A Brief History of Eviction Defense

And speaking of collapse, Um, 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, Nah,

it's not not constitutional. We're not going to say anymore. Uh start kicking people out of their motherfucker and homes and boy, how did that process is started? And we don't know. I mean, I think the the you'll get very different numbers when you try to figure out like how many people are going to get evicted or at risk of being evicted. Like the highest deal here is like thirty to forty million Americans at risk of eviction. UM.

I think it was UM. I think it was Bank of America's numbers that anticipated as many as seven hundred and fifty thousand households. Goldman, it was a Goldman gold anticipated about seven and fifty thousand American households losing their

homes getting and that's obviously more than seven fifty thousand people. Now, when we talk about like how many of those folks could end up homeless, UM, it's going to be a less than that total number of households because whenever you have stuff like this happened, like in two thousand and eight, a decent number of people who lose access to their homes wind up kind of CouchSurfing, 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's um that

introduces additional complications. But it's it's possible, in fact, very likely because about the s the kind of conservative estimate for the number of people who are homeless on American streets right now is a little over five and fifty thousand, 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 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, um, 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. Um, because kind of historically and today we're going to kind of give a little bit of a historic overview here. Um. Historically, eviction defense is it has not in American history solved the overall problems, but it solves it can provide necessary Uh, it can be a necessary like tourniquet for a lot of people

and for communities. Um. Before kind of more long term solutions to these problems get get get brought up, and I think it behooves this 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, 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 communists like websites. Um. And there's 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. Now, I found some kind of scholarly analyzes of some of the reporting on that that will point out that they especially if you're kind of like report if you're if you're studying eviction defense, based on kind of the documents at the time, and it was a lot of like Socialist Worker, UM and

Unemployed Citizen and whatnot newspapers with titles like that. UM, A lot of those would kind of tend to deliberately under count the efforts of of non communist anti eviction organizations because there was a whole political fight going on then. UM. So keep that in mind that said, it is kind of worth reading, uh some of these some of these accounts, and I think one that is particularly uh noteworthy is what happened in New York City starting in nineteen one

nineteen thirty two, UM. And this was in the Bronx Park East and Allerton Avenue UM. And it started obviously, like the Great Depression kicks off, like nineteen thirty, nineteen thirty one. UM. By January of nineteen thirty two, 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. UM. And the communists in the Bronx started an eviction defense network that was very noteworthy, and it kind of it initially crystallized around this series of communist co ops, which were these two buildings in the Bronx that were populated by communists UM. And that had included like a cooperative housing experiment, like some cooperative gardening that

sort of stuff. And they were mostly Eastern European uh Jewish like workers, like people who had come over from Europe and in a lot of cases had been socialist activists in Europe, many of whom had like had to flee Europe to the United States because of their activism UM and in January of nineteen thirty two, they organized rent strikes at three larger apartment buildings at Bronx East Park UM 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 the creation of an organization called the Unemployed Citizens Committees I think is they called them UM. 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 embody and imbued with

like the full rights of an American citizen UM. And so they were kind of taking ownership of the term unemployed rather than accepting it as a slur UM that like, no, we're like, we're still citizens, and we we have rights in power and will UM will organize in order to enact our power on or in order to UM in order to kind of forcefully 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 fifteen percent reduction in rent and into eviction, repairs and apartments, and 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 four

tenants in a building. UM. Now, these like this rent strike set off a rent riot that eventually more than four thousand people participated in city marshals and the marshals were the people the city would hire to to force homeless people out of their houses. UM, marshals and police showed up to evict seventeen tenants and yeah, about four thousand people showed up to oppose them, and that started

this massive street fight. UM. And it was largely and and this would be the case with most of these rent strikes in the early thirties, it was largely women who would do most of the fighting and would do most of the the the like the actual like physical organizing against the police. And some of this was because they recognized that like when their men were there, the cops would beat the ship 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, like the women are going to organize. We'll get up on the fire escapes and balconies. We'll like we'll throw ship at the cops, you know. Um. And these were also very like and I don't want to like be be ignoring this either. These were extremely communist uh like events, Like they would be singing communist songs, they would be like making carrying out communist chance. It was communist papers

that did a lot of the organizing. Um. 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 six six five 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 buildings 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 Kim a Wits 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 positions, landlords felt they had no choice but to pull out the stops to suppress

the movement. By the second week of February nineteen thirty two, 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 the considerable political influence and legal expertise at their disposal, that developed a strategy that included wholesale issuance of dispossessed notices against striking tenants, efforts to win in junctions 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. When Landlords 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, one are the

things that's interesting about this. So in a lot of cases particularly, there was like this 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 um 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 lift like they would put together police systems and lift people's furniture back into their apartments, um,

and move them back in. And so part of the understanding was it cost the city money every time they send marshals out because the city was paying to evict people, So will just move them back in after they're evicted, um, And that's going to like make the situation untenable for the city. UM. So that led to the police setting up like temporary police stations outside of some of the buildings that were like most active as part of a

long term solution to try to suppress the revolt. UM. 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. Um. And so yeah, it you know, kind of this went on for weeks.

And there's one of the criticisms that even this this International Socialist Review right up, I found will make of the of the initial rent strike is that because kind of the 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 um, whereas there was I think among the masses more of like a well, we we

mostly 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 um. And it it kind of led to this uh kind of

loss of of of momentum within the movement UM. And that didn't change until the communists kind of altered their organizing strategy um, 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 pick it rent striking buildings,

to hold street rallies and protest marches. When a protester was killed by the police, they got like fifty people out in the streets and it was just it was this matter of number one, keeping huge numbers of people in the streets, which is you know, expensive for the city,

was bad for business in a lot of cases. UM. But they also started organizing unemployed people in to uh like kind of a quasi union sort of situation that didn't just organized 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 UM and including like eviction protections and like funding to help

people stay in their houses. And that was kind of you could 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 these unemployed councils they called them, would basically help people go to the government, help people like file for benefits, help people and help people stay in their houses, and kind of in the end, through a variety of different tactics, UM, they were really successful in uh stopping large numbers of people from being dispossessed and keeping a lot of these

communities UM together. And the Home Belief Bureaus, which is kind of the government agencies that were formed from like the fund the emergency funding here UM worked with the the unemployed councils to keep people in their home. So it was this you saw this situation where you had it's what started with kind of like physical force confronting the eviction UH teams and confronting the police, and that helped to organize and galvanize people, but it had its limitations.

UM and that eventually evolved into a broader sort of series of strikes and marches that were disruptive enough to life that they in the city that they helped to UH to provide kind of UM 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 UH 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 UH 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 their homes. UM and UH, I don't know, I think it's it's an interesting story and it's it's kind of you see when you when you hear eviction events talked about, you 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 threatened police and uh 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 UM. And these Unemployed councils were communist organizations, but you didn't have to be a communist to join UM 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 battle, which was keeping families in

their homes. UM so I don't know. That's that's that's kind of like the what will include a couple of links in here, but um, that's kind of the overall, uh story of what happened in a particularly in New York in the thirties, which is 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. We're back. Um. And before I move on to to Chris's, I wanted to make a note that I've come across a couple of times in my in the readings that I found that like kind of talk about eviction resistance in the thirties, but within the context of either what was happening in two thousand and eight 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. Um, both as

a percentage of workers and in absolute numbers. UM, it is enormously common. In One of the statistics I found in a New Yorker article about the eviction epidemic is that in Milwaukee, a city which has about a hundred and five thousand renter households. Landlords legally evict roughly sixteen thousand adults and children every year, um. And that's like that 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 where you get so many people out in the streets, is that the idea that families would be evicted, um, particularly any kind of significant numbers, was was fairly new, and so it drew a lot of attention. People were outraged, um, Whereas today it's something that happens all the time, UM, and it's something that uh, they're 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 is there's so much of this going on in every major city in the country, UM, that there's a significant amount of there's you're not just competing with you know, these 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, you why don't

you go on? You know, well, okay, what one thing I will say though, is that you know, still even to this date, like the landlords rely heavily on people self evicting people just sort of yeah, you know, the you had an division does as people's leave, right, and so they do not even even with all the certic capacity they built up, they don't actually have the ability to like if everyone, if literally every tenant, I mean you know, like and peopuilt a lot of tenants have

started showing up in corporate like if it would be genuinely difficult for them to actually evict every single person like by force, even even with the infrastructure they've built up.

But you know I were talking about before before I go into some more resistant example of how we got here, which is, you know, there's there there's a lot of stuff that happens in the seventies and eighties that are sort of important to this um on on a sort of macroeconomic level whose even seems all the way out right. You know, if there's some of these eighties this is a normous economic sort of collapses. There's all these problems,

there's mass inflation. And one of the big things that's happening here is that, you know, profit rates and manufacturing are collapsing. It's like, okay, well, what does that have to do with housing? What what I has to do with housing is that you know, we'll zooming on your hand for a second, because you're like, the US were just like guts Japan's manufacturing economy in the eighties 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 sectors in ruins. How do we maintain the economy?

What if we just give a bunch of credit, the very cheap credit to banks and let them buy houses, and so they do, yeah you know, and you know, and yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we'll they'll buy houses, and they'll and they'll you know, they'll buy houses, and they'll buy stocks, and the value those assets will just keep it like keep increasing and keep increasing, keep increasing.

Nothing will ever go wrong. With this, uh about maybe like eight years later you get the East Asian but we're collapsing, and you know, that's that that's a big part of what that was. But the important part about this for US is that so in order to save Japan, right, the US government guts its own manufacturing sector. And so this means you're in the nineties. You know, you have Clinton going, Okay, how are we going to save the economy?

And Clinton looks at the Japanese bottle and was like, wait, no, hold down, we can do this too. And so you know, the first the first collapses causes you know, Clinton, Clinton gives the banks and 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 thousand eight, where you know, all of the all of the sort of all the bad mortgages, the banks that I'm passing out just implode and and some a couple of banks go under, a couple of like two, like three banks go under, but the ones who survive suddenly, you know, there's all these four closed houses and you know, they just they just

start buying them up. And part of the story is Obama just starts just think called robo signing, where they they just start signing like for closure notices, just random houses, like people who were keeping up on their payments. They just like they just take their houses. Like tens tens of thousands of these houses just get taken and get

back to the bank, given back to the banks. And this is you know, this is this is how the banks are covered from thous and eight is they took about they stole a bun people's houses at gun point, and what what you see from there? And you know, and this is this is this this is a long range trend that's been happening in the economy since, you know, since seventies and the eighties. Is that you know, Okay, so 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 you know, we we we built, we built anormous police force, and

we buy everyone's houses. And now you know there's you know, if you like we we you know this is this is how we get this sue with that's even worse than what was happening in the thirties, which is that, like you know, enormous portions of the world economy are just completely dependent on on these banks and these these 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 thousand eight, you know, spends one of the country's worst hit by by by the whole sort of collapse, and you know, so normal some 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 thousand and eight eleven, people start just squatting in them, and you know, and and

a lot of these people like these people, some of a lot of times's they're going back to the homes that like the bank's attaining for them. And you know, they they form these basically they formed these like enormous I guess you can. They're just sort of the parts

squad organizations, part um like anti fiction organizations. And what what what they're basically able to do is they can Yeah, the biggest one is called uh ps p ah UM And what what what they're basically able to do is they can get enough people together that when the when the police show up for an eviction, they can bring

like five thousand, six thousand people. And this makes it just almost this makes it almost impossible, you know, unless unless the police can like I can specifically isolate one squat squad doesn't have community support, it become almost impossible

to evict people. And so they have these you know, there's there's, there's, there's there's you know, and they they lose some battles, they win some battles, but you know, they're able to hold be because because they have these these sort of enormous organizations of of you know, people who are squatting, and then they have you know, they

have a bunch of communities support, they have support. They said, this is something I think, you know, talking about how the commun strategy works in the thirties, this is something that we're gonna 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 people who are draining to division 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 that they start winning is when they're able to sort of well a a when they stop fighting you know len Lard's individually and be you know, and you start getting these large reverstations. The second read and the second thing that changes when they're able to bring in the rest of the community. And so you know, one one of the another sort of example of this is seen, you know it really from

from you know, seventeen across or North America. You start to see a sort of resurgence of tenant of tenant organizing, and you know, one of one of the most sort of famous examples is Parkdale, which is a it's it's it's it's a place in Toronto and in Parkdale, a whole bunch of you know, several several hundred tenants and across a bunch of buildings, organizing for a long time.

And eventually, you know, the the you know, they keep getting rent increases, they keep getting rent increases, and you know, a bunch of these people are going in danger losing their homes because they can't aford them anymore. And so they start doing rents tricks and they start going for building the building to building, and you know, they're they're not fighting the cops as much as sort of the

communists were. A lot of what they do is so a lot of people, you know, these park Deals working class, community rights. It's also a largely immigrant community, and you know,

it's it's sort of rapidly being gentrified. But you know a lot of people who are in these you know, a lot of the tenants are are people who you know, had had been in like labor actions, right, have been have been in strikes, have 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 bring in like a bunch of the teachers at the local elementary school because you know, a bunch of the buildings that

they're striking in their own but these landlords are right around an elementary school, and you know, the teachers who you know teaching these schools are you know, they're they're also seeing the effects of these kids losing your family,

like you know that the kids losing their houses. Kids just appearings and lost their houses, dealing with these fancial struggles, and so they, you know, the teachers start backing them, and you start getting this bunch of community support and they're able to basically to force the landlords to negotiate

and they get a settlement. It's like the way they describe there's a really good documentary about this called Welcome to park called This is Parkdale, And you know, the way the way they describe it is that the deal they got from from all the all this organizing all these men strikes was so good that the government that like 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 Moments for Housing that was in Oakland that you know was was had had taken back houses that have been taken you know, by by the banks that were just sitting there empty. And you know, at the very beginning of like the police show up with tanks, they show up with you like full ripe police stuff. It's like, yeah, like there, you know, and the moms are sort of like Griffin 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 Lendlers and with the city over it.

And eventually, you know, they're not able to physically retake the building, but they're able to put so much pressure on the city that the the Lendler companies basically forced to sell the house to a community land trust, which is one of the other solutions people who sort of come come up and try to deal with that this this crisis were broadly, which is that you know, instead of instead of having buildings that are like owned by landlords and so you know that the reason there they

have this property is to make money for you and they kick you out of you they can't make enough money. You have you know, you have these buildings owned by the community instead, and you know, and this this, this has been I mean there's limits to it, like you you need to have enough money to actually be able

to like buy these buildings. But you know that that this this that's that's one of the other things that's been, you know, 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 gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back to hear from Garrison and Sophie become the president of Transitions. I've always been the president. What do you? What do you? What do you? What do you? What do you? What are you? Why

are you? Why you Well, here's adds m. All Right, we're back and we're gonna hear from Garrison last. So I'm gonna be bringing up one of the more recent kind of cases of eviction defense that kind of that captured um a bit like a bit of national media attention. This was back uh in December with the Red House in Portland kind of kind of riding off the trails of the of the BLM protests. This kind of had

the inertia to keep this situation. I'm active with people, you know, willing to kind of do the thing where you actually go out and fight the cops. Um, although that did not happen tons with this situation, UM A brief, brief, brief overview of what happened. So there was this family who's been in this specific whose own specific home, like over fifty years, um, and in the two thousands, they

went into a series of financial hardships. UM. They they took out some kind of predatory loans, um, and just they kind of just kept getting they kept they kept running into problems with their home. UM. There 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 but you know, but that all of so all of that is like is like a part of this, but the important part for everyone who decided to actually show up was like we're in like like this was like during like November and December when the plague was like the worst it was ever at and just except we like there was like there was there was there was no vaccinated people in November, right, it was like like like the the death rates were like super were super high. So and that's when the cops decided to

evict this family. Um. The the other the other side of this is that the company that technically like bought the house from the banks, it's also a pretty shady developer company. Yeah, so there was there was a lot of like weird it was are you going to go

into you can? You can go into that. Yeah. So basically just for an example how shadies they had they were, it was some when the national attention started, they immediately backed out of wanting to take the house 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 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

ship it. 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 were just

like went back um. And this kind of all culminated around like December five, I think, is the date that that cops like really tried to to like you know, go in there with like rifles, riot gear and like like drag people out. Um. And even though it was super early in the morning, a lot of like the people who have been protesting for like BLM in Portland

all showed up really quickly and they chased the cops away. Um. And then everyone got super tense because they just chased away like I don't know, like twenty I think it was. It was mostly sheriff's I believe, um. And yeah, so then they did what everyone in Portland does is just build barricades. For some context, on those 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've they've 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 cow trops. They had like sw trips are spiky balls basically that are meant to funk up generally tires, but you don't want to step on them either. They also had um uh I think they're called like they called

they're called check headshogs. Um. They're basically kind of like cal trops a giant and they're meant to like mess at the undercarriage of a vehicle, make it hard for vehicles to plow through. So we we had we had these. There was there was all this you know, all this kind of impromptu weapons. Um. There was like behind all the barricades people like lined up like bottles and eggs to like help to throw out people if they tried to rock. There's various various projectiles like just like laid

out behind all these barricades. But the barricades were thick, you know, they like they actually had like multiple layers UM and they had like binding to keep them together. It would have been like it would have been difficult to get a couple hundred people and heavy equipment, especially if the bear if I mean if they weren't manned. Obviously you could just walk through, but if the barricades had been manned, it would have been um an intense uh effort in order to force your way through them.

So yeah, within like within a few hours, these barricades started to come up, and they kept growing over the course of a week. UM and there was always like they were between like fifty to a hundred people like camping out in this spot, sometimes even more people. UM. There was like multiple kitchens got set up, people try to like there was like they tried to do like

COVID safe protocols in certain areas. UM. And yeah, it became this kuyke relatively relatively like um complicated like network of like people like rotating shifts, manning different spots to always make sure people are watching all the different entrances UM. And basically this this lasted for like like over a week. The mayor was very was very pissed. UM. He was not thrilled that this situation was happening because one it made the sheriffs look bad and two it made it

made the protesters actually look effective. Um. And now that that now, like all of these things we've talked about this before, there's 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 doing like you know, like like attacking people for like doing graffiti on like random walls, um of like like like like pavement in other like apartment buildings or whatever. Like. There there was

there was there was there was like problems specifically around security. Um. But that that that that that happens in a lot a lot of these things, and that that's kind of worth discussing on a whole in a whole another 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 because like we're just like they're just doing this thing where like, we don't know how long it's gonna last.

But as as this was happening, other people were setting up like a go fund means to raise money for um 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 three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars was the number. And because the developer was so shady, he was he like

like a Robert said, he like backed down immediately. He's like, you know, we can, we can find some other solution to this. Just stop talking about it. We stopped 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, So, so that that was kind of the result is that 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 at this spot. But that this would have been totally impossible if it weren't for the militant display of defense that activists UM deployed in this in this street in Portland, because I mean there's like a lot of a lot of you know, like the Portlandia liberal Portlanders who weren't also tappy with this. It's like 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 as a way to like stop this from happening, because they did not want this to continue, and because it would have been pretty difficult for the cops to push through like it we would have turned into quite the ship show. And there's I think too really important takeaways in terms of why it was able to succeed.

And I think most of the ultimate success of it was was resultant on the first twenty four hours really even maybe the first twelve because once the sheriffs tried their first push and got pushed out, if they had done what generally happened in protests, 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 to bringing more folks in. Within six hours or so, they were pretty potent barricades. By the time night fell, they were significant already, and they just by the time I got there that night, they were it was already

too much, too easily handle. Um. And because of what happened in that first twelve 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 talked a lot about the ode loop, right about how you kind of disrupt an opponent, and it is it is

about stopping them from making a decision, right, um. 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 would stopped the cops from observing as well as they might otherwise have. And of course they couldn't physically observed because they were blocked out of

the area. Um, 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.

Um 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 push the city and the police off balance and allowed a victory. Yeah, so you know, the city made the city, the developer and the family made a deal that if they saially, 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 and that is that is still no gooing process. That that's that's still something that's still it's

still being dealt with. But the cops haven't messed with the property since December five, 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, like you know, it's not always possible to raise two dollars to buy to buy back a property. Um, you know, because especially if especially if you're renting. Um you know, there's 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 is something that it can be useful in a lot of different scenarios. Right. It's so the kind of the reason because basically the barricades and the testmnizlation 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, you know, the red haws is sort of interesting because the cops, to some extent, we're expecting just since they just were expecting this much. But you know, again, like as we're saying earlier, landlords like are basically relying to to a very large sound of people invating themselves right there. They're

not expecting resistance. And this is why, you know, like this is why it tends to be. You know, if if you if you do one of these things, you get this like like one enormous police response, right, Like you know, they show they show up, they you know, trow up a tanks, right, And the reason they do that is because you know that 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 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 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 banks, you show up to their offices right like they're not

you know, and you keep going right there they're they're not they're not expecting this, they're not prepared for it. And you know, and you know there's also a park there. Like they'll lose, right like they they will a lot of times. Like they will negotiate, they will settle. They will not effect you like 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, um the podcast that is this one. So go out and I don't know, eat an entire seven thirty seven piece by piece or do something else. Goodbye. You can follow us happen here on Twitter, on Instagram, and allegedly allegedly allegedly Sophie by Everybody. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot 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.