Everything Old is New Again, with Methods 173 and 183

 

At NTodd’s request, I am  following up on his post at Dohiyimir about the recent reappearance of  some protest tactics that haven’t been seen in this country in an organized way since the Great Depression.

But now, in response to the huge wave of mortgage foreclosures around the county, ACORN has started a civil disobedience campaign to prevent people whose homes have been foreclosed on from being evicted. (Method 173. Nonviolent occupation)

They are organizing teams of “Home Defenders” to peacefully occupy the houses and support the the families who live there.  Since the last group to do mass organizing around this tactic were the Unemployed Councils of the 1930’s, which were organized by the Communist Party U.S.A.,  one begins to understand the fear and loathing that the name “ACORN” conjures up for right wing Republicans today.

From The New York Times:  

Acorn’s strategy is modeled on a movement the group led in the 1980s, when squatters occupied and set out to renovate thousands of abandoned city-owned buildings in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit,  among other cities. The motivation was to solve what Ms. Lewis has called “the working family’s housing crisis.”

In cities like Orlando, Fla., which has one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates — and Boston, Houston, Baltimore, Oakland, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz. — Acorn organizers have been creating networks to alert a homeowner’s neighbors when an eviction has been scheduled or deputies are on the way. Some volunteers will summon friends and relatives to converge at the home, while others will be in charge of notifying the news media. Organizers are also recruiting lawyers willing to defend for no fee those who are arrested.

The campaign, called Home Defenders, enlisted about 500 participants during meetings held Friday and Saturday in New York and five other cities. Ms. Lewis and other organizers said that they believed the number will reach into the tens of thousands within weeks.

“This is a desperate, last-ditch effort by folks who are working two or three jobs, single mothers, elderly people who don’t know what else to do to save their homes,” said Ginny Goldman, Acorn’s lead organizer in Texas, where the campaign began in Houston on Saturday.

And it looks like some in the law enforcement community are not unsympathetic:

Sheriffs in some places have also taken a stand. In Wayne County in Michigan, Sheriff Warren C. Evans suspended all evictions starting Feb. 2 until the federal government implements a plan to help homeowners facing foreclosures. In Cook County in Illinois, which includes Chicago, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart directed a lawyer to review all eviction orders to protect people who kept on paying rent after the buildings where they lived had been seized by banks. In Butler County in Ohio, Sheriff Richard K. Jones ordered his deputies not to evict people who had no place else to go.

“This is a cold place in the winter and I will not give people a death sentence for not paying their debts,” Sheriff Jones said in an interview. “These are human beings, responsible middle-class people who fell on hard times, and I just can’t toss them out onto the streets.”

 I’m personally amazed how quickly attitudes have changed as the economic crisis is  now affecting people far beyond the chronically poor.  And at the militancy of at least one Congresswoman, Marcy Kaptur, urging her constituents to stay in their homes no matter what, ignoring and/or resisting eviction notices, through the use of a tactic called “Produce the note”.

Eviction resistance and rent strikes were popular tactic in the Great Depression, but in those days, the people being evicted were tenants rather than homeowners. From "A People's History" by Howard Zinn:

All over the country, people organized spontaneously to stop evictions, in New York, in Chicago, in other cities-when word spread that someone was being evicted, a crowd would gather; the police would remove the furniture from the house, put it out in the street, and the crowd would bring the furniture back.

Thousands of organized incidents of eviction resistance occurred throughout the Great Depression and had a lasting impact on government policy, in the areas of  rent control and public housing.  After years of rent strikes and eviction resistance, Congress passed the United States Housing Act of 1937. The act established a public housing program under the direction of the U.S. Housing Authority to provide loans to local agencies for the  construction of low-rent housing. The USHA was the predecessor of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is supposed to ensure affordable housing today.  In 1942 Franklin Roosevelt signed the Emergency Price Control Act into law, which established a countrywide price control system including limits on the amount of rent landlords could charge for apartments. When the act expired in 1947, various states and municipalities around the country stepped in to keep some form of rent controls in place.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis,  Method 183, Nonviolent land seizure,  is also coming into play.  

“While delivering a where’s-the-love message on Valentine’s Day may seem like a gimmick, an action by homeless advocates to be announced this weekend is anything but a stunt, according to its organizer. On Saturday, Cheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (at right, center) will reveal to members of the media its long-running project to find housing for homeless people in some of the many foreclosed and vacant homes on   Minneapolis' North Side and South Side.”(hat tip to Eschaton stalwart AndyMN )

    So is it time to say that the American people are awakening from their decades long stupor, and change is on the way?   The mood of the country feels not at all like the 60's to me. It's starting to smell more like the 1930's.

Some more suggested reading and listening on this topic:

At Studs Terkel’s website, I found an interview with a Judge who presided over landlord and tenants court back in the days. You can listen to Part 1, here and  Part 2, here.

How-To instructions for using  “Produce The Note” to avoid foreclosure eviction here.

Sign up to join  ACORN’s  Home Defender Teams, now being organized around the country here.

Read "Self Help in Hard Times" (Chapter 15 of  a People's History of The United States here.     Read "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" or "The Hungry Years" by T. H. Watkins here. 

By Karin

 

Comments

[Judy]

Nice post. On foreclosure: I like the produce-the-note strategy. I live in Tampa and know one person he helped, and it actually worked. They did not get the entire home paid for, but they got terms adjusted to be favorable and they were able to avoid foreclosure. It really varries by situation and probably the laws of your state on how far this goes. This site has all the videos they have done. Watch all the videos here:

http://tinyurl.com/producenotevideo

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