Detroit, Michigan
The day of the Garretts’ eviction began as an unforgiving Michigan morning. It was bitterly cold, about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. The roads were so slick that a driver on the East Side had already crashed into a utility pole and died before most of the city even woke.137 On Bertha and William’s street, an inch of packed snow blanketed the front yards and roofs of the neighborhood, and ice tinged the branches of the leafless trees. The whole world looked grey and bleak, except for Bertha and William’s front lawn. It was buzzing with energy.
A small crowd had amassed, the freezing people stamping their feet and hunching over small cups of steaming coffee that were delivered by Bertha’s neighbors. Willie and Tommy McDade from up the street were there, Willie wrapped in a purple-and-yellow-checkered scarf. A.J. Freer, the vice president of the United Auto Workers Local 600, mingled with a handful of workers from his union. A younger crowd, some sporting Occupy Detroit patches, clustered together, talking about the plans. One driver with the Teamsters Union had arrived at 4:30 a.m. just in case things got started early.
The action had been thrown together at nearly the last moment, and no one knew how it would play out. The previous Friday—only three days earlier—Michelle had called Eric Campbell, a reporter at the Michigan Citizen, to explain the impending eviction. Campbell started making calls. Bertha, meanwhile, finally told her husband, William, about the eviction and her and Michelle’s plan to fight it. He agreed.
“Just telling me I got to up and leave . . . I just can’t see it,” he said. “I can’t understand it. We got a lot of love in this house. We watch out for each other. I can walk the street over here, being a blind man, and I feel pretty secure,” he paused as his voice caught in his throat. “I get a little emotional, because everybody watches out for me … I just can’t see walking away from what I’ve worked for for years. I just can’t do it. I’m tired of seeing the bank and the mortgage companies distress this Detroit. I’m not going to walk away from this. I’m going to fight for it. I’m going to fight till my last breath.”138
By Saturday night, all the local activist and community groups were gathered together in Bertha’s home: Moratorium Now!, People Before Banks, Occupy Detroit, Jobs for Justice, and the United Auto Workers Union Local 600. Because the crisis hit Detroit earlier and harder than other places, the city has a vast network of housing groups, some of which have been at the forefront of the growing national movement since well before Occupy began. Detroit’s local union branches, too, are some of the most radical of any in the country, and the UAW Local 600 had a long history of political and social activism.
“Unions used to be groups that championed social issues, not just groups that negotiated really good contracts,” said A.J. Freer, the second vice president of the Local 600. He considered the effort to reestablish unions as the guardians of society to be just as important to his job as representing his own workers—both for the good of his city and for the future of unions themselves.
Still, two days didn’t give the group much time to work with. Reverend Charles Williams, a prominent local pastor at King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church, organized a prayer circle for Sunday night to give Bertha courage. Others were more straightforward.
“Occupy Detroit was honest with me,” said Bertha. “There was no false hope. It was last-minute, they said, but they’d try.”
A truck pulling an enormous construction dumpster came rumbling down Pierson Street around mid-morning on Monday. That was the moment everyone was waiting for. In Detroit, a city ordinance states that a dumpster must be placed in front of the foreclosed house in order to proceed with the eviction, meaning that if the dumpster is blocked, so too is the process of evicting people from their homes. As the truck approached, one car, and then a second, screeched to a stop in the middle of the street, parking laterally to prevent the dumpster from reaching the house. A young man ran down the road and jumped onto the driver’s side of the truck, shouting for him to turn around. The crowd of people rushed into the street. An older man with Parkinson’s disease planted himself in front of the truck’s bumper and shook his fist.
“It was crazy,” remembers Joe McGuire, a law student who worked with Occupy Detroit. “It’s one thing to know academically [what a blockade is], but to see it is another thing.”
The driver circled the block, trying to park the dumpster nearby. But Bertha’s neighbors were prepared. One man told the driver that he couldn’t park that shit in front of his house. Others agreed. Blocked and confused, the driver finally left.
Michael Shane, one of Bertha’s neighbors and an organizer with Moratorium Now!, called Bertha to tell her that the dumpster had left—for now.
As neighbors and supporters blocked the dumpster from reaching her house, Bertha stood in a hallway inside the imposing Dime Building in Detroit’s downtown financial district. Completed in 1912, the building is a twenty-three-story steel-frame skyscraper initially named after its first primary tenant, the Dime Savings Bank. In 2009, it was renamed the Chrysler Building when executives at the auto manufacturer moved into the top two floors, but the new name didn’t change the building’s symbolism as Wall Street’s outpost in Detroit. And in a small office on the ninth floor was Bank of New York Mellon’s local headquarters.
The Bank of New York Mellon is despised in Detroit for gambling away $1 billion worth of the city’s pension funds in the years leading up to the financial meltdown.139 The bank had come under similar fire on the East Coast, where it stole nearly $2 billion from New Yorkers’ pension funds, including the retirement funds of firefighters, teachers, and police, by lying to its clients about the foreign exchange rates on trades.140 But in Detroit, the gambling loss contributed to such a budget shortfall that the local government was nearly taken over by a state receiver only months after the money’s disappearance was revealed. In the ensuing debate, many mistakenly blamed the union workers themselves, rather than the bank that lost their pensions, for the city’s financial crisis.
Outside of the Dime Building, about two dozen people stood shivering and holding signs reading, STOP THE EVICTIN OF THE GARRETT FAMILY. Inside, Bertha was camped out on the ninth floor, waiting to speak to a representative about her mortgage contract. She had leverage now; a crowd of protesters had just turned away the city’s dumpster and halted the bank’s intended eviction. Yet the secretary informed Bertha that she would not be allowed in. No one was available to see her today. From the hallway, the little office looked about as far away from the center of global capital as one could get, but Bertha realized that it still operated under the same rules of exclusion and faceless bureaucracy.
“I watched the men go in and out, and I just thought: Well, if I can’t go in, then they can’t come out,” she said.
With that thought in her mind, sixty-five-year-old Bertha Garrett, decked out in her elegant winter coat and cream-colored fur hat, lay down in front of the door to the office of the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation in the Financial District of Detroit, and she refused to move.
The term “eviction blockade” is not a metaphor. As Bertha’s splayed body and the dumpster-blocking crowd demonstrate, eviction blockades are physical, embodied actions designed to prevent authorities from seizing control of a family’s home. Since the housing crisis began, communities in dozens of cities across the United States have orchestrated eviction blockades that are powerful, nonviolent, and utterly magical.
“My daughter called and said that the sheriff was here,” remembered Patricia Hill, a retired police officer whose eviction blockade stopped the foreclosure of her century-old two-story graystone in Chicago. “So I called J.R., and before you know it, all these people are on the porch chanting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ and then more people are coming up on bicycles and everyone is saying, ‘We are the people—What?’ My neighbors are out on their porches and we’re yelling, ‘We got a story—What?’ The construction worker down the street is coming over, and the whole porch is filled with people chanting, ‘To tell the whole wide world this is the people’s territory!’ And the eviction blockade is out in full force.”
She paused to catch her breath. At sixty-one years old, with porcelain skin and a bun of grey dreadlocks, Hill was gracefully perched on her stone front steps more than a year after the bank attempted to evict her in March 2011.
“It was a beautiful thing. I felt like I was floating outside myself, and I was just watching all these people on my front porch to defend my home,” she said.
Housing activists in the United States have used the tactic of eviction blockades for nearly a century, if not longer. Inspired by Occupy’s ethos of direct action and people power, eviction blockades are once again spreading across the country as a definitive tactic of the housing movement. Drawing directly on the symbols of Occupy’s encampments, some eviction blockades turn into miniature tent cities on the families’ front lawns. In Atlanta, Carmen Pittman turned her grandmother’s foreclosed house into a neighborhood community center, complete with a half dozen tents and an outdoor kitchen. In Center Point, Alabama, Allyn Hudson of Occupy Birmingham lived in a tent on the Ward family’s front lawn for fourteen weeks during the winter of 2011—2012, weathering storm systems and a tornado that passed within one hundred feet of the tent.
Each eviction blockade has its own story. In Toledo, a man sealed himself into his own home with cinder blocks and cement, forcing the police to spend days trying to get him out. In Minneapolis, one woman defiantly planted a garden in her backyard a few weeks before her scheduled eviction to demonstrate that she was not going to leave. In New York City, waves of people halted auctions of bank-foreclosed homes by singing in the courtrooms, and more than one thousand people amassed for a home liberation in East New York, Brooklyn, on December 6, 2012. Sometimes eviction blockades are not just physical actions, but also life-changing moments of bravery.
“I’ve been bullied all my life,” said Scot Johnson, one of the residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Trailer Park in rural Pennsylvania. A quiet, feline-looking man, Johnson had been abused as a child by his father, he confided. Later, he was pushed around by the state, which seized his family’s land to build a highway. Then the abuse came from aggressive landlords. Finally, when he heard that he was to be displaced from his trailer because a water extraction company had bought the land to expand the region’s fracking industry, it was the last straw.
“As you can imagine, I’m getting tired of being pushed around by corporations, schools, the government—anyone that thinks they can push us around,” he said. Rather than move, he helped run a round-the-clock eviction blockade that lasted weeks. Adjacent to the highway that bordered the park, two other blockading residents, ten-year-old twins Amanda and Chevelle Eck, painted a sign that captured the spirit of not just Johnson’s experience but of all eviction blockades.
The sign read: WE ARE NOT EXPENDABLE.
Some eviction blockades go beyond signs and crowds and use “hard locks”—such as chains and bicycle locks—to make it much more difficult to move the protesters’ bodies. In Minneapolis, the Cruz family defended their home from eviction for months with the help of friends, neighbors and multiple hard lockdowns. In one of the many successful defense actions, eight sheriff department officers slammed a battering ram though the front door of the house at 4:00 a.m. only to find two people locked to the peak of the house’s steep shingled roof and another two with their necks locked to the bars of the second-floor balcony. All four were extricated from their locks with jackhammers and electric saws, a process that provided enough time for hundreds of neighbors to amass at the home and reoccupy it through the backdoor.
Hard lockdowns are not for the faint of heart. The most popular method is to cuff a person’s neck to a structure with a bicycle U-lock, such as the two did on the railing. Police have to sever the metal, which is only inches from one’s neck, with diamond saws, jackhammers, or “jaws of life”—cutters powered by piston-rod hydraulics used to rescue people from car crashes and collapsed buildings. In the 1980s, Greenpeace began using even more secure lockboxes such as “metal sleeves” to block chemical weapons shipments. To use these devices, two people each insert one arm into a hollow tube and lock their wrists to a central rod using a carabineer, a latch device used for climbing. It can take the police hours to cut through the reinforced metal, so officers will often use “pain compliance,” assaulting people with pepper spray or other types of physical and psychological abuse in an attempt to coerce them to unlock themselves. Once, police even soaked Q-tips in liquid pepper spray and swabbed it directly in protesters’ eyes in an attempt to force a group of women to release themselves from their lockdown.141
The 4:00 a.m. raid was only one of multiple eviction attempts thwarted by the hard lockdowns at the Cruz house, which made national headlines and terrified Freddie Mac, the federally owned mortgage company that was attempting to repossess the house.
“What is unusual, in fact to our experience utterly unprecedented, is the level of aggression and defiance of the law by these activists,” a spokesperson for Freddie Mac told the Star Tribune.142
During these moments, blockades throw an actual wrench in the system, temporarily halting auction sales or evictions by pitting people’s bodies against the mechanisms of global capital. Yet the longer-lasting power of eviction defense actions comes from the moral crisis that they create for those who witness them. Viewers are suddenly forced to see the violence that lies at the heart of society’s current housing system, evils that rarely manifest themselves because the people rarely resist.
By illuminating this moral crisis for neighbors and the larger community, eviction defense efforts can force the bankers to the negotiation table, where they must confront a community’s demands. In Bertha’s case, the demand was for Bank of New York Mellon to sell her the house for the auction price of $12,000. But her action was also just one piece of a growing national campaign with much bigger demands: state moratoriums on foreclosures, followed by widespread principal reduction for all home mortgage-holders.
Neighbors and friends link arms around the Cruz family home in South Minneapolis
during an eviction blockade in May 2012. Photo by Peter Leeman.
Actions linked to these demands are gaining momentum across the country as people realize the full social and economic impacts of continued foreclosures and evictions, not just on families but also on the broader society. Even the U.S. Treasury Department has come out in support of widespread principal reductions, arguing that reducing the mortgages will be less costly for the government than continuing the foreclosure process.143
Some housing activists fear that even such a principal-reduction plan won’t fully confront the injustices of the for-profit housing system. It would act as a reset button for current mortgage-holding families, they argue, but fail to force future changes in the system. Even worse, they say that it fully ignores those in the lower third of the U.S. economy, people like Martha Biggs and Michael Hutchins, who don’t have the luxury of challenging their home’s foreclosure to begin with.
The theoretical power of principal reduction, however, is in demonstrating that economic contracts are not immutable, that with enough outcry and organizing, any economic reality can be renegotiated for the public good. In this sense, principal reduction would affect everyone in society, because Americans are growing increasingly indebted, not only with mortgages but also with consumer, student, and medical debt. Winning widespread principal reduction would demonstrate that enough defaults (whether intentional or by necessity), coupled with community defense teams, can force the dissolution of any type of debt. In the wake of the economic crisis, citizens of other countries have already won these types of victories. Iceland, for example, structurally reduced the mortgage debts of more than one-quarter of the country’s mortgage-holding families, a reduction in loans totaling 13 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.144 Spain enacted a two-year moratorium on evictions for any family in circumstances of “extreme necessity” after a spate of suicides in 2012 that was not unlike the wave of foreclosure-related suicides that swept the country in 2011 and 2012.145
Many people in the United States worry that dissolving debt would cause the banks to lose confidence in borrowers, leading to sharp increases in interest rates and stringent rules for lending, which would actually make homeownership a more difficult goal to achieve. But these concerns miss the broad analysis—and are almost laughable to people like Gerardo Cajamarca, who has lost all confidence in the mortgage industry.
“Credit—they’re always threatening your credit,” the Minneapolis resident said in Spanish. “So I told them, ‘If you don’t trust me, okay. That’s fine. Because I already don’t trust you.’ ”
The real problem, Cajamarca and others argue, is the underlying system of debt-financed capitalism that portrays itself to be about freedom and ownership but is really focused on producing as much profit as possible, as fast as possible, from interest and fees generated by mass debt and related financial “products.” Achieving principal reduction would be the first step toward the ultimate goal of overhauling this economic model in favor of one that does not force the majority of the population into lifelong debt. It’s a lofty and seemingly impossible goal—except for those who make it happen in their own lives.
“They want you to call off the dogs,” Bertha’s lawyer told her over the phone the morning after the eviction blockade. It was around 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and Bertha was sitting at the city council building waiting to speak out against her eviction. In her front yard, an even larger crowd had amassed than the one present the day before, just in case the city tried to deliver the dumpster. But the precaution was unnecessary. Bank of New York Mellon’s lawyers had called. They were tired of the articles and the phone calls; they didn’t need any more bad press. If Bertha wanted the house for $12,000, she could have it.
“I’m trying to laugh, but I’m hyperventilating,” Bertha remembers. For the days that followed, she could barely contain her emotions.
At a celebration in front of the house the following day, Bertha explained how she felt when she first heard that the bank’s lawyers had capitulated.
“I felt like shouting. I felt like running down this street. . . . Your presence gave me strength to fight. And my daughter and my neighbors, they gave me strength to fight. And the prayers of everyone that prayed for me. So how do I feel? I feel like dancing! I feel like shouting! I feel like worshiping God, that’s how I feel! I feel good! I feel like that house has been lifted off my shoulders. I feel like I can help my husband now without every day wondering: Do I tell him that he has to move? How do I tell him without him falling down and having a stroke? That’s what I feel like.”146
A few weeks later, Bertha signed the paperwork to buy her home back from Bank of New York Mellon for $12,000. Her whole sixty-five-year-old body felt numb as she scrawled her signature in order to finally be safe in the place that was already her home.
137. “Man Killed in Icy Detroit Crash.” CBS Detroit. January 30, 2012. http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/01/30/man-killed-in-icy-detroit-crash/
138. Quotes from video by Bob Ingalls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dfiVzL11U
139. Halah Touryalai, “Detroit Pension Funds Hit BNY Mellon with $1 Billion Class Action Suit,” Forbes, September 13, 2011. http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2011/09/13/detroit-pension-funds-hit-bny-mellon-with-1-billion-class-action-suit
140. Ben Rooney, “Bank of New York Named in Currency Fraud Suit,” CNN Money, October 5. 2011. http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/05/news/companies/bank_new_york_mellon_fraud/
141. Ed Denson, “Pepper Spray, Pain and Justice,” Civil Liberties, Winter 1998. http://www.civilliberties.org/win98spray.html
142142. Eric Roper and Nicole Norfleet, “Foreclosure Protest Puts Minneapolis Officials in Tight Spot,” [Minneapolis] Star Tribune, May 31, 2012. http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/156108395.html?page=1&c=y&refer=y
143. Christopher Matthews, “Why Is Ed DeMarco Blocking a Win-Win Housing Program?” Time, August 1, 2012. http://business.time.com/2012/08/01/why-is-ed-demarco-blocking-a-win-win-housing-program/
144. J.D. Heyes, “Iceland Forgives Mortgage Debt to Save Its Economy,” Natural News, May 6, 2012. http://www.naturalnews.com/035779_Iceland_mortgage_debt_economy.html
145. Al Goodman, “Spanish banks stop evictions for the next two years in cases of ‘extreme necessity’ ” CNN, November 12, 2012. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/12/business/spain-home-evictions/index.html
146. Quotes from video by Bob Ingalls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dfiVzL11U