Right to the City

http://ariseforsocialjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/homes-for-all-march-13-2013-launch.html

Originally published in Labor Notes.

It took police four tries to evict the Cruz family in Minneapolis. After 39 arrests, the police broke the door down at 4 a.m. Many defense attempts have prevented evictions and saved homes. Photo: Peter Leeman.

Ramon Suero fell behind on his mortgage payments after he got fired for organizing a union.

Suero, a hotel worker and UNITE HERE Local 26 member in Boston, got his job back after a year. But then his wife had to quit hers and travel to the Dominican Republic to care for her sick mother—and they fell further behind.

They applied to modify their home loan, but federally sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac said no, foreclosed, and demanded the family get out by February 1.

The Sueros aren't leaving.

"I want to send a message to the banks: we deserve a second chance," Suero said. "That's why I decided to fight—not only for my family, but for our community."

Local 26 members and activists from the housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana vow to thwart the eviction with a human blockade if necessary.

BATTERING RAM

In the wake of Occupy, the tactic is spreading. Activists around the country are placing their bodies in the way of police doing the banks' dirty work.

In the Twin Cities, supporters get text-message alerts from the grassroots group Occupy Homes MN and mobilize quickly to stop surprise evictions.

It took Minneapolis police four attempts—and 39 arrests—to evict the Cruz family last spring. When they showed up at 4 a.m. and attacked the front door with a battering ram, 60 volunteers held them off.

The whole effort cost the city $40,000, and activists carried the battered door down to city hall to shame elected officials for the misuse of public resources.

"It becomes really politically costly—both to the banks who are creating this kind of chaos, and also to city politicians," said organizer Nick Espinosa.

Many foreclosure resisters his group works with are current or former union members—like Monique White of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 26, who lost her youth-counselor job to state budget cuts. White kept her house after she confronted the U.S. Bank CEO in front of 200 shareholders.

DUMPSTER DEFENSE

When they evict you in Detroit, they bring a dumpster to throw away your belongings. That's how the Cullors family found out they were being evicted last Halloween: the dumpster showed up.

The family had struggled to pay its mortgage after Jerry Cullors, a retired bakery truck driver, suffered wage and pension cuts in the run-up to Wonder Bread's bankruptcy.

So Eviction Defense Committee activists improvised: they filled the dumpster with bags of leaves. The sheriff had to call for another dumpster—buying allies just enough time to win a stay of eviction in court that morning.

A month later, after a march on the bank and a packed court hearing, Fannie Mae backed off and told Bank of America to negotiate a modified mortgage.

'MORAL HAZARD'

Like millions of other homeowners, at the time of their default the Sueros were "underwater": they owed more on their mortgage than the house was worth.

Freddie Mac has already lost the money. It will have to resell the house at today's fair market value, about $80,000, down from $283,000. The question is who will benefit from Freddie's loss: the Sueros, or some hedge fund investor who buys up the property?

The Sueros want "principal reduction": a new loan based on the house's current value. A community bank has offered to buy the house from Freddie for $90,000 and sell it back to the Sueros on those terms.

Fannie and Freddie, which own or insure a majority of home loans in the U.S., could save taxpayers billions by adopting principal reduction, a Federal Housing Finance Agency study found last year.

This is because, when a homeowner defaults on a mortgage backed by Fannie or Freddie, taxpayers are on the hook to pay back to the bank all the money still owing on the original mortgage. If the principal is reduced, odds are better the homeowner will be able to keep making payments and avoid default (or re-default).

Bush appointee Ed DeMarco—who still heads the FHFA—says no to principal reduction. His policy is not to sell back to foreclosed homeowners, because that would create a "moral hazard," encouraging others to follow their example.

"They're concerned that people will get the wrong idea and strategically default," said Steve Meacham, lead organizer for City Life. "From our point of view, it's the right idea. The banks caused the housing crisis. They should pay for it."

And talk of morality seems laughable from an institution that fueled the rampant financial speculation that caused the housing collapse. Community groups are lobbying the president to replace DeMarco.

DOWN FOR DIRECT ACTION

Supporting the Sueros was a no-brainer for UNITE HERE Local 26 President Brian Lang. The union has long worked on housing issues. It negotiated a housing trust fund in the late '80s to help members make down payments—and lobbied Congress to allow this.

Help from the fund "has made the difference for many in being able to own homes," Lang said. "We see our union as trying to transfer wealth to our neighborhoods and communities." Local 26 has begun comparing its member list against foreclosure lists to identify other potential resisters.

Grassroots group Occupy Our Homes Atlanta is helping Gulf War veteran Mark Harris fight for principal reduction to keep his home.

Harris was a Teamster for 20 years, so organizers encouraged him to reach out to his union brothers. Teamsters and Jobs with Justice members started coming to rallies to support Harris, doubling or tripling Occupy Our Homes' usual turnout.

"It's exciting working with Teamsters, because they're more than down," Occupy Our Homes organizer Tim Franzen said. "They understand direct action. The lengths they're willing to go to protect one of their brothers is pretty far."

NO SHAME

You don't have to look far to see the connection between workplace and housing struggles. People lose their homes or get evicted from rentals because of unemployment, underemployment, low wages, or health care bills.

"Anyone who's facing a housing crisis will also have a job crisis story to tell you," said Tony Romano, organizing director of the national coalition Right to the City Alliance, many of whose member groups fight foreclosures.

So political education is key. "One of the big things is always breaking down the shame," said Malcolm Chu, lead organizer for the Massachusetts group Springfield No One Leaves. "So many members come into our space and say, 'It's my fault. I should have done better.'"

In reality, "everybody who got a loan in the bubble is a predatory loan victim," City Life's Meacham argues, since housing prices were inflated by rich speculators. "When the 1% don't know what to do with their money, they speculate and cause bubbles."

"It's another example of the banks trying to generate ridiculously huge profits for investors, at great cost to everyone else," agreed Ron Patenaude, president of United Auto Workers Local 2322, representing health and human services workers in Western Massachusetts.

His union supports Springfield No One Leaves with turnout and what financial support it can muster. A few union members are working with SNOL to fight their own foreclosures.

The solidarity goes both ways. When Verizon workers struck against concessions in 2011, SNOL invited union members to explain their issues to housing activists.

NOT ASKING NICELY

Activists occupied the sheriff's office in Portland, Oregon, in January until he agreed to pursue a moratorium on foreclosure evictions.

The win showed that "what works is demanding and taking action, not asking nicely," said Angela MacWhinnie, organizer with We Are Oregon, a branch of SEIU's Fight for a Fair Economy, "because we had asked nicely for over a year."

In We Are Oregon's network of rapid responders, volunteers take shifts answering the distress hotline and staying at resisters' houses, so no one has to be home alone when the riot cops show up to evict—"and the people getting support commit to come help others," MacWhinnie said.

The freedom of strategy is a refreshing change from worksite fights, she said. Labor law imposes heavy penalties for some of the most effective union tactics, such as sit-downs or intermittent strikes.

Housing struggles offer "a lot more openness to think creatively and make effective uses of our strength," said MacWhinnie.

BIGGER DREAMS

Many of the groups described here borrow City Life's organizing model: the Sword (legal defense), the Shield (public protest), and the Offer (alternative financing).

Last year City Life toured to 12 cities to spread the model. Romano says Right to the City Alliance plans to invite unions to join a national campaign, One Million Homes for People Not Profit—targeting not only foreclosures but also high rents, unstable public housing, and homelessness.

He hopes to train unions in eviction defense and vacant home takeovers.

Organizing works: activists consistently force the banks and mortgage lenders to back off specific homes. "But for every case we win, there's probably a thousand people who don't fight back and who lose their house," said Dianne Feeley, active with Detroit's Eviction Defense Committee. "We need a systemic solution."

Her group calls for Fannie and Freddie to halt all evictions and start doing principal reductions. The committee is also launching a federal court challenge, arguing that Fannie Mae's foreclosures violate the constitutional right to due process.

In Atlanta, Franzen too is envisioning next steps.

In neighborhoods that are falling apart, it wouldn't be hard to "liberate" vacant homes—whether buying them cheap, getting them donated, or "straight-up taking them in militant direct action," he said. But the houses need serious rehab.

He'd like to unite with unions and "force the city to invest in those communities by hiring folks in those neighborhoods to fix up the houses," he said. "We need a solution like that, that creates jobs and puts people in homes at the same time."

To learn how a union can start or join a coalition to fight foreclosures, see City Life's organizing manual, or contact Right to the City Alliance, righttothecity.org.

by Max Rivlin Nadler /Originally posted in SALON.com April 28,2012

From Paris in 1871 to Prague in 1968 to Cairo in 2011 and eventually the streets of New York City, cities have long been a hotbed of radical movements. Over the decades, urban protests have been spurred by everything from unemployment and food shortages to privatization and corruption. But were they also caused by the geography of the cities themselves? The question has particular resonance this week, as Occupy prepares for a series of large May 1 protests in cities around the country.

Geographer and social theorist David Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and one of the 20 most cited humanities scholars of all time, has spent his career exploring how cities organize themselves, and when they do, what their achievements are. His new book, “Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution,” dissects the effects of free-market financial policy on urban life, the crippling debt of middle- and low-income Americans and how runaway development has destroyed a common space for all city dwellers.

Beginning with the question, How do we organize a whole city? Harvey looks at how the current credit crisis had its root in urban development, and how this development has made any political organizing in American cities virtually impossible in the past 20 years. Harvey is at the forefront of the movement for “the right to the city,” the idea that citizens should have a say in how their cities are developed and organized. Drawing inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871, where the entire city of Paris overthrew the aristocracy to seize power, Harvey outlines where cities have organized, or could or should organize, themselves in more sane, inclusive ways.

Salon spoke with Harvey about Occupy Wall Street, the destructiveness of Bloomberg’s development of New York City, and making the city more after our heart’s desire.

You describe “the right to the city” as an empty slogan. But what does it mean?

Everybody can claim a right to the city. Bloomberg has a right to the city. But different factions in the city have different capacities to exercise that right. So when I talk about the right to make the city more after our heart’s desire, and what we’ve seen in New York City over the last 20-30 years, it’s been the heart’s desire of the rich folk. Back in the ’70s it was the Rockefeller brothers for example, who were the big players. Now we have people like Bloomberg, and essentially, they make the city in a way that is convenient to them and their businesses. But the mass of the population has almost no influence over this process. There are nearly a million people in this city who are trying to get by on $10,000 a year. What influence do they have over the kind of city that is being built? None at all.

My concern about the right to the city is not to say that there’s some ethical right way to do things out there, but it’s something to be struggled over. Whose right? To make what kind of city? My concern is that those million people who are living on $10,000 a year should have at least as much an influence as the top 1 percent. I call it an empty signifier because it’s about who gets in there and says, “It’s my right that matters, and not your right.” It will always involve conflict.

Since the 1980s, there’s been a worldwide wave of privatizations of formerly public institutions (schools, rail travel, water). How has this affected unrest among lower-income people who live in cities?

In a way that’s one of the questions I try to pose in the book: Why haven’t we done anything about it? Why haven’t we had our ’68? Why hasn’t there been more unrest, given the immense increase in inequalities in many U.S. cities and in the rest of the world? We’re beginning to see some response to it with Occupy Wall Street, and in other parts of the world, we’re seeing some big signs of it. In Chile students are occupying the universities, and we saw some signs of it in the 1960s against the inequalities that existed then.

I don’t quite know why there hasn’t been more unrest. I think it has to do with the tremendous power of money to command a police apparatus. I think we’re in a very dangerous situation right now because any form of unrest is likely to be treated as a form of terrorism, as part of the post-9/11 security apparatus. What we’ve seen in places like Tahrir Square and other urban uprisings, with echoes of it in Wisconsin last year, there are signs of resistance beginning to emerge. There’s a parallel here to what happened back in the 1930s. When the stock market crash occurred in 1929, the real big protests didn’t start until 1933, and then you really started to see a mass movement emerging. We may be coming to that stage right now, because the depression, recession, whatever you want to call it, is not over – there’s still mass unemployment, and people are losing their houses left and right, and people are realizing that this is not just a little blip. This is a permanent condition. So I think we’re more likely to see mass unrest emerging around now. It’s not like 1987, where we had a crash and then we got out of it in a couple of years. That’s not happening in this country.

There’s a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn’t have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It had a message that it wished to convey, which was putting social inequality on the agenda, and I think they were very successful. At least the Democratic Party is talking about it, and it wasn’t talking about it a year ago. It wasn’t even mentioned. But now they’re talking about it, and you’re seeing it seep into Obama’s campaign, which kind of co-opts that rhetoric.

Why is the Paris Commune of 1871 important to today’s movements?

For two reasons: The first is that it’s one of the great revolts in history. In its own right it’s worthy of discussion and study. Another reason is that it’s part of the ideology in the pantheon of thinking on the left. It’s interesting that Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky all looked to the Paris Commune as an example that needed to be learned from and to some degree followed, as it was in Petrograd in 1905 and later on during the Russian Revolution itself. It needs to be questioned and learned from.

How has free-market urbanization destroyed the city as a social, political and livable commons?

Without romanticizing what the city was about in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a relatively compact concentration of urban population with governance by a political machine — a concentrated, effective political power. Over time we’ve been dispersed through suburbanization, so we have a spread city. You’ve dispersed what’s termed “the ghetto” more and more, so low-income communities are no longer highly concentrated enough to organize themselves. There’s been moments where they’ve been able to come together, like in Los Angeles with Rodney King.

I think the spreading out of the city, and the creation of the suburbs, and the creation of gated communities, fragments the possibility of a coherent political life and this idea of a communal political project. It leads to a lot of Not in My Backyard politics. People don’t want to live near people who look different, don’t want migrants hanging around – so sociality has changed. I always think of the political subjectivity that has been created by the suburbs, the gated communities, and of course it’s a fragmented subjectivity in which no one is going to be able to take in the totality of the city, and the totality of the urban process as something that they should be concerned about. They’re just concerned with their piece of it. To reconstruct a body politic of the city on the ruins of this capitalization process is what I believe the political project needs to be about.

A term that keeps coming up in stories about OWS is the “precariat” (workers involved in either freelance or non-unionized labor). Why are they important to radical movements?

I’m not too fond of the term “precariat.” It’s always been the case that the people who produce and reproduce urban life look at their condition as being insecure, a lot of it is temporary labor, and have been different from factory workers. The left, historically, has always looked to the trade unions and the factory workers to engage its political base in the age of political change. The left has never thought of the people who are producing and reproducing urban life as being significant. This is where I think the Paris Commune comes in, because if you actually look at who made the Paris Commune, it wasn’t the factory workers. It was artisan workers, and a lot of the labor in Paris at that time was precarious.

What you have right now, with the disappearance of many factories, is that you don’t have an industrial working class of the same size and significance that existed in the 1960s and ’70s. So the question becomes, what is the political base of the left? And my argument is to make it all the people who produce and reproduce urban life. Most of those people are precarious, they’re often moving around, they’re not easily organized, hard to unionize, and they’re a shifting population, but nevertheless they have tremendous potential political power.

And the example I always use about that is the immigrant rights movement of 2006. A lot of the immigrant population refused to go to work for a day, and Los Angeles and Chicago had to close down, showing they had this tremendous power. We should be thinking about this group in the population. This doesn’t exclude organized labor, but organized labor in the private sector (as opposed to the public sector) is now down to 9 percent of the population. Precarious labor is huge. And if we can find a way of organizing them, and if they can find new means of political expression, I think they can be mobilized as a huge influence on how urban life is being lived and structured in a city like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or whatever.

You say, “The revolution in our times has to be urban.” Why is the left so resistant to that idea?

I think this is part of the struggle over how you interpret the Paris Commune. Some people say it was an urban social movement and therefore was not a class movement. This comes back to the Marxist/leftist view that the only people who can create a revolutionary movement are factory workers. Well, if you don’t have any factories around, you can’t have a revolution. This is ridiculous.

I’m arguing that we have to look at the urban as a class phenomenon. After all, if finance capital is producing the city these days, and it builds the condominiums and it builds the offices, it is producing the city. If we want to resist the way they are doing it, then we have to wage a class struggle, in effect, against their power. I’m very concerned with asking a question like, How do we organize a whole city? The city is where our political future lies on the left.

How can public spaces be transformed into more accessible places?

I look at it in simple terms – there’s a lot of public space in New York City, but there’s very little public space in which you can engage in common activity. Athenian democracy had the agora. Where can we go in New York City, where we can have an agora, and really talk. And this is what the assemblies were trying to define, what the people in Zuccotti Park were trying to do. They made a space where we can have a political dialogue. So we need to take public space, which, it turns out, is a space in which the public is not allowed, and turn it into a political commons, where real decisions are going to be made, where we can decide if it’s a good idea to have another building project, another bunch of condominiums.

I was going through the parks the other day, Union Square, for example, where things used to be able to happen, but frequently they’re turned into flower beds. So now the tulips have a commons, but we don’t. Public spaces are now entirely controlled by political power in such a way that they are no longer commons.

Bloomberg’s policy has been described as “Building like Moses with Jane Jacobs in mind.” [Robert Moses ruthlessly developed mid-century New York City, often destroying neighborhoods for the sake of speedier transportation to the suburbs. Jane Jacobs, a writer who was his biggest opponent, helped save Greenwich Village from having a highway put through it.] How does he reconcile the two?

What it means is when you are building in a high-modernist style, and you do so pretty ruthlessly. The Bloomberg administration has launched more mega-projects than Moses did in the 1960s, but he tried to do it in such a way that he dresses it up as being about community with an aesthetic like Jane Jacobs’. That masks what the big project is about. It also has a little bit of an environmentalist tinge to it. Bloomberg is, genuinely to some degree, an environmentalist. He gets very happy if you can make a green building. We see him reengineering the streets into “friendlier” kinds of spaces for bicyclists — provided, of course, we don’t have a mass bicycle-in. Then he gets very unhappy.

Do you think there’s been a growing resistance movement to some of these free-market urban policies?

What is striking is that if you had a map of protests worldwide which are against aspects of what’s going wrong under capitalism, you would see a huge mass of protests. The difficulty is that a lot of it is fragmented. For example, today we are talking about student debt and all the protests around that. Tomorrow people might be out resisting foreclosures; somebody else might be organizing a protest about the closure of a hospital, or a protest about what’s going on in public education. The difficulty right now is to find some sort of way to connect all of them. There are some attempts to create alliances, like The Right to the City Alliance, and the Excluded Workers Congress, so increasingly people are thinking about how to pull it all together. But it’s in the early stages. If it does all get together, you will find a huge mass of people who are interested in changing the system, root and branch, because this is not satisfying anybody’s real needs or desires.

Occupy Wall Street seems to be a coalescence of some of the issues you mentioned, but it still lacks a cohesive message. Why has the left always been so resistant to the idea of leadership, of hierarchy?

I think the left has always had a problem, a fetishism of organization, a belief that one kind of organization is sufficient for a particular project. This was true of the communist project, where they followed a democratic-centralist model that they didn’t deviate from at all. And that model had some strengths and certain weaknesses. What we now see are many elements on the left who resist any form of hierarchy. They insist that everything has to be horizontal and openly democratic. Actually it’s not, in practice.

In effect Occupy Wall Street was operating as a vanguard movement [a political party at the forefront of a movement]. They’ll deny it, but they were. They were talking for the 99 percent and they were not the 99 percent. They were talking to the 99 percent. There has to be a lot more flexibility on the left in terms of building different organizational structures. I was very impressed by the model of El Alto in Bolivia, where there was a mix of horizontal and hierarchical structures that came together to create a very powerful political organization. I think that the sooner we get away from certain rules of discussion, the better.

The current rules of discussion that are currently in vogue are very good for small groups, because you can have an assembly. But if you want to create an assembly that includes the entire population of New York City, you can’t. You have to then think about whether there will be regional assemblies, or a mega-assembly. In fact, Occupy Wall Street does have a coordinating committee. They’re just very nervous about actually taking leadership and organizing.

I think the successful movements always have a mix of horizontality and hierarchy. The most impressive one I’ve come across were the Chilean student movements, where one of the leaders was a young communist woman [Camila Vallejo], who is fully open to being as horizontal as possible, rather than having a central committee decide things. But at the same time, when leadership is called for, it should be exercised. If we start to think in these terms, we’ll have a more flexible system of organization on the left. There are groups within Occupy that are trying to get people within the Democratic Party to sign support for Occupy’s demands, and if not, they’re going to run candidates against them. There’s a wing doing that sort of thing, but they’re not the majority at all.

At the end of your book, you don’t provide many answers, but you wish to open a dialogue for how to get out of this gross economic inequality and the multiple crises of capitalism. Do you see this coming out of Occupy?

It could possibly. If the union movement moves toward more geographical forms of organization, and not just based around workplaces, then the alliances between urban social movements and unions would be much, much stronger. What’s interesting is that there’s quite a good history of those types of collaborations that have been quite successful. I think that if you could just plant that seed, a huge change could be possible. If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible. My book is a groundwork for exploring all of these possibilities, and not dismissing anything, because we don’t know what the successful form of organization will be. But there’s a huge space at this moment for political activism.

Right to the City Alliance is supporting our local member groups in NYC in their efforts to provide support to communities that are not served by larger relief efforts throughout the city.  Below is some information  regarding our member groups. For the most updated info on how to volunteer or donate to grassroots organizations doing direct service work, please go to www.interoccupy.net/occupysandy/

(information BELOW provided by JFREJ, FUREE, GOLES, FIERCE,  CAAAV and CVH) 

FUREE

Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) is a Brooklyn-based multi-racial organization made up almost exclusively of women of color.  We organize low-income families to build power to change the system so that all people's work is valued and all of us have the right and economic means to decide and live out our own destinies. We use direct action, leadership development, community organizing, civic engagement and political education to win the changes our members seek. Our guiding principle is that those directly affected by the policies we are seeking to change should lead the organization.

FOR THE LATEST ON UPDATES REGARDING RELIEF EFFORTS FOR THE GOWANUS HOUSES IN BROOKLYN, please call 347-806-6435. Contributions can be delivered to Gowanus Community Center, 420 Baltic Street in Brooklyn and will be accepted until 6 p.m. We apologize if we haven't responded to your e-mail earlier. For all other inquiries, please call the FUREE Office at 718-852-2960 x. 300. Thanks.

CAAAV- ORGANIZING ASIAN COMMUNITIES

Recently CAAAV announced that due to their work, they were able to get the lights up and running in Chinatown and through the work of hundreds of volunteers and several donations, they were effectively helping the neglected community of Chinatown through a process. Click on the pic below to find out the latest on the work of CAAAV. 

About CAAAV: Organzing Asian Communities
CAAAV works to build grassroots community power across diverse poor and working class Asian immigrant and refugee communities in New York City. Through an organizing model constituted by five core elements- basebuilding, leadership development, campaigns, alliances, and organizational development- CAAAV organize communities to fight for institutional change and participates in a broader movement towards racial, gender, and economic justice.

GOLES (GOOD OLE LOWER EAST SIDE)

About GOLES (The Good Old Lower East Side)

GOLES, is a community based organization that's been fighting for tenant rights, homelessness prevention and community self determination in the Lower East Side since 1977. GOLES has worked for decades to build the power of low-income residents to address displacement and gentrification, 
and ensure a clean, healthy environment where people live.

FIERCE

CHECK OUT FIERCE'S STATEMENT ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS- Hurricane Sandy, LGBTQ Youth & the Power of Community Organizing