[“I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to
‘protect and serve.’”] [[link removed]]

HOUSING ACTIVISTS UNITE TO FIGHT MASS EVICTIONS AND DEFUND POLICE  
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Candice Bernd
July 2, 2020
Truthout
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_ “I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to
‘protect and serve.’” _

A protester holds a flag with the words "Black Housing" in New York
City's Times Square during a Black Lives Matter rally supporting
policing, housing and education reforms on June 7, 2020., Ira L.
Black/Corbis/Getty Images

 

As COVID-19’s second wave bears down, nearly half of all states’
eviction moratoria have already expired or are set to expire in the
next two months. A federal moratorium that bans evictions of people in
rentals backed by the government expires July 25. To make matters
worse, the CARES Act’s supplemental boost to unemployment insurance
ends July 31.

The country is already in the beginning stages of a massive eviction
crisis as housing courts nationwide reopen. As many as 28 million
renters
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could lose their homes in the coming eviction wave, boosting the
national homeless rate by as much as 40 to 45 percent
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by the end of the year.

The wave will hit low-income Black and Brown people, who are twice as
likely to rent as white people, the hardest. According to an Urban
Institute
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survey in which half of adult renters reported having trouble paying
rent or bills from late March to mid-April, Black and Brown renters
were most likely to report reduced spending on food, depleted savings
or increased credit card debt. According to the latest census
[[link removed]] data, 44
percent of Black tenants reported having little or no confidence they
could make their next rent payment.

Last week, the U.S. Labor Department reported
[[link removed]] more than 1.5 million Americans
filed new state unemployment claims, bringing the national total of
claims to more than 44 million since mid-March. Rising Black and Brown
unemployment coupled with mass evictions could spark renewed uprisings
in the streets amid a national reckoning over racial justice following
the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. was facing affordable housing,
eviction and homelessness crises disproportionately impacting Black
and Brown people. In 2019, about 568,000
[[link removed]]
people experienced homelessness on a single night, with Black people
making up 40 percent of those experiencing homelessness despite being
13 percent of the U.S. population.

While Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently introduced
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legislation that would extend and expand federal eviction protections
for nonpayment of rent for one year, Congress is not expected to begin
negotiating a new economic relief package until after July 4.
Meanwhile, the $3 trillion HEROES Act stimulus package, which also
includes a nationwide eviction moratorium, continues to languish in
the Senate.

Without federal rental assistance and an extension of renter
protections, the coming eviction wave could send the nation’s
already dire homelessness numbers skyrocketing, overwhelming already
overburdened shelters and emergency rooms.

This is the reality that housing rights activists across the nation
are bracing for, and they say they won’t let it unfold without a
fight. While calling for rent and debt cancellation for millions of
tenants impacted by the pandemic, many activists are also tying their
housing demands to the national movement to defund police as some
prepare to face off with city marshals, constables and cops forcibly
evicting renters.

MILITARIZED EVICTIONS IN OAKLAND

Dominique Walker, an activist with Moms 4 Housing, a collective of
unhoused and housing insecure mothers in Oakland, California, told
_Truthout _that the collective’s organizing pressure has been key in
city leaders’ decision to extend Oakland’s eviction moratorium to
August 31. Nonetheless, several of the mothers say their housing is
still in danger: They won’t be able to pay their owed rent when the
city’s moratorium expires.

“This is the police state that we live in, where they will spend
tens of thousands just to make you get out of a speculative-owned
property rather than help you get permanently housed.”

The end of the city’s moratorium, she says, will have severe,
disproportionate impacts on Black and Brown renters, as gentrification
and tech wealth has accelerated a housing affordability crisis that
was already among the nation’s most dire before the COVID-19 crisis:
The average rent
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one-bedroom apartment in Oakland is $2,300.

When the moratorium lifts, many tenants could owe $10,000 or more in
back rent. Many simply won’t be able to pay, and could wind up on
Oakland’s streets, where they join an unhoused population
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that has already jumped by 47 percent in the past two years.

After struggling to keep her family housed while working two jobs,
Walker and three other working mothers reclaimed a vacant,
investor-owned house
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on the 2900 block of Magnolia Street last November to call attention
to the city’s “displacement machine.”

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office evicted the moms and their
children in a high-profile, militarized raid in early January.
Sherriff’s deputies decked in riot gear and armed with AR-15s showed
up with an armored tank and a specialized robot. The eviction
ultimately cost the county $40,000
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— well beyond the cost of simply housing the families — a point
the moms are now zeroing in on ahead of a looming eviction wave.

Walker tells _Truthout_ that in addition to calling for full rent
relief, the moms are targeting the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office
for funding cuts. They want that money reinvested in organizations
that provide housing and a jobs training program focused on providing
mothers with the necessary skills to land jobs that make at least
$40.88 an hour — the minimum wage required to afford a one-bedroom
apartment in Oakland.

“There still hasn’t been an explanation of why they came with that
much force for mothers and babies.”

The January eviction “was a very violent display and was meant to
cause terror in folks who are standing up for their human rights,”
Walker says. “This is the police state that we live in, where they
will spend tens of thousands just to make you get out of a
speculative-owned property rather than help you get permanently housed
and fix the issue. It was unreal.”

Walker says the group is still working to plan actions this week
targeting the Alameda County Board of Supervisors budget.

The January eviction “looked like a war scene out of a movie,” she
says. “There still hasn’t been an explanation of why they came
with that much force for mothers and babies, so we still want to hold
them accountable for that while redirecting some of those funds to get
mothers and babies off of the streets.”

TARGETING COPS AND MARSHALS IN NYC

On the East Coast, New York’s City Council voted this week to cut
$457 million
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from city’s housing agency while also allocating an additional $8.6
million
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to city housing programs. The council also cut $1 billion
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the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) budget, canceling the
planned hiring of about 1,160 officers.

Both housing and police accountability activists, many of whom have
protested at City Hall since last Tuesday, argue the budget doesn’t
go far enough to address the twin crises of police violence and mass
evictions, and say the council used accounting tricks to move money
around, such as shifting funding of school policing over to the
Department of Education.

Hundreds of renters also rallied last week outside newly opened
housing courts in at least five city boroughs and in upstate New York
to call for debt and rent cancellation and to protest the end of Gov.
Andrew Cuomo’s eviction moratorium, which expired June 20.

So far Governor Cuomo has resisted extending the moratorium, siding
with landlords he says must continue to pay property taxes, utility
bills and mortgages. Housing advocates fear up to 50,000 new eviction
cases
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could be filed in the coming days, and that thousands of cases that
were already in progress but were paused in March will resume.

A separate state order shielding tenants directly affected by the
pandemic is set to expire in late August and could result in an
explosion in the number of eviction cases, transforming the coming
wave into a tsunami.

“Police violence is an extension, the most brutal expression, of the
ways police exist to protect private property interests and not
people.”

At least 19 legal services organizations, including The Legal Aid
Society and The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, oppose the state’s
reopening of housing courts, arguing that continuing eviction
proceedings not only spells disaster for renters but could also expose
legal aid workers to COVID-19. Sixty-nine housing advocacy
organizations recently penned an open letter to Governor Cuomo
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demanding a universal eviction moratorium for all renters in New York
State for the duration of the pandemic.

The New York-based coalition of tenants and housing activists, Housing
Justice For All, is calling for the extension of the New York
moratorium for the remainder of the year as well as rent, mortgage and
utility payment cancellation. The group has helped coordinate
[[link removed]] the
city’s largest rent strike in nearly a century, with at least 400
families in buildings each containing over 1,500 rental units
withholding rent in May.

Housing Justice For All Campaign Coordinator Cea Weaver tells
_Truthout_ that the group is supporting efforts to confront police
violence in the city and is calling for the firing of all city
marshals, responsible for serving eviction papers. The coalition’s
actions outside housing courts and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office
have heavily emphasized the role of police in evictions.

The coalition has also organized several teach-ins on the intersection
between housing and racial justice. This week, coalition organizers
are training tenants and activists in both direct action and legal
tactics for eviction defense in anticipation of hundreds of renters
being forced out of their homes.

“Police violence is an extension, the most brutal expression, of the
ways police exist to protect private property interests and not
people, and that’s very much a part of what we are pushing and
framing in this moment,” Weaver told _Truthout_. The coalition is
not trying to replicate the work already being done by its affiliated
groups, but instead, center anti-police brutality messaging in its
housing work because the issues are interconnected.

Housing rights activists in New York highlight the NYPD’s 1984
murder of Eleanor Bumpurs
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a 67-year-old Black woman, in her Bronx public housing apartment
during her scheduled eviction. Advocates also point to more recent
cases of Black people killed in their own homes, such as Botham Jean
in Dallas, Texas, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

“We need to prevent people from being evicted when the marshals
come, but in reality, we want a much earlier intervention,” Weaver
says. Ultimately though, she says, direct action and legal tactics
aren’t a transformative solution. “We need to be able to use
principles of eviction defense to heighten the political urgency to
pass a real ‘cancel rent’ program. We can’t permanently block
marshals from coming to get people through direct action alone.”

“We need to be able to use principles of eviction defense to
heighten the political urgency to pass a real ‘cancel rent’
program.”

A “real cancel rent” program means a policy that would
automatically forgive all rent, mortgage and utility payments accrued
during the COVID-19 pandemic that would apply universally to all
homeowners and renters. Beyond pandemic-related protections and rent
cancellation, Weaver says there must be a broader expansion of
tenants’ rights in the private housing market, an end to
homelessness, and investments in public and decommodified housing.

She is heartened by recent primary victories of progressive Democratic
challengers Jamaal Bowman, Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, who ran
strongly on affordable housing platforms. Bowman, who ran on a
national homes guarantee, joined housing justice organizations and
tenant leaders this week in supporting a national eviction blockade
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as part the rent cancellation movement and “We Strike Together
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campaign.

NEW DATA IN BOSTON

Housing advocates with City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston have organized
eviction blockades in defense of renters since the 1970s, according to
the organization’s executive director, Lisa Owens. Now, she says,
the group is working to bring renters into a series of online
trainings that encourage tenants to form associations while guiding
them through a series of escalating direct-action tactics. The group
is also pushing two state bills that would provide a year of housing
stability for renters and lift a ban on rent control.

“We believe in escalating direct action tactics based on the level
of consciousness that gets developed when you’re beginning to figure
out how to fight your case,” Owens says.

At least one of the group’s staffers have been directly involved in
organizing efforts to redirect 10 percent of the Boston Police
Department budget to community needs and services, including
affordable housing. Last week Boston’s city council passed a city
budget that only contained small cuts to the police department’s
overtime pay, but Owens says police accountability and housing
activists have since worked together more closely as a result of
efforts to defund the department.

“I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to
‘protect and serve.’”

A report [[link removed]] released Sunday based on
three years of housing court data collected by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology researchers and City Life/Vida Urbana found
that 70 percent of market-rate eviction filings in Boston occur in
neighborhoods of color — and most starkly in Black neighborhoods —
even though only about half of rental housing is in these
neighborhoods. The pandemic
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produced a spike in eviction filings in Boston before the state issued
an eviction moratorium in April; 78 percent of the suspended cases
were in communities of color.

Annie Gordon is one Black tenant at risk of eviction once the
state’s moratorium lifts. She is the tenant association leader at
the “SoMa Apartments at the T,” a Boston apartment complex she’s
lived in for 44 years. The complex had already priced her out when it
raised rents in 2018. Then the pandemic struck, laying off a family
member Gordon relied on for financial help.

“We didn’t even realize we had rights or that we could speak up
when it comes to our housing.”

Gordon told _Truthout_ tenants in her building are committed to
defending one another from city marshals attempting evictions, if it
comes to that, by using nonviolent, physical blockade tactics. She
supports the city’s cuts to the police department’s overtime pay,
saying that funding affordable housing is “much more important”
than paying cops overtime.

The association is working to negotiate with the building’s
management company to work out “a little more reasonable” rent
increase than what was initially asked. They haven’t received a
response from the company as of yet, Gordon says.

“Myself, as well as other tenants here, we didn’t even realize we
had rights or that we could speak up when it comes to our housing. We
didn’t know that. We just automatically assumed landlords have all
the rights,” Gordon says.

City marshals and constables forcibly evicting renters in Black
communities only adds to the stress and anxiety these communities face
while struggling to survive the nation’s multiple crises, she says.
“I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to
‘protect and serve.’”

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. 
Reprinted with permission.

_Candice Bernd [[link removed]] is senior editor/staff
reporter at Truthout. Her work has also appeared in several other
publications, including The Nation, In These Times, the Texas
Observer, Salon, Rewire.News, Sludge, YES! Magazine and Earth Island
Journal. Her work has received awards from the San Francisco Press
Club, the Fort Worth chapter of Society of Professional Journalists,
the Native American Journalists Association, and the Dallas Peace and
Justice Center. Follow her on Twitter: @CandiceBernd
[[link removed]]._

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