in here, but um, that's kind of the overall,
uh story of what happened in a particularly in New
York in the thirties, which is kind of the best
(16:22):
documented series of eviction resistance movements. Yeah, quick break, go
pee and then continue peeing because you can pee and
listen to a podcast. We're back. Um. And before I
(16:48):
move on to to Chris's, I wanted to make a
note that I've come across a couple of times in
my in the readings that I found that like kind
of talk about eviction resistance in the thirties, but within
the context of either what was happening in two thousand
and eight after the financial crash, or what's happening now,
which is that evictions are way more common now than
they ever were during the Great Depression. Um, both as
(17:09):
a percentage of workers and in absolute numbers. UM, it
is enormously common. In One of the statistics I found
in a New Yorker article about the eviction epidemic is
that in Milwaukee, a city which has about a hundred
and five thousand renter households. Landlords legally evict roughly sixteen
thousand adults and children every year, um. And that's like
(17:32):
that that is a significantly higher rate than they were
dealing in this period. And because evictions are so commonplace,
they don't really attract much attention. One of the reasons
why those early eviction defense networks where you get so
many people out in the streets, is that the idea
that families would be evicted, um, particularly any kind of
significant numbers, was was fairly new, and so it drew
(17:53):
a lot of attention. People were outraged, um, Whereas today
it's something that happens all the time, UM, and it's
something that uh, they're a significant amount of infrastructure has
been built up to allow evictions. So there are full
time sheriff squads in large cities whose only job is
to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving
(18:13):
companies that specialize in just evictions, and the crews for
these companies work all day long, five days a week.
There is there's so much of this going on in
every major city in the country, UM, that there's a
significant amount of there's you're not just competing with you know,
these these kind of ad hoc teams of marshals and
cops showing up to like pile furniture out on the street.
(18:36):
You're dealing with years worth of infrastructure to enable evictions.
Um so yeah, that sucks anyway, Chris, you why don't
you go on? You know, well, okay, what one thing
I will say though, is that you know, still even
to this date, like the landlords rely heavily on people
self evicting people just sort of yeah, you know, the
(18:57):
you had an division does as people's leave, right, and
so they do not even even with all the certic
capacity they built up, they don't actually have the ability
to like if everyone, if literally every tenant, I mean
you know, like and peopuilt a lot of tenants have
started showing up in corporate like if it would be
genuinely difficult for them to actually evict every single person
like by force, even even with the infrastructure they've built up.
(19:22):
But you know I were talking about before before I
go into some more resistant example of how we got here,
which is, you know, there's there there's a lot of
stuff that happens in the seventies and eighties that are
sort of important to this um on on a sort
of macroeconomic level whose even seems all the way out right.
You know, if there's some of these eighties this is
(19:42):
a normous economic sort of collapses. There's all these problems,
there's mass inflation. And one of the big things that's
happening here is that, you know, profit rates and manufacturing
are collapsing. It's like, okay, well, what does that have
to do with housing? What what I has to do
with housing is that you know, we'll zooming on your
hand for a second, because you're like, the US were
just like guts Japan's manufacturing economy in the eighties through
(20:04):
some sort of complicated currency stuff. But Japan's solution to
this is interesting. They you know, they're like, okay, so
our manufacturing sectors in ruins. How do we maintain the economy?
What if we just give a bunch of credit, the
very cheap credit to banks and let them buy houses,
and so they do, yeah you know, and you know,
and yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we'll they'll buy houses,
and they'll and they'll you know, they'll buy houses, and
(20:26):
they'll buy stocks, and the value those assets will just
keep it like keep increasing and keep increasing, keep increasing.
Nothing will ever go wrong. With this, uh about maybe
like eight years later you get the East Asian but
we're collapsing, and you know, that's that that's a big
part of what that was. But the important part about
this for US is that so in order to save Japan, right,
the US government guts its own manufacturing sector. And so
(20:47):
this means you're in the nineties. You know, you have
Clinton going, Okay, how are we going to save the economy?
And Clinton looks at the Japanese bottle and was like, wait, no,
hold down, we can do this too. And so you know,
the first the first collapses causes you know, Clinton, Clinton
gives the banks and credit, they buy stocks with it.
You know, they give like us a bunch of cheap credit,
and you know, we buy houses and we buy stocks
(21:07):
with it. And then you know, the tech bubble implodes,
and then this all leads to thousand eight, where you know,
all of the all of the sort of all the
bad mortgages, the banks that I'm passing out just implode
and and some a couple of banks go under, a
couple of like two, like three banks go under, but
the ones who survive suddenly, you know, there's all these
(21:27):
four closed houses and you know, they just they just
start buying them up. And part of the story is
Obama just starts just think called robo signing, where they
they just start signing like for closure notices, just random houses,
like people who were keeping up on their payments. They
just like they just take their houses. Like tens tens
of thousands of these houses just get taken and get
back to the bank, given back to the banks. And
this is you know, this is this is how the
banks are covered from thous and eight is they took
(21:48):
about they stole a bun people's houses at gun point,
and what what you see from there? And you know,
and this is this is this this is a long
range trend that's been happening in the economy since, you know,
since seventies and the eighties. Is that you know, Okay,
so the sort of the institutional investors people with a
bunch of money. They can't get returns from manufacturing anymore
in the way they used to. So instead they're like, okay,
(22:11):
what if you know, what if what if instead of
making money by making things, we just take the money
from you at gunpoint and we invest in you know,
we we we built, we built anormous police force, and
we buy everyone's houses. And now you know there's you know,
if you like we we you know this is this
is how we get this sue with that's even worse
than what was happening in the thirties, which is that,
like you know, enormous portions of the world economy are
(22:32):
just completely dependent on on these banks and these these
giant landlord firms owning these buildings and then you know,
putting a gun to your head and saying, hey, you're
going to give us money, and if you don't give
us money, you lose your home. There are periods where
people mount sort of effective resistances to this. One of
them is in so in Spain after thousand eight, you know,
(22:52):
spends one of the country's worst hit by by by
the whole sort of collapse, and you know, so normal
some of people get evicted, but they realize that, you know,
there's just a bunch of these houses that are just
sitting there empty, and so, you know, very slowly and
it's sort of accelerating after thousand and eight eleven, people
(23:15):
start just squatting in them, and you know, and and
a lot of these people like these people, some of
a lot of times's they're going back to the homes
that like the bank's attaining for them. And you know,
they they form these basically they formed these like enormous
I guess you can. They're just sort of the parts
squad organizations, part um like anti fiction organizations. And what
(23:40):
what what they're basically able to do is they can Yeah,
the biggest one is called uh ps p ah UM
And what what what they're basically able to do is
they can get enough people together that when the when
the police show up for an eviction, they can bring
like five thousand, six thousand people. And this makes it
(24:01):
just almost this makes it almost impossible, you know, unless
unless the police can like I can specifically isolate one
squat squad doesn't have community support, it become almost impossible
to evict people. And so they have these you know,
there's there's, there's, there's there's you know, and they they
lose some battles, they win some battles, but you know,
they're able to hold be because because they have these
(24:21):
these sort of enormous organizations of of you know, people
who are squatting, and then they have you know, they
have a bunch of communities support, they have support. They said,
this is something I think, you know, talking about how
the commun strategy works in the thirties, this is something
that we're gonna see with a lot of these is
that like the renters, a bunch of like renters, or
a bunch of sort of a bunch of people who
are squatting in houses, a bunch people who are draining
(24:42):
to division defense because they're being evicted. You know, there's
there's kind of a limit to what they can do
on their own to some extent. And the way that
they you know, the way that they start winning is
when they're able to sort of well a a when
they stop fighting you know len Lard's individually and be
you know, and you start getting these large reverstations. The
second read and the second thing that changes when they're
(25:02):
able to bring in the rest of the community. And
so you know, one one of the another sort of
example of this is seen, you know it really from
from you know, seventeen across or North America. You start
to see a sort of resurgence of tenant of tenant organizing,
and you know, one of one of the most sort
of famous examples is Parkdale, which is a it's it's
(25:26):
it's it's a place in Toronto and in Parkdale, a
whole bunch of you know, several several hundred tenants and
across a bunch of buildings, organizing for a long time.
And eventually, you know, the the you know, they keep
getting rent increases, they keep getting rent increases, and you know,
a bunch of these people are going in danger losing
their homes because they can't aford them anymore. And so
(25:49):
they start doing rents tricks and they start going for
building the building to building, and you know, they're they're
not fighting the cops as much as sort of the
communists were. A lot of what they do is so
a lot of people, you know, these park Deals working class,
community rights. It's also a largely immigrant community, and you know,
it's it's sort of rapidly being gentrified. But you know
(26:09):
a lot of people who are in these you know,
a lot of the tenants are are people who you know,
had had been in like labor actions, right, have been
have been in strikes, have been in sort of other
kinds of labor organizing, and so they're able to pull
together and they're able also to importantly, they bring in
like a bunch of the teachers at the local elementary
(26:32):
school because you know, a bunch of the buildings that
they're striking in their own but these landlords are right
around an elementary school, and you know, the teachers who
you know teaching these schools are you know, they're they're
also seeing the effects of these kids losing your family,
like you know that the kids losing their houses. Kids
just appearings and lost their houses, dealing with these fancial struggles,
and so they, you know, the teachers start backing them,
(26:52):
and you start getting this bunch of community support and
they're able to basically to force the landlords to negotiate
and they get a settlement. It's like the way they
describe there's a really good documentary about this called Welcome
to park called This is Parkdale, And you know, the
way the way they describe it is that the deal
they got from from all the all this organizing all
(27:13):
these men strikes was so good that the government that
like the company, put a gag order on them so
they can't talk about the numbers. Right before the pandemic started,
I think some people probably have heard of this. There
was a group called Moments for Housing that was in
Oakland that you know was was had had taken back
houses that have been taken you know, by by the
banks that were just sitting there empty. And you know,
(27:35):
at the very beginning of like the police show up
with tanks, they show up with you like full ripe
police stuff. It's like, yeah, like there, you know, and
the moms are sort of like Griffin from the house
and this starts. You know, this this is this is
a continuation of this whole sort of battle they've been
having with the Lendlers and with the city over it.
And eventually, you know, they're not able to physically retake
(27:59):
the building, but they're able to put so much pressure
on the city that the the Lendler companies basically forced
to sell the house to a community land trust, which
is one of the other solutions people who sort of
come come up and try to deal with that this
this crisis were broadly, which is that you know, instead
of instead of having buildings that are like owned by
landlords and so you know that the reason there they
(28:19):
have this property is to make money for you and
they kick you out of you they can't make enough money.
You have you know, you have these buildings owned by
the community instead, and you know, and this this, this
has been I mean there's limits to it, like you
you need to have enough money to actually be able
to like buy these buildings. But you know that that
this this that's that's one of the other things that's been,
(28:39):
you know, being done to sort of fight this crisis
is by having the communities themselves just directly take control
of the buildings. Thanks Chris, We're gonna take a quick
break and then we'll be back to hear from Garrison
and Sophie become the president of Transitions. I've always been
the president. What do you? What do you? What do you?
What do you? What do you? What are you? Why
are you? Why you Well, here's adds m. All Right,
(29:13):
we're back and we're gonna hear from Garrison last. So
I'm gonna be bringing up one of the more recent
kind of cases of eviction defense that kind of that
captured um a bit like a bit of national media attention.
This was back uh in December with the Red House
(29:34):
in Portland kind of kind of riding off the trails
of the of the BLM protests. This kind of had
the inertia to keep this situation. I'm active with people,
you know, willing to kind of do the thing where
you actually go out and fight the cops. Um, although
that did not happen tons with this situation, UM A brief, brief,
(29:57):
brief overview of what happened. So there was this family
who's been in this specific whose own specific home, like
over fifty years, um, and in the two thousands, they
went into a series of financial hardships. UM. They they
took out some kind of predatory loans, um, and just
they kind of just kept getting they kept they kept
(30:19):
running into problems with their home. UM. There they tried
to have one of their sons do like litigation, but
he was like a sovereign citizen type person and it
made things kind of worse and it wasn't really ideal.
But but you know, but that all of so all
of that is like is like a part of this,
but the important part for everyone who decided to actually
(30:41):
show up was like we're in like like this was
like during like November and December when the plague was
like the worst it was ever at and just except
we like there was like there was there was there
was no vaccinated people in November, right, it was like
like like the the death rates were like super were
super high. So and that's when the cops decided to
(31:04):
evict this family. Um. The the other the other side
of this is that the company that technically like bought
the house from the banks, it's also a pretty shady
developer company. Yeah, so there was there was a lot
of like weird it was are you going to go
into you can? You can go into that. Yeah. So
(31:26):
basically just for an example how shadies they had they were,
it was some when the national attention started, they immediately
backed out of wanting to take the house in such
a way that because of kind of some of the
connections with people involved, everyone's like, oh it was an
organized crime thing like it was. It was a criminal enterprise.
They got attention, We're like, well this is not worth it.
(31:47):
We don't we don't want anybody looking in on our
ship it. We're just giving up right away. It was
a very very very sketchy company slash person had had
bought the house from from the bank, which the bank
you took it from this family. But so anyway, in
like from September to December, the cops kept trying to
(32:09):
kick people, to kick the people out of this home.
Sometimes they did, and then sometimes the people were just
like went back um. And this kind of all culminated
around like December five, I think, is the date that
that cops like really tried to to like you know,
go in there with like rifles, riot gear and like
like drag people out. Um. And even though it was
(32:30):
super early in the morning, a lot of like the
people who have been protesting for like BLM in Portland
all showed up really quickly and they chased the cops away. Um.
And then everyone got super tense because they just chased
away like I don't know, like twenty I think it was.
It was mostly sheriff's I believe, um. And yeah, so
(32:52):
then they did what everyone in Portland does is just
build barricades. For some context, on those Portlanders had been
building barricades for months, generally to no effect. Like it
would be like there would be a moving protest, somebody
would throw a barricade in the street and the police
would immediately shove it aside. But this time it worked.
This time it absolutely worked. They built This time it
(33:13):
worked like gangbusters. They've they've built very thick barricades over
like like five different sides of this house. Because like
this this house is like in the middle of a
city block. It's it was it's a super interesting property
that just like sits in the middle of a street. Um.
So they built barricades all around this whole this whole
(33:34):
section of this neighborhood. They had like they had like
cow trops. They had like sw trips are spiky balls
basically that are meant to funk up generally tires, but
you don't want to step on them either. They also
had um uh I think they're called like they called
they're called check headshogs. Um. They're basically kind of like
(33:55):
cal trops a giant and they're meant to like mess
at the undercarriage of a vehicle, make it hard for
vehicles to plow through. So we we had we had these.
There was there was all this you know, all this
kind of impromptu weapons. Um. There was like behind all
the barricades people like lined up like bottles and eggs
to like help to throw out people if they tried
to rock. There's various various projectiles like just like laid
(34:19):
out behind all these barricades. But the barricades were thick,
you know, they like they actually had like multiple layers
UM and they had like binding to keep them together.
It would have been like it would have been difficult
to get a couple hundred people and heavy equipment, especially
if the bear if I mean if they weren't manned.
Obviously you could just walk through, but if the barricades
had been manned, it would have been um an intense
(34:41):
uh effort in order to force your way through them.
So yeah, within like within a few hours, these barricades
started to come up, and they kept growing over the
course of a week. UM and there was always like
they were between like fifty to a hundred people like
camping out in this spot, sometimes even more people. UM.
There was like multiple kitchens got set up, people try
(35:01):
to like there was like they tried to do like
COVID safe protocols in certain areas. UM. And yeah, it
became this kuyke relatively relatively like um complicated like network
of like people like rotating shifts, manning different spots to
always make sure people are watching all the different entrances UM.
And basically this this lasted for like like over a week.
(35:25):
The mayor was very was very pissed. UM. He was
not thrilled that this situation was happening because one it
made the sheriffs look bad and two it made it
made the protesters actually look effective. Um. And now that
that now, like all of these things we've talked about
this before, there's there's always runs into problems with sorts
(35:46):
of things. This is they're never perfect. There was instances
of people who appointed themselves security doing like you know,
like like attacking people for like doing graffiti on like
random walls, um of like like like like pavement in
other like apartment buildings or whatever. Like. There there was
there was there was there was like problems specifically around security. Um.
(36:10):
But that that that that that happens in a lot
a lot of these things, and that that's kind of
worth discussing on a whole in a whole another episode. Um.
And And there were attempts from fascists, like like like
street fascists not cops, to like to like attack the
barricades and they didn't really succeed because there were just
so many people there. Um. So that was kind of
that that was kind of what happened. Now, people didn't
(36:31):
know what the end game was for this type of thing,
right because like we're just like they're just doing this
thing where like, we don't know how long it's gonna last.
But as as this was happening, other people were setting
up like a go fund means to raise money for
um the family, And eventually the kind of idea that
was decided on by the family and a few other
like people involved was like, what if we can just
(36:54):
get enough money to actually buy the house back um.
And after like a week and a half they raised
three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars was the number. And
because the developer was so shady, he was he like
like a Robert said, he like backed down immediately. He's like,
you know, we can, we can find some other solution
to this. Just stop talking about it. We stopped talking
(37:15):
about me and my business. So I have to say,
like we said, probably an organized crime thing. I prefer
this guy and whatever he's doing a thousand times to
a bank absolutely, So, so that that was kind of
the result is that the family made a deal with
both the city and this developer that they would try
(37:36):
to basically use some of the fundraised money to buy
back at this spot. But that this would have been
totally impossible if it weren't for the militant display of
defense that activists UM deployed in this in this street
in Portland, because I mean there's like a lot of
a lot of you know, like the Portlandia liberal Portlanders
(37:59):
who weren't also tappy with this. It's like like a
lot of people wanted this situation ended. UM. So as
soon as this thing became, you know, a possibility, the
mayor was like quick was quick to jump on this
as as a way to like stop this from happening,
because they did not want this to continue, and because
it would have been pretty difficult for the cops to
(38:19):
push through like it we would have turned into quite
the ship show. And there's I think too really important
takeaways in terms of why it was able to succeed.
And I think most of the ultimate success of it
was was resultant on the first twenty four hours really
even maybe the first twelve because once the sheriffs tried
their first push and got pushed out, if they had
(38:42):
done what generally happened in protests, which is, you know
you have sometimes you would have a push where the
cops would like back off, they would bring in more forces,
and if they had in an hour or two, they
probably could have cleared people out and done the eviction,
but they were so surprised, and the fact that it
had happened in broad daylight was a big factor. It
was kind of early in the morning when this kicked
off that they didn't come back, and so immediately people
(39:05):
started to bringing more folks in. Within six hours or so,
they were pretty potent barricades. By the time night fell,
they were significant already, and they just by the time
I got there that night, they were it was already
too much, too easily handle. Um. And because of what
happened in that first twelve hours, by the time the
city kind of had adapted to what was happening, it
(39:25):
was already a huge story. The level of defensive infrastructure
was massive. Like it did. It was because of how
quickly people came together and got barricades down that they
were able to get the police off balance. We talked
a lot about the ode loop, right about how you
kind of disrupt an opponent, and it is it is
about stopping them from making a decision, right, um. And
(39:47):
so step one was kind of once they forced the
police out, there was something of a blackout about like
what was like people would talk about what was going on,
but there wasn't a lot of footage from inside or
video from inside, so would stopped the cops from observing
as well as they might otherwise have. And of course
they couldn't physically observed because they were blocked out of
the area. Um, they weren't able to kind of because
(40:09):
of how quickly the media around it drummed up, they
weren't able to sort of orient a response, find a
way to villainize the protesters easily. There were attempts made
after that to attack them personally, like the family and
the house personally, but they didn't get on that quickly.
Um And overall, because of how quickly things developed and
how quickly it got much larger than they were prepared
(40:30):
to deal with, they were not able to decide and
act in a timely fashion, and that left kind of
the momentum on the side of the protesters, and ultimately
they were successful as a result of that. And I
think if you're trying to study what about Red House
is replicable, you know, there's a lot of barricade tactics
and stuff, but a big part of it is just
the speed with which people took action and how that
(40:54):
push the city and the police off balance and allowed
a victory. Yeah, so you know, the city made the city,
the developer and the family made a deal that if
they saially, if the barricades came down, the cops won't
mess with them. Um As this process of signing over
the house and doing like financial stuff would go on
and and and and that is that is still no
(41:15):
gooing process. That that's that's still something that's still it's
still being dealt with. But the cops haven't messed with
the property since December five, Um, so that is that
is you know, and this this isn't a perfectly reputable
This isn't a perfectly um like, you can't you can't
replicate this specific strategy always, like you know, it's not
(41:36):
always possible to raise two dollars to buy to buy
back a property. Um, you know, because especially if especially
if you're renting. Um you know, there's there's all these
things that can't be replicated exactly. But the general idea
of very quick sudden mobilization that catches powers at be
(41:59):
off is something that it can be useful in a
lot of different scenarios. Right. It's so the kind of
the reason because basically the barricades and the testmnizlation created
more options. So if you want to create more options,
this is something that that can do that, right, This
is something that can put more things on the table.
It may not be the same result, but there's going
(42:21):
to be other things that that could happen. And I
think the other thing that's important here, you know, you know,
the red haws is sort of interesting because the cops,
to some extent, we're expecting just since they just were
expecting this much. But you know, again, like as we're
saying earlier, landlords like are basically relying to to a
very large sound of people invating themselves right there. They're
(42:43):
not expecting resistance. And this is why, you know, like
this is why it tends to be. You know, if
if you if you do one of these things, you
get this like like one enormous police response, right, Like
you know, they show they show up, they you know,
trow up a tanks, right, And the reason they do
that is because you know that what what they can
do is they can make an example out of people, right,
(43:03):
but they can't actually stop everyone. Right, Like they're they're
they're they're not, they're not they're not they're not equipped
for you know, dealing with three million people just saying no.
And so you know, if if you organize fast enough
and if you catch them by surprise, and you know,
if if you bring the stuff that they're doing like
to light, like you know, you show up to their houses,
you show up to like you show up to the banks,
(43:24):
you show up to their offices right like they're not
you know, and you keep going right there they're they're
not they're not expecting this, they're not prepared for it.
And you know, and you know there's also a park there.
Like they'll lose, right like they they will a lot
of times. Like they will negotiate, they will settle. They
will not effect you like in order basically to you know,
deal with all the attention, the fact that they can't
(43:46):
drive you out. Yeah, all right, and I think that's
going to uh call it a day for us here
at it could happen here, um the podcast that is
this one. So go out and I don't know, eat
an entire seven thirty seven piece by piece or do
(44:10):
something else. Goodbye. You can follow us happen here on Twitter,
on Instagram, and allegedly allegedly allegedly Sophie by Everybody. It
Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
(44:31):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zone media dot com or check us out on
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could
Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com,
slash sources, and just as a heads up, we'll be
back next week on Tuesday instead of Monday, as we'll
be taking the day off for Labor Day by not laboring,
(44:54):
so catch up on an old episode or cleanse yourself
of our voices.
It Could Happen Here News
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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