The idea for the Anti-Eviction Campaign actually came from South Africa. Toussaint Losier had traveled there to study the direct-action tactics of an organization called the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Its members had been putting their bodies in front of homes to block evictions, building their own squatter settlements on unused land. So J. R. and Toussaint (who got to know each other when the chairman of the South African group visited Cabrini-Green) started a Chicago chapter together. J. R. realized they didn’t need to build lean-tos in Chicago’s black community. They had all the empty homes they required. “We want to do what Roosevelt did,” he said of the home takeovers. “If the government won’t provide public housing for the people, the people must provide it for themselves.”
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J. R. estimates that the Anti-Eviction Campaign and its affiliated groups will be able to liberate a hundred foreclosed and abandoned homes in Chicago in the next year, maybe far more. He was training several other advocacy groups how to identify and occupy vacant properties. The houses they’d already taken were ideal workshops to teach basic carpentry and repairs. Money was always an obstacle, but they’ve been able to cobble together gifts from like-minded nonprofits. J. R. has also teamed up with a businessman — a man who used to have the contract to board up public-housing units — whose community-development corporation has an agreement to obtain houses donated by Citibank. J. R. said the banks were starting to take notice. The campaign needed only to keep on the attack. The Chicago City Council even seemed poised to pass an ordinance that would require banks foreclosing on properties to pay any renters living there $12,000 in relocation fees or allow them to stay put, with rent-controlled leases, until the buildings were finally sold. Cathy Albisa, the executive director of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, has worked with J. R. for years. “He is a man of faith,” she says. “J. R. is a believer. He will do this work irrespective of the conditions.”For the Anti-Eviction Campaign to grow into a truly effective citywide phenomenon, however, it required that people in the neighborhoods take charge of their own communities. That was no easy task. One house they recently reclaimed was a bulky Dutch colonial that dominates a corner in an isolated residential section of South Chicago called the Bush. The area used to be a feeder for a nearby U.S. Steel mill, now shuttered, and some 1,700 homes there are vacant. One evening last summer, J. R. and a group of local activists calling themselves South Chicago Rising held a barbecue in the Bush. Burgers and corn on the cob cooked on a small grill set up on a bulldozed city block that had gone to field, the grass trimmed and parched to an amber hue. Smoke coiled around the 25 people sitting in a ring of foldout chairs. A group of them, all black and ranging in age from 30 to 60, had walked over from a halfway house. “Be good,” the man monitoring them would utter forbiddingly when one of them seemed to get a little riled up. Mexican women from the block, some who didn’t speak English, also filled out the circle, as did a few white activists who knew J. R. from other ventures. They passed around two-liter bottles of RC Cola and Squirt, listening to the rhythmic school-bell chiming of passing commuter trains and to the radio from a parked Hyundai.
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A leader of South Chicago Rising, Crystal Vance Guerra, alternating between English and Spanish, tried to steer their concerns toward the house across the street. “How do we begin to organize to make sure Lakeside doesn’t kick us out?” she asked rhetorically. “By taking back foreclosed homes.” That was J. R.’s cue. “The bank won’t help you, right?” he began, in a rhythmic call and response. “The people are left to do it for themselves, right? We throw our own community cookouts, right?” He pointed across the street. On the chain-link fence surrounding the reclaimed wood-frame house, someone had hung a bedsheet with a hand-painted message: “Everything belongs to everyone.” J. R. explained that they cleaned up the house, taking it away from the drug dealers and the prostitutes. “That’s where you all come in,” he continued. The house now belonged to the community. It could become a neighborhood center. Homeless families could take up residence there. J. R. wanted to know whether those gathered would come out to defend the property when the call went out. Would they help rehab and maintain it? “I see a lot of great leaders out there,” J. R. professed. “The community will have a sense of power. Your children will know that you did it.”
via www.nytimes.com
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