Читать книгу Dispatches Against Displacement - James Tracy - Страница 7

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature’s law is wrong, it learned to walk without having feet.

—Tupac Shakur

Thanksgiving Morning, 2003. At the intersection of 30th and Mission Streets, an odd assortment of humanity—even by San Francisco standards—gathered. Homeless families, most with strollers in tow, cautiously mingled with trade-union activists; college students tried out their Spanish on Latino day laborers; street punks checked out the nonprofit workers with a sneer that acknowledged, “I’ll probably be you one day.” The crowd of about 140 had diversity written all over it—they were old and young, with enough ethnicity to make even the most jaded observer speak about Rainbow Coalitions. Picket signs read “Let Us In!” The mood remained mellow, maybe strangely so for a crowd of people who, in an hour’s time, would participate in an illegal occupation of vacant housing—just one vacant unit among thousands owned by the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA),1 the troubled agency charged with providing homes for the city’s most impoverished.2

The bus chartered to bring the protesters to the secret takeover site was late. The driver, reached by cell phone, reported a holiday hangover from which he’d just woken up. He would be stopping for a strong cup of coffee.

Even though it was Thanksgiving Day, there was more than one protest going on in San Francisco; a couple of hundred feet away, United Food and Commercial Workers members picketed Safeway in the ongoing battle over the company’s attempts to decimate employee healthcare benefits. A delegation went over to wish the unionists well, as one nervous housing protester tried to conceal the Safeway logo on her fresh cup of coffee.

The press showed up early to search for a spokesperson, played today by Carrie Goodspeed, a formerly homeless twenty-four-year-old organizer with Family Rights and Dignity (FRD).3 She’s nervous at first but then relaxes. “The Authority [SFHA] owns over one thousand units of vacant housing that could be used to house families. We will risk arrest to make this point.”

“Is this the right thing to do?” blurted out one reporter. There’s silence, and the expression of someone having second thoughts crosses Godspeed’s face. Suddenly that expression disappears.

“Definitely. It’s the right thing to do.”

Takeover! The caravan consisting of five autos, some bikes, and the long-awaited bus arrived at the tip of the West Point Housing Development. Banners in the windows proclaimed: “HOMES NOT JAILS FOR HOMELESS FAMILIES,” and “THESE UNITS SIT VACANT WHILE FAMILIES SLEEP ON THE STREETS.” The dwelling, at 45 Westpoint, was opened up the night before by a covert team. The strategy was for one group of people to do the breaking and another to do the entering, so as to shrink potential criminal charges.

Some were there to pressure the Authority to rehabilitate the vacant units. Homeless people added another thoroughly practical perspective: “If I get busted, I sleep inside. If I don’t, I sleep inside,” one person remarked.

In front of the building, a resident of the development, Camila Watson, took the microphone. Watson is one of the reasons this action landed here—because of her outreach most of the neighbors are reasonably supportive. When Watson became homeless, she turned for help to Bianca Henry of FRD, one of the women occupying the apartment. Watson’s name had “disappeared” from the Housing Authority’s waiting list. Extremely aggressive advocacy (oftentimes visiting at the Authority’s offices to file a complaint with a bullhorn) had helped the agency “find” Watson and offer her a place to live.

“I used to come by here and think, ‘Why can’t I live in apartment 41, or 45, or 47? Give me paint and a hammer and I’ll fix it up.’” With housing, other good things have come to pass. Watson now holds down a job, and is doing well at City College. The experience left her determined to fight for those still stuck in the shelter system.

“They say these units are vacant because people don’t want to live here. I haven’t met a mother yet that wouldn’t move here over the streets and the shelter.”

Another woman told a story of how her homelessness began the day the government demolished the public housing development where she lived and reneged on promises for replacement housing. One resident remarked that she feared taking homeless family members into her home, since her contract with the Authority made that act of compassion an evictable offense. A young poet named Puff spoke in a style that was equal parts poetry slam, evangelism, and comedy. By the end of her time on the microphone, she managed to connect homelessness, minimum-wage work, consumerism, police abuse, war, and genocide. The San Francisco Labor Chorus rallied the group in rousing renditions of post-revolutionary holiday favorites such as “Budget La-La-Land,” stretched to fit “Winter Wonderland,” and “Share the Dough,” set to the tune of “Let It Snow.”

As many neighbors stopped by, a trio of young men came down the hill. “Is that where the homeless people are going to live?” the tallest one asked.

“We hope so!” yelled Bianca Henry from the second floor window.

“How many rooms?”

“Three!” Henry replied.

The youngest looking of the three flashed a smile gleaming with gold caps, “Happy Thanksgiving, Yo!” as the trio continued down the hill.

From Hope to Hopeless, The Local Politics of Austerity

Within a very short time people who never before could get a decent roof over their heads will live here in reasonable comfort and healthful, worthwhile surroundings.

—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the opening of Atlanta’s Techwood Homes 1940

How was it possible for thousands of units of public housing to sit vacant in the middle of a housing crisis? Life for the San Francisco Housing Authority, as San Francisco’s largest landlord and last line of defense against homelessness, has never been easy. Born in 1940, the SFHA initially housed returning servicemen and their families.4 Over the years, it grew to operate over 6,575 units of housing and administer another 10,000 units in conjunction with other partners. In the late 1980s, then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp announced the creation of the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) program, which would tear down public housing and rebuild it. HOPE was intended to move the feds out of housing provision by transferring ownership to resident cooperatives. Kemp’s cocktail was infused with doses of privatization and austerity, yet it wasn’t a road map for displacement. Homes would have to be replaced on a one-to-one basis. It assumed and allowed for most residents to return. If the federal government, like a father in a divorce, left the house, it at least tried to leave it in good working order.

In 1990, the Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act created HOPE VI, infusing new funding into the revitalization of public housing. In theory, the original tenants are able to return to their refurbished homes and enjoy a wide range of social and economic programs designed to ease the transition from welfare to work. Democratic president Bill Clinton removed most of the hope from the HOPE program when, in 1995, requirements for resident participation, return, and unit replacement were stricken from the federal record. Smaller developments meant that not every family even had a place to return. In reality, what often happened was that the reconstruction was delayed or abandoned altogether, or the “mixed income” residency requirements caused the poorest of the tenants—those most in need of subsidies—to lose their homes.

Since 1992, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has awarded 446 HOPE VI grants in 166 cities. A 2004 study found that only 21,000 units had been built to replace the 49,828 demolished units.5 In other words, only 42 percent of the demolished public housing has been replaced. Other estimates put the loss higher, suggesting 50 percent of the public housing stock has been slashed.

No amount of “resident empowerment” can change the fact that once a building is finished, it will shortly suffer small and large injuries. When the elevator breaks or a pipe bursts it is usually too expensive for the residents—minimum-wage workers, senior citizens, and government-assistance recipients—to repair. To meet the deficit in operating costs, the SFHA requested proposals from both for-profit and nonprofit developers to redevelop its properties—again raising the specter of displacement—what would be dubbed “The Plan” by many residents, thanks to a shameful history of being on the receiving end of plans. Many residents, some who lived through the “urban removal” of the 1960s, saw the demolition as one more attempt to kick blacks out of town.

The term “urban removal” refers explicitly to the government-financed and -facilitated destruction of inner-city housing. In the case of HOPE VI, the destruction is of government-owned developments, but in some cases, the government also seized private property and removed entire communities.

Memories of landgrabs past are hard to erase. The word on the street accused then-Housing Authority Executive Director Ronnie Davis of giving his staff free rein to evict outspoken tenants, forge documents, and take bribes. Davis was never convicted of any wrongdoing while in San Francisco but was later convicted of embezzling from his former job—the Cayahuga Housing Authority in Cleveland, Ohio. High-ranking officials under Davis’s watch in San Francisco were convicted of auctioning portable Section 8 vouchers to homeless families. One mother met the asking price by taking a loan from a local drug dealer, and ended up serving a short time on federal probation.6

Tenants: Putting the Hope back into HOPE VI

From the beginning, residents of San Francisco’s public housing and a handful of allies organized to put real hope back into the HOPE VI process. In 1995, an ad hoc group, Fillmore In Struggle Together (FIST), put the public housing issue on the map by mobilizing residents of Hayes Valley public housing to disrupt a conference of housing professionals gathering to discuss HOPE VI. Several officials expressed covert support for tenant activists by feeding FIST inside information about the Housing Authority’s intention to displace residents.7 In 1996, a small group of highly organized residents of North Beach public housing in San Francisco began to raise questions about the fate of their homes, slated to be demolished under HUD’s HOPE VI program a few years later. Because two other Hope VI Projects in the city had remained vacant mud lots for two years, residents invited the San Francisco–based Eviction Defense Network (EDN), which had led a campaign to prevent the evictions of undocumented residents, to help organize others in the development. The residents and EDN began a slow process of door-to-door organizing.8

Residents at North Beach had their work cut out for them. Very basic demands, such as the right to return to their homes after redevelopment and the hiring of local residents in the construction process were dismissed by Housing Authority officials or given superficial and vague lip service. Resident leaders were well aware of the treatment that tenants of other Housing Authority and HUD sites had received for organizing. Across town at Geneva Towers, all but the two dozen or so activist residents had been successfully relocated, intransigence that was largely believed to be passive-aggressive retaliation. It took a sleep-in, led by tenant association president Louise Vaughn, on the front lawn of HUD Secretary Art Agnos to wrestle relocation vouchers for the remaining residents.9 HOPE VI residents at Hayes Valley public housing revolted after the relocation process was accelerated and they were given just thirty days to find replacement housing. Valley residents were also shocked to discover that demolition plans were secretly approved by a former resident of their development, not an elected body as was then required by federal law.10 At North Beach, residents found that a sign-in sheet for a community meeting had been cut-and-pasted into a petition asking HUD to demolish the property. The Housing Authority also routinely offered vocal tenants employment or vacated evictions in exchange for support of HOPE VI. North Beach tenant activist Bethola Harper explained the game: “We learned that we couldn’t sign anything without it being used against us. We learned that agreements we made with the Housing Authority were meant to be broken as soon as they could demonstrate enough tenant support to satisfy HUD. Most importantly, we learned never to air out any differences in front of the city. If we had to argue, we needed to meet amongst ourselves to work out our own problems. They were always looking for ways to spread rumors and pit the races against each other. The end goal was to get as many of us out, and pay for as little relocation as possible.”

Calling out the demolition machine was dangerous business. In 1994, former Black Panther Party member Malik Rahim was hired by the SFHA to assist in educating tenants at the Bernal Dwellings (aka Army Street) about their relocation options in the HOPE VI process. At the time of his hire, the agency knew full well about Rahim’s radical past and five-year stint in prison for armed robbery. It only became a problem after he realized that the HOPE VI plan at Bernal would return as few as one-third of the original tenants. Rahim quit his job and started organizing tenants against the plan, calling meetings to build a greater tenant voice in the process and to demand the right to return. Defending public housing tenants was hardwired into Rahim’s political outlook; residents of Desire Housing Projects had militantly defended the New Orleans Panthers—his chapter—from an attack by the police.11

Rahim allied with former Bernal resident Jeff Branner to organize the residents. During the 1980s, the Branner family controlled the majority of the crack trade at the development. He had served five years in prison, and there was no evidence that he had returned to the trade post-release. However, after leaving the Housing Authority’s good graces, both men’s pasts were fair game again. A newspaper article alleged that violent convicts had taken over the tenant association, followed by a three-day investigative series on a local television channel. The truth could have not been more mundane; the tenant association was hardly controlled by the two. However, many residents were indeed alarmed by Branner’s return and had called the police to complain.

Shortly after the media flurry, the SFHA boarded up the tenant association’s offices. Branner and Rahim broke into the room to retrieve personal belongings and outreach records and were arrested for trespassing. The two faced charges that could have resulted in long prison sentences due to past convictions, but those charges were dropped thanks to the work of legendary activist lawyer, William Kunstler, who was no stranger to defending Black Panthers. It was Kunstler’s final case before his death in 1995. In a final attempt to put Branner away, police resurrected a 1993 cocaine possession charge. He pleaded guilty to possession but not to intent to sell. Under an unusual sentencing arrangement, he was sentenced to probation and 1,000 hours of community service for which he would advise the school district on gang-intervention strategies.

Organizing at North Beach was difficult but made easier by a group of dedicated tenant leaders, most of them with prior experience in organizing. One tenant leader, Gregory Richardson, had been active as a youth in fighting the destruction of the Western Addition. Alma Lark, a dynamic and cantankerous elder, did trench work in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the 1960s civil rights movement and was an associate of Ella J. Baker. Bethola Harper was a former member of the Black Panther Party. Other key leaders, such as Donald Hesbitt and Thomas Toy, had taken part in strikes as trade union members.

The partnership with the EDN worked in a variety of ways. One resident leader joked that the residents needed the outsiders because “the elevators are broken down and we’re too old to go up and down the stairs doing outreach all the time. The [EDN] people are young and don’t mind going up the stairs and doing some door-knocking.”

At first, the tenant response was limited to mobilizing at hearings of the Board of Supervisors. As indiscriminate evictions picked up in pace, they also had to open up new fronts. “One Strike” raised the stakes in any negative encounter that a resident might have with the police, private security, or Housing Authority staff.12 They asked the Coalition On Homelessness to train activist residents in the art of Cop Watching and to loan them the video cameras to do it with.13 They designed stickers that read “Police and Thieves Watch Out: This is a Working-Class Neighborhood,” alongside an icon of a VHS video camera. Since pubic relations is everything during a redevelopment process, the threat of being caught on videotape helped put the agency on notice and chilled out the behavior of their security forces.14

These evictions were part of a national policy shift, and were extremely effective in clearing residents out of HOPE VI sites. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law a bill designed to accelerate evictions in public housing. Dubbed “One Strike and You’re Out,” it was touted as a way to stop drug trafficking and violent crimes in public housing developments. Since One Strike was a civil procedure, tenants could be evicted even if they were acquitted of criminal charges. In effect, what One Strike did was provide an excuse for eviction based solely on innuendo and allegations of criminal activity. Housing authorities across the country evicted entire households based on the arrest of one member. In one case, a grandmother was brought to court after her grandson, whom she hadn’t seen in several years, was arrested on drug possession charges in the neighboring county.

In another case, Housing Authority resident Zelma Matthews was evicted because of her son’s drug charges. A Housing Authority document uncovered by one reporter, Angela Rowen, confirmed that One Strike would be used to help the agency conform to new “income-mixing requirements” by weeding out low-income tenants like Matthews.

The turning point in the campaign came in 1998, as residents and their allies looked for ways to escalate the fight. Some advocated for a non-violent blockade of one of San Francisco’s fabled cable cars, which ironically ended its route in a plaza that cut through the development. As resident Patsy Brown recalled, “When the City decided to extend the cable car stop down a few blocks in the middle of the development, I had a feeling we would have to go sooner or later.” The idea was eventually voted down in favor of a tenant speak-out because of concerns that tenant arrests might lead to evictions, and arrests of allies would signal that resistance to HOPE VI was only the work of outside agitators.

Together, the group came up with another option: they would go ahead and organize a rally but encourage residents to pledge not to move until a list of ten relocation and re-occupancy demands were met. Households displayed trilingual “Sign-the-Contract” window signs. Their ability to hold up the relocation process was the only leverage the tenants had. Federal requirements mandated strict timetables, which meant that a coordinated refusal to move would jeopardize the funds needed to initiate the demolition. Activists knew it was a bluff and that the actual capacity to defend such an action was questionable. “We were brave, but we were often really scared. Housing [the SFHA] was always looking for ways to get us out. The slightest little mistake they would use against you—your kids being too loud, bad housekeeping, whatever. At the same time, we knew that we weren’t going to get anywhere by doing nothing,” remarked North Beach tenant activist Benita Grayson.

Racial tensions also flared up as the campaign went on. Nearly identical rumors about tenant leaders on the take or secretly signing off on each other’s ouster abounded, initially splitting the Asian and African-American tenants. The source of these rumors was revealed to be Housing Authority staff themselves when one was caught spreading falsehoods—in Cantonese—to a Chinese tenant. This staff member was unaware that an African-American neighbor understood basic Cantonese. Armed with this information, the EDN convinced the different factions to sit down with each other, with adequate translation, to dispel any misconceptions the rumors had created. This led to over 60 percent of the tenants signing a pledge to not move until the exit contract was delivered with real guarantees. By and large, residents stood firm, refusing relocation at a time when the SFHA needed to begin the process to comply with HUD mandates. Fearing that a protracted battle could cause it to lose $23 million in HOPE VI money, the SFHA finally relented.15

The Housing Authority capitulated to some important demands. An “Exit Contract” contained legally binding guarantees, most significant among them one-for-one replacement of all demolished low-income units and a limited number of reasons that could disqualify one from re-occupancy. The SFHA executive director presented the signed contract on September 22, 1999, in front of the City Board of Supervisors’ Finance and Labor Committee during a hearing around the Public Housing Tenant Protection Act (PHTPA).16

The HOPE VI program became part and parcel of the overall push toward privatizing resources once held for the public good. Far from bringing in needed resources, the trend has been to remove tenant protections and clear the way for more developer profit. For example, North Beach’s new, private, for-profit management company tried to stipulate that it could convert vacated low-income units to market rate, even though all low-income units would be initially rebuilt. Remarkably, with the help of Housing Is a Human Right, another small organizing group, residents who by this time were relocated across the Bay Area returned to protest. This conversion plan was scrapped.

The partnership of tenants and outside organizers was especially strong in this campaign. The tenants brought to the table the dedication of people fighting for their future. The EDN brought with it a willingness to organize alongside tenant leaders, instead of usurping their power.

This Town is Headed for a Ghost Town?

Back at 45 Westpoint, Ted Gullicksen, a co-founder of Homes Not Jails, takes the bullhorn. Speaking from the broken window, he invites the press and anyone else to check out the apartment. “It won’t take thousands of dollars to fix it up.”

Gullicksen, a working-class Bostonian, co-founded Homes Not Jails to add a direct action component to the San Francisco Tenants Union, which he directs. The group has several “survival squats,” shorthand for covert squats meant to house people for as long as possible. In contrast, 45 Westpoint is a short-term “political squat” used to protest the housing crisis, popularize demands, and generally raise a ruckus. At a political squat, the occupiers don’t expect to be staying for long. In fact, they may spend more time in county jail than in a reclaimed building.17

This ruckus is usually raised on major holidays, especially the very cold ones. San Francisco’s press is usually quick to broadcast sensationalistic stories about homeless people using drugs or having mental health breakdowns in public places. Such “journalism” has played a major role in mustering public support for punitive anti-homeless legislation.18 On takeover days, the camera is forced to observe pictures of homeless people at their most powerful, instead of their most vulnerable. Images of poor people and their allies repairing broken apartments replace myopic images of addiction. Homes Not Jails specializes in the strategic use of a slow news day. As Coalition On Homelessness co-founder Paul Boden remarked, “Homeless people have to be militant to even get a chance of being portrayed as human beings who are capable of organizing themselves, making decisions, and setting agendas. Even when we take bold actions like housing takeovers, the media is likely to portray us as people who are begging for a handout.”19

What about the former residents of 45 Westpoint? What happened to them and who were they? The house holds a few clues. Stickers on the upstairs bedroom door read “Audrina loves Biz.” Judging from the artifacts of the development, they were likely Black or Samoan. Large plastic “Little Tykes” toys left behind suggest a child, probably two. The only other evidence is a sewing machine, a conch shell, and a broken entertainment center.

What caused their exit? Did the family leave in response to the gang turf wars that periodically erupt on the hill? Were they recipients of a “One Strike” eviction?

Bianca Henry surveys the Thanksgiving rebellion with pride, a grin playing on her lips. For someone who was raised in the projects and knows firsthand the over-reaching arm of the law, the fact that she is purposely risking arrest for the cause is a small but dramatic personal revolution.

Henry’s pride in her work is evident. Together with other parents, she has done one of the hardest things a community organizer can do: inspire poor people to move beyond “Case Management” and “Services” and take things to the next level: collective action. The action is separated into two zones: the Arrest Zone (inside the house) and the Safe Zone (on the grass outside). It assumes a social contract with the police to respect Arrest and Safe zones. Henry knows first-hand that even minor brushes with the law can bring the wrath of the CPS, INS, POs, PDs, and various other Big Brother–like institutions adept at tearing families apart.

Henry believes that if you want to get anything done, you can’t just wait for the next election, though she can effortlessly rattle off obscure public-policy points and arcane aspects of the Code of Federal Regulations as they pertain to housing poor people. Starr Smith is Bianca’s co-organizer. A white single mom who came to work with Family Rights when she was still homeless, she’s on the outside fielding questions and dealing with the dozens of unforeseen snafus cropping up minute by minute. They make an interesting team. Henry grew up in the thick of gangs, and her neighborhood was devastated by the crack cocaine industry. She exemplifies the Tupac generation of young people who grew up in the era where every reform won during previous upheavals was being stripped away.20 Smith came of age following the Grateful Dead in the final days of Jerry Garcia. In many ways the eclectic crowd is a reflection of this partnership.

Later in the afternoon, one neighbor the group forgot to outreach to is steaming pissed—the president of the tenant association. She confers with Jim Williams, head of security of the SFHA, and insists that he call the police. Surprisingly, he doesn’t seem too worried. Sarcastically he asks Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness to please call the agency when the protest is over.

“We’re not leaving; we’re moving more people in,” Freidenbach answers.

“Yeah, right,” Williams retorts.

“Really.”

“Well… Why don’t we have our legal people call yours?”

Hope-Based Punishment

Like the Lucha Libre characters of Mexican wrestling, the Republican and Democratic parties have generally tag-teamed on dismantling the social support system ushered in by the New Deal. Throughout the 1990s, the rhetoric of welfare reform blamed “cultures of poverty” and “concentrations of poverty” for poverty itself. In other words, poverty can be blamed on bad parenting, low community expectations, and even poor people living too close to each other. These terms were popularized by right-wing politicians such as Newt Gingrich. In the 1990s this framework was used to obscure the roles of free trade agreements, structural unemployment, and the persistence of racism in perpetuating deep poverty. Residents of public housing were on the receiving end of a series of punitive measures that worked alongside the HOPE VI program to empty out federal housing.

Another Clinton-era gift, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) of 1998, mandated that all public housing developments should become “mixed income,” usually meaning a reduction in homes available to very-low-income people. QHWRA also ripped housing subsidies from households of undocumented immigrants.

Urban land being at a premium, the HOPE VI process usually results in the privatization of many developments as developers contracted to do the reconstruction generally gain partial ownership of the new housing (currently estimated at around $1 billion). So the poor continue to lose, as corporations, such as McCormack Baron and Sun America, make immense profits.

Taken together, these measures accelerated spatial deconcentration—the exodus of low-income people of color from city centers to outlying suburbs. Spatial deconcentration has long been a staple in the pantheon of far-left (particularly anarchist) conspiracy theories. The theory went that, in response to the inner city uprisings (popularly known as riots) of the late 1960s and the threat of urban revolutionaries, the government set out to break up urban neighborhoods of color as a means of curtailing rebellion. It is alleged that an African-American federal worker, Yolanda Ward, was executed in the middle of Washington, DC, to prevent her from exposing the policy shift.21

Whether Ward was executed for this reason or not, it is no secret that spatial deconcentration remains the anchor of what remains of federal housing policy. The US Code of Federal Regulations identifies “the growth of population in metropolitan and other urban areas, and the concentration of persons of lower income in central cities,” and sets a goal to “develop new centers of population growth and economic activity.” Its objective is “the reduction of the isolation of income groups within communities and geographical areas and the promotion and increase in the diversity and vitality of neighborhoods through the spatial deconcentration of housing opportunities for persons of lower income and the revitalization of deteriorating neighborhoods.”