PART I: Defensive occupations to save homes are increasingly visible as crises compound
About this series
As the current housing crisis deepens, groups of unhoused people and other activists around the country have increasingly taken a militant approach in the fight for housing for all. Street Roots is investigating this phenomenon locally and nationally in this three-part series.
This is Part I.
PART I: Militant housing activism in Portland, our recent history of militant housing activism and what is driving it.
PART II: Connecting events in Portland to a larger boom of militant housing action in cities like Philadelphia, Oakland, Tacoma and more.
PART III: How a militant approach to housing activism won big in Philadelphia and what activists behind this national wave have to say to others in similar situations.
On Dec. 10, 2020, Portland’s Red House on Mississippi Avenue erupted into national news. The militant eviction defense, already well into its third month, had come to a head two days earlier as police surrounded the house and attempted to evict the Kinney family and its supporters, arresting seven and injuring at least one protester in the process.
In response, the protesters re-secured the house, which had come under foreclosure, erecting extensive barricades and putting out a call for support, which Willamette Week reported rallied 100 to 200 people, many camped out, occupying a portion of the neighborhood. In the following days, the scene only intensified as local elected officials and right-wing media condemned the defense and protesters dug their heels in, further fortifying the house and posting armed guards around the perimeter.
While the defense would go on to be successful both in holding off police and in raising enough money to meet the new owner’s offer to sell the home back to the family, a complete resolution to the winding series of events has still not been definitively reached.
Despite this, the defense has been touted as a model for militant housing activism, with leftist media outlet CounterPunch describing it as “the future of eviction defense.” Looking at the outcome, it’s not hard to understand why, but the occupation’s relationship to Portland’s history and the present moment is significant.
Structural racism and a reckoning
During a Dec. 9 press conference laying out some of the family’s story, Kinney family matriarch Julie Metcalf Kinney broke down the history that had led to their eviction.
Detailing the Afro-Indigenous family’s time in the Red House, from her father-in-law buying the house in 1955 and raising his kids there to her immediate family moving there in 1983 to the present, Kinney (Upper Skagit) connected their current situation to ongoing processes of Colonial expansion and anti-Black dispossession such as gentrification and redlining.
And while these issues go back hundreds of years (as detailed in a Dec. 12 article about the Red House in Indian Country Today), the Kinneys were forced to the front of the city’s consciousness as raucous protests about the police killing of George Floyd extended well past 100 nights.
“We had a big uprising and (with that a) big uptick in direct action related to Black Lives Matter,” said Leeor Schweitzer, an organizer with Portland Tenants United, “and then we’ve seen, as the nightly protests have diminished, a lot of interest in directing that energy towards other issues that are disproportionately impacting communities of color. … I think that Red House action is the perfect example where people were seeing the intersection.”
This recent uptick in militant housing activism has not been limited to the Red House. A month prior, protesters numbering at times in the hundreds surrounded a large camp that unhoused people had built at Laurelhurst Park, holding off the completion of a sweep for over a week.
Amid these high-publicity actions, many low-key actions have also occurred. An interactive map published by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project shows that there are also a number of active rent strikes in Portland. These rent strikes come on the heels of organizing this past spring, in which a number of local organizations and a Facebook group with over 1,000 members pushed for widespread rent strikes, according to The Village Portland.
Findings from Multifamily NW’s 2020 Rent Survey show that between May and October of 2020, approximately 10% to 15% of Oregon households in the study population could not or did not pay their rent by the 8th of the month.
A Portland tradition
While more militant actions and approaches have gained increasing exposure lately, they are nothing new for Portland. Two years ago, Portland Tenants United supported the tenants of Holgate Manor in a rent strike involving 21 of the building’s 53 remaining units. The apartment complex had recently been bought up by the large property management company, Princeton Property Management, and was in the process of gentrifying.
Earlier that same year, another company with development plans ran into trouble when squatters took over an abandoned nursery that the company had planned to develop into a self-storage facility, KATU news reported. Similar actions appear regularly throughout local TV news archives, starting in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 when the city faced a “Zombie House” crisis and KATU reported squatting was on the rise.
But actions like these are nothing new to some who have lived them. After escaping an abusive relationship, Lisa Larson squatted in houses with her current husband, Scott Layman, until legal troubles from the squats forced them to the woods.
After that proved traumatizing, the couple ended up at Dignity Village, where they have lived for 11 years and Larson serves as vice chair. She described the village — which is city sanctioned, self-governing and self-supporting — as “the houseless helping the other houseless.”
Dignity Village’s model, which many younger camps take inspiration from, wasn’t easy to create. Two decades ago, in the winter of 2000-01, unhoused activists took on Portland’s infamous sit-lie laws, camping in plain sight and, once removed by the police, marching as a convoy to another spot to repeat the protest.
“You couldn’t sleep downtown,” Layman said. “The police would wake you up and tell you move, wake you up and tell you move, wake you up and tell you move all night long.
“And so they banded together and they pitched tents. They decided to be seen instead of hide,” Layman said. “They moved around downtown for like seven different spots — cops come, move them and they push their shopping carts with all their belongings to another site. And that made TV, and of course that made national news.
“And then once we started asking for just a basic place to be, people from all over the country were calling, coming here to Portland to help fight, and then that’s kind of how the Village was formed,” Layman said. “And through negotiations with the city, we came out here to the piece of property that we’re on, and we’ve been here ever since.”
(These marches were in part organized and supported by the advocacy arm of the Street Roots organization.)
Current drivers and responses
While Portland’s history may reveal it should be no surprise that these tactics and approaches are still in use, it doesn’t entirely explain why they are increasing — or at least increasingly visible.
Lauren Everett, a Portland Tenants United organizer, described a culture of mutual aid blossoming out of the Black Lives Matter uprising and the early days of the pandemic.
Everett, who is an Urban Studies Ph.D. student at Portland State University, told Street Roots it was as if people suddenly realized, “Oh! We can form these really informal networks of people helping each other, and that’s actually really effective.”
Despite a widely perceived increase in militant housing activism, it is impossible to truly quantify, cautioned Schweitzer, a Portland Tenants United organizer. Part of that perception, he said, could be increased visibility as issues that previously affected mostly Black and Indigenous people begin to affect lower-middle-class white people.
Either way, the repercussions of these long-standing issues are racialized. According to Portland State University’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, Black people are twice as likely, and Indigenous people five times as likely, to experience homelessness.
And across racial demographics in recent years, the number of people experiencing homelessness who are sleeping outside, as opposed to in a shelter, has been uniformly up, with a 22% increase in Multnomah County’s unsheltered population between the county’s 2017 and 2019 biannual Point in Time Counts, although the overall number declined in the same time period. That may be because Point in Time Counts, which counted a total of 4,177 people experiencing homelessness in 2017, are thought to be drastically low, with a HRAC report concluding 38,000 people likely experienced homelessness in the tri-county area that year.
FINDING HOME: A Street Roots series examining America’s housing crisis
To Everett, this itself may be another cause of more militant approaches to housing activism.
“When there’s an emergency, there’s that kind of a human response to just roll up your sleeves and figure out what you can do,” she said. “You don’t have time anymore to wait around on if this representative, that commissioner is gonna hear your case. … You’re about to lose your home, and so it necessitates a really physical, direct response.”
Residents of the Laurelhurst Park camp echoed this when speaking with Street Roots in November and suggested that increased solidarity from housed activists has expanded their views of what is possible.
In mid-December, as the scale of the Red House’s win became clear, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler acknowledged the potential snowballing of one group inspiring another. The Oregonian quoted Wheeler as saying, “I hope it is not an ongoing phenomenon.”
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