It Could Happen Here - A Brief History of Eviction Defense

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

In the wake of the Supreme Court's shadow ruling to block the eviction moratorium and allow mass evictions to proceed, Robert, Mia, and Garrison discuss historical and contemporary eviction defense. �� Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And I was like, oh, no, there. Pulled it off. Great job. So this is It Could Happen Here. It's a show about collapse. And speaking of collapse, the Supreme Court just issued a shadow ruling, which we should probably do a whole episode about this practice of, like, Supreme Court decisions that are... It was a Supreme Court decision that was not a Supreme Court decision. So they don't have to issue, like, a whole justification.

They don't have to, like, explain where everyone landed. They just said, hey, you know, the eviction moratoriums that the Biden administration just pushed through again? Nuh-uh. It's not constitutional. We're not going to say anymore, start kicking people out of their motherfucking homes. And boy, how did that process have started? And we don't know. I mean, I think you'll get very different numbers when you try to figure out how many people are going to get evicted or at risk of being evicted. The highest you'll hear is like 30 to 40 million Americans at risk of eviction. I think it was Bank of America's numbers that anticipated as many as

750,000 households. I think it was Goldman. Oh, was it Goldman? Goldman Sachs. Yeah, Goldman Sachs's numbers. Anticipated about 750,000 American households losing their homes, getting, and that's obviously more than 750,000 people. Now, when we talk about, like, how many of those folks could end up homeless, it's going to be less than that total number of households, because whenever you have stuff like this happen, like in 2008, a decent number of people who lose access to their homes wind up kind of couch surfing, bunking with family. You wind up with two or three families in one home, which is obviously particularly a problem during a pandemic, right? Like if you have families doubling or tripling up in the same house while there's a plague, that introduces additional complications. But it's possible, in fact, very likely, because about the kind of conservative estimate for the number of people who are homeless on American streets right now is a little over 550,000. So there's a pretty good chance that the number of homeless could essentially double in the next, you know, not quite overnight. Because evictions, it's not like a thing where like, okay, the Supreme Court said you can evict people now. Everybody's out on their ass the next day.

It's a process of evicting people. There is like a legal process. But in the near future, we could see a doubling of the number of Americans who are without homes, if not even potentially more than that. So it's pretty high stakes, which I think necessitates everybody be thinking about not just ways to fight the Supreme Court ruling or whatever, not just ways to get the government to provide support to people, but also eviction defense. Because kind of historically, and today we're going to kind of give a little bit of a historic overview here. Historically, eviction defense is, it has not in American history solved the overall problems, but it solves, it can provide

necessary, it can be a necessary like tourniquet for a lot of people and for communities before kind of more long-term solutions to these problems get get get brought up and i i think it behooves us to talk about eviction defense kind of from that standpoint um so i found a really interesting article when you when you start reading about eviction defense uh a lot of the eviction defense like articles kind of talking about the Great Depression are going to come from the International Socialist Review or other kind of socialist or outright communist websites. And there's some good reasons for this, which is that the organizations during the Great Depression who were doing most of the anti-eviction organizing were communist organizations. were communist organizations. Now, I found some kind of scholarly analyses of some of the reporting on that that will point out that they, especially if you're kind of like report, if you're studying eviction defense based on kind of the documents at the time, and it was a lot of like socialist worker and unemployed citizen and whatnot, newspapers with titles like that, a lot of those

would kind of tend to deliberately undercount the efforts of non-communist anti-eviction organizations because there was a whole political fight going on then. So keep that in mind. That said, it is kind of worth reading some of these accounts. And I think one that is particularly noteworthy is what happened in New York City starting in 1931, 1932. And this was in the Bronx Park East and Allerton Avenue. And it started, obviously, like the Great Depression kicks off like 1930, 1931. By January of 1932, you've got a huge number of people unemployed and increasingly desperate. And you've got these landlords trying to evict and kick them out.

And the communists in the Bronx started an eviction defense network that was very noteworthy. And it kind of initially crystallized around this series of communist co-ops, which were these two buildings in the Bronx that were populated by communists. co-ops, which were these two buildings in the Bronx that were populated by communists. And that had included like a cooperative housing experiment, like some cooperative gardening, that sort of stuff. And they were mostly Eastern European Jewish workers, like people who would come over from Europe, and in a lot of cases had been socialist activists in Europe, many of whom had to flee Europe to the United States because of their activism. And in January of 1932, they organized rent strikes at three large apartment buildings at Bronx East Park. And one of the things that they created was what they called the Upper Bronx

Unemployed Council. And this kind of was part of a series of decisions that led to like the creation of an organization called the Unemployed Citizens Committees, I think is what they call the Upper Bronx Unemployed Council. And this kind of was part of a series of decisions that led to like the creation of an organization called the Unemployed Citizens Committees, I think is what they called them. And kind of one of the ideas there was to point out that, you know, despite kind of the focus within the capitalist system on people needing to have a job, needing to make income in order to be like citizens, unemployed people were citizens too

and imbued with like the full rights of an American citizen. And so they were kind of taking ownership of the term unemployed rather than accepting it as a slur that like, no, we're still citizens and we have rights and power and we'll organize in order to enact our power on

or in order to enact our power on, or in order to, um, in order to kind of, uh, forcefully, uh, try to make the changes that we need. And so these, these communists in the Bronx organized three buildings worth of tenants into a rent strike. They were refusing to pay rent until they got their demands, which were a 15% reduction in rent and into eviction, uh, repairs and, uh in apartments in recognition of the tenants committee as an official bargaining agent. So they were trying to effectively unionize like in the same way that workers had just for tenants in a building. Now these like this rent strike set off a rent riot that eventually more than 4,000 people

participated in. City marshals And the marshals were the people the city would hire to force homeless people out of their houses. Marshals and police showed up to evict 17 tenants. And yeah, about 4,000 people showed up to oppose them. And that started this massive street fight. And it was largely, and this would be the case with most of these rent strikes in the early 30s, it was largely, and this would be the case with most of these rent strikes in the early 30s, it was largely women who would do most of the fighting and would do most of the actual physical organizing against the police. And some of this was because they recognized that when their men were there, the cops would beat the shit out of them and arrest them. And so there

was a lot of times where they were like, okay, you guys get out of the house. The women are going to organize. We'll get up on the fire escapes and the balconies, we'll like, we'll throw shit at the cops, you know. And these were also very like, and I don't want to like be ignoring this either. These were extremely communist, like events, like they would be singing communist songs, they would be like making, carrying out communist chants. It was communist papers that did a lot of the organizing. I want to read a quote from that International Socialist Review article that I found kind of like laying out how this particular strike went. Quote, Bronx property owners moved quickly to try to contain the movement. At first, they tried

arbitration. Following the evictions at 665 Allerton, landlords in Bronx Park East asked a blue ribbon committee of Bronx Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute, convinced that an impartial examination of the building's books would show that the landlord could not meet the striker's demands without operating at a loss. But the strike leaders contemptuously rejected arbitration, and indeed the whole notion that a reasonable return on one's investment represented a basis for negotiation. When times were good, strike leader Max Kamowitz declared, the landlords didn't offer to share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money off us when we had it. Now that we haven't got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less. Faced with this kind of bargaining position, landlords felt they had no choice but to pull

out the stops to suppress the movement. By the second week of February 1932, two major organizations of Bronx landlords had formed rent strike committees that offered unlimited funding and legal support for any landlord facing a communist-led rent strike. Using a considerable political influence and legal expertise at their disposal, they developed a strategy that included wholesale issuance of dispossessed notices against striking tenants, efforts to win injunctions against picketing and strikes, agreements by judges to waive normal delay periods and evictions, and efforts to ban rent strikes by legislative enactment. The situation has become much graver than most persons suppose, one landlord's spokesman declared. The strikes are spreading rapidly, and scores of landlords are facing financial ruin or loss of their properties as a result of them. Former State Senator Benjamin Anton told landlords,

This is a peculiar neighborhood. It is the hotbed of communism and radicalism. The people in this neighborhood are mostly communists and Soviet sympathizers. They do not believe in our form of government. Now, what are the things that's interesting about this? So in a lot of cases, particularly there was like this first big set of riots that kind of ended when the police kind of pushed the rioters back. But because of how many of them there were, they came to an agreement and like the landlords gave concessions to the people in those three buildings. But the next set of strikes were pretty much crushed. And

the majority of the rent strikes, they start popping up in buildings kind of all around this part of New York in the period. They don't win the initial strike, by which I mean people get evicted. The marshals come in. They take these people's furniture out. But what the communists started doing, because they had the numbers, is they would show up after the cops and the marshals left, and they would put together pulley systems and lift people's furniture back into their apartments and move them back in. And so part of the understanding was it costs the city money every time they send marshals out because the city was paying to evict people.

So we'll just move them back in after they're evicted, and that's going to make the situation untenable for the city. So that led to the police setting up temporary police stations outside of some of the buildings that were most active as part of a long-term solution to try to suppress the revolt. The one issue of the Daily Worker noted, quote, cops patrol the street all day. The entire territory is under semi-martial law. People are driven around the streets, off the corners and away from the houses.

And so, yeah, it, you know, kind of this went on for weeks. And there's one of the criticisms that even this International Socialist Review write-up I found will make of the initial rent strike is that because a lot of the hardcore communist activists came to relish sort of these clashes with police as a result of the evictions and had this belief that they would radicalize the masses. Whereas there was, I think, among the masses more of like, well, we mostly don't want to lose our homes. And when it became, when you hit this, like, they kind of hit this wall where they would come out and fight the cops, but the cops would win and push people out in the end and the evictions would still happen. And it kind of led to this kind of loss of momentum within the

movement. And that didn't change until the communists kind of altered their organizing strategy. And so they started carrying out, they started like mobilizing all of the different sort of left-wing networks that were in the area to not just do eviction resistance, but to picket rent-striking buildings, to hold street rallies and protest marches. When a protester was killed by the police, they got like 50,000 people out in the streets. And it was this matter of, number one, keeping huge numbers of people in the streets, which is expensive for the city, was bad for business in a lot of cases. But they also started organizing unemployed people into kind of a quasi-union sort of situation that didn't just organize stuff on the street, but started reaching out to

the government when, because this is right around the time that the Roosevelt administration started pushing protections, including evictioniction protections and like funding to help people stay in their houses. And that was kind of, you could argue like a lot of those protections came about as a result of all of the people who were doing eviction resistance on the street. But these unemployed councils, they called them, would basically help people go to the government, help people file for benefits, and help people stay in their houses. And kind of in the end, through a variety of different tactics, they were really successful in stopping large numbers of people from being dispossessed and keeping a lot of these communities together. communities together. And the home relief bureaus, which is kind of the government agencies that were formed from like the emergency funding here, worked with the unemployed councils to keep people in their homes. So it was this, you saw this situation where you had, it's what started

with kind of like physical force confronting the eviction teams and confronting the police. force confronting the eviction teams and confronting the police. And that helped to organize and galvanize people, but it had its limitations. And that eventually evolved into a broader sort of series of strikes and marches that were disruptive enough to life in the city that they helped to provide kind of impetus for government benefits to keep people in their homes. And then once those benefits were there, a lot of these organizations kind of pivoted towards helping people like file and get benefits in order to keep them in their homes. And in the end of it, it was just kind of this

very multifaceted movement that had its missteps and went through a variety of tactics over time, but in the end was largely successful in keeping communities from being forced out of their homes. And I don't know. I think it's an interesting story. And it's kind of – you see when you hear eviction events talked about, people tend to kind of hone in on just the big fights against the police, which were clearly important, or they tend to hone in on stuff that happened elsewhere in the country, like organizations of farmers and sharecroppers who would show up in eviction courts and like threaten police and stop, you know, sheriffs from evicting widows from their homes and whatnot. And these are important stories. But I think the broader story about like why these eviction resistance networks functioned was that they they pivoted regularly.

They didn't just stick with we're going to fight the cops when they try to evict people. They formed these unemployed councils and these unemployed councils were communist organizations. But you didn't have to be a communist to join or to benefit from them. And they would, you know, lobby the government on behalf of these people. They would help them get benefits. Um, and in the end, all of this was really successful in, you know, what was the most important, uh, battle, which was keeping families in their homes. Um, so I don't know, that's, that's, that's kind of like the, uh, we'll include a couple of, of links in here, but, um, that's kind of the overall story of what happened, particularly in New York in the 30s, which was kind of the best documented series of eviction resistance movements. Yeah.

Quick break. Go pee. And then continue peeing because you can pee and listen to a podcast. Must be nice. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And before I move on to Chris's, I wanted to make a note that I've come across a couple of times in my, in I found that kind of talk about eviction resistance in the 30s, but within the context of either what was happening in 2008 after the financial crash or what's happening now, which is that evictions are way more common now than they ever were during the Great Depression, both as a percentage of workers and in absolute numbers. It is enormously common. of workers and in absolute numbers. It is enormously common. And one of the statistics I found in a New Yorker article about the eviction epidemic is that in Milwaukee, a city which has about 105,000 renter households, landlords legally evict roughly 16,000 adults and children every year. And that's like, that is a significantly higher rate than they were dealing in this period. And because evictions are so commonplace, they don't really attract much attention.

One of the reasons why those early eviction defense networks were able to get so many people out in the streets is that the idea that families would be evicted, particularly in any kind of significant numbers, was fairly new. And so it drew a lot of attention. People were outraged. Whereas today, it's something that happens all the time. And it's something that a significant amount of infrastructure has been built up to allow evictions. So there are full-time sheriff squads in large cities whose only job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies that specialize in just evictions, and the crews for these companies work all day long, five days a week. There's so much of this going on in every major city in the country that there's a significant amount of... You're not just competing with these kind of ad hoc teams of marshals and cops showing up to like pile furniture out on the street you're dealing with years worth of

infrastructure to enable evictions um so yeah that sucks anyway chris yeah you why don't you go on you know well okay one thing i will say though is that you know still even to this day like the landlords rely heavily on people self-evicting people just sort of yeah you know still even to this day like the landlords rely heavily on people self-evicting people just sort of yeah you know the guy had an eviction notice people just leave right and so they they do not even even with all the sort of capacity they built up they don't actually have the ability to like if everyone if literally every tenant i mean you know like people a lot of tenants have started showing up in court like if it would be genuinely difficult for them to actually evict

every single person like by force you know even even with the infrastructure they've built up um but you know i would talk about before i go into some more resistance examples sort of how we got here which is you know there's there's a lot of stuff that happens in the 70s and 80s that are sort of important to this. On a sort of macroeconomic level, all the way out, for the 70s and 80s, there's this enormous economic collapse. There's all these economic problems.

There's massive inflation. And one of the big things that's happening here is that profit rates in manufacturing are collapsing. It's like, okay, well, what does that have to do with housing? Well, what it has to do with housing is that you know profit rates and manufacturing are collapsing it's like okay well what does it have to do with housing well what has to do with housing is that you know we'll zoom in on japan for a second because like the u.s sort of just like guts japan's manufacturing economy in the 80s through some sort of complicated currency stuff but japan's solution to this is interesting they you know they're like okay so our manufacturing sector is in ruins how do we maintain the economy what if we just give a bunch of credit, very cheap credit to banks and let them buy houses?

And so they do. Yeah, you know, and the Japanese government is something. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, they'll buy houses and they'll, you know, they'll buy houses and they'll buy stocks. And the value of those assets will just keep increasing, keep increasing, keep increasing. Nothing will ever go wrong with this. About maybe like eight years later you get the

the east asian bubble collapsing and you know that's that that's a big part of what that was but the the the important part about this for us is that so in order to save japan right the u.s government got its own manufacturing sector and so this means in the 90s you know you have clinton going okay how are we going to save the economy and clinton looks at the japanese model and was like wait no hold on we can do this too and so you know the first the first collapses causes you know clinton clinton gives the banks a bunch of cheap credit they buy stocks with it you know they give like us a bunch of cheap credit and you know we buy houses and we buy stocks with it and then you know the tech bubble implodes and then this all leads to 2008 where you know all of the all the

sort of all the bad mortgages the the the banks have been passing out just implode. And a couple of banks go under. Like two. Like three banks go under. But the ones who survive, suddenly there's all these foreclosed houses. And they just start buying them up. And part of the story is Obama just starts this thing called robo-signing where they just start signing foreclosure notices on just random houses, people who were keeping up on their payments. They just take their houses, like tens of thousands of these houses just get taken and given back to the banks.

And this is how the banks recovered from 2008 is they just stole a bunch of people's houses at gunpoint. at gunpoint and what what you see from there and you know and this is this is the so long-range trend that's been happening in in the economy since you know since the 70s and the 80s is that you know okay so the the sort of the institutional investors people with a bunch of money they can't get returns from manufacturing anymore in the way they used to so instead they're like okay what if you know what if what if instead of making money by making things we just take the money from you at gunpoint and we invest in – we build enormous police force and we buy everyone's houses. Like, you know, enormous portions of the world economy are just completely dependent on these banks and these sort of giant landlord firms owning these buildings and then, you know, putting a gun to your head and saying, hey, you're going to give us money. And if you don't give us money, you lose your home. There are periods where people mount sort of effective resistances to this. One of them is in – so in Spain after 2008, you know, Spain is one of the countries worst hit by by by the whole

sort of collapse and you know so enormous amount of people get evicted but they realize that you know there's just a bunch of these houses that are just sitting there empty and so you know very slowly and it's sort of accelerating after 2008, 2011, people start just squatting in them. And, you know, and a lot of these people, like these people, a lot of times they're going back to the homes that, like, the banks are taking from them. And, you know, they form these, basically, they form these, like, enormous, I guess you could call them... They're part squatter organizations, part anti-eviction organizations. And what they're basically able to do is they can... Yeah, the biggest one is called PAH.

What they're basically able to do is they can get enough people together that when the police show up for an eviction, they can bring like 5,000, 6,000 people. And this makes it almost impossible. Unless the police can specifically isolate one squad that doesn't have community support, it becomes almost impossible to evict people. And so they have these – there's – they lose some battles. They win some battles.

But they're able to hold – because they have these sort of enormous organizations of people who are squatting, and then they have a bunch of community support. They have support. And this is something I think – talking about how the sort of communist strategy works in the 30s this is something that we're going to see with a lot of these is that like the renters a bunch of like renters or a bunch of sort of a bunch of people who are squatting in houses a bunch of people who are trying to eviction defense because they're being evicted you know there's there's kind of a limit to what they can do on their own to some extent and the way that they you know the way they start winning is when they're able to sort of – well, A, when they stop fighting landlords individually, and B, you start getting these larger organizations. And the second thing that changes is when they're able to bring in the rest of the community.

And so one of the – another sort of example of this is in 2017 – really from 2016, 2017, across North America, you start to see a sort of resurgence of tenant organizing. And, you know, one of the most sort of famous examples is Parkdale, which is a place in Toronto. And in Parkdale, a whole bunch, you know, several hundred tenants across a bunch of buildings organizing for a long time, and eventually, you know, they keep getting rent increases, they keep getting rent increases, and you know, a bunch of these people are in danger

of losing their homes because they can't afford them anymore, and so they start doing rent strikes, and they start going from building to building to building, and, you know, they're not fighting the cops as much as sort of the communists, where a lot of what they do is – so a lot of people – Parkdale these, you know, a lot of the tenants are people who, you know, had been in like labor actions, right. Had been in,

had been in strikes, had been in sort of other kinds of labor organizing. And so they're able to pull together and they're able also to, importantly, they, they bring in like a bunch of the teachers at the local elementary school, because, you know,

a bunch of the buildings that they're, that they're striking in their own, but these landlords are right around an elementary school. And, you know, the, the, the teachers at the local elementary school because you know a bunch of the buildings that they're striking in that are owned by these landlords are right around an elementary school and you know the the teachers who you know teaching these schools are you know they're also seeing the effects of these kids losing their family like you know the kids losing their houses kids just disappearing so lots of houses kids dealing with these financial struggles and so they you know the teachers start backing them you start getting this bunch of community support and they're able to basically force

the landlords to negotiate. And they get a settlement that's like... The way they describe it, there's a really good documentary about this called This is Parkdale. And the way they describe it is that the deal they got from all this organizing, all these rent strikes,

was so good that the company put a gag order on them so they can't talk about the numbers right before the pandemic started i think some people probably have heard of this there was a group called moms for housing that was in oakland that you know was was had taken back houses that have been taken you know by by the banks i was just sitting there empty and you know at the very beginning of 2020 like the police show up with tanks they show up with you like full riot police stuff it's like yeah like they're you know and the the moms are sort of like driven from the house and this starts you know this this is this is a continuation of this whole sort of battle they've been having with the landlords and with the city over it.

And eventually, they're not able to physically retake the building, but they're able to put so much pressure on the city that the landlord company is basically forced to sell the house to a community land trust, which is one of the other solutions people have sort of come up and tried to deal with this crisis more broadly, which is that, you know, instead of having buildings that are, like, owned by landlords, and so, you know, the reason they have this property is to make money from you, and they kick you out if you can't make enough money, you have, you know, you have these buildings be owned by the community instead. And, you know, and this has been, I mean, there's limits to it. Like, you need to have enough money to actually be able to, like,

buy these buildings. But, you know, that's one of the. You need to have enough money to actually be able to buy these buildings. But that's one of the other things that's been being done to sort of fight this crisis is by having the communities themselves just directly take control of the buildings. Thanks, Chris. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back to hear from Garrison. When did Sophie become the president of Transitions? I've always been the president. What are you? What are you?

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Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like,

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All right, we're back and we're going to hear from garrison last so i'm gonna be bringing up one of the more recent kind of uh cases of eviction defense that kind that captured um a bit like a bit of national media attention this was back uh in december of 2020 with the red house in Portland, kind of riding off the trails of the 2020 BLM protests. This kind of had the inertia to keep this situation active with people, you know, willing to kind of do the thing where you actually go out and fight the cops. Although that did not happen tons with this situation. A brief overview of what happened. So there was this family who's owned this specific home for like over 50 years.

And in the 2000s, they ran into a series of financial hardships. They took out some kind of predatory loans, and just, they kind of just kept getting, they kept running into problems with their home. They tried to have one of their sons do, like, litigation, but he was, like, a sovereign citizen type person, and it made things kind of worse, and it wasn't really ideal. But, you know, but that all of, so all of that is like a part of this. But the important part for everyone who decided to actually show up was like, we're in like, this was like during like November and December when the plague was like the worst it was ever at.

Except for right now. Except for like, there was no vaccinated people in November, right? It was like the death rates were super, super high. Yeah, yeah. And that's when the cops decided to evict this family. The other side of this is that the company that technically, like, bought the house from the banks is also a pretty shady developer company yeah so there's sure was yeah so there was a lot of like weird stuff it was are you gonna go into you can you can go into that yeah so basically just for an example how

shady is they had they were it was some when the national attention started they immediately backed out of wanting to to take the house uh in such a way that because of kind of some of the connections with people involved everyone's like oh it was an organized crime thing like yeah it was it was a criminal enterprise they got attention we're like well this is not worth it we don't we don't want anybody looking in on our shit we're just giving up right away it was a very very very sketchy company slash person had had bought the house from from the bank which the bank you took it from this family but so anyway in like from september to december the cops kept trying to kick people to kick the people out of this home sometimes they did and then sometimes the people just of this home. Sometimes they did, and then sometimes the people just went back.

And this kind of all culminated around December 5th, I think, is the date that cops really tried to go in there with rifles, riot gear, and drag people out. And even though it was super early in the morning,

a lot of the people who had been protesting for BLM in Portland all showed up really quickly, and they chased the cops away. And then everyone got super tense because they just chased away, I don't know, like 20—I think it was mostly sheriffs, I believe. Yeah. And, yeah. So then they did what everyone in Portlandland does is just build barricades for some context on this portlanders had been building barricades for months generally to no effect like it would be like there would be a moving protest somebody would

throw a barricade in the street and the police would immediately shove it aside but this time it worked this time it absolutely worked they built this time it worked like gangbusters they they built very thick barricades over like like five different sides of this house because like this this house is like in the middle of a city block it's it was it's a super interesting property that just like sits in the middle of a street um so they built barricades all around this whole this whole section of this neighborhood they had like they had like caltrops they had like caltrops are spiky balls basically that are meant to fuck up uh generally tires but you don't want to step on them either they they also had um uh uh i think they're called like are they called they're called um check hedgehogs um

they're basically kind of like caltrops, but giant. And they're meant to mess up the undercarriage of a vehicle, make it hard for vehicles to plow through. So we had these. There was all this kind of impromptu weapons. There was behind all the barricades, people lined up bottles and eggs to just throw at people if they tried to enter.

And rocks, lots of rocks. There was various projectiles laid out behind all these barricades. But the barricades were thick. They actually had multiple layers. They had binding to keep them together. It would have been difficult to get through the barricades.

You would have needed a couple hundred people and heavy equipment. If they weren't manned, obviously, you could just walk through. But if the barricades had been manned, it would have been an intense effort in order to force your way through them. So, yeah, within a few hours, these barricades started to come up, and they kept growing over the course of a week. And there was always, like always anywhere between 50 to 100 people camping out in this spot. Sometimes even more people.

There was multiple kitchens got set up. People tried to do COVID safe protocols in certain areas. And yeah, it became this relatively complicated network of people rotating shifts, manning different spots to always make sure people are watching all the different entrances.

And basically, this lasted for, like, over a week. The mayor was very pissed. He was not thrilled that this situation was happening uh because one it made the sheriffs look bad and two it made it made the protesters actually look effective um and now that now like all of these things we've talked about this before there's always runs into problems with sorts of things this is they're never perfect there was instances of people who appointed themselves security oh god yeah doing like you know, like, attacking people for, like, doing graffiti on, like, random walls of, like, pavement in other, like, apartment buildings

or whatever. Like, there was, like, problems specifically around security. But that happens in a lot of these things, and that's kind of worth happens in a lot, a lot of these things and that, that's kind of worth discussing on a whole, on a whole nother episode. Um, and, and there were attempts from fascists, like, like, like street fascists, not cops to like, to like attack the barricades and they didn't really succeed because there were

just so many people there. Um, so that was kind of that, that was kind of what happened. Now, people didn't know what the end game was for this type of thing, right? Cause like, we're just like, they're just doing this thing this thing where we don't know how long this is going to last. But as this was happening, other people were setting up GoFundMes to raise money for the family. And eventually, the kind of idea that was decided on by the family and a few other like people involved was like what if we can just get enough money to actually buy the house back um and after like a week and a half they raised i think three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars was the number and because the developer was so shady he

was he like he like robert said he like backed down immediately he's like no we can we can find some other solution to this just stop talking about it just please stop talking about me and my business so i have to say like we said probably an organized crime thing i prefer this guy and whatever he's doing a thousand times to a bank absolutely yeah so so that that was kind of the the result is that the the the family made a deal with both the city and this developer that they would try to basically use some of the fundraised money to buy back this spot. But this would have been totally impossible if it weren't for the militant display of defense that activists deployed in this street in portland because i mean there was like a lot of a lot of you know like the portlandia liberal portlanders weren't also weren't happy with this so like every like a lot of people wanted this situation ended um so as soon as this thing became you know a possibility the mayor was like quick was quick to jump on this as a way to like

stop this from happening uh yeah because they did not want this to continue and because it would have been pretty difficult for the cops to push through like it would have turned into quite the shit show and there's i think two really important takeaways in terms of why it was able to succeed and i think most of the the ultimate success of it was was was was resultant on the first 24 hours really even maybe the first 12 because yeah once the sheriffs tried their first push and got pushed out if they had done what generally happened in protest which is you know you have sometimes you would have a push where the cops would like back off they would bring in more forces and if

they had in an hour or two they probably could have cleared people out and done the eviction. But they were so surprised. And the fact that it had happened in broad daylight was a big factor. It was kind of early in the morning when this kicked off, that they didn't come back. And so immediately people started bringing more folks in. Within six hours or so, there were pretty potent barricades. By the time night fell, they were significant already. And they just, by the time I got there that night that night they were it was already too much to easily handle yeah um and because of what happened in that first 12 hours by the time the city kind of had adapted to what was happening it was already a huge story the level of defensive infrastructure was massive like it did it was because of how quickly people came together and got barricades down that they were able to get the police off balance. We talk a lot about the

Ota loop, right? About how you kind of disrupt an opponent. And it is, it is about stopping them from making a decision. Right. And so step one was kind of, once they forced the police out, there was something of a blackout about like what was like people would talk about what was going on, but there wasn't a lot of footage from inside or video from inside. So it stopped the cops from observing as well as they might otherwise have. And of course, they couldn't physically observe because they were blocked out of the area. They weren't able to kind of because of how quickly the media around it drummed up, they

weren't able to sort of orient a response, find a way to villainize the protesters easily. There were attempts made after that to attack them personally, like the family and the house personally, but they didn't get on that quickly. And overall, because of how quickly things developed and how quickly it got much larger than they were prepared to deal with. They were not able to decide and act in a timely fashion. And that left kind of the momentum on the side of the protesters. And ultimately they were successful as a result of that. And I think if you're trying to study what about Red House is replicable, you know, there's a lot of barricade tactics and stuff. But a big part of it is just the speed with which people took action and how that pushed the the city and the police off balance

and allowed a victory yeah so you know the the city made the city the developer and the family made a deal that if basically if the barricades came down the cops won't mess with them um as this process of signing over the house and doing like financial stuff would go on. And, and, and that is, that is still an ongoing process. That's still something that's still, that's still being dealt with, but the cops haven't messed with the property since December 5th. Um,

so that is, that is, you know, and this, this isn't a perfectly reputable, this isn't a perfectly, um, like you can't,

you can't replicate this specific strategy always. It's not always possible to raise $250,000 to buy back a property, especially if you're renting. There's all these things that can't be replicated exactly, but the general idea of very quick, sudden mobilization that catches powers at be off guard is something that can be useful in a lot of different scenarios, right? So the kind of – the reason – because basically the barricades and the passive mobilization created more options. So if you want to create more options this is something that that can do that right this is something that can put more things on the table it may not be the same result but there's going to be other things that that could happen and i think the other thing that's important here you know it you know the the red house is sort of interesting because the cops

to some extent were expecting resistance they just weren't expecting this much but you know again like as we were saying earlier landlords like are basically relying to to a very large extent people evicting themselves right they're not expecting resistance and this is why you know he's like this is why it tends to be you know if if you if you do one of these things you get this like in like one enormous police response right like you know they show they show up they in oakland they show up with tanks right and the reason they do that is because you know what what they can do is they can make an example out of people right but they can't actually stop everyone right like they're they're not they're not they're not they're not equipped for you know dealing with three million people just saying no

and so you know if if you organize fast enough and if you if you catch them by surprise and you know if if you bring the stuff that they're doing like to light like you know you show up to their houses you show up to like you show up to the bank you show up to their offices right like they're not you know and you keep going right they're they're not they're not expecting this they're not prepared for it and you know and you know there's all this in parkdale like they'll lose right like they they will a lot of times like they will negotiate they will settle they will not evict you like in in order basically to you know deal with all the attention the fact that they can't drive you out yeah all right and i think

that's going to uh call it a day for us here at It Could Happen Here, the podcast that is this one. So go out and, I don't know, eat an entire 737 piece by piece or do something else. Goodbye. You can follow us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. And not CoolZoneMedia. That's allegedly. Allegedly.

Allegedly, Sophie. Bye, everybody. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. And just as a heads up, we'll be back next week on Tuesday instead of Monday, as we'll be taking the day off for Labor Day by not laboring. So catch up on an old episode or cleanse yourself of our voices. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

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But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura.

I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.