Community Begins Eviction Resistance To Combat Wave Of Displacement

Asheville, NC – Community members, including tenants and precariously housed people, have come together on November 4th to resist an eviction in support of a multi-generational family experiencing forced displacement by Buncombe County. A number of people have occupied the property and have refused to leave until the city and county enact real solutions to the widely experienced housing crisis. Dressed as woodland creatures, the group brought a banner that says “Everyone needs a home”.

The family being evicted—a mother, grandmother and two children under 5, who wish to remain unnamed due to fear of finding suitable housing in the future—has been living in their home in the Sweeten Creek area for six years in good standing, with part of their rent covered by the Section 8 program.

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Howard University Students Protesting Housing Conditions

In an open letter published Tuesday, Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick wrote that students’ two-week occupation of a campus building in protest of poor housing conditions and other issues “must end.”

Students have occupied Howard’s Armour J. Blackburn Center for two weeks, vowing to stay put until the university remediates mold in students’ dorms; creates a housing plan for incoming freshmen; and reinstates student, faculty, and alumni members to the university’s Board of Trustees, among other demands.

Alumni, local activist organizations, and public figures have shown support on social media for what’s being called the Blackburn Takeover. School administrators have warned demonstrators they could be suspended or expelled for continuing to occupy the building.

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The World Has Millions Of Vacant Homes

The whole world is undergoing a housing shortage, but vacant homes are barely budging. The OECD‘s latest data drop shows 42 million of its 426 million homes are vacant. Yes, roughly one in ten homes in advanced economies are empty. There are literally years of housing supply being used as an alternative to gold.

Rather than pondering why it’s so attractive to have vacant homes, many countries doubled down on reasons to hoard. If we only build more homes and give the investors cheap money, there can be enough to hoard too, right? I mean, you almost tried, so partial points. Let’s take a look at how bad the issue has become.

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Black Families Passed Their Homes From One Generation To The Next

Margaret Alston doesn’t remember the night that Hurricane Matthew hit, but she remembers how afraid she was of the flooding that followed.

The biggest hurricane to hit South Carolina  since 1999, the storm caused massive inland flooding across large swaths of the south-east. In Bucksport, the small, unincorporated town where Alston grew up, the Wacamaw River overflowed, inundating the street Alston’s house is on and making it impassable.

“The water was everywhere,” she says. “And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere.” She found refuge at a nearby community center, before moving in temporarily with her sister in Conway, 14 miles away.

Six years later, she is still in Conway, her house sits abandoned and in disrepair, and the funding allocated to Hurricane Matthew victims has dried up.

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The Obama Presidential Center Will Displace Black People

The soon to be constructed Barack Obama Presidential Center poses a great danger to the surrounding Black neighborhoods on the South Shore of Chicago. In fact, thanks to this $500 million, 19-acre homage to the 44th president, there may not be any Black people living there much longer.

Families are already facing rent increases and homes that were once moderately priced are now unaffordable to Black working people. These market manipulations are integral to the gentrification model of urban development. The end result is always a displaced and dispersed Black population.

This crisis is but the latest Obama slap in the face to the people who loved him the most. His 2008 presidential campaign stump speeches were replete with the worst stereotypes about Black men.

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Destroying Black And Brown Lives For High-Rises In The Nation’s Capital

Washington, DC — “Where that McDonald’s is right now,” he says pointing across the street. “That used to be a news stand where I’d buy comics as a kid.” Dumah Muhammad stands in Adams Morgan Plaza in Washington, D.C., a light drizzle misting a small crowd of supporters and press. A few people wrangle a tarp over the PA system and there’s a tent where folks can grab snacks, pamphlets, water and shelter. Five Metropolitan Police cars are parked alongside the plaza and just behind the plaza there’s a staging area stacked with fencing and mingling cops.

Despite literally being surrounded, the energy in the plaza is that familiar direct-action blend of defiance and celebration. Between speeches, music pumps out of the PA and folks dance alongside anti-gentrification artwork and handmade signs.

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Lessons From The National Union Of The Homeless

This July, unhoused leaders set up tents in front of Atlanta City Hall to demand a meeting with city officials. They were met by nearly 60 armed police officers who gave them 15 minutes to disperse. Only moments later, 10 of the activists — members of the newly-formed Atlanta Homeless Union — were arrested.

The group had four demands: permanent housing, health care, access to water and sanitation, and a “seat at the table” to negotiate with city officials regarding housing policy. “Nobody else that’s not walking in our shoes gonna tell us what to do,” the unhoused leaders announced in their first press release. “Teach us how to fish, and we’ll eat forever. The homeless have unionized, and we’re here for what we deserve.”

The Atlanta Homeless Union came into being at a critical moment for the nearly 600,000 people experiencing homelessness across the nation — a number that is likely much higher since data on homelessness hasn’t been gathered since before the pandemic.

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More Than 60 Actions Nationwide Pile Pressure On Congress

As part of national days of protest called by Cancel the Rents, more than 60 demonstrations took place in cities and towns across the United States September 24-26 calling on Congress to immediately pass an indefinite nationwide moratorium on evictions. Protesters also demanded the cancellation of the crushing debt to landlords that had built up over the course of the pandemic as tenants’ were unable to work and back rent accumulated. Tens of billions of dollars have already been allocated for renter relief programs by the federal government, but is being distributed excruciatingly slowly — another focus of the protests. Congress has the authority to prevent 11 million evictions from taking place in the midst of a pandemic. This could be accomplished by incorporating an eviction freeze into the social spending budget that is currently under consideration.

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Climate Protesters Defy Court Order To Block Highway

London  – Insulate Britain campaigners, an environmental group calling on the UK government to implement a better national home insulation program, blocked on Monday the M25 highway encircling London for the sixth time, despite a court order warning them of jail terms if they carried on disrupting traffic on UK’s busiest road.

“You can throw as many injunctions at us as you like, but we are going nowhere. You can raid our savings and confiscate our property. You can deny us our liberty and put us behind bars. But that is only shooting the messenger. The truth is that this country is going to hell unless you take emergency action to stop putting carbon into the air,” Insulate Britain spokesperson Liam Norton said in a statement.

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Universal Housing Vouchers: A Promise Or A Pipe Dream?

Once again, the clock is ticking as states scramble to distribute billions in federal emergency rent relief to stress-weary, increasingly panicked tenants and landlords before the national eviction moratorium expires. If the money doesn’t get out in time, a rush of evictions and foreclosures could be in store this fall.

Would the nation be in such a precarious predicament if everyone who qualified for a housing voucher got one?

Over the last year and a half, tenants who receive income-dependent rental assistance—like housing vouchers—had their rent responsibility reduced when their incomes fell, and their landlords were still paid. But housing vouchers’ eviction-preventing effects were limited to households lucky enough to get a voucher, since the underfunded Housing Choice Voucher program reaches just one in five households that qualify.

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Yimby Movement Is Not The Answer To Housing Crisis

There is a battle raging in U.S. cities around land and who controls it. It is fought with zoning laws and red lines. Its battlefields are neighborhood associations and local elections. Across the country, racist reactionaries square off against capitalist developers in a struggle to determine the future of the housing market. In these types of battles, whoever wins, tenants lose, according to housing organizers working to halt the damage wrought by both developers and racist politicians.

The U.S.’s housing crisis began long before COVID eviction moratoria brought the problem into the spotlight. Median rent in the United States has increased 70 percent since 1995, even as real wages remained static. This lack of affordable housing kept millions of people one crisis away from losing their homes.

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The Pandemic Has Made Homelessness And Eviction Even More Deadly

According to the Associated Press, a one-night tally in 2020 counted 580,000 people experiencing homelessness in the United States. Advocates say that total is almost certainly a severe undercount, with a more accurate total being upwards of 2 million people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged both the difficulty of helping unhoused folks get vaccinated—most don’t have access to transit options—and the reality that they’re more likely to be at risk of severe illness because of compounding health issues. But how we actually help our unhoused neighbors get vaccinated varies from city to city, and often relies on NGOs like Southern Solidarity.

In Texas, the pandemic brought a swift pivot to healthcare support for Austin’s Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO), a nonprofit that plans and implements strategies to end homelessness in Travis County.

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Public Housing To Be Demolished In Tampa For New Development

Robles Park Village is a 433-unit public housing complex in Tampa Heights, Florida, near Ybor City. After months of inspections, city officials found that a small portion of this community was built on top of Zion Cemetery, a historic Black cemetery, forcing 88 units to be vacated to move forward with cemetery preservation processes. Following several surveying sessions, the remaining Robles Park residents were told by Tampa city officials that their homes were set to be demolished.

The Tampa Housing Authority along with Baker Barrios Architects and Property Markets Group announced a “master plan” for the Robles Park Village which is set to include over 1,000 new houses, resource facilities, and a Zion Cemetery memorial site. The Tampa Housing Authority reports that 85 percent of the new development will be “affordable rental housing” while

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Squatters’ History

On September 8th 1946, some 1500 men, women and children occupied properties in Kensington and Chelsea as part of the largest single direct action of trespass in a year marked by the squatting of military camps and empty residences across the UK.

In defiance of the risk of arrest and absolutely zero guarantee of any rights to remain, these actions were executed with meticulous planning and coordination, with people arriving with their possessions in lorries and being directed by volunteers.

Over 100 families entered the luxury flats of the Duchess of Bedford House, via conveniently unlocked doors and skylights. Within days overspill properties were opened near Regent’s Park, spreading through the city to the Ivanhoe Hotel in Bloomsbury and Fountain Court on Buckingham Palace Road.

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Report Details Corporate Landlord Gluttony As Millions Face Eviction

Despite their loud public complaints to lawmakers about the supposed “economic hardships” caused by the CDC’s now-terminated eviction moratorium, large real estate companies have privately touted their solid performance during the coronavirus pandemic—and they’ve rewarded their CEOs with major pay increases.

A new report (pdf) provided exclusively to Common Dreams by the government watchdog group Accountable.US shows that large corporate landlords have reported “strong or stable” earnings to investors in recent months as millions of people across the U.S. worried about losing their homes. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against the eviction moratorium on Thursday, millions of people are now at imminent risk of eviction.

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