(en) US, Rochester Red and Black - Housing Resistance and Transformation: From Direct Action to Direct Democracy

If there is one thing that has marked the libertarian tradition, at least in the classical 
sense, it has been the focus on transformative organizing. This may simply appear as 
rhetoric to some people, and in many cases it is. The phraseology is often employed 
simply to celebrate tactics that are cartoonish or illogical, while at the same time 
allowing people to decry more traditional tactics as ?too reformist.? This loses the 
fundamental nature of the term and its roots in direct action. As part of the anarchist 
dictionary, direct action can act as a type of dogma for many people in movements. Its 
use is for its own sake, as if this is the foundation of transformation both for the 
individuals and the community. This misses the context for how to approach tactics and 
what will make them truly transformative.

As we entered the seemingly perpetual financial crisis, and the realities of corporate 
finance started to crystalize in the minds of the public, it became clear that there were 
material necessities that were increasingly lacking in neighborhoods. As things are taken 
away from working people, as collapse becomes eminent, the discussions about how 
transformative an action is can seem arbitrary. The reality is that people need food, 
education, and housing. By the time we entered 2010 the housing crisis became the most 
obvious eruption and the necessity became critical. Since the beginning of the financial 
crisis, some reports estimate that between 20 and 30 million people will be forcefully 
displaced by foreclosure in the United States. This is then combined the rising number of 
rental evictions, the falling standards for rental properties, the slashes in social 
spending and public housing, and a general climate of instability. Together this becomes 
an intertwined net of financial failure, one that allows a margin at the top to pillage 
the rest of us. Here is where direct action has become a marker of transformative 
organizing because it is necessary simply to live and meet your needs.

It is on this precept that the housing movements we engage in, especially with movements 
like Take Back the Land and Occupy Our Homes, allows us to feel a sense of the new world 
growing within the shell of the old. There are two primary realities: the homeless 
population is growing and there are people being foreclosed on and evicted at record 
rates. Our response to this? Put people in homes and block evictions. This is not a 
simple proposition, nor is it one where the details are assumed, but it is on this basic 
declaration that we build the rest of the housing movement.

The most obvious of these is often the liberation of empty bank owned homes. Around our 
major cities, especially in post-industrial rust belt cities, there are a frightening 
number of empty homes that litter working class neighborhoods. Though the specifics may 
lend a long list of sociological explanations as to why these houses are empty, the 
broadest way to see these abandoned home is simply ?foreclosures.? The banks, as the 
primary vessel for home ownership in the U.S., began a predatory and fraudulent lending 
pattern. We have seen them as an almost paramilitary force destroying out communities; 
removing people with force and occupying the land for the financial gain of a few. This 
is not a story of obscure market forces or the flux of international economies, but a 
deliberate process of the rich to roll the dice of the poor. A paradox occurs here where 
hundreds of homeless people in a given area are matched by thousands of vacant homes. The 
answer to this in an organizing framework based in common sense and rooted in direct 
action. The project of Take Back the Land, Occupy Our Homes, and other movements is to 
support people to move into those empty bank owned homes. Instead of living as a 
?squatter,? they fix up the home, turn on the utilities, and maintain it as if they own 
the place. This is the most efficient and direct way to house a family who is without 
aid, and at the same time shows that to simply support them to live as human beings we 
must break the law. In this way living has become a form of civil disobedience, and for 
every family that is successful there is another moment of resistance against a web of 
corrupt financial institutions.

The second foundation of this housing movement is in the direct support of families 
attempting to fight their foreclosure and to develop a solidarity network that forms 
between other families going through the same situation. We are again placed into direct 
action by the necessity of these circumstances since the position of the state and local 
governments is to immediately side with the banks demands. Those in Take Back the Land 
and other movements often provide casework support for people going through foreclosure, 
lending our own networks so that people can get the support of attorneys, government 
agencies, and other organizations. The work is not in these institutional forms, but is 
instead in the solidarity that is exhibited by those involved. The very source of this 
support is in the notion that any one of us could be victimized next; forced out of our 
homes and away from our own stability. We give support in a fashion that working class 
people use to create change, whether in the union hall or in our communities. A final 
confrontation with both state and capital takes place when the police use government 
resources to evict a family at the behest of the bank. The government, in the form of the 
police, immediately takes a side in the civil dispute with the bank, even though we have 
seen a systemic epidemic of fraud in the handling of these foreclosures. The benefit of 
the doubt is given to the lender and the family is forcefully removed from their home. 
This leaves them with a necessity that must be filled: a place to live. Just like the 
housing liberation, we take up the mantle to physically defend the house through civil 
disobedience. Here people will protest and picket, blockading the home, often chaining 
themselves to immobile objects and risking arrest. It begins to become a liability for 
both the bank and the city, which both operate under public pressure and commerce. Here 
we again are forced to meet people?s needs by engaging in direct action in violation of 
the law, except it is in preemption of homelessness instead of a reaction to it.

In these moments of confrontation, a person is able to see exactly what the power of a 
movement looks like. This is not in the abstraction of electoral politics where many 
progressives finally reduce their hopes, where an elected hero will hopefully combat the 
forces of repression on their behalf. In both of these situations, when successful, a 
person?s situation is overturned. Their homelessness becomes a memory; their house 
remains their home. In these concerted moments a community acts as one, understanding 
that the plight of their neighbor is theirs as well. Here we are able to see what happens 
when we fight together for what is right and what is possible, and to win. These are the 
most direct moments in lives where participation is often discouraged or impossible, and 
where the events of the world seem hopeless. This can transform those involved by giving 
a sense of immediatism to a long-term movement. The relationships that have most recently 
governed housing like commodification, markets, development, and gentrification, suddenly 
become replaced by the tools that were able to save it: solidarity and direct action.

Anarchism, unlike utopian and revolutionary visions past, is about both the present and 
the future. The way we survive today is the way we will be victorious and joyous 
tomorrow, and if we can build movements that accentuate this mechanism we can hope to 
?build the new world in the shell of the old.? We know that transformation comes 
internally when it comes externally, but only when it comes from the direct involvement of 
the people and in a way that reflects the world that should be. When this happens we 
cease to simply be actors in a social project, but are transformed by the sense that we 
can really build a society that reflects us. We aren?t just activists and hobbyists.

The center of our housing work is our belief in direct action, and from here we can build 
a multi-faceted approach to a housing movement that takes on multiple approaches when 
necessary. Whether this is work on local policy, land trust models, or radical social 
work, all of it is in support of direct action with the understanding that this is the 
most effective method in terms of results and is the way that communities begin to show 
that they can survive the banking onslaught. It is through this that people will begin to 
be revitalized to a political and social life. Where most people have been so alienated 
from the power in themselves and their community they begin to see an actual cause and 
effect and this empowerment breeds involvement, fostering a movement that only grows and 
grows.

The final solution to transformative housing, one that is beyond the temperamental realms 
of capital or the paternalistic hand of the state, is not something a few people can 
declare with any certainty. The final establishment of community control can only come by 
creating models to prevent mass displacement, foreclosure, and homelessness. As we are 
able to see the power that we have ourselves we are able to peer into a possible future 
for our neighborhoods, and a whole world of social relationships.