WEBVTT - A Brief History of Eviction Defense 0:00:04.120 --> 0:00:12.399 What's evicting my people who didn't want to die? Serving 0:00:12.520 --> 0:00:17.960 lattes to anti mask activists. That's actually one of your 0:00:17.960 --> 0:00:21.439 best I was like, where are you going? I was like, 0:00:21.480 --> 0:00:25.120 oh no, they pulled it off. Great job. So this 0:00:25.200 --> 0:00:27.840 is it could happen here. It's a show about collapse. 0:00:27.920 --> 0:00:32.640 And speaking of collapse, Um, the Supreme Court just issued 0:00:32.720 --> 0:00:35.080 a shadow ruling, which we should probably do a whole 0:00:35.080 --> 0:00:38.440 episode about this practice of like Supreme Court decisions that 0:00:38.479 --> 0:00:40.720 are it was a Supreme Court decision that was not 0:00:40.800 --> 0:00:42.920 a Supreme Court decision, So they don't have to issue 0:00:42.920 --> 0:00:45.760 like a whole justification. They don't have to like explain 0:00:45.760 --> 0:00:48.479 where everyone landed. They just said, hey, you know the 0:00:48.520 --> 0:00:53.240 eviction moratoriums that the Biden administration just pushed through Again, Nah, 0:00:53.880 --> 0:00:56.880 it's not not constitutional. We're not going to say anymore. 0:00:57.640 --> 0:01:00.520 Uh start kicking people out of their motherfucker and homes 0:01:00.920 --> 0:01:02.960 and boy, how did that process is started? And we 0:01:03.000 --> 0:01:06.720 don't know. I mean, I think the the you'll get 0:01:06.840 --> 0:01:08.880 very different numbers when you try to figure out like 0:01:08.959 --> 0:01:11.240 how many people are going to get evicted or at 0:01:11.319 --> 0:01:13.280 risk of being evicted. Like the highest deal here is 0:01:13.280 --> 0:01:17.560 like thirty to forty million Americans at risk of eviction. UM. 0:01:17.600 --> 0:01:19.920 I think it was UM. I think it was Bank 0:01:19.959 --> 0:01:25.200 of America's numbers that anticipated as many as seven hundred 0:01:25.240 --> 0:01:29.600 and fifty thousand households. Goldman, it was a Goldman gold 0:01:30.400 --> 0:01:34.920 anticipated about seven and fifty thousand American households losing their 0:01:34.920 --> 0:01:38.679 homes getting and that's obviously more than seven fifty thousand people. Now, 0:01:38.720 --> 0:01:40.360 when we talk about like how many of those folks 0:01:40.360 --> 0:01:43.080 could end up homeless, UM, it's going to be a 0:01:43.200 --> 0:01:46.080 less than that total number of households because whenever you 0:01:46.120 --> 0:01:48.240 have stuff like this happened, like in two thousand and eight, 0:01:48.440 --> 0:01:50.640 a decent number of people who lose access to their 0:01:50.640 --> 0:01:53.040 homes wind up kind of CouchSurfing, bunking with family. You 0:01:53.040 --> 0:01:55.440 wind up with two or three families in one home, 0:01:55.520 --> 0:01:59.200 which is obviously particularly a problem during a pandemic. Right 0:01:59.280 --> 0:02:01.520 Like if you have families doubling or tripling up in 0:02:01.560 --> 0:02:04.960 the same house while there's a plague, that's um that 0:02:05.040 --> 0:02:09.919 introduces additional complications. But it's it's possible, in fact, very 0:02:09.960 --> 0:02:13.440 likely because about the s the kind of conservative estimate 0:02:13.440 --> 0:02:15.080 for the number of people who are homeless on American 0:02:15.120 --> 0:02:17.400 streets right now is a little over five and fifty thousand, 0:02:17.680 --> 0:02:19.600 So there's a pretty good chance that the number of 0:02:19.600 --> 0:02:22.240 homeless could essentially double in the next you know, not 0:02:22.320 --> 0:02:25.280 quite overnight, because evictions it's not like a thing where like, okay, 0:02:25.480 --> 0:02:27.799 the Supreme Court said you can evict people. Now, everybody's 0:02:27.800 --> 0:02:29.520 out on their ass the next day. It's it's a 0:02:29.560 --> 0:02:32.280 process of evicting people. There is like a legal process. 0:02:32.320 --> 0:02:35.000 But in the near future, we could see a doubling 0:02:35.080 --> 0:02:37.760 of the number of Americans who are without homes, if 0:02:37.840 --> 0:02:42.200 not even potentially more than that. So it's pretty high stakes, um, 0:02:42.320 --> 0:02:46.800 which I think necessitates everybody be thinking about not just 0:02:46.880 --> 0:02:49.520 ways to fight the Supreme Court ruling or whatever, not 0:02:49.600 --> 0:02:51.600 just ways to get the government to provide support to people, 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:56.840 but also eviction defense. Um, because kind of historically and 0:02:56.840 --> 0:02:58.360 today we're going to kind of give a little bit 0:02:58.360 --> 0:03:02.640 of a historic overview here. Um. Historically, eviction defense is 0:03:03.480 --> 0:03:07.680 it has not in American history solved the overall problems, 0:03:07.720 --> 0:03:11.920 but it solves it can provide necessary Uh, it can 0:03:11.919 --> 0:03:14.560 be a necessary like tourniquet for a lot of people 0:03:14.600 --> 0:03:17.919 and for communities. Um. Before kind of more long term 0:03:17.960 --> 0:03:21.040 solutions to these problems get get get brought up, and 0:03:21.280 --> 0:03:23.320 I think it behooves this to talk about eviction defense 0:03:23.400 --> 0:03:26.800 kind of from that standpoint. UM So I found a 0:03:26.840 --> 0:03:29.480 really interesting article when you when you start reading about 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:33.480 eviction defense, a lot of the eviction defense like articles 0:03:33.520 --> 0:03:35.760 kind of talking about the Great Depression are going to 0:03:35.800 --> 0:03:39.240 come from the International Socialist Review or other kind of 0:03:39.240 --> 0:03:43.800 socialist or outright communists like websites. Um. And there's there's 0:03:43.800 --> 0:03:47.240 some good reasons for this, which is that the organizations 0:03:47.320 --> 0:03:49.240 during the Great Depression who were doing most of the 0:03:49.280 --> 0:03:54.040 anti eviction organizing were communist organizations. Now, I found some 0:03:54.120 --> 0:03:56.600 kind of scholarly analyzes of some of the reporting on 0:03:56.640 --> 0:03:58.880 that that will point out that they especially if you're 0:03:58.960 --> 0:04:02.280 kind of like report if you're if you're studying eviction defense, 0:04:02.400 --> 0:04:05.160 based on kind of the documents at the time, and 0:04:05.200 --> 0:04:07.880 it was a lot of like Socialist Worker, UM and 0:04:08.080 --> 0:04:12.279 Unemployed Citizen and whatnot newspapers with titles like that. UM, 0:04:12.320 --> 0:04:15.840 A lot of those would kind of tend to deliberately 0:04:16.360 --> 0:04:20.200 under count the efforts of of non communist anti eviction 0:04:20.320 --> 0:04:24.720 organizations because there was a whole political fight going on then. UM. 0:04:24.760 --> 0:04:26.520 So keep that in mind that said, it is kind 0:04:26.560 --> 0:04:30.680 of worth reading, uh some of these some of these accounts, 0:04:30.680 --> 0:04:33.919 and I think one that is particularly uh noteworthy is 0:04:33.960 --> 0:04:37.040 what happened in New York City starting in nineteen one 0:04:37.160 --> 0:04:40.640 nineteen thirty two, UM. And this was in the Bronx 0:04:41.440 --> 0:04:45.440 Park East and Allerton Avenue UM. And it started obviously, 0:04:45.480 --> 0:04:48.240 like the Great Depression kicks off, like nineteen thirty, nineteen 0:04:48.279 --> 0:04:51.680 thirty one. UM. By January of nineteen thirty two, you've 0:04:51.680 --> 0:04:54.640 got a huge number of people unemployed and increasingly desperate, 0:04:54.640 --> 0:04:57.920 and you've got these landlords trying to evict and kick 0:04:58.000 --> 0:05:03.280 them out. UM. And the communists in the Bronx started 0:05:03.760 --> 0:05:07.320 an eviction defense network that was very noteworthy, and it 0:05:07.400 --> 0:05:10.680 kind of it initially crystallized around this series of communist 0:05:10.760 --> 0:05:13.359 co ops, which were these two buildings in the Bronx 0:05:13.400 --> 0:05:17.080 that were populated by communists UM. And that had included 0:05:17.120 --> 0:05:20.400 like a cooperative housing experiment, like some cooperative gardening that 0:05:20.480 --> 0:05:24.640 sort of stuff. And they were mostly Eastern European uh 0:05:25.000 --> 0:05:28.120 Jewish like workers, like people who had come over from 0:05:28.160 --> 0:05:30.799 Europe and in a lot of cases had been socialist 0:05:30.880 --> 0:05:33.640 activists in Europe, many of whom had like had to 0:05:33.680 --> 0:05:37.080 flee Europe to the United States because of their activism 0:05:37.320 --> 0:05:41.760 UM and in January of nineteen thirty two, they organized 0:05:41.800 --> 0:05:45.960 rent strikes at three larger apartment buildings at Bronx East 0:05:46.000 --> 0:05:50.359 Park UM and one of the things that they created 0:05:50.440 --> 0:05:53.560 was what they called the Upper Bronx Unemployed Council. And 0:05:53.640 --> 0:05:55.799 this kind of was part of a series of decisions 0:05:55.839 --> 0:05:57.920 that led to the creation of an organization called the 0:05:58.000 --> 0:06:01.640 Unemployed Citizens Committees I think is they called them UM. 0:06:01.640 --> 0:06:03.560 And kind of one of the ideas there was to 0:06:03.640 --> 0:06:07.080 point out that, you know, despite kind of the focus 0:06:07.200 --> 0:06:09.800 within the capitalist system on people needing to have a job, 0:06:09.920 --> 0:06:12.800 needing to make income in order to be like citizens, 0:06:13.040 --> 0:06:16.880 unemployed people were citizens too and embody and imbued with 0:06:16.920 --> 0:06:19.920 like the full rights of an American citizen UM. And 0:06:19.960 --> 0:06:22.720 so they were kind of taking ownership of the term 0:06:22.800 --> 0:06:26.279 unemployed rather than accepting it as a slur UM that like, no, 0:06:26.440 --> 0:06:29.560 we're like, we're still citizens, and we we have rights 0:06:29.560 --> 0:06:32.920 in power and will UM will organize in order to 0:06:33.040 --> 0:06:36.039 enact our power on or in order to UM in 0:06:36.160 --> 0:06:40.320 order to kind of forcefully try to make the changes 0:06:40.360 --> 0:06:43.400 that we need. And so these these communists in the 0:06:43.440 --> 0:06:47.599 Bronx organized three buildings worth of tenants into a rent strike. 0:06:48.080 --> 0:06:50.680 They were refusing to pay rent until they got their demands, 0:06:50.720 --> 0:06:53.720 which were a fifteen percent reduction in rent and into eviction, 0:06:54.320 --> 0:06:57.680 repairs and apartments, and recognition of the Tenants Committee as 0:06:57.680 --> 0:07:01.680 an official bargaining agent. So they were trying to effectively unionize, 0:07:01.720 --> 0:07:03.800 like in the same way that workers had just four 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:09.039 tenants in a building. UM. Now, these like this rent 0:07:09.080 --> 0:07:11.920 strike set off a rent riot that eventually more than 0:07:11.960 --> 0:07:15.840 four thousand people participated in city marshals and the marshals 0:07:15.840 --> 0:07:18.320 were the people the city would hire to to force 0:07:18.360 --> 0:07:21.760 homeless people out of their houses. UM, marshals and police 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:26.200 showed up to evict seventeen tenants and yeah, about four 0:07:26.240 --> 0:07:29.840 thousand people showed up to oppose them, and that started 0:07:29.840 --> 0:07:34.280 this massive street fight. UM. And it was largely and 0:07:34.280 --> 0:07:35.920 and this would be the case with most of these 0:07:35.920 --> 0:07:38.320 rent strikes in the early thirties, it was largely women 0:07:38.320 --> 0:07:40.280 who would do most of the fighting and would do 0:07:40.400 --> 0:07:44.000 most of the the the like the actual like physical 0:07:44.120 --> 0:07:46.200 organizing against the police. And some of this was because 0:07:46.240 --> 0:07:48.640 they recognized that like when their men were there, the 0:07:48.720 --> 0:07:50.880 cops would beat the ship out of them and arrest them. 0:07:50.880 --> 0:07:52.240 And so there was a lot of times where they 0:07:52.240 --> 0:07:54.480 were like, okay, you guys, get out of the house, 0:07:54.520 --> 0:07:56.280 like the women are going to organize. We'll get up 0:07:56.280 --> 0:07:58.520 on the fire escapes and balconies. We'll like we'll throw 0:07:58.520 --> 0:08:01.080 ship at the cops, you know. Um. And these were 0:08:01.120 --> 0:08:03.760 also very like and I don't want to like be 0:08:03.760 --> 0:08:10.040 be ignoring this either. These were extremely communist uh like events, 0:08:10.080 --> 0:08:12.680 Like they would be singing communist songs, they would be 0:08:12.680 --> 0:08:15.760 like making carrying out communist chance. It was communist papers 0:08:15.800 --> 0:08:18.520 that did a lot of the organizing. Um. I want 0:08:18.520 --> 0:08:21.880 to read a quote from that International Socialist Review article 0:08:22.120 --> 0:08:24.440 that I found kind of like laying out how this 0:08:24.520 --> 0:08:28.200 particular strike went. Quote. Bronx property owners moved quickly to 0:08:28.240 --> 0:08:30.560 try to contain the movement. At first, they tried arbitration. 0:08:30.640 --> 0:08:33.439 Following the evictions at six six five Allerton, landlords in 0:08:33.520 --> 0:08:35.880 Bronx Park East asked a Blue Ribbon committee of Bronx 0:08:35.960 --> 0:08:39.040 Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute, convinced that an impartial 0:08:39.080 --> 0:08:41.520 examination of the buildings books would show that the landlord 0:08:41.520 --> 0:08:44.120 could not meet the striker's demands without operating at a loss, 0:08:44.480 --> 0:08:47.680 but the strike leaders contemptuously rejected arbitration and indeed the 0:08:47.679 --> 0:08:51.400 whole notion that a reasonable return on one's investment represented 0:08:51.440 --> 0:08:54.800 a basis for negotiation when times were good, Strike leader 0:08:54.840 --> 0:08:57.719 Max Kim a Wits declared, the landlords didn't offer to 0:08:57.800 --> 0:09:00.560 share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money 0:09:00.640 --> 0:09:02.760 off us when we had it. Now that we haven't 0:09:02.760 --> 0:09:06.080 got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less. Faced 0:09:06.080 --> 0:09:08.400 with this kind of bargaining positions, landlords felt they had 0:09:08.400 --> 0:09:10.360 no choice but to pull out the stops to suppress 0:09:10.360 --> 0:09:13.320 the movement. By the second week of February nineteen thirty two, 0:09:13.320 --> 0:09:16.400 two major organizations of Bronx landlords had formed rent strike 0:09:16.400 --> 0:09:19.640 committees that offered unlimited funding and legal support for any 0:09:19.720 --> 0:09:23.240 landlord facing a Communist led rent strike. Using the considerable 0:09:23.240 --> 0:09:26.360 political influence and legal expertise at their disposal, that developed 0:09:26.360 --> 0:09:29.959 a strategy that included wholesale issuance of dispossessed notices against 0:09:30.000 --> 0:09:33.440 striking tenants, efforts to win in junctions against picketing and strikes, 0:09:33.640 --> 0:09:36.640 agreements by judges to waive normal delay periods and evictions, 0:09:36.840 --> 0:09:39.880 and efforts to ban rent strikes by legislative enactment. The 0:09:39.920 --> 0:09:42.920 situation has become much graver than most persons suppose. When 0:09:43.000 --> 0:09:46.320 Landlords spokesman declared the strikes are spreading rapidly and scores 0:09:46.320 --> 0:09:48.880 of landlords are facing financial ruin or loss of their 0:09:48.920 --> 0:09:52.040 properties as a result of them. Former State Senator Benjamin 0:09:52.040 --> 0:09:54.760 Anton told landlords, this is a peculiar neighborhood. It is 0:09:54.760 --> 0:09:57.080 the hotbed of communism and radicalism. The people in this 0:09:57.080 --> 0:10:00.360 neighborhood are mostly communists and Soviet sympathizers. They do not 0:10:00.440 --> 0:10:05.200 believe in our form of government. Now, one are the 0:10:05.280 --> 0:10:07.960 things that's interesting about this. So in a lot of 0:10:08.000 --> 0:10:10.880 cases particularly, there was like this this first big set 0:10:10.880 --> 0:10:13.880 of riots that kind of ended when the police kind 0:10:13.920 --> 0:10:16.120 of pushed the rioters back. But because of how many 0:10:16.120 --> 0:10:18.600 of them there were, they came to an agreement and 0:10:18.640 --> 0:10:21.360 like the landlords gave concessions to the people in those 0:10:21.400 --> 0:10:24.040 three buildings. But the next set of strikes were pretty 0:10:24.120 --> 0:10:26.720 much crushed and the majority of the rent strikes they 0:10:26.720 --> 0:10:29.200 start popping up in buildings kind of all around this 0:10:29.280 --> 0:10:31.480 part of New York. In the period they don't win 0:10:31.880 --> 0:10:36.320 the initial strike um by which I mean people get evicted, 0:10:36.360 --> 0:10:38.800 the marshals come in, they take these people's furniture out. 0:10:39.000 --> 0:10:41.840 But what the communists started doing, because they had the numbers, 0:10:41.920 --> 0:10:43.680 is they would show up after the cops and the 0:10:43.720 --> 0:10:46.679 marshals left and they would lift like they would put 0:10:46.679 --> 0:10:51.079 together police systems and lift people's furniture back into their apartments, um, 0:10:51.120 --> 0:10:53.120 and move them back in. And so part of the 0:10:53.160 --> 0:10:56.200 understanding was it cost the city money every time they 0:10:56.240 --> 0:10:59.160 send marshals out because the city was paying to evict people, 0:10:59.480 --> 0:11:02.959 So will just move them back in after they're evicted, um, 0:11:03.000 --> 0:11:05.600 And that's going to like make the situation untenable for 0:11:05.640 --> 0:11:09.240 the city. UM. So that led to the police setting 0:11:09.280 --> 0:11:12.080 up like temporary police stations outside of some of the 0:11:12.120 --> 0:11:14.520 buildings that were like most active as part of a 0:11:14.559 --> 0:11:18.199 long term solution to try to suppress the revolt. UM. 0:11:18.320 --> 0:11:21.040 The one issue of the Daily Worker noted quote cops 0:11:21.080 --> 0:11:23.760 patrol the street all day. The entire territory is under 0:11:23.800 --> 0:11:26.719 semi martial law. People are driven around the streets, off 0:11:26.720 --> 0:11:31.160 the corners and away from the houses. Um. And so yeah, 0:11:31.280 --> 0:11:34.040 it you know, kind of this went on for weeks. 0:11:34.080 --> 0:11:37.400 And there's one of the criticisms that even this this 0:11:37.480 --> 0:11:40.240 International Socialist Review right up, I found will make of 0:11:40.280 --> 0:11:44.440 the of the initial rent strike is that because kind 0:11:44.440 --> 0:11:47.439 of the a lot of the hardcore communist activists came 0:11:47.480 --> 0:11:50.360 to relish sort of these clashes with police as a 0:11:50.400 --> 0:11:52.880 result of the evictions and had this belief that they 0:11:52.880 --> 0:11:56.960 would radicalize the masses um, whereas there was I think 0:11:57.200 --> 0:11:59.200 among the masses more of like a well, we we 0:11:59.440 --> 0:12:02.000 mostly want to lose our homes. And when it became 0:12:02.360 --> 0:12:04.680 when you hit this like they kind of hit this 0:12:04.760 --> 0:12:08.080 wall where they would come out and fight the cops, 0:12:08.120 --> 0:12:10.160 but the cops would win and push people out in 0:12:10.200 --> 0:12:13.400 the end, and the evictions would still happen um. And 0:12:13.440 --> 0:12:16.360 it it kind of led to this uh kind of 0:12:16.400 --> 0:12:21.200 loss of of of momentum within the movement UM. And 0:12:21.240 --> 0:12:25.400 that didn't change until the communists kind of altered their 0:12:25.520 --> 0:12:29.600 organizing strategy um, and so they started carrying out They 0:12:29.600 --> 0:12:32.600 started like mobilizing all of the different sort of left 0:12:32.600 --> 0:12:34.520 wing networks that were in the area to not just 0:12:35.040 --> 0:12:39.400 do eviction resistance, but to pick it rent striking buildings, 0:12:39.440 --> 0:12:43.160 to hold street rallies and protest marches. When a protester 0:12:43.320 --> 0:12:45.800 was killed by the police, they got like fifty people 0:12:45.840 --> 0:12:47.960 out in the streets and it was just it was 0:12:48.000 --> 0:12:50.600 this matter of number one, keeping huge numbers of people 0:12:50.640 --> 0:12:53.199 in the streets, which is you know, expensive for the city, 0:12:53.360 --> 0:12:56.280 was bad for business in a lot of cases. UM. 0:12:56.320 --> 0:13:01.720 But they also started organizing unemployed people in to uh 0:13:01.840 --> 0:13:05.560 like kind of a quasi union sort of situation that 0:13:06.040 --> 0:13:10.440 didn't just organized stuff on the street, but started reaching 0:13:10.440 --> 0:13:12.960 out to the government when because this is right around 0:13:13.000 --> 0:13:17.160 the time that the Roosevelt administration started pushing protections UM 0:13:17.200 --> 0:13:20.079 and including like eviction protections and like funding to help 0:13:20.120 --> 0:13:22.720 people stay in their houses. And that was kind of 0:13:22.760 --> 0:13:24.880 you could you could argue like a lot of those 0:13:24.920 --> 0:13:27.240 protections came about as a result of all of the 0:13:27.240 --> 0:13:30.280 people who were doing eviction resistance on the street. But 0:13:30.440 --> 0:13:35.400 these these unemployed councils they called them, would basically help 0:13:35.440 --> 0:13:38.559 people go to the government, help people like file for benefits, 0:13:38.559 --> 0:13:40.719 help people and help people stay in their houses, and 0:13:40.800 --> 0:13:44.400 kind of in the end, through a variety of different tactics, UM, 0:13:44.520 --> 0:13:48.440 they were really successful in uh stopping large numbers of 0:13:48.440 --> 0:13:50.719 people from being dispossessed and keeping a lot of these 0:13:50.760 --> 0:13:54.120 communities UM together. And the Home Belief Bureaus, which is 0:13:54.160 --> 0:13:57.320 kind of the government agencies that were formed from like 0:13:57.400 --> 0:14:01.640 the fund the emergency funding here UM worked with the 0:14:01.640 --> 0:14:03.920 the unemployed councils to keep people in their home. So 0:14:03.920 --> 0:14:07.400 it was this you saw this situation where you had 0:14:07.480 --> 0:14:11.720 it's what started with kind of like physical force confronting 0:14:11.760 --> 0:14:15.360 the eviction UH teams and confronting the police, and that 0:14:15.400 --> 0:14:18.960 helped to organize and galvanize people, but it had its limitations. 0:14:19.440 --> 0:14:22.800 UM and that eventually evolved into a broader sort of 0:14:23.040 --> 0:14:26.520 series of strikes and marches that were disruptive enough to 0:14:26.600 --> 0:14:28.960 life that they in the city that they helped to 0:14:29.160 --> 0:14:33.200 UH to provide kind of UM impetus for government benefits 0:14:33.200 --> 0:14:35.480 to keep people in their homes. And then once those 0:14:35.520 --> 0:14:38.320 benefits were there, a lot of these organizations kind of 0:14:38.680 --> 0:14:43.720 pivoted towards helping people UH like file and get benefits 0:14:43.760 --> 0:14:45.680 in order to keep them in their homes. And in 0:14:45.720 --> 0:14:47.080 the end of it, it was just kind of this 0:14:47.200 --> 0:14:52.480 very multifaceted UH movement that had its missteps and went 0:14:52.520 --> 0:14:54.760 through a variety of tactics over time, but in the 0:14:54.840 --> 0:14:59.600 end was largely successful in keeping communities from being forced 0:14:59.640 --> 0:15:03.280 out their homes. UM and UH, I don't know, I 0:15:03.280 --> 0:15:05.720 think it's it's an interesting story and it's it's kind 0:15:05.760 --> 0:15:08.400 of you see when you when you hear eviction events 0:15:08.440 --> 0:15:11.840 talked about, you people tend to kind of hone in 0:15:11.960 --> 0:15:14.600 on just the big fights against the police, which were 0:15:14.640 --> 0:15:16.560 clearly important, or they tend to hone in on stuff 0:15:16.600 --> 0:15:19.920 that happened elsewhere in the country, like organizations of farmers 0:15:19.920 --> 0:15:23.160 and sharecroppers who would show up in eviction courts and 0:15:23.240 --> 0:15:27.320 like threatened police and uh stop you know, sheriffs from 0:15:27.360 --> 0:15:29.720 evicting widows from their homes and whatnot. And these are 0:15:29.720 --> 0:15:33.040 important stories, but I think the broader story about like 0:15:33.240 --> 0:15:39.080 why these eviction resistance networks functioned was that they they 0:15:39.160 --> 0:15:41.600 pivoted regularly. They didn't just stick with we're going to 0:15:41.720 --> 0:15:43.920 fight the cops when they try to evict people. They 0:15:43.960 --> 0:15:47.720 formed these Unemployed Councils UM. And these Unemployed councils were 0:15:47.720 --> 0:15:50.280 communist organizations, but you didn't have to be a communist 0:15:50.400 --> 0:15:53.600 to join UM or to benefit from them, and they would, 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:55.880 you know, lobby the government on behalf of these people. 0:15:55.920 --> 0:15:58.920 They would help them get benefits UM and in the end, 0:15:58.960 --> 0:16:02.000 all of this was really successful in you know, what 0:16:02.040 --> 0:16:06.280 was the most important battle, which was keeping families in 0:16:06.280 --> 0:16:09.680 their homes. UM so I don't know. That's that's that's 0:16:09.720 --> 0:16:12.400 kind of like the what will include a couple of 0:16:12.600 --> 0:16:16.120 links in here, but um, that's kind of the overall, 0:16:16.560 --> 0:16:20.680 uh story of what happened in a particularly in New 0:16:20.760 --> 0:16:22.680 York in the thirties, which is kind of the best 0:16:22.760 --> 0:16:29.040 documented series of eviction resistance movements. Yeah, quick break, go 0:16:29.200 --> 0:16:31.480 pee and then continue peeing because you can pee and 0:16:31.480 --> 0:16:48.400 listen to a podcast. We're back. Um. And before I 0:16:48.440 --> 0:16:50.760 move on to to Chris's, I wanted to make a 0:16:50.840 --> 0:16:52.720 note that I've come across a couple of times in 0:16:52.800 --> 0:16:55.320 my in the readings that I found that like kind 0:16:55.320 --> 0:16:58.640 of talk about eviction resistance in the thirties, but within 0:16:58.680 --> 0:17:01.840 the context of either what was happening in two thousand 0:17:01.840 --> 0:17:03.760 and eight after the financial crash, or what's happening now, 0:17:03.800 --> 0:17:06.720 which is that evictions are way more common now than 0:17:06.760 --> 0:17:09.320 they ever were during the Great Depression. Um, both as 0:17:09.320 --> 0:17:12.000 a percentage of workers and in absolute numbers. UM, it 0:17:12.160 --> 0:17:16.760 is enormously common. In One of the statistics I found 0:17:16.760 --> 0:17:19.480 in a New Yorker article about the eviction epidemic is 0:17:19.520 --> 0:17:22.000 that in Milwaukee, a city which has about a hundred 0:17:22.000 --> 0:17:26.639 and five thousand renter households. Landlords legally evict roughly sixteen 0:17:26.720 --> 0:17:31.400 thousand adults and children every year, um. And that's like 0:17:32.560 --> 0:17:35.720 that that is a significantly higher rate than they were 0:17:35.720 --> 0:17:39.080 dealing in this period. And because evictions are so commonplace, 0:17:39.400 --> 0:17:41.840 they don't really attract much attention. One of the reasons 0:17:41.840 --> 0:17:44.520 why those early eviction defense networks where you get so 0:17:44.520 --> 0:17:47.200 many people out in the streets, is that the idea 0:17:47.280 --> 0:17:50.439 that families would be evicted, um, particularly any kind of 0:17:50.440 --> 0:17:53.160 significant numbers, was was fairly new, and so it drew 0:17:53.160 --> 0:17:56.720 a lot of attention. People were outraged, um, Whereas today 0:17:56.760 --> 0:17:59.680 it's something that happens all the time, UM, and it's 0:17:59.680 --> 0:18:04.159 something that uh, they're a significant amount of infrastructure has 0:18:04.160 --> 0:18:07.480 been built up to allow evictions. So there are full 0:18:07.520 --> 0:18:10.680 time sheriff squads in large cities whose only job is 0:18:10.720 --> 0:18:13.800 to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving 0:18:13.840 --> 0:18:16.679 companies that specialize in just evictions, and the crews for 0:18:16.720 --> 0:18:19.560 these companies work all day long, five days a week. 0:18:19.600 --> 0:18:21.639 There is there's so much of this going on in 0:18:21.680 --> 0:18:27.320 every major city in the country, UM, that there's a 0:18:27.400 --> 0:18:31.520 significant amount of there's you're not just competing with you know, 0:18:31.600 --> 0:18:33.639 these these kind of ad hoc teams of marshals and 0:18:33.720 --> 0:18:36.800 cops showing up to like pile furniture out on the street. 0:18:36.840 --> 0:18:41.199 You're dealing with years worth of infrastructure to enable evictions. 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:46.280 Um so yeah, that sucks anyway, Chris, you why don't 0:18:46.280 --> 0:18:48.440 you go on? You know, well, okay, what one thing 0:18:48.480 --> 0:18:51.520 I will say though, is that you know, still even 0:18:51.560 --> 0:18:55.360 to this date, like the landlords rely heavily on people 0:18:55.440 --> 0:18:57.800 self evicting people just sort of yeah, you know, the 0:18:57.960 --> 0:19:00.119 you had an division does as people's leave, right, and 0:19:00.160 --> 0:19:02.400 so they do not even even with all the certic 0:19:02.440 --> 0:19:04.680 capacity they built up, they don't actually have the ability 0:19:04.920 --> 0:19:08.280 to like if everyone, if literally every tenant, I mean 0:19:08.280 --> 0:19:09.960 you know, like and peopuilt a lot of tenants have 0:19:10.040 --> 0:19:13.120 started showing up in corporate like if it would be 0:19:13.440 --> 0:19:17.080 genuinely difficult for them to actually evict every single person 0:19:17.280 --> 0:19:20.679 like by force, even even with the infrastructure they've built up. 0:19:22.119 --> 0:19:25.520 But you know I were talking about before before I 0:19:25.560 --> 0:19:28.320 go into some more resistant example of how we got here, 0:19:29.320 --> 0:19:32.879 which is, you know, there's there there's a lot of 0:19:32.880 --> 0:19:35.600 stuff that happens in the seventies and eighties that are 0:19:35.600 --> 0:19:37.680 sort of important to this um on on a sort 0:19:37.680 --> 0:19:41.119 of macroeconomic level whose even seems all the way out right. 0:19:41.640 --> 0:19:42.920 You know, if there's some of these eighties this is 0:19:42.920 --> 0:19:46.560 a normous economic sort of collapses. There's all these problems, 0:19:46.560 --> 0:19:49.480 there's mass inflation. And one of the big things that's 0:19:49.480 --> 0:19:53.400 happening here is that, you know, profit rates and manufacturing 0:19:53.400 --> 0:19:54.879 are collapsing. It's like, okay, well, what does that have 0:19:54.960 --> 0:19:56.760 to do with housing? What what I has to do 0:19:56.800 --> 0:19:59.959 with housing is that you know, we'll zooming on your 0:20:00.040 --> 0:20:02.120 hand for a second, because you're like, the US were 0:20:02.200 --> 0:20:04.840 just like guts Japan's manufacturing economy in the eighties through 0:20:04.880 --> 0:20:08.560 some sort of complicated currency stuff. But Japan's solution to 0:20:08.640 --> 0:20:11.280 this is interesting. They you know, they're like, okay, so 0:20:11.359 --> 0:20:13.840 our manufacturing sectors in ruins. How do we maintain the economy? 0:20:13.920 --> 0:20:15.520 What if we just give a bunch of credit, the 0:20:15.640 --> 0:20:18.000 very cheap credit to banks and let them buy houses, 0:20:19.680 --> 0:20:20.879 and so they do, yeah you know, and you know, 0:20:20.920 --> 0:20:24.639 and yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we'll they'll buy houses, 0:20:24.680 --> 0:20:26.080 and they'll and they'll you know, they'll buy houses, and 0:20:26.080 --> 0:20:28.119 they'll buy stocks, and the value those assets will just 0:20:28.200 --> 0:20:30.359 keep it like keep increasing and keep increasing, keep increasing. 0:20:30.400 --> 0:20:33.800 Nothing will ever go wrong. With this, uh about maybe 0:20:33.800 --> 0:20:36.000 like eight years later you get the East Asian but 0:20:36.119 --> 0:20:38.720 we're collapsing, and you know, that's that that's a big 0:20:38.720 --> 0:20:40.840 part of what that was. But the important part about 0:20:40.840 --> 0:20:44.119 this for US is that so in order to save Japan, right, 0:20:44.119 --> 0:20:47.119 the US government guts its own manufacturing sector. And so 0:20:47.160 --> 0:20:49.199 this means you're in the nineties. You know, you have 0:20:49.200 --> 0:20:51.160 Clinton going, Okay, how are we going to save the economy? 0:20:51.160 --> 0:20:53.720 And Clinton looks at the Japanese bottle and was like, wait, no, 0:20:53.840 --> 0:20:56.919 hold down, we can do this too. And so you know, 0:20:56.960 --> 0:20:59.760 the first the first collapses causes you know, Clinton, Clinton 0:20:59.760 --> 0:21:01.960 gives the banks and credit, they buy stocks with it. 0:21:02.280 --> 0:21:04.760 You know, they give like us a bunch of cheap credit, 0:21:05.600 --> 0:21:07.679 and you know, we buy houses and we buy stocks 0:21:07.680 --> 0:21:09.520 with it. And then you know, the tech bubble implodes, 0:21:09.600 --> 0:21:12.399 and then this all leads to thousand eight, where you know, 0:21:12.480 --> 0:21:14.720 all of the all of the sort of all the 0:21:14.720 --> 0:21:18.160 bad mortgages, the banks that I'm passing out just implode 0:21:18.240 --> 0:21:20.560 and and some a couple of banks go under, a 0:21:20.600 --> 0:21:24.399 couple of like two, like three banks go under, but 0:21:24.600 --> 0:21:27.720