It Could Happen Here - The New 'Ugly' Laws: How People Are Pushing Back On America's War on the Houseless

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

In the late 1800s, many big cities used laws against "ugliness" to cleanse the streets of the disabled, the poor, and the homeless. Fast forward to today, and in the middle of a deepening housing crisis and extreme weather, cities are breaking up encampments and passing new laws to target the most vulnerable. On this episode of It Could Happen Here, guest hosted by It's Going Down, we speak with former squatters, activists resisting sweeps, and houseless folks facing down eviction - to find out how people are pushing back against displacement.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome back. Once again, this is the crew from It's Going Down, squatting the airwaves of It Could Happen Here. On today's show, we're going to look at the growing crisis around homelessness and how the state has moved to address it with brutal sweeps and new laws that target the poor. In the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. housing crisis deepened and homelessness

grew. Following the George Floyd rebellion, Republicans pointed to a rising murder rate during the 2022 election cycle, along with growing encampments of the houseless as examples of rampant Democratic mismanagement and the supposed end result of defunding the police. In reality, two years after the uprising, both funding for the police has only increased along with the number of people killed per year by law enforcement, while growing police budgets have had no impact on crime. Meanwhile, both parties have embraced a draconian crackdown on the houseless, as a slew of new laws target sleeping outside,

and police move against encampments, even in the midst of extreme weather. But a new wave of resistance is also materializing, as communities mobilize to provide mutual aid, fight for access to housing, and resist sweeps of encampments. On today's episode, we investigate the history of these struggles, and how these tactics, ranging from squatting to encampment defense, are spreading across the social terrain as the current crisis deepens and more people find themselves out in the cold. But to kick things off, let's talk about state strategy. Just why are they carrying out these sweeps? these sweeps. I think one of the first things that comes to mind for me is how this behavior from like the Democrats or like liberals or progressives isn't an anomaly, that they are, you know, that their role is facilitating a capitalist state just with slightly different tactics than the Republicans. But basically, they're trying to do that. What they're doing,

which is basically demonizing unhoused people and sort of pushes the blame of um what's going on of the failings basically of our culture onto these individuals that are unhoused rather than on their failures as like mayors of democratic cities or whatever um and the kind of logical outcome of class-based capitalist extractive society and when they can just make it that instead of it being like a social problem that people are unhoused they can make it these bad homeless people and they're dirty and crime or whatever and just kind of try and eliminate that to protect their image but i think it's just a way of like scapegoating a built-in problem with how they operate and actually it's something

it makes me think especially thinking about San Francisco in terms of like precedence for this it makes me think about the ugly laws which um for anyone who doesn't know that was something kind of in the 1800s San Francisco implemented in 1867 which was a law um forbidding people who were kind of like unsightly according to this law, to not be seen in the street. So if people were physically disabled or they were begging or even limping, there were laws targeting them. And part of it even says that anything that's triggering like disgust or guilt is like to not be seen. And I feel like it's a really similar thing that's happening now. And so, yeah, progressive liberalism, they do this.

I'm glad that you brought up ableism, because I think that this ties in real, real well into that. So we live in essentially like an extremely able society that says if you don't work, you die. And I think criminalizing homeless people is a huge part of that. I mean, really think about it. We have to rent our bodies to corporations so we can get money to pay rent to landlords. Essentially, we're being paid a tax to live. But how do you force people? How else do you get people to do the drudgery that we have to do at work if you don't show them the consequences of that? So if they were nice to homeless people, if they were like, oh, here's a free home, then that creates a precedent of like,

oh, you cannot work and have a home so like they don't want to do that so i mean i think one thing that people don't talk about like homelessness is existing i think it's like a way to like scare us into essentially doing these things that we don't want to do to live because you're constantly reminding us of like oh you want to quiet quit you want to go on a strike this is what your life could be you're going to be homeless and not only that we're going to make it so that you can't exist as a homeless person in this society because if people like if you go to New York right now all these uh brunchy folks they eat on the sidewalk they have all these like houses built up on the sidewalk people are drinking mimosas but you can't

have a tan but what are these makeshift things so I mean it goes to show you like it's not even like the idea of taking public space it's like who, who's taking public space? And if it's somebody who's not serving capitalism, you can't take a public space. The housing question to really understand the connection with Democrats and capitalist understandings of housing, we have to think about how housing, how property structures space, right? How capitalism structures space. And so, you know, when I was thinking about this before we're recording, I keep going back to James Scott, Seeing Like a State, which is, you know, an amazing book. If people haven't read it, absolutely pick up a copy. But in the first,

you know, couple of chapters, one of the things he talks about is land exposure. And he's talking about this structure specifically in France, in which sort of towards the end of monarchism, there was an attempt to actually create a tax regime where individuals were taxed. And to do that, individuals had to exist legally, but they didn't at that point. They existed as communities within feudalism. They paid taxes as communities. They held land as communities. When the French government went to these towns to figure out who owned what, what they found was that every single community broke up their understanding of land differently. And that it wasn't really based on

ownership, it was based on use. And so they had to standardize all of that. To do that, they had to fragment the commons. They had to sit there and go, you own this piece of land and you own this piece of land. They did that. They made maps. And they went back two years later, they realized nobody was following the maps. But what they did was they started charging taxes based on the maps. And so people had to start making money on the land to pay the taxes based on the maps that have nothing to do with their lives, right? And what that was, was the creation of property, right? Because when we think about property, you know, there's this fiction of, you know, stateless capitalism, right? You have like Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand types who are talking about, you know, there's this fiction of, you know, stateless capitalism, right? You have like Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand types who are talking about, you know, capitalism can exist without

the state. But really, we can see the fallacy of that when we look at the question of property, right? The question of exclusion from property or exclusion from space. Not only is it fragmenting public space, but we start to look at the way that all of a sudden property has to exist, right? And so in the Rust Belt, for example, after the financial crisis, cities, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, got all this money from the federal government to tear houses down. And they were tearing down like 50 houses a day in these cities, right, for years on end. And these are cities that have people that don't have houses. And so you sit there and you go, well, why are they tearing houses down when there are people that don't have houses? Right. When there's more vacant houses than there are people without houses. How can you justify tearing the houses for housing. If there's no reason to pay for housing, housing ceases to be a commodity. Right. Like this is actually the important part that capitalism has to function through that exclusion of access.

Otherwise, commodities can't have the scarcity necessary to allow them to be priced. Right. There can't be a supply that is lower than a demand, for example, unless you artificially limit supply. a supply that is lower than a demand, for example, unless you artificially limit supply, right? And so when we really see this, we can really see not just the way that capitalism sort of atomizes us, right, creates us as people who live in individual housing units, as opposed to as people who conceive of ourselves as living in communities. But it also really comes to highlight the relationship between the state and the police and capital and how we have to understand capital as a content of the state. It is a definition of life that is imposed through policing purely and can't exist outside of that. Right. It's the fallacy of, quote, unquote, anarcho capitalism, which isn't the thing that really exists for this exact reason.

Right. And so when we're looking at why are Democrats engaging in techniques that involve pushing people off the streets, this is exactly why. It's a capitalist political party. They're trying to maintain property. They're trying to maintain property value. Right. And this is why you see this happen in cities where gentrification is really horrible at a much, much faster clip than you see it in cities where there's like open housing stock. That really makes me think about the beginning of like workhouses in England in the 1830s and the poor law reforms. And it goes back to what you were saying more about just that making it really undesirable to be poor, you know, like needing a group of people who are in that position. And that workhouses was something that were introduced by liberals progressives you know like this as a form of like changing this poor relief system so

instead of giving people money so they could be supported and stay with their families or whatever people were put into these institutions where they're separated from their kids from their husbands and wives or whatever and it's meant to be so undesirable that you would only seek it if you were sort of desperately needed it or whatever, as a way to like save on taxes for like money to people basically, it's really fucked up. And it's like this was part of a social reform progressive like project thing that I think about specifically in New York is that homeless encampments do offer this radical idea of like what it looks like to take back a public space and to collectively like meet together, you know, and like, that's the other thing that I was thinking about last night when I was high, this whole idea of what happens if we just allow homeless encampments to spread and take over, then people who are not homeless start interacting with homeless people as we do like people in the city do. Then you form these connections and these relationships, and then it becomes perfectly normal for people to take over public spaces. And then what does

that mean? Then we have to provide services in public spaces like bathrooms and showers, because the public would start requesting and asking for these things, and more of a relationship they form with homeless folks. So I think part of the the cleaning, which is what their term Eric Adams is used, which is absolutely disgusting in terms of like moving homeless people. The whole I think a huge part of it is also just like destroying the notion that we own public spaces like you do not own a public space and we want to let you know that and we want you out. So I think that really and the additional aspect of that is like when you look at homelessness in New York, like a huge chunk of it are like black people too. So there's like a racial component of it too, when you really want to add

it. This whole idea of like black people are not allowed to take up space. And then specifically if you're homeless, you're not allowed to take up public space. So I wanted to bring that in. It's like very much related to work, but also just related to the idea that the government owns everything and corporations own everything, including the spaces that we exist in. Well, speaking of corporations owning everything, here's some words from our sponsors. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Across the U.S., in large cities often controlled by Democrats, a war on the poor, and specifically on encampments of houseless people, has been increasingly waged over the past year. In San Francisco, the city's mayor, London Breed, recently declared it was time to, quote, be less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city, in an effort to ramp up police harassment of the poor and unhoused. And Portland city officials openly toyed with the idea of forcing, quote, up to 3,000 homeless

people into massive temporary shelters staffed by the Oregon of forcing, quote, up to 3,000 homeless people into massive temporary shelters staffed by the Oregon National Guard. While in California, the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has pushed for, quote, care courts, which threaten to place those who do not complete state directives under involuntary hospitalization, a policy which mirrors efforts already underway in New York. Bans against camping, panhandling, sleeping in one's car have also proliferated. Last spring, for instance, Tennessee made it a felony to camp on public owned land. In Missouri, those caught sleeping on state property could now get jail time and fines, under a new law that just went into effect on January 1st.

Other new laws outlaw encampments in LA next to schools and forbid houseless folks from sleeping on public transit in New York. In the progressive bastion of Asheville, North Carolina, over a dozen mutual aid organizers also now face trumped-up charges of felony littering for supporting protests against sweeps of encampments. This shift in many liberal cities to criminalize, attack, and ban encampments shows just how much the Democratic Party has continued to move to the right while embracing Republicans' line on combating rising crime. Instead of mobilizing the state's forces to house people and meet their most basic needs in a period of mass pandemic and a growing housing crisis, liberal governments across the country have instead mobilized their

forces to attack some of the most vulnerable. Want to know more about what's driving these ongoing attacks on the houseless and how it relates to the housing crisis itself? We sat down with Gifford Hartman, a longtime radical organizer in the Bay Area and a former squatter. Movements arise, like say the George Floyd uprising, And there's some changes, there's some movement towards reforms to police brutality and things like that. But then there's kind of a backlash. And I think right now we're kind of suffering through a backlash. And I think that's kind of a pattern that happens is there's pushback, kind of penal reform, trying to rein the police in a little bit. And then they kind of the backlash means just the police have more power

and they have more power to really kind of brutalize unhoused people and i think we're living through that right now i think the the trends go you know like back and forth and the pendulum has swung in the direction where right now in san francisco there's constant sweeps of tents and unhoused people living on streets, there's a lot of media support given to that. And it's kind of like, as I said, the tail lags the dog and then they start doing all this stuff. And the pushback hasn't really, activism hasn't really been able to kind of stand up to that and stop it or even challenge it right now, at least what I see. Booms happen and property values go up and vacancies go to almost zero, the cops crack down harder.

And I think there have been periods, at least in my lifetime here in the Bay Area, where there's kind of a lull or there's a bottom of the trough when maybe there's more vacancies, a little bit more wiggle room, the cops aren't quite so brutal. But when things are peaking or when the economy is in its dynamic kind of high points, that's where I see the repression is the worst because there's more people to complain. There's more people whose, you know, values are tied to property and who are more willing to push the cops to brutalize unhoused people. And but, you know, right now it's kind of fraying because there's a lot of tech layoffs. fraying because there's a lot of tech layoffs. Yet the agenda of sweeping tents and unhoused people off the streets is kind of still kind of a rapid pace. So I don't know how much longer it'll

last. But right now it's at a pretty high point. As we speak, the weather's awful and the sweeps haven't really stopped and there aren't enough shelter beds to house all the unhoused folks. So it's really a crisis. It's not only just a human crisis, but it's a health crisis because people out in the cold rain are more vulnerable to getting sick and dying. And it should be the time where we're doing the opposite. We're making sure everybody's housed and it just certainly isn't happening. Even though San Francisco, the mayors have been Democrats, I believe, since the mid 60s, the Democrats aren't a monolith and they're not all progressive. And even the progressive ones aren't that good. But the ones that are in power now, like Mayor London Breed, are moderates. And they really are more believe in the police more and they believe in using police for social crimes.

And when they're not moderates, it's a little less bad, but it's not better. It's just less bad. I don't know if that really makes sense. Because I don't think there's ever been a political regime in San Francisco that wasn't pro-cop. You know, everybody loves the cops. Everybody sees the cops as ways to enforce the social values of society, which are private property and all that. And it just never stops. It just depends how brutal they are. And again, as I said earlier, it goes through waves. And

presently, we're in a brutal wave. And the only alternative to that is a less brutal wave. And so my opinion, there's never a time when the cops don't, you know, run rapid. But right now, they're actually at the high point that they've been in a long time. And now we speak with Javier from the National Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco. We talk about the current wave of attacks against houseless people in big cities and how they mirror historic attempts at policing and repressing the poor. The income that you need to rent a two-bedroom apartment, by the city's own estimation, you need an hourly wage of about $61.50 to have an apartment like that.

So the income gap is becoming more evident than ever nowadays. There's a 9% increase in homelessness for every $100 increase in rent. So it's like if health care, housing, education all gets more expensive, but wages don't go up. People are going to lose their housing. So I think people need to understand how similar we are to the unhoused population, how important it is to recognize that we should have solidarity with each other, because if we're fighting against each other, then guess who's winning? The millionaires and the big. We're suing the city because when they do these sweeps,

they're taking people's belongings, which is illegal search and seizure, and cruel and unusual punishment because the shelter that they're offering a lot of times isn't adequate for the folks who are being swept. We're looking for permanent supportive housing for folks, and it's not there. And if you're telling people that they have to move across the street every day in the morning, then it kind of shows, I think, a social and kind of cultural understanding that mirrors the ugly laws people had in place, especially in America, for a long time, which is homeless people are not supposed to be seen and they're supposed to be criminalized.

And speaking of things that probably shouldn't be seen, again, some words from our sponsors. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now

at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. From resisting sweeps, setting up autonomous warming centers, to taking over vacant buildings,

over the past few years, there's been a wide array of expressions of solidarity, direct action, and mutual aid in the face of attempts by the state to displace and destroy the lives of houseless people across the U.S. But these projects and actions haven't come out of nowhere. Building on the radical history of groups in the Bay Area such as the Diggers and the White Panthers, who set up free stores, grocery programs, and squatted buildings, starting in the 1980s out of the anti-nuclear movement, peace activists began sharing free vegan food in a protest of the US war budget under the banner Food Not Bombs.

In the late 1980s, Food Not Bombs in San Francisco faced over 1,000 arrests for sharing free food publicly and taking part in demonstrations. Soon another group, Homes Not Jails, evolved out of the same scene and began to open up and squat vacant housing, part of a wave of other houseless activist groups that sprouted nationwide, following the economic recession of the 1980s. Chapters of Homes Not Jails worked to open squats weekly to covertly house people while also organizing public housing takeovers, which thrust squatting into the spotlight of the mass media. Again, here's Gifford Hartman talking about squatting in the 1990s.

There had been a wave of really successful squats in the 1970s. One group was called the White Panthers that did it in the Lower Haight neighborhood, and they were modeled on the Black Panthers. So they actually squatted, but actually created community programs for things like food distribution. They defended their squats. They fortified their squats. And that was a tradition that kind of preceded my period of squatting. So they were both looking at the squatting in Europe,

but also the previous generations doing it here in San Francisco. I moved to the Bay Area in 1986. I lived in Berkeley for most of the beginning of the years I was here. From the end of World War II, in the 1940s, the population in San Francisco peaked in the mid-20th century, and then it went down. Population decreased by 100,000. In the late 80s, there were still a lot of cracks in the surface of housing, and there was a lot of empty units. were still a lot of cracks in the surface of housing. And there was a lot of empty units.

There was a lot of abandoned units. And it was a lot of ability to people to find squats. And I was part of that. There were various times where I either wasn't working or had a part-time job. And I chose as a political act to squat. And I began doing that in the late 80s. But most of my success in squatting was in the early 90s. But then I kind of ran up against the contradiction. Groups like Homestead Jails were founded in 1992.

I'd already been squatting. But then there was another wave of repression. So in 1992, the former chief of police in San Francisco, Frank Jordan, got elected mayor. And by 1993, he was doing something called the Matrix Program. And the Matrix Program was very much like what Giuliani did in New York with his zero tolerance for broken windows, which is cops would get tough on quality of life crimes, which means like broken windows and graffiti. But it also included food, not bombs. like broken windows and graffiti, but it also included food, not bombs.

Feedings were attacked by the police and squatters were even, myself included, were attacked and cleared out even in a way that was not legal. When I succeeded, we squatted covertly. And when we didn't succeed, often we were aligned with groups like Homes Not Jails, where they were a high profile group, very media savvy. Well, media savvy might be an overstatement. They kind of had a media focus, and the media focus was often a double-edged sword. It brought popular understanding of the conditions of the housing stock, but also it was a way for the police to be telegraphed exactly what we were doing

and to come down and crack down on our squads. Homes Not Jails wouldn't be the last group to take over vacant homes for housing. In the mid-2000s, take back the land based out of Miami, Florida, work to block evictions and move unhoused families into foreclosed homes. In the present period, various grassroots groups have organized to stop the sweeping of houses and encampments. Crews in Olympia, Washington and Austin, Texas have been successful in organizing broad campaigns. In Minneapolis, groups have mobilized mass numbers to, at times, halt evictions. In the following interview, we speak with Christian and Post from Minneapolis

on the ongoing battle with the city government and police to stop attacks and sweeps on their houseless neighbors. In the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, it raised a lot of people's awareness as to the way that our systems and practices in our city aren't really serving us. I think there was a lot of work happening in Minneapolis, in particular, before that, in regard to policing and the way that our systems do or do not serve people. in regard to policing and the way that our systems do or do not serve people. And then in 2020, the awareness just grew exponentially. And because that foundational path had been laid already, we had something to go with.

And we can see the direct line between what happened to George Floyd and to the community at George Floyd Square and the way that that also shows up in other spaces in our community, such as with our unhoused neighbors. We know that the majority of people that are living at encampments in Minneapolis are indigenous immigrant populations or Black Americans. And so we can see that there is, you know, a specific need and also a real, you know, a disparity between. And a direct through line to all of the oppression that 2020 kind of threw in the face of every, you know, I mean, person with a heart. Absolutely. And I think, too, we started practicing a lot of mutual aid,

more like much bigger than we ever have historically in the summer of 2020. We saw lots of people getting involved. There were encampments throughout the city, as there was for some time because of COVID. People were able to stay outside and couldn't be evicted as easily at that time. And we saw lots of community getting involved in doing mutual aid. And that really helped build, I think, a movement that is, you know, sort of beautifully disorganized in many ways, because lots of people from lots of different walks of life coming together and showing up for each other. I mean, I think people started to become aware of the way that we are all connected to each other and that when we're

taking care of each other, we're all happier, we're all safer, we're actually able to meet needs and the resources are there. It's a matter of the will. I cannot overemphasize enough how terrible the boy Mayor Frey has been since he took power here in so-called Minneapolis. You know, he ran on ending houselessness and was in majority funded by developers during his campaign. And we've seen what ending houselessness means to Democrats. pain. And we've seen what ending houselessness means to Democrats. It basically means ending visible poverty and ending the lives of houseless people. But frankly, I mean, the number of evictions over the course of the last few years has just skyrocketed. And, you know, our so-called progressive politicians love to give some money to the nonprofit industrial complex and do their private public partnership. And then when there are people who are, quote unquote,

resistant to service, that's the phrase they love to use. They have all of their excuses lined up so that they can just blow those people's houses and kick them out of the roofs that are keeping them warm and dry. And it's just been a really eye-opening thing for a lot of people, I think, to see how our progressive, quote-unquote, establishment here has just fully committed to jackboot thuggery all in the name of clearing the streets and making it so that people in their kind of four-story mixed-use condos can have a beautiful view without having to see the poverty that that lifestyle necessitates. You know, in the summer of 2020, there were several council, at the time, council members

who committed to defunding the police. However, that did not come to fruition. Since that time, there's been increases in the budget to policing in Minneapolis. No decreases, only increases that police haven't been able to spend their whole budget. And yet the city continues to pour more money into them. And what we're seeing happen is unhoused people come together to keep one another safe. And also so community is able to stay connected with them and, you know, will be in an encampment. And then various levels of government will come in and displace them.

And so the people don't have anywhere else to go. So they need to move to a new space together. So what's happening is not housing. What's happening is not even laying a foundation for somebody to be able to get the services or support that they may want or need. What's happening is displacement. When somebody hears about an eviction potentially happening, it becomes a situation that's, it's almost, it's almost kind of magical that people come together and it is kind of chaotic, but it always comes together. And we end up having, whether it's people that are doing cop watch or are just neighbors like we had neighbors show up on the first day the day that the quarry was planned to be evicted

on december 28th um i can't tell you how many different people that just live in that area were coming up and asking questions and were appalled at the response from the city because really that the quarry encampment was in a space that you could barely see it you wouldn't know it was there if you didn't know it was there you know and we're talking about by the last day the day that it was evicted there were eight people there and over 150 police officers it was bonkers and that extreme response is something that when you see it you can't unsee it. And so we come together in what, you know, you get in where you fit in with whatever skills you have,

whatever gifts you have, whatever time you have, you know, and a lot of us show up because we are people who have experienced other forms of trauma or have seen and experienced other forms of oppression too. You can't unsee it once you do. In the last few years, mutual aid and autonomous disaster relief efforts have informed projects like Heater Block, the squatting of land for people displaced by climate change-fueled fires, and the setting up of autonomous warming centers in the middle of winter. In the winter of 2021, autonomous groups across Texas also mobilized when the state's electrical grid failed and hundreds of people tragically died due to lack of heat. Autonomous groups across Texas also mobilized when the state's electrical grid failed and hundreds of people tragically died due to lack of heat. Autonomous groups have also worked to

directly house people. In the Los Angeles area, this has looked like houseless folks taking over homes owned by Caltrans and various groups in the Pacific Northwest occupying and demanding access to hotels in the dead of winter. In Philadelphia in 2020, housing activists squatted and then won the keys to homes for upwards of 50 unhoused families in the midst of the George Floyd Rebellion. And there have been other success stories as well. In Boise, Idaho, after months of ongoing protests by houseless folks and their supporters, the city was pushed to green light the building of hundreds of housing units. In Berkeley, California last summer, people once again tore down the fences surrounding People's Park and destroyed machines, stopping the destruction of the autonomous enclave

once again. In Sacramento, California, houseless people and their supporters beat back an eviction attempt at Camp Resolution, a parking lot which is home to people living in their vehicles and RVs. Here's two Camp Resolution residents, Sharon and Satara, who speak on the deadly impact of sweeps. I think that the biggest thing is like being treated inhumanely, you know what I mean, or rudely or like you're an animal or they're very mean to people, you know what I mean,

when they sweep you, they take people's stuff and just throw it out, don't matter if it matters to them, or you know what I mean, or, you know, which, you know, creates mental health issues for some people, because people get traumatized from stuff like that, you know what I mean, you just coming in, and the only places they have that they can call home, or a place of shelter, and you know, stormy times like this you know they come and even now while it's raining and make them move and tell them you know they gotta go throw their things out or you know what i mean make them leave without it whatever they you know what i mean whatever no matter if it's important to them or not you know what i mean like i think that's the most messed up part because like i have a friend out here who who lost you know her child's ashes you know what i mean half the half of the people that

were at that we lose contact with and then every time they sweep that's another half and they're just diminishing people where people are where are people going they're just disappearing and the further you know people who do need, like, other help with other things, health things and stuff like that, the harm reduction people and stuff like that that come out and, you know, give people things they need, you know what I mean? They move you around, then you can't be found. People can die like that. You can't receive services. And people die like that all the time. Especially, you know, when they move us around.

Sometimes we got to go to areas that are not necessarily safe, especially the women. you know when they move us around sometimes we got to go to areas that are not necessarily safe especially the women you know what i mean women die out here all the time they separate us camp resolution was formed because uh this lot that we're on it was part of the original siting plan and they spent six hundred seventeen thousand dollars on this for a fence in a parking lot and promised folks that they would uh that they were going to get them into little tiny houses or trailers so they can get back on their feet and get housing they swept them off the lot as soon as they were finished with this they came they came and viciously swept them off of the property the other side of the property they were

on and put a fence up and promised those people, and they got nothing. And then didn't even bother to contact them or anything and just left those people hanging after they signed up for all the services and were denied. And my sister-in-law was one of those people. And she's a quadriplegic, and she's still waiting for housing. And we weren't going to have another winter of her being down on the county side in the weather, in the water. So that's we started it and it's we're here for safety so we

can get back up on our feet we're human beings not to mention like half more than half the camp you know a majority of the camp there are males that live here so please don't get me wrong but this is a camp of majority women you know what i I mean? Who out here, who live out here. And, you know, a lot of us, you know, we're homeless, but we're not bums. You know what I mean? Like, we're not, we have regular lives like everyone else. We have family. We have friends.

You know what I mean? And we take care of each other. You know what I'm saying? Like, and a lot of us have been camping right here for years. Some of us years up against the county and the city. You know what I'm saying? But for every success, sweeps remain a daily constant in the United States.

And many attempts to push back by helpless folks and their supporters are met with extreme resistance from law enforcement. So I'm curious what you all think. How can communities continue to organize for change in the face of this brutality? Something that comes to mind is just kind of more more of some things that have already been happening basically um and i'm thinking of um echo park that you brought up um and the encampment echo park was

really interesting to me because um it was that's a neighborhood in uh la and it grew to maybe sort of two to three hundred people living there and as it went on it kind of like a sense of community developed pretty strongly there with support from people in the neighborhood too and people had set up like a garden a community kitchen there were like meetings even showers near the end like um it was actually kind of thriving like it was like doing well and people were like pretty like uh I don't know politicized or like aware of like what's going on and talking about it and sharing with each other um and yeah people coming together to resist sweeps and like threats of sweeps of of the park um and the response to it was one of the most like heavy-handed sort of disproportionate seeming things that I'd ever seen where they had been threatening the city had been threatening

that they were going to do a sweep and they were saying they were going to get everyone into housing it's like this humanitarian offer of secure housing to people but they came with like 400 cops and like all the rest of like lapd's full force you know the helicopters and just like everything they blocked um entrances into echo park to stop supporters coming from out of the neighborhood um and basically yeah evicted people fought with people resisting um and then put a fence up very quickly like during this whole thing um and closed the park off and that fence is still up and that's like and then what is it now a year and a half or something these years and that that

fence has been up um and something i think is like interesting about this example is i really think that the reason that response was so heavy-handed is because the very existence of it was disrupting this logic of like rent and landlord and stuff like people were reclaiming the commons basically reclaiming public space using it to meet their needs and this was incredibly threatening to the city and they needed to shut it down and sort of turn the park back into recreation middle-class people basically um and i think you know what we've talked about already like um tom what you were talking about with like enclosure and stuff like I really see that these sweeps like this is such a just a continuation of this and Echo Park in a really big way. And what you were saying more about just like what happens when we challenge that logic being the most like threatening thing to them, you know, just like what happens if it was just like this homeless camp survives and then another encampment, another encampment.

And it basically disrupts everything we know about property and rent and everything anyway so i think just uh more of that yeah i mean i would yeah i agree with you sophie i think it's like more of what's happening like currently new york there's still sweeps happening like um dhs department of homeless services puts up these like um sweep notices um and the way it works is that when these sweeps notices go up like there's a group of people who let each other know that a sweep is about to happen. People show up to the people who are about to be swept. I hate that word, swept. Oh my gosh, that's so disgusting. What can we use

instead of swept? Treated badly by evil Eric Adams. I don't know, maybe we could use that. But anyway, so, like, people will go and talk to the people who are in the encampment who are going to be swept and ask them, like, what type of support would you like? Like, do you want us to help you move your stuff? Do you want us to send, you know, when the cops and like so the sanitation department comes usually during these cleanups and like throws away people's things.

And because, you know, if you don't serve capitalism, your stuff, you don't matter. So definitely your stuff doesn't matter. matter. One thing that has been happening is that people have been showing up for people who are about to be have their things thrown out and either moving the things for them or supporting them or standing in the way in front of the police or like documenting it. And I think that's like a huge way to just like show up right now. If you can, you sickly block out time on your calendar at work. If you know something happening down the street, like this is like something like you could do now. And I think that's really important. Like this is solidarity that we should show and we should show up for our comrades because they are on the ground of fighting for us having housing as a human right. And that's why we should show up for them and to support them. this strategic response group, showed up. This is a counterterrorism group, y'all. Showed up to get people out of an encampment in Tompkins Square,

which was deemed anarchy. I think it was like five people. Five people brought in SRG or counterterrorism groups. It just goes to show you the extent to which like houses, people taking up public space is a threat to the idea of property

as we know it. It's a threat to capitalists and it's a threat to landlords like Eric Adams. Eric Adams is a threat to the idea of property as we know it is a threat to capitalists and it's a threat to landlords like eric adams eric adams is a landlord i don't know if you all know that this the new york the new york city mayor is a landlord if you need to know anything as to why they're sweeping homeless people landlords run everything and they have rats like eric adams because he had rats and he was supposed to pay a fine and he didn't pay a fine because he's a landlord i guess just going back to that, it's like, yeah, show up for people now. The need now is like when sweeps are happening is for people to show up in place for people. And the other part of it,

I want to say this, and this is a wild idea, but I've been thinking about it for a while. What if we all stopped paying rent? What if we all did? What if we got together with all our friends and stopped paying rent? And I know this is wild. And I know some people might be like, oh no, Marcella, we're going to get evicted. But what if we paid rent? And we all thought the cops and they're trying to pay us when they're trying to evict all of us. So like, that's another part of it is like showing up to people's evictions, trying to come up together to come up with a long strategy, because houses people right now are fighting for us to like have housing as a human right, we can meet them on the other end and say, actually, we're not going to pay rent as long as you're doing this because we're that's like solidarity when i'm thinking about how to

resist displacement you know what i go back to is squatter movements that existed in europe right like the social center movements in the 70s and 80s um but also squatting that happened in the rust belt in the 2000s right and like what was unique about those situations like others have have existed obviously but what was unique about those situations? Like others have existed, obviously, but what was unique about those situations is that squatting became about more than just space. It also became about autonomy and self-defense, right? So in those situations, what would happen is in these Rust Belt squats, people would like lock down a whole street and take over a house. And then just, that was just their space, you know, and the cops just couldn't get back there or didn't want to get back there. And some of those squats held out for years, like years

and years and years. And we see that in Europe, too. And so what that does, though, is it it accomplishes something really important, which I think we have to sort of shift in our discussions of this question, which is that the question isn't just about housing, the question's about space, right? And very specifically, how we understand space. So currently, when we talk about a neighborhood or when city politicians talk about a neighborhood, they don't mean what I think a lot of us mean. Like a lot of us, when we talk about our neighborhoods, we mean like our neighbors, right? The people that live around the corner, the old lady up the street that feeds the cats,

like whatever it happens to be, you know, like you have a community that you live in, at least where I live. When city politicians talk about a neighborhood, what they mean is real estate. They mean this fragmented space of commodified housing where individual houses can just be slotted in and slotted out and new residents could just be slotted in and slotted out. And the space becomes reduced down to its physical form. Right. And within all capitalist understandings of space, that is what happens. Space gets reduced down to the commodification of that space. Right. And so we're talking about that inscription into our spaces. You know, I was saying earlier, that doesn't occur without the ability to get arrested for trespassing.

And so this becomes a fight against the police as much as it's a fight against housing, because at the end of the day, the enforcement of that structuring of space comes through the projection of police force into that space. Right. Whether that's passive things like surveillance, whether that's active things like sending a counterterrorism team to evict five people from a park in Manhattan. And so as we're kind of like looking through this, we can take some interesting sort of examples. I mean, the Paris Commune had a whole discourse that talked just about how they were going to rebuild the city. Like, what is the city going to look like without property? How are we going to restructure our use of space? Who gets to decide how to use these big public spaces, right? These were the big discussions that were happening.

The Situationist International had a whole discourse on building conceptual cities and avant-garde cities. And, you know, graffiti was a big part of that. Because what is graffiti? Graffiti is the marking of people's presence in space. Why do cities crack down on graffiti so hard? Every single time someone puts a tag up, that's a gap in police coverage that's being marked literally every single time. Right. And so when we're talking about these questions, we have to push this into a question of capitalism in general. But that makes it a question of the state. We can't talk about capitalism in isolation from that. And so we have to really talk about

how our spaces are fragmented and the ways that things like even encampments or squats or things like this that are defended, that are able to be sort of preserved isn't the right word, are able to maintain their autonomy. Those become sort of the models of different ways to live in some ways, right? These become the places where people are experimenting with different types of living, whether it's by choice or not. But these are the spaces that get eliminated because of that specific dynamic, right? That they are fundamentally violating the entire concept of property in their very existence.

And that's why we see the crackdowns happening the way that they are. Democrats are just as, you know, complicit in that as Republicans are. It's functionally no different, especially after the George Floyd uprising, where you really see in a lot of Democratic cities them hiring a lot more cops, giving them a lot more guns, like doing the same stuff that happened in more conservative cities, right? The gap is almost non-existent. That's going to do it for us. Once again, this has been the It's Going Down crew

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