Evictions

Housing Justice Group Puts Power Back In Tenants’ Hands

March 10, 2021 Bryce Covert, The Appeal. Create! Evictions, Housing, Missouri, Tenant Rights

Brandy Granados’s road to activism began in November 2018 when the heater in her Kansas City, Missouri, apartment exploded. She went without heat for two months during a winter that included multiple blizzards. She continued to pay rent, she said, but in response her landlord didn’t fix the heater; instead he tried to evict her and her children. Desperate for help, she was connected with Tara Raghuveer, an area native who had returned after graduating from college with the goal of solving residents’ housing insecurity. “I figured I could either just sit there and be mad about my situation, or I could do something about it,” Granados said. She was able to fight off the first eviction attempt in court, but the landlord removed her to retake possession of the house. She ended up in a homeless shelter for three months. The loss of her home has left her son suffering from anxiety and trauma.

KC Tenants’ Month Of Activism Broke The System

March 9, 2021 Emily Cox, The Pitch. Resist! Evictions, Housing, Legal System, Missouri

Daniel Halferty was behind on rent. “When I made a partial payment in October, [my landlord] texted me, berating me.” Halferty had been hunting for a job since April, but with a history of cancer and traumatic brain injury, he was cautious about finding a job that would be fairly safe from COVID-19. Halferty started his new job at the end of November, and made a payment plan to catch up on past-due rent. That was fine with his landlord, Ellis Real Estate, until Halferty asked to delay just 2 weeks, so he could prevent his utilities from being shut off. Then his landlord stopped communicating. “They just cut out all communication to me, and then Christmas Eve, we had the notice from the lawyer on our door that we were going to be sued for $2,925. They had 30 days to collect the payment and get the apartment back.”

Tenant Organizers Protest The Re-opening Of Housing Court

March 6, 2021 Ken Lopez, The Indypendent. Resistance Report Cancel the Rent, Evictions, Housing, New York City (NYC)

New York City - Eviction proceedings resumed Monday at the NYC Housing Courts. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been unable to cover rent due to the pandemic and the economic crisis it has caused. Members of a variety of tenants’ organizations — including Crown Heights Tenant Union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, Cosecha, DSA Housing Working Group, Met Council on Housing and and the PSL — rallied at Brooklyn Housing Court calling for cancellation of the rents. Although the demonstrators tried to enter both Brooklyn Housing Court and Brooklyn Borough Hall, they were barred from doing so by a phalanx of police officers. “Direct action is the only thing we’ve seen that does anything. Getting arrested, making a scene, is apparently the only thing that moves our legislators so in terms of the moratorium, it was absolutely essential.

No Evictions For 30+ Families In Philadelphia Takeover Houses

February 19, 2021 National Lawyers Guild and Poor People's Army, Popular Resistance. Resist! Evictions, Housing, HUD, Philadelphia

The National Lawyers Guild stands in solidarity with the Poor People’s Army and all of the 30+ families that are sheltered in homes that are reclaimed, abandoned properties in Philadelphia. Three families in Philadelphia, residing in homes owned by the Department of Housing & Urban Development, have received notices or threats of eviction within the last 2 months, and could be thrown out into the freezing cold at any moment. Poor People’s Army / Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign has filed 3 pro se federal injunctions for these properties and are likely to go to court any day. The families should not be viewed as trespassers or criminals, they are human beings that have a right to safe housing.

US-Wide Eviction Ban Could Have Prevented Thousands Of COVID-19 Deaths

February 1, 2021 Jake Blumgart, City Monitor. Educate! COVID-19, Eviction Moratorium, Evictions, Housing

Julie Rey has been living on the edge of eviction for much of the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s a 42-year-old mother of two, and her family has also been especially afraid of infection, as her 19-year-old daughter suffers from a comorbid condition and is at greater risk from the virus. In 2021, what they long feared finally happened. At the beginning of the year, Rey and her 14-year-old daughter contracted the virus, and a judge ordered them out of their home by 20 January. The only mercy was that the gears of eviction did not finish turning until their illnesses had faded. They were able to quarantine away from Rey’s older daughter, and she was spared from Covid.

How Biden’s First Executive Actions Fall Short

January 25, 2021 Nelini Stamp, Blavity. Educate! Evictions, Executive Order, Immigrant Rights, Joe Biden

On January 20, 2021, President Biden signed a series of executive orders that fell short of addressing two major crises facing jobless, poor, immigrants and working people: the threat of a wave of mass evictions and the threats of family separation by an emboldened rogue ICE agency. Simply put: Biden’s first executive orders did not cancel the rent debt and only delivered a partial moratorium on deportations. As the President settles in his new home, everyday people are wondering if they’ll avoid being kicked out of theirs. Millions of renters, homeowners and undocumented immigrants are teetering on the edge of being evicted, foreclosed off their homes or being deported from the country they call home too.

Local Activists Call Attention To Housing Rights

January 22, 2021 Dean-Paul Stephens, The Times News. Resist! Cancel the Rent, Evictions, Housing, North Carolina

Graham, North Carolina - Amy Cooper said she and a handful of other activists came together at Court Square in Graham on Wednesday for an event touting tenants' rights while decrying evictions. "A lot of landlords take advantage of people not knowing their rights, so one of the things we want to do is push tenants' rights so people know what they can and can't do as a tenant," Cooper said. Cooper's thoughts echo criticism from housing advocates across the country. Last Wednesday, housing rights advocates held simultaneous nationwide demonstrations in the hopes of sparking a paradigm shift away from the current system of landlords using evictions as a threat against tenants. Many argue housing is a human right and the system should reflect that.

‘Subsidizing The Spread Of Covid’

January 20, 2021 Kenny Stancil, Commondreams. Educate! CARES Act, Evictions, Landlords

Nearly 200 corporate landlords received $320 million in federal pandemic-related assistance only to turn around and file more than 5,380 evictions between mid-March and mid-October of last year, recklessly displacing thousands of impoverished Americans in the midst of a public health and economic emergency. That's according to Taxpayer Subsidized Evictions: Corporate Landlords Pocket Federal Sweetheart Deals, Subsidies, and Tax Breaks While Evicting Struggling Families, a newreport(pdf) published Tuesday by the Jobs With Justice Education Fund and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

National Day Of Action For Eviction Moratorium

January 15, 2021 Shira Laucharoen, Dig Boston. Resist! COVID-19, Evictions, Housing, Joe Biden

Boston, MA - As part of the National Day of Action to Prevent Evictions, City Life/Vida Urbana organized a rally called “Housing Is The Cure!” on January 13. Protesters gathered outside of the Boston Housing Court on New Chardon Street and marched to the JFK Building. Speakers included frontline residents and faith leaders. The housing crisis has been exacerbated by the coronavirus, leaving many who have lost their jobs unable to pay rent. According to City Life, a new study from UCLA estimates that states that allowed evictions to continue this summer led to almost 11,000 preventable pandemic-related deaths.

Eviction Moratorium Is A Useful Lesson In How Reform Happens

January 12, 2021 Ray Valentine, Organizing Work. Organize! COVID-19, Eviction Defense, Evictions, Tenant organizing

It didn’t make a lot of headlines, but in the recent stimulus and government funding deal, Congress extended what is probably the most significant federal housing policy in a generation: the nationwide eviction moratorium. We should study how it came to be, because it illustrates how working class people successfully influence public policy through collective action outside the political process. Originally implemented by the CDC in September, the moratorium is obviously imperfect in a number of ways: it is clearly designed to be narrowly targeted at “deserving” tenants and to compel people to pay what they can, its reach is limited because in practice it has to be implemented by local judges and sheriffs...

And The Landlords Said ‘Fuck You’

January 2, 2021 David Rovics. Educate! Cancel the Rent, Evictions, Landlords, Portland

Portland, OR - I know it is often hard to see, but significant elements of the folks in power at various levels of government are keenly aware that we're in a crisis, and they want to avoid a total meltdown of the social order. They often like to act blasé and in control of the situation, they like to pretend that we all believe we live in a society governed by law, where we all play by certain rules that are more or less sacred. But really they know they rule over a house of cards that sits on top of a powder keg, and there's a fire burning nearby, which they need to keep from reaching the powder keg, and any notions of the rule of law are relatively worthless when millions of people are suddenly unable to house themselves or put food on the table.

Activist Groups Earn One-Week Stay On Evictions

December 31, 2020 Jessica A. York, Santa Cruz Sentinel. Resist! California, Evictions, Homeless encampment, Legal System

Santa Cruz, CA - Local advocacy groups turned to the federal court system this week in the latest effort to prevent dispersal of a homeless encampment that swelled to an estimated 150 people this month. In response, U.S. District Court of Northern California Judge Susan van Keulen granted an emergency temporary restraining order against the City of Santa Cruz, through Jan. 6, preventing it from shuttering San Lorenzo Park. “The Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown that immediate and irreparable injury, loss, and/or damage will result to the movant before the adverse party can be heard in opposition,” van Keulen wrote in her order. The Santa Cruz Homeless Union and Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs groups earlier filed a request with the San Jose court in response to the city’s Dec. 17 emergency order by the city manager.

Housing Activists Are Fighting Evictions In The Streets

December 27, 2020 Jason Koslowski and Mia Gray, Left Voices. Resist! Democrats, Evictions, Housing, Philadelphia

Philadelphia is facing a housing crisis with little help from the Democratic city council, mayor, or governor. In the city, 5,700 people are currently unhoused. Almost a thousand sleep on the streets on a given night. But more than that, this year has already seen 4,400 evictions filed in Philly courts. Another 2,000 renters are facing the very real threat of eviction and becoming part of the unhoused. This multifaceted crisis of housing is taking place as the numbers of those infected with Covid-19 are skyrocketing in the city (reaching 100,000 cases and 2,500 deaths), as winter descends, and in the wake of a major snowstorm that just hit the city.

As Millions Of People Face Evictions, Here Is How People Are Fighting Back

December 14, 2020 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Podcast COVID-19, Eviction Defense, Evictions, Homeless encampment

The federal eviction moratorium is set to expire in December leaving an estimated 30 million people at risk of eviction. Members of Congress are still unable to reach an agreement on a relief bill that will extend the moratorium, as well as other important programs that were included in the CARES Act early in the year. I speak with two people about what is being done in their communities. They provide examples for others in similar situations. Joey Lankowski is with Food Not Bombs Las Vegas. They are building tiny home communities to keep people sheltered and physically separated when they have nowhere else to go. Then I speak with William X Nietsche whose family was victimized by predatory lending practices about what they are doing to keep their home. Many people in the community have rallied around them, building an eviction defense camp around their house.

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