Fighting Displacement in the Neighborhood Anti-Eviction Organizing

Displacement, or the forcible removal of poor and working people from their homes and communities is the inevitable consequence of the surplus driven capitalist “housing market” - an un-natural and anti-human system that rewards greed, exploitation, racism and class oppression. Displacement of poor and working people occurs when essential services, like sanitation and fire protection are withdrawn, when drugs are allowed to flow and youth are incarcerated, where schools and health facilities are shuttered, and where the police harass residents 24/7. Most critically, displacement occurs when banks deny mortgage financing and loans to small neighborhood owners. In this way, whole communities are “red-lined” and as a result landlords neglect building repairs and are finally squeezed into giving up their properties and evicting their tenants. In NYC in the 1980s thousands of “distressed” properties were seized by “public” agencies like HPD, then the second biggest landlord (next to NYCHA) in the City of New York. With disinvestment and “red-lining” and all the other co-occurring aspects typical of an urban “ecology of destruction” the neighborhood is bled dry … that is, neglected until the “tipping” point arrives. That’s when bankers and their real estate associates decide that it’s time to invest; and where there’s money to be made, a profitable “urban renewal” scheme can be devised and “developed.” That’s when the vulture capitalists engage and feast on a community that’s been killed off. Investment dollars begin to flow, streets are repaired, parks are spruced up, drug dealers forced to flee. Meanwhile, artists and

“new pioneers” are encouraged to move in and engage in a form of “workfare,” in other words, prettify the place for the eager investors looking to make a buck, climaxing with the flooding of the neighborhood by white young “gentry” whose function is to pay the higher costs and materially consolidate hold of the land that’s been cleared for investment. Meanwhile, those still living in the neighborhood, barely hanging on, having struggled through the worst times, they are targeted for removal. Why? Because they don’t figure in the plan! In fact, with rising prices and rising market value of neighborhood “housing stock,” poor folks become expendable, so much collateral damage in the drive for maximizing profits, victims of the relentless capitalist law of predatory economics. Now, it must be emphasized that displacement also has political motives, motives of social control, motives that are separate from economic ones. These motives aim to destabilize security of tenure as a form of pre-emptive counter-insurgency against whole communities. This is done, presumably, in order to prevent popular organization. In other words, perpetual precariousness of housing is meant to preclude political organizing. Think about it: It’s hard to commit to social change praxis when one is concerned with basic survival, leaving little time to consolidate with others for greater social gains. Thus displacement, which entails dis-enfranchisement and dis-empowerment of whole communities, is a political attack at the base, where we live, an attack that aims to limit our ability to come together and change things. Further, during the process of displacement rents rise, arson fires happen, often with fire trucks responding more slowly, municipal services and repairs decrease, landlord harassment of tenants occurs, housing court is packed and stacked against the under-represented tenants, bribes to move are offered, cops

brutalize, drugs flow, stop and frisk becomes rampant, and eventually folks move on, often moving even prior to being “legally” evicted, maybe to an affordable place, maybe to a friends house, or the streets, or even worse, into shelters. Often, displaced people become homeless. Displacement is tied to the massive growth of urban homelessness beginning in the early 1980s during which state sponsored urban “dispersal” strategies were first enacted, calculated to forestall “civil disorder; ” in other words, for political motives, motives that aimed to prevent the urban poor and workers from concentrating and collaborating, their potential solidarity deemed a threat, a material and political threat to the white elite sector that runs things. Put bluntly, state repression of poor people of color created homelessness. It is the modern origin of homelessness. Looking beyond the narrow economic analysis that dominates in most discussion of the politics of homelessness, even within progressive circles, we are speaking here about a history of ground-based repression targeting where we live (“housing”), a veritable militarist response that forced massive numbers of people (mostly young Black and Latino men and women) into FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) run shelters that are a nothing less than a form of low-intensity detention designed for social control. And finally, and most seriously, to the extent that these “shelter” environments (coupled with the daily physical and psychological violence of homelessness) are documented determinants in the deteriorating health and life expectancy of its victims; we could say that displacement is tied to the genociding of people made homeless. In NYC, the most disparate city in the world in terms of wealth and poverty, city of some 70 billionaires, nearly 50,000 people are without a home, the highest since the Depression,

with women and children leading that demographic, having nearly doubled under the Bloomberg regime. And further, in NYC some 30,000 tenant evictions took place last year, (1500 foreclosure related ones); even evictions of tenants to make room for homeless folks being “sheltered” for more than the tenants could afford! One of the myriad ironies of the billion dollar a year homeless industrial complex in NYC. Situated within this historical and ideological framework, grass roots, neighborhood based anti-displacement, anti-eviction organizing today confronts such a system within the zone of its most visceral and exploitive penetration, that is within the context of ones’ very home, the contested terrain of private life. Unfortunately, despite the self-evident pathology and immorality of the current housing for profit system, this system has become a normalized, second nature to “tenants” and “homeowners” alike, willing and dependent subjects, dutifully having bought into the fraud of sanctified property, a blind and mis-placed faith that enables the predations of the capitalist owners. Therefore, much of the work of anti-eviction organizing has to concern itself with de-legitimizing such a system, the fraud of speculation, exposing it’s contradictions to human self interest, and then to confront, deconstruct and reconstruct a housing system that is in accord with the inherent and universal human right to a home and the requisite requirements of peace, calm and security of residence, situated of course within a wider social revolution and revolution of values that seeks to “change life.” So, getting to the nitty gritty: The immediate goal of anti-displacement organizing is to break down the atomized and individualized behavior of neighborhood residents. Tenants (renters) and individual mortgage strapped homeowners tend to live isolated lives, their homes a veritable walled castle shutting them out from the natural and necessary neighborly solidarity

that resistance to this exploitation requires. Therefore, right from the start, it’s important to devise means of connecting disparate neighbors around common strategies of community self defense. This can be realized by creating popular forums, conferences, teach-ins, held in local community centers and gardens for discussion and education, possibly even a local newspaper (Power House News) to inform and analyze the wider and deeper ideological nature of the “housing question,” the tactics and techniques of organizing rent strikes, techniques of researching neighborhood economics and power, and of course, teaching tactics to resist when the displacement born of real estate speculation leads inexorably to notices of eviction, marshals and the cops. And that’s what we’re gonna look at right now! Grass roots, anti-eviction organizing is about organizing horizontally in the neighborhood under the guidance of a grassroots politics that sees power emanating from below, that moves beyond the notion of power residing in the pinnacle of the pyramid, and instead envisions the power of the people in the hood, at the base, where we live. Grass roots organizing is therefore less concerned with appeals to the hardened heart of the Pharoah at the top than it is with seizing land and organizing for community defense at the base, as I said, where we live. Anti-eviction campaigns rather than appealing to the owners and their lackeys to cease evicting us, or appealing to the legislators to make laws to cease evicting us, rather we must move to create the capacity to call out as many people as possible to the site of an eviction, call them out as rapidly as possible, and have them engage in direct action in order to defend against evictions, cognizant that these are the only means of stemming the predatory march of capitalist profiteering and the violent displacement and gentrification which leads to homelessness.

Consequently, it is critical to have community people suitably trained and educated in order to execute the various aspects that make for effective anti-eviction blockades, including non-violent civil disobedience. What I am saying is that whatever other tactics are brought to bear in anti-displacement, anti-eviction neighborhood campaigns (legal maneuvers, rental assistance, public pressure on landlords and politicians etc), having the capability to respond through direct mass action in the streets where the evictions take place is the sin qua non of effective community self-defense. Having the means of expressing popular (counter) power concretely on the streets (which is where our power resides) is a necessary component of successful anti-eviction organizing. Therefore, those who wish to engage in resistance against evictions need to prepare, through regular trainings, for campaigns involving non-violent civil disobedience, which of course imply the possibility of arrest, necessitating the cultivating of knowledgeable movement attorneys sympathetic to the cause. Now, before we get to the day that the marshal is coming, the day the eviction is scheduled to go down, the day the cops show up … before we get there, let us examine what can be done to insure that that day never comes! Build an anti-eviction campaign in the neighborhood! In other words, raise the issue of displacement to the level of collective consciousness and awareness through the creation of a local anti-eviction group, say for example, the “Bushwick Anti-Eviction Campaign.” By posting stickers throughout the neighborhood: (“Are you under threat of Eviction? Tired of the rampant displacement? … Then Join the Anti-Eviction Campaign!”) the campaign will become a point of contact and hope for those facing the threat of eviction in isolation while at the same time linking all the already existing neighborhood organizations

around a common action agenda centered around preventing evictions of poor and working people from the neighborhood regardless (and especially!) if they are pure and simple cases of evictions due to economics or fraudulent attempts at eviction by demolition ie “your building is in immanent danger of collapse, we’re throwing you out for your own good … “ and so forth.) So, having formed such a group, anti-eviction campaign organizers begin by canvassing the neighborhood, specifically those sections suffering pronounced displacement, areas under heavy gentrification etc. Going door to store, with ID and campaign literature, visiting community centers, neighborhood organizations, religious institutions etc. they speak with people about the need to come together and defend one another, listen to their concerns and encourage action to fight back against the forced removal of long-time residents of the community, battling the pervasive fatalism, making an initial contact. Through role-playing, organizers train for these first encounters. The ultimate objective of these initial one-on-ones and follow-up encounters with neighbors is to get people to sign up, to enlist in the cause of community self-defense. Through these initial conversations and interventions, community forums and the distribution of educational materials, a contact list of anti-eviction supporters grows. These accumulated local contacts form the core, the modus operandi, the machinery of the emerging Eviction Watch Network composed of those who commit to being contacted and responding in the event of an eviction emergency in the neighborhood and coming to the aid of their neighbors. Of course, those who live closest to the site of a potential eviction are the ones who will most likely get there the quickest! But there is a role for everyone wherever they live. Those who live far away or who are otherwise engaged (at work, minding children) can do other things like call local media, call the

landlord in protest of the eviction attempt, call politicians associated with that district. Potentially thousands can be brought to bear. How might it work? Well, aware of an immanent threat of eviction, and having in their possession a short list of say six contacts, residents under threat, who have previously been in contact with campaign organizers initiate a call-out of support. Utilizing all means necessary (computers, phones and word of mouth) a geometric galvanizing of neighborhood power is generated resulting in wider and wider buzz and then numbers against the forces of greed, which generally amount to a marshal, a few cops and a suit, clearly no match for the power of a righteous and organized community! To repeat: Grass roots eviction watch and anti-eviction organizing is about getting as many people as possible to the site of a potential eviction as rapidly as possible – but then the question becomes: What do they do once they get there? In any direct action defense of someone’s home there are at least three zones of resistance requiring three different kinds of behavior. Think of it as a series of concentric circles radiating outward, with our neighbors’ (or our) home at the center. First, those neighbors and supporters who have undergone proper training, education and preparation for civil disobedience, and have secured the trust and support of the homeowners/tenants/squatters, position themselves within the house with the residents. Barricading the doors, they are prepared to non-violently resist any attempt to remove themselves and the occupants. The second layer of defense, similarly trained, is comprised of those who have committed to giving bodily expression to an eviction blockade on the street and doorway immediately outside the home. Using their bodies, locking arms to protect the residents, they form a human shield preventing the marshals, cops and officials from entering the home.

The third and final layer of defense are those who are present and witnesses to the proceedings. Under little or no threat of arrest, they offer support through shouting encouragement, holding up signs for the media to transmit our message to the public, documenting the behavior of the cops (video), and reporting on the action. In the meanwhile, they are also continuing the call out and outreach, bringing more and more people to the action. In addition, a small contingent of this third group (say one or two folks) are designated as police liaisons. Hierarchically oriented, police will want someone to speak with … Less concerned with what they have to say, (“by order of Capital you must disperse now!”), the role of our folks is to communicate the collective decisions and determination of the group, and also to suggest to the police that it is in their interest to abide by the law, that we are monitoring them and to treat those protesting with all the civil rights presumably accorded to free speech, lawful assembly and protest, coordinating with campaign attorneys on the scene. Another role for a few members of this third tier of resistance is to act as press spokespeople. Having been chosen by the group and rehearsed their message, they communicate the reason for the action (to prevent the eviction), the demand of the occupants to halt the eviction and the politics of the action (the opposing of gentrification that is decimating poor communities and causing homelessness that can only be prevented through community self defense, that the politicians have failed the people etc, etc.) Lastly, other folks in this third tier need to fan out throughout the immediate vicinity and distribute fliers which communicate to the neighbors in the immediate vicinity what is going on and why. They are the most important folks to know. In this way, solidarity and awareness is built and radiates throughout the community.

As mentioned earlier, a key component of anti-eviction organizing is to transform, in the minds of the people, the fatalistic notion that private property is the last word, that their “legal” eviction is the final stage, and to demonstrate that speculation on land and the fraud of rent is a deep injustice that must be resisted and can be resisted successfully. Folks must be taught to transcend their obedience to unjust and immoral law. As Pedro Albizu Campos, the great Puerto Rican nationalist leader once said: “When Tyranny is Law, Revolution is Order.” We must also communicate the words of the great South African freedom fighter Steven Biko who said that, “the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Much of the work of anti-eviction organizing and building the consciousness of community self-defense is about freeing our minds from the notion that speculation on land and the inevitable surplus driven displacing of poor people is invincible or morally justifiable. It is neither! We must teach that with popular, horizontal solidarity and practical action the community can not only successfully defend itself and push back predatory speculative profiteering and in practice actualize our human right to our homes, but can also force so-called policy change at the top, pending of course the big change that eliminates the top alltogether! And with each victory against displacement the community’s sense of its power grows and consciousness of new situations and possibilities grow. With concrete victories won by the community itself people see that with struggle, positive change occurs, policy change happens, that negotiations take place where formerly there was nothing but “slamming doors,” and the landlord backs down and the people remain in their homes. People learn that collective action creates new situations!

Now, what are the tell-tale signs of looming displacement? Of course, signs of neighborhood decline, as outlined earlier, are self-evident, but more immediately, much depends on the venue. Are we speaking of a six-story walk-up or a family fighting bank foreclosure in a one or two family house? How one goes about organizing anti-eviction campaigns depends to a degree on the venue we’re dealing with, though mostly the tactics are the same. The point is that we can spot the early signs and move to pre-empt the eviction attempt. Let’s take a six-story walk-up tenanted by poor and working people, long term residents under the gun of gentrification, owner having been or about to be foreclosed upon (or deciding that the time is ripe for selling out) and the residents, lacking “legal standing” and at the mercy of voracious capital and “lawful greed” are suddenly subject to the demands of the owner who wants them out in order to double (or triple) his money. What can be done? First of all, the tenants (maybe with the assistance of a campaign organizer) form an association if they haven’t already and secure a housing attorney to advise them of their rights, rights of course conferred by the owners, and limited as the are, they are none the less weapons (if used correctly) in the hands of the people. The tenants association will want to ascertain the current status and plans of the new owner in order to get an accurate picture of what’s going on and more critically, what lies ahead. If it is clear that the new owner intends to displace the tenants in lieu of “gutting” the building for renovation resulting in “market rate” housing, then they need to go on the offensive. So, concurrent with whatever legal strategies are in motion, the residents need to identify any vacant apartments in the building being “warehoused” (kept empty) by the landlord, identify suitable neighborhood people down to occupy them, and move

them in. If there is a super who is cool and looks the other way, good. If not (stooge of the landlord) then he/she has to be convinced that his/her self-interest lies with the residents, in that once the building is gentrified he/she will be more than likely out of a job and gone as well. Bottom line: Gentrification begins with the emptying out of tenanted buildings, so the thing that needs to happen is to fill up all the vacant warehoused apartments as a means of forestalling the hollowing out of the building. In other words, occupy for community defense! It may also be the case that the landlord (former or new) is cutting back on services (heat and hot water) and failing to make necessary repairs, facilitating unsafe conditions in the building, trying to create an untenable, unhealthy, unsafe and deplorable situation in the building so that the tenants, especially those long-term and elderly tenants who are rent stabilized and thus hard to legally evict, are encouraged to move. In this case, it may be advisable (with the advice of an housing attorney if possible) for the tenants to go on rent strike, to place their rent money “in escrow” (in a bank account in the name of the tenants association) and use a portion of that money to make the repairs themselves. There is never any sense in suffering the ill effects of faulty plumbing, unsafe electric, wide open front doors, rats and the like, waiting for the man to do it for you, especially when they do nothing because they intend nothing other than to chuck you out into the street! The underlying ethos of community self defense calls for a hands on approach when it comes to our homes. When landlords fail to make repairs and are aiming to empty the place, and the residents make the repairs themselves (and document the work) the effect can be instructive: Not only are the residents empowered and the immediate beneficiaries of the repairs; but by putting the owner on notice that the tenants intend to take over and self-manage the property themselves, with the direct

action of the residents modeling a new form of community management in the face of the landlord, well, lo and behold, landlords are more likely to jump next time in making repairs when rights-aware tenants take matters into their own hands and demonstrate the motivation and skills to do it themselves. Direct action of this sort scares the shit out of landlords! Arson is a thoroughly documented means of vacating buildings in behalf of cut-throat owners who enact violent short cuts to the vacating of their property, again, especially when it is otherwise difficult and costly to evict folks “legally.” Hence, neighborhood residents who live in buildings in the cross hairs of the speculative process need defend themselves against this most dangerous landlord tactic, namely, arson for profit. Arson fires in the dead of night, or in early morning hours generally occur in rear vacant apartments on the upper floors, by way of open windows shielded from the street and accessible via the rear fire-escape. Hired thugs climb up these and toss “Molotov cocktails” (gasoline fire bombs) into open windows, burn up an apartment and a portion of the roof which allows for the Buildings Department mafia (in cahoots with developers) to issue a “vacate order” for the entire building, whether or not the fire damage itself has effected the entire building. And it’s in this process, with the residents now separated and strewn throughout the city in Red Cross shelters and worse, with a slow-motion timetable of repairs that meets the needs of the gathering speculators, that the building is lost to the greed mongers. Therefore, as before, the tenants need to move beyond the limitations of the landlords calculated lack of response, their own dependencies and their lawyers’ reticence, and their own fears, and immediately move to seal up (with 4x8’ plywood) all the open windows, especially those hidden in the rear of the building. Make sure that the rear fire escapes are not accessible from below with low hanging ladder-stairs, make sure the roof

door is locked from within with a push bar type lock, post anti-arson alerts in the building and in the front of the building letting those in the vicinity who are looking for a quick payday know that the residents are on alert, vigilant and aiming to defend themselves against fire-setters and low-life arsonists. Also, clean out public hall areas of any refuse that could be set on fire. This is obviously serious business, lives are lost during arson attacks, whole neighborhoods have been decimated by way of this most dastardly means. But remember, the people can resist it effectively – but first it must be brought to conscious awareness and openly combated. In the case of a one-two family house facing eviction much of the same can be said. Bringing whatever legal resources to bear in the initial stages of foreclosure and displacement can have the effect of forestalling or preventing the eviction, but if these means fail then we are left to organize among the neighborhood a means by which we can keep our homes despite the legal maneuvering and entitlements of organized greed and bank theft for whom the laws are made. And that is what grass roots organizing for community self-defense is all about, organizing for power and prosperity, affordability and security from below. Lastly, a key component of this organizing work has to do with identifying the target and organizing in such a way as to pressure the would-be evictor to cease and desist before it ever gets to the eviction stage. During preparation for defending the home in and around the immediate vicinity of the house under threat, the growing of the Eviction Watch “rapid deployment” contact list, the erecting of barricades, training for civil disobedience and so forth, is the necessary identification and pressuring of the target. Through peaceful though spirited protest and direct action, neighborhood forces can shame the owner thus ameliorating the threat of eviction before it gets to the stage of physical resistance at the site itself. By organizing neighborhood marches and

protests at the official site of the owner, their offices, the banks, the landlords very house, the community can force a negotiated settlement and pre-empt the eviction before it is even attempted. In conclusion, through dedicated work, effective outreach, shared leadership, common struggle, street action, civil disobedience training, transmitting and transferring knowledge and inspiration throughout the neighborhood, and most importantly, keeping folks in their homes, the organization grows, but know this: The objective is NOT to create an organization as such (as a noun) but to facilitate the organizing (as a verb) and empowerment of the community, so that they, we, us, our neighbors, tenant associations, block associations and collectives, armed with the tools and the know how, in community, can organize themselves, ourselves to do this work of collective self defense of our neighborhood and thus achieve a stability in our lives and in our communities born of the arresting of the spreading cancer of speculation, now stopped dead in its tracks. A strong and powerful community dedicated to mutual aid and community self-defense will afford the people the peaceful and uncontested space to generate new forms of community ownership and prosperity, new forms of community property and land management via land trusts and other forms of non-speculative and long term affordable housing solutions. But mostly, it will insure that neighbors, both new to the hood and long timers can live together no longer in fear but in the confidence that their homes, their gardens, galleries and work spaces, their play areas and local institutions are secure for themselves, their children, and future generations, secure as bases of organization for achieving the wider and necessary changes that lie ahead. See also:

http://skillshares.interactivist.net/housing/war.html http://www.evergreeneditions.com/display_article.php?id=1238894 -- By Frank Morales, Summer 2013 .