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