Personal Geographies of a Local Yokel

I just looked at a map of my hometown for possibly the first time. And realized that streets I’ve walked, biked, and driven for the last 25 years have names I’ve never known.

This time last year a man passing in a van asked me how to get to Lila Ave. from the back side of the hill where I was walking the dog. Perplexed, I gave him landmark-based directions to get to the one street I suspected started with an L.

According to this map, we were both already on Lila at the time. Or wait, what I *thought* the map said was Lila at first look. On second look, what I always considered the same street growing up is actually two different ones, with two different names, becoming Lila later on. I didn't even construct the streets that way in my head - I understood the continuity, direction, and relative distances of different paths through my town in a completely different way.

Apparently, I am purty ignorant.

Not to mention all the paths I took regularly, that would constitute main thoroughfares in my understanding of my hometown, but which do not constitute roads in an official map-making sense.

This probably means something profound about maps, place, and individual perception. Oh the tyranny of technology over personal histories of lived space! The arbitrary basis for scientific understandings of distance and time!

But my analytical powers are sapped at the moment. So pretend I wrote something profound about it, instead of what I am writing, which is

Hot damn son, that's some crazy shit!

Financial Katrina: The Mortgage and Foreclosure Crisis as a Flashpoint for our Urban Future

About 9 months ago I gave my first conference "presentation" - well a cross between an academic talk and activist workshop. The audio file is up on the website for WCRS Columbus. It was fun - I got to mash up work by David Harvey, the Kirwan Institute, and my own investigations into Ohio's foreclosure crisis, and get people pumped to fight gentrification in Columbus.

It's the 3rd file down, jump to the 4:20 mark to start - everything before that is folks introducing themselves, and the audio quality is bad.

Title: A Financial Katrina: The Mortgage & Foreclosure Crisis as a Flashpoint for our Urban Future

Conference: Confronting Racism: Building United Movements

Held on the Campus of The Ohio State University, May 16th 2009

And by way of teaser, here is an into to the talk...

We all know about the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans back in 2005. Many also know that the hurricane caused a disproportionate gutting of poor black neighborhoods, and that these neighborhoods lag behind in bouncing back compared to other areas of the city. Those involved recognize that the city’s response to this situation has the capacity to change the face of New Orleans as we know it, and so fierce political battles rage over how to rebuild, what, and where.

What few people realize is that what happened in New Orleans is happening now in cities all across the country as a result of the mortgage and foreclosure crisis. Lower income communities of color are gutted, houses and apartment complexes sit vacant and deteriorating, and whole swaths of the city are suddenly “up for grabs.” I argue that an appreciation of what is at stake, a “Financial Katrina” in Ohio’s cities, demands a more alarmed response from anyone concerned about urban social justice.

Columbus testimony to the UN Special Rapporteur for Housing

The UN Special Rapporteur for Housing, the paulistana Raquel Rolnik, is visiting the U.S. this week to investigate the housing crisis and take testimony on violations of the human right to housing. A local group I work with, Columbus Housing Justice, submitted testimony about the demolition or sale of nearly half the local public housing stock. Read the testimony and see video of residents HERE - at our blog!

Letter to a young do-gooder

Dear young do-gooder,

So you are facing the choice of a job, a school, a non-profit internship, the peace corps… whatever it is, you want a life with meaning, to do justice, to make change. You are looking for a good fit, something you can belong to that will tell you exactly what you must do to realize your desired world, and provide the opportunity to do it. I hate to break it to you, but don’t hold your breath.

There is no one institution that will magically turn you into who you want to be. Every structure you plug yourself in to, be it a church, a degree program, a political party, or other entity will shape you in certain ways. You will need to unlearn about 30-70% of any institutional socialization experience you receive, or inoculate yourself against this negative share before hand, to be a truly effective and radical agent of justice. I’ve spent too much time joining things and dedicating myself to them believing “THIS is IT!” only to find it isn’t. If you are anything like me – a young idealist – you probably have too. Eventually a critical social eye realizes that the system (for lack of a better word) does not provide a clear channel to teach and nourish those who would be bent on changing it. You are, and should consider yourself to be, a rogue agent: responsible for controlling your own education and for creating alternative spaces for reflection and action with the few you will find who share your values.

There is no one institution that will teach you everything you need to know. The balanced and effective agent for justice must engage in a variety of relationships with different institutions and accumulate a myriad of experiences to learn everything they must learn. The trick is to be savvy - arrive at a sense of the various elements of your personality, skills, and ideals that you must develop. Investigate the institutions you can access – schools, jobs, clubs – what they can and cannot teach you, what they can and cannot position you to do in the future. Identify the ways they could lead you astray by incentivizing activities that ultimately don’t matter. Be prepared to do some bullshit in exchange for the opportunity to grab what you need while you are around, and make sure to do some good for the place and the people before you go. But know where to draw the line when the bullshit starts to take over.

Finally, work your ass off, both in your institutional duties and outside of them, and ask inappropriate amounts of questions at unexpected times. You learn more than you “should” this way, and if you are pulling your weight, people are willing to take the time to answer in revealing ways. Take that insider information, recalibrate your course, and continue to chart your path along the itchy, bumpy, shadowy underbelly of traditional ideas of success. It's really the only path worth taking.

Good luck, and Godspeed.

Jargon in Academia and Organizing

My friend Jane recently wrote a good blog post on the importance and difficulty of communicating across various barriers.

I've been considering how to communicate across disciplines, departments, socio-economic barriers, and cultural identities.... At times, I feel like a chameleon when deciding how to speak to one person or another. What type of slang should I use? Should I cuss? Should I get out my biggest words and stand up straight? Communication is tough.

I took one of the points she made and ran with it, because it is something I have been struggling with too - how to talk about social issues as you move from academia to organizing, specifically what to do about jargon.

I posted my thoughts on Jane's group blog, but I am copying them here because I liked how it came out.

------------------

[When out and about in the world...] My working hypothesis is only use jargon or an uncommon word when:

(1) it articulates an important concept that is not captured in another, simpler word or short phrase. Anything beyond this is jargon that shouldn't exist at all, not in academics and not in daily life.

(2) when it adds a necessary level of complexity to the topic or task at hand. Some jargon does deserve to exist, in that it captures a unique concept, but is rarely appropriate to use outside of academic treatments of a subject. Concepts that are laden with historical and structural detail are probably not worth introducing into a conversation if explaining them is not going to clarify the situation at hand. For example, you probably don't need to bring up orientalism when talking about today's immigration policy with your neighbor.

College educated social justice folks often screw up on both points because they fail to strike a balance. Most obviously they overdo it, using jargon that either shouldn't exist at all, or is inappropriate for the topic at hand.

But I want to focus on the less obvious mistake of underdoing it: dumbing things down so severely - either by censoring all uncommon words or jargon, or by oversimplifying a situation - that we fail to realistically depict the thing we are trying to communicate.

These mistakes can lead to paternalist and populist forms of engaging people. We disrespect folks by talking to them in ways that assume they are not capable of generating new and more complex thoughts, or assuming they haven't already. We do a disservice to them when we divide the world unrealistically into black and white, knowing there are shades of gray but thinking the best way to motivate others is to be harshly dualistic.

So I think we can use a little bit of jargon when engaging people if we are savvy about it. For example, it is worth making the sex/gender distinction (for those feminists who use it) when talking to a housewife about enrolling her son in gymnastics, or daughter in hockey.

The bottom line is this: the point of using any jargon should be to open up discussion, to clarify or deepen our understanding of a reality. This is in contrast to the example described by Jane, where the competitive graduate student uses it to close down discussion and obscure realities, thereby "winning" a debate or impressing others by virtue of befuddling them.

My only other thought is that we make sure to engage people conversationally, so any goofy words we want to use come up organically in response to the direction of the conversation. Too often we get into the habit of delivering mini lectures, a holdover from our socialization experience in the university classroom. And as we use any jargon, we should not assume people know what it means. Instead, volunteer to explain any concept as you bring it up, and make sure you have established an environment in which other people know they can feel comfortable interrupting you to ask for clarification. Let them know that doing so means you are being unclear, rather than that they are revealing ignorance.

Deutsche Bank's bad behavior

I first got a bad taste in my mouth for Deutsche Bank, a German-based global investment bank, back in São Paulo as the funder behind the Urban Age São Paulo conference. Upon further investigation it turns out they have an unlikely link to my home community in Ohio. Putting the two together reveals a delicious little hypocrisy that I will unfold for you here...

First to the Brazilian side: Urban Age, funded by Deutsche Bank, is a six-year series of conferences in cities across the globe designed to unite top minds around questions of our global urban future. The 2008 conference was held in and themed around São Paulo, where it faced criticism in the activist community for its elitism. The conference was invitation only, locking out civil society groups and community members who didn't have the "right credentials" even though they requested to attend. And like other swank international conferences on São Paulo urban issues, it included in-depth discussions about squatter settlements, slums, poverty and exclusion, while being both (1) entirely inaccessible to anyone living these realities, and (2) spending enough money on horsdeourves and fancy venues to lift many families out of poverty many times over.

Even the high powered Brazilian architects and urbanists who were invited to participate did so begrudgingly. While they complained in semi-private circles about the academic imperialism of the European organizers, they ultimately played ball for a chance to win the big checks Deutsche Bank hands out for research and projects.

The 2009 conference will be in Istanbul, and I just received an e-mailed "call for entries" for the 2009 Urban Age Award: a "$100,000 USD award for an outstanding project or initiative which improves the physical conditions of a community and the lives of residents in Istanbul."

Other verbage from the e-mail:

The award celebrates the Urban Age mission to connect quality of life to the quality of the urban environment. "Governing a city means managing contradictions. The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award and the Urban Age conference aim to encourage people to overcome contradictions and work together to take responsibility for their cities." – Wolfgang Nowak, Managing Director, Alfred Herrhausen Society.

and

The Deutsche Bank Urban Age award was created to encourage people to take responsibility for their cities and form new alliances.

So the themes are: innovative project, improved quality of urban life, and taking responsibility for our cities.

Wouldn't it be great if the same themes guiding Deutche Bank's Urban Age awards guided its own business practices?

Now we come to Ohio. Here the Deutsche Bank has been one of several large out-of-town banks wreaking havoc on our communities: foreclosing on properties willy-nilly and then re-purchasing them at sheriff sales, yet refusing responsibility for keeping the vacant buildings up to code so they are not a danger to neighbors. From a November 25, 2007 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

About one of every eight properties bought in Hamilton County this year was purchased at a sheriff's sale, the Enquirer analysis shows. Since 2003, the number of properties purchased by a bank or investor at a sheriff's sale and not yet resold has almost doubled - to 2,695 as of August.

Deutsche Bank National Trust purchased the most properties - 265 - this year through Oct. 31.

The German banking giant didn't own a single parcel in Hamilton County in 2004, but now is the second-largest owner of single-family homes in the county, after the federal government. The bank owned 188 properties last week, and is taking on an average of nine or 10 newly foreclosed properties each week, according to the Hamilton County Auditor's records.

And yet Deutsche Bank denies owning any houses here.

John T. Gallagher, a bank spokesman in New York City, would not comment on the bank's ownership or maintenance of properties. Instead, he issued a written statement that said the bank acts only as trustee for securitization trusts - investment pools that buy up risky subprime mortgages in bulk on Wall Street.

That position - while helping Deutsche Bank evade responsibility for maintaining properties - could put a halt to its foreclosures across Ohio.

Last month, a federal judge in Cleveland ruled that Deutsche Bank can't have it both ways: Either it owns a property, in which case it must maintain it; or it doesn't, in which case it shouldn't be foreclosing on it.

U.S. District Judge Christopher A. Boyko sharply criticized financial institutions for their handling of foreclosures. He said the banks "rush to foreclose" and then "sit on the deed, avoiding responsibility for maintaining the property while reaping the financial benefits of interest running on a judgment."

When the Deutsche bank plays absentee trustee, the financial price for maintaining the property (in some instances, ultimately demolishing it) falls on our already cash strapped local governments. Neighbors or the city end up cutting the grass, boarding the windows, sealing the doors, maintaining the facade, and clearing scrap. This same Enquirer article found the collective bill owed to the city by absentee banks for foreclosed properties totaled $201,237 at the time. Today it is surely much higher. Add this to the value lost in neighbors' homes because of vacant houses down the street, and to rising homelessness as a result of foreclosures on properties, and the damage to our communities go through the roof.

Such crimes by Deutsche Bank are found all over Ohio, not just in Cincinnati. The company owns around 970 foreclosed properties in Cuyahoga County, most of which sit vacant. And in 2007, Deutsche Bank had 14 of its foreclosures thrown out of court for failure to show it even owned the mortgage when it filed foreclosure against the homeowners. This is foreclosure fraud, plain and simple.

One community in Cincinnati is fighting back. In 2007, Price Hill saw 300 of its homes foreclosed upon. Many of those homes, and those already sitting vacant, were owned by Deutsche Bank, which subsequently refused to address the code violations that began to rack up on the vacant properties. So Price Hill Will, a local group that works to revitalize the neighborhood, is suing for damages incurred by the city and neighborhood residents. The outcome of the lawsuit is still pending.

What if the Deutsche Bank lived up to the same criteria it sets for Urban Age grant hopefuls? The bank could start an urban homesteading program for its vacant properties: if a family agreed to get the house up to code within one year, it could have the property turned over to them for a small fee (say, $100). The city could pitch in and waive the code violation fees for all properties that were granted to homesteaders.

I think I've got a proposal for their 2009 Urban Age Award here - anyone want to help me write it?

The OTHER Wall

Talk about horrible, inhumane ideas. Construction has begun on a Gaza-style wall in Rio de Janeiro that is designed to cut off several favelas from expanding into nearby forest land, simultaneously causing further segregation between the slums and other neighborhoods in the city.

Wall construction, with condominiums in background. Photo from O Globo

"By year-end the Rio de Janeiro state government wants to build almost 7 miles (11 km) of walls to contain 19 communities. It will spend 40 million reais ($17.6 million) and have to relocate 550 houses, Lazzoli said." Read full story here.

That money could be used for upgrades that residents actually need in public services, health, education, and police reform. It's 2009, you would think officials would have enough basic economic sense to know that the massive unmet demand for low-income housing will not magically disappear if you build a wall.

This is another example of abuses that favelados continue to endure, even after the democratic transition turned them from a persecuted underclass without any substantive rights into ostensible "citizens" with votes.

Just another symbol of how democracy is often woefully insufficient to protect the basic interests of the marginalized urban poor.

Women, Land, and Agribusiness

(A past-due post in honor of International Women's Day, March 9th.)

Did you know that only 2% of the world's land is owned by women?

This statistic comes from an article in the Seattle Times, where Tim Handstad argues that increased land ownership among women increases their status in home and in society, lifts families out of poverty, and leads to secondary benefits like better nutrition for the household, increased food security, and better disease prevention.

I went digging for more stats on global land ownership because this strikes me as just the tip of the iceberg. How much land do men own? What about corporations, governments, and heads of state?

I couldn't find the answers to most of these questions. (If you know where this can be found, please let me know!) Though in an ironic twist, I did find a source that estimates the largest personal landowner in the world to be a woman - Queen Elizabeth II, who comes in at 6,600 million acres valuing perhaps 17.6 trillion pounds, or 1/6th of the world's dry surface.

My inclination is that a surprising percentage of land is actually owned by large and increasingly transnational corporations. This is definitely the case in Brazil, where the Landless Worker's Movement (MST) has shifted it's political focus over the last 25 years from targeting large private landowners to international agribusiness.

To commemorate International Women's Day, hundreds to thousands of Brazilian women of the MST and Via Campesina occupied the Ministry of Agriculture, a shipping port, and at least two large industrial farms. They argue that the government should focus on agrarian reform and small farms, many for women, instead of catering to industrial agribusiness.

They also argue that the mono-cropping eucalyptus for pulp, an activity occurring at the occupied sites, destroys natural habitat, creating topsoil loss and ultimately desertification. An anecdote here: a public defender in rural São Paulo state won an immediate suspension of eucalyptus plantation in his area. While visiting some of his contacts I was recruited to translate the suspension notice into English because the companies involved were foreign with English-speaking employees. I didn't get much background on the case, but local residents were up in arms about the spread of eucalyptus in their areas.

1 year anniversary and a statement of belief

Dear friends, family, mentors, and general readers,

I want to thank you for following my blog over the last year, as today is the one year anniversary! As you may (or may not) know, I started this blog to keep in touch with my 'idea community' in the states while developing my Fulbright research on democracy and housing rights in São Paulo, Brazil.

Now that I am back in the U.S. and trying to link the struggle for housing rights in Brazil to movements stateside, the blog has evolved into a strange fusion of topics: (1) Urban democracy and housing struggles in São Paulo, (2) ditto in the Midwestern United States, and (3) the occasional reflection on my personal attempts to fuse a useful life's work on these issues from bits of academia, community organizing, political action, and professional training.

I realize that you may only be interested in one or two of these areas, so I have created labels to assist readers in filtering for the content they want. To the right you will see categories for "U.S." "Brazil" "News and Information" "Reflection and Analysis" and "Community or Group Profile." Click at will! Also, if you have any suggestions for how I can make the blog more enjoyable/navigable for your own reading interests, please comment on this post.

As an added bit to commemortate, I am including a personal statement of belief, which I wrote a few days ago for a job application. It sums up fairly well my central conclusions on the current social reality, as I developed them over the last 6-ish years.

I believe that everyone deserves a life where they can control the decisions and processes that determine their fate. A just society is a society where this holds true for all citizens.

I now believe we live in a society that is rightly called unjust for the existence of the opposite: whole segments of our population do not control the trajectory of their own lives. Instead, this is determined by the workings of large institutions, and by extension, a relatively small group of people involved in their navigation.

Ending injustice thus requires fundamental change in how social institutions function. In some cases it may even call for their wholesale dismantling. This cannot occur if we rely on those typically in power for change; it can only be done by building power among those suffering from various degrees of un-control, and recruiting their allies.

Finally, I believe that success in this effort requires that people suffering from injustice actively determine how to use the power that comes from uniting them in organization. They must realize in the movement what they are otherwise denied in society – control over their own lives and direction. In other words, injustice must be fought by practicing its opposite.

Operation Saturation in Paraisópolis: Policies of Overt State Violence

There has been a little flurry of media attention, and not just in Portuguese language sources, about the Military Police occupation of favela Paraisópolis in recent days. As has been done elsewhere, I’ll give an account of this event. But first I want to put it into a context that clearly identifies this act as an oft-utilized tool of government policy towards favelas, and not just an emergency response to extreme circumstances, as news reports or government accounts would lead you to believe.

In fact, a keyword search of “Operação Saturação” on a news or government portal show scanty coverage of these saturation operations deserving a serious and alarmed discussion. Only some instances of saturation have received significant coverage, which often lacks solid information of the events leading up to its implimentation or the negative ramifications for residents. This only further demonstrates the low priority that media outlets and their audiences place on slum dwellers’ quality of life.

Background

A “Saturation Operation,” or the descent of hundreds of police, vehicles, and arms to first lock down and then monitor an entire community for extended periods of time, has been used in the city of São Paulo a total of 12 times since 2005. It is a deliberate response to spikes of violence that are perceived to threaten neighboring areas or the governability of the favela by state authorities.

In a saturation, hundreds of troops will enter and essentially subdue all activity in the community (over 600 troops in one case) – including legitimate business and school functions, and most car and foot traffic. They embark on an intense investigation of all recent incidences of violence (though rarely their own) and perform detentions, searches (over 50,000 personal searches in one instance), questioning, and sweeps for illegal drugs and arms. Once the community is effectively subdued, they continue to occupy and monitor residents’ coming and going - for up to three months in recent cases. In fact the first use of the saturation tactic, at least under the title of “operation saturation,” was in Paraisópolis. So it seems things have come full circle.

Past saturation operations in São Paulo and their duration include:

Paraisópolis (julho/agosto 2005) – 42 days
Elba/Tamarutaca (agosto/outubro 2005) – 48 days
Pantanal (outubro/dezembro 2005) – 53 days
Guarujá (janeiro 2006) – 25 days
Parque Novo Mundo (fevereiro/abril 2006) – 44 days
Jardim Colombo II/Buraco Quente (maio/julho 2006) – 61 days
Morro do Samba (julho/agosto 2006) – 51 days
Taipas (setembro/novembro 2006) – 72 days
Elisa Maria (março/junho 2007) – 81 days
Alba (setembro/dezembro 2007) – 93 days
Rio Claro (junho/setembro 2008) – 99 days

Starting in 2007 with the occupation of Jardim Elisa Maria, the saturation effort has been followed by a project known as a Virada Social. This omnibus package of social service programs by both state and city agencies often includes dental clinics, construction of a new school or nursery, job skills classes, sporting events, tree planting, community center construction, new public lighting, a family planning course, and the list goes on.

I suspect it simply became politically unfeasible, as these operations became larger, for the government to undertake such drastic repressive measures without some kind of positive social outreach afterward. Or perhaps there is a sense that authorities must clean up after themselves, as in the case of Elisa Maria, where the slaughter of 6 local teens, given at the time as just one instance justifying the initial saturation, later proved to be committed by police.

Operation Saturation in Paraisópolis

We’re now entering the fourth week of the most recent Paraisópolis occupation, a community I visited regularly during my time in São Paulo. It is one of the more economically developed favelas in the city, and boasts some of the best infrastructure I saw in a squatter settlement throughout my time there. It is also the second largest, with around 88,000 residents.

The immediate events leading up to the occupation began on February 1st, when police shot and killed a resident and arrested another. Accounts of this story vary – that the dead man was unarmed, that he was armed and fired on officers, that the surviving man was a relative of a famous imprisoned drug lord, and that he is unrelated. Media reports have neglected any serious investigation into the truth of this first encounter.

In response to this shooting death groups of residents clashed with police on Feb. 2nd– residents barricaded roads, damaged businesses, and burned a handful of cars. Once again, the motives here are unclear. The police allege that the famous drug lord ordered the riot from prison, but again, this has not been confirmed. In the confrontation 4 police and at least two residents were wounded.

In response to this encounter authorities began the Saturation Operation on Feb. 4th that has effectively put the entire community under occupation. 300 Shock Troops and 100 local police patrol the streets and houses, 33 checkpoints operate throughout the community to filter foot traffic and stop suspicious looking persons. There are several reports of officers mistreating and firing upon innocents, detaining and questioning residents an excessive number of times, speaking threateningly to local leaders, and entering houses without residents’ permission. Regardless of whether the rioting was ordered by the imprisoned drug lord or was simply a spontaneous response to police brutality, it is hard to argue that a full-scale occupation of the community for an “unforeseeable amount of time” is justifiable or humane.

Accounts of some resident's complaints have surfaced in major media reports, but the complaints highlighted are either paltry, or when serious, presented as an isolated instance. In fact, serious and widespread complaints exist and were recorded by a group of rights activists in the city whose e-mails I receive. Most residents will not speak to outside reporters. This photo comes from such an e-mail and depicts a man's foot, injured by a police explosive thrown at him while looking for his wife. She is employed at the popular chain homegoods store Casas Bahia, which recently opened in the community, and was working when the police operation began.

Photo taken by Joelma Couto

Details of the Paraisópolis Virada Social are just coming out, but the list is extensive. I would be impressed if all the activities mentioned actually take place, though the large majority of them are short-term, quickie interventions that I cannot see having a lasting impact on the community. Thus far, the saturation and promised social programs have not cooled all tensions, as two journalists who recently entered the favela to record day to day life in the community where temporarily held captive and then driven outside favela borders. Their captors took their recording equipment and instructed the reporters not to come back.


Paraisópolis quick stats

unemployment: 20-25%
illiteracy: 15,000 residents
children who cannot attend school due to lack of spaces in facilities: 5,000
median income: R$367-$614, or 1/4 to 1/2 of the city average

The U.S. squatting movement grows

Squatting in vacant buildings, subsequently known as cortiços in Brazil, is a both a common solution for needy families and a political strategy to press for larger policy changes on housing rights. In recent history, this was largely unheard of in the U.S., which traditionally has stronger laws against such activity and a smaller low income housing deficit than exist in Brazilian cities. But the housing crisis is pushing the needy and their activists into a similar strategy state-side. First in Miami, now Minneapolis, and soon in up to 24 more cities.

The first I heard of this was from a Miami, Florida group called Take Back the Land. They link the housing crisis with the historic struggle of African Americans to access land and property rights:

People of African descent have been systematically denied control of land in their communities- from slavery to sharecropping to segregation to the current gentrification and displacement of our communities…. We assert our right to the land in our community and to use public space for the public good- specifically, to house, feed and provide community space for the poor, particularly in low income black communities. As such, we are Taking Back the Land and empowering the black community, not the politicians, to determine how to use land for the benefit of the community.

- from the TBTL mission statement

Though their philosophy is unique, they share a strategy with the rest of the groups in this post: moving poor families into government- and bank-owned properties. Here is founder Max Rameau on CNN. He makes some excellent points, noting that letting houses sit vacant is not only bad for their now homeless former occupants, but harms the bank's investment (via looting, use as a refuge by drug addicts, and weather damage) as well as the quality of life for surrounding residents:



Just yesterday poverty activists Cheri Honkala and formerly homeless Dwayne Cunningham appeared on Democracy Now! Detailing similar efforts in Minneapolis. There, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign recently helped move homeless individuals and families into 13 foreclosed and vacant homes. They are calling for a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions, and short sales in the city. Watch the full story here.

We’re about the business of bringing the neighbors back into the neighborhood, as opposed to throwing them out onto the streets…. We teach people how to reclaim housing as a human right. We’ll teach you how to move into an abandoned government-owned property, to house families. We’ll teach you how to hold a sit-in, to hold a house that’s in the process of foreclosure.

– Cheri Honkala, PPEHRC

In raw numbers, the actions of these two groups only amount to less than 30 occupied homes. But it serves as a significant model that could expand as the crisis deepens, as well as a strong political statement that could ferment action on the part of policymakers to take stronger steps and protect homeowners and homeless families.

Finally, ACORN is now advocating homesteading for foreclosed families – simply refusing to leave your house. They are also recruiting volunteers to join their Home Defenders network. Home Defenders will be trained and then called upon on short notice to help peacefully defend ACORN homesteaders in their city. You can sign up to be on a Home Defender team - cities organizing include Cincinnati and Cleveland, OH. Do it!

Municipal Elections 2: Incomes and Outcomes

In response to my first post on São Paulo’s municipal elections, I got a few questions from a friend about how incomes affected the outcomes. Here are my answers:

Do the non-poor outnumber the poor in SP?

Yes. But by how much is difficult to say. The poverty line in the city is one-half the monthly minimum wage, which is an extremely low figure. Let me illustrate: starting this month, ½ the minimum wage is R$232.50 or about $100 U.S. dollars. Considering that two bus rides per day, M-F, cost R$92 per month alone, this leaves only R$140.50 (U.S. $60) for food, rent, and all other expenses. Riding the bus to work consumes 40% of your income! Also, the city is moving to raise bus and metro fare, so this number could prove even higher in the future.

A better line for poverty in the city would be the full minimum monthly salary, at least. When you consider that a person can qualify for most housing support programs with a family income up to 3 or more minimum salaries, I think one minimum salary as the poverty cut-off is more than reasonable.

Using the low ½ minimum wage line in 2000 (when the last census was taken), 12% of the city’s population was poor, or 1.1 million people. This number reaches 20-38% of the population in the poorest peripheral areas. If you use the full minimum wage as your poverty line, entire sub-municipalities have an average wage that dips within one minimum salary of poverty level. This means that majorities in these electoral districts would live in or near poverty.

This is not to say that the majority of all Paulistanos live in poverty today, but it does mean that a lot more do than official numbers would suggest. For example, a 2003 IBGE study names poverty at 28% versus the 12% census number from 2000.

Remember too that the city also has the highest concentration of rich and super-rich in Brazil, as it is the industrial and financial capital of the country. This group is enormously important for both city and country GDP, and they are very influential.

Was that what gave Kassab the edge and allowed his party to grab five additional City Council seats? [In other words, what effect did income distribution have on municipal elections?]

Yes, this was probably a strong factor. Now there is never a single determining variable in any election, and to prove that income was THE THING or even a BIG THING scientifically would require regression analysis. But from my perspective as an enhanced laywoman, it’s no accident that the districts with money went for Kassab at high margins while Marta only carried the poorest districts. Looking closely reveals two even more interesting questions.

First I'll show the wealth-win correlations - this first graph is some older data (2000 is the most recent census) on income distribution in the city. Now compare this to the graph I posted earlier showing district wins for each candidate. The first is divided by sub-municipal district while the second is by electoral district, but the general correlation is strong and clear. Click on the images to view larger versions.

PER CAPITA INCOME BY SUB-MUNICIPALITY in 2000
source: Atlas de Trabalho e Desenvolvomento de São Paulo

Bounds:
Red = highest income, R$894.77 or more
Light Cream = lowest income, R$275.32 or less



[The upper and lower bounds on this graph hide the extremes of income difference. Monthly incomes in the highest earning districts are actually in the thousands, while the bottom 5th of residents of peripheral districts earn about R$50 per month.]

RESULTS OF THE RUN-OFF
source: Folha de São Paulo

See how most of the red and orange areas in the first graph went for Kassab in the second, while the lighter areas went for Marta?

Not only did Kassab win the richer districts, but he did so at higher margins than Marta was able to carry the poorer ones. For example, Kassab took chic Jardim Paulista (84%), Pinheiros (80%), and Vila Mariana (82%). In all he carried 21 districts by at least 70%, while Marta only carried two. These - Parelheiros (77%) and Grajaú (75%) – are both in the extreme south. The next closest win she claimed was in the public-housing filled Cidade Tiradentes (69%).

Also, the PT lost districts they previously carried in 2004, many in the mid-zones between the poverty of the far periphery and the most concentrated wealth of the center and center-southwest. Examples of this are Capela do Socorro to the south, where Marta won 57%-42% in 2004 but lost 51%-48% in 2008, or Itaquera to the east, where she won won 52%-48% in '04 but lost 58%-42% in '08. Marta increased her support in the last 4 years in only 5 of 57 electoral districts, all of which lie in areas that absorb the city’s highest numbers of poor rural-urban migrants. Four are in the extreme south and one, Brasilândia, is an area to the north where I saw huge expansions of new slum settlement into formerly untouched countryside firsthand.

This begs the questions: why did the PT lose these mid-zones from 2004-2008, and why didn’t the poorer districts back Marta as strongly as the rich ones backed Kassab?

At first I wrote long speculative paragraphs about why this may be: rising incomes over the last 8 years and how these map onto the city today, the rising consumerism and de-politicization of the middle class, increasing concerns over crime, the “pasteurization and professionalization” of social movements, some weaknesses in Marta as a candidate, and the ability of the incumbent Kassab to use city resources to co-opt influential people in poor and transitioning neighborhoods. But reading over them, I don’t have the data to demonstrate national trends in the space of São Paulo, and new census data is still a year away.

Was there a green candidate who siphoned off votes?

Not in the second round, which was the decision-maker. Only Marta and Kassab were left standing for that one.

A squatter's movement in Ohio?

Toledo Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is telling residents to squat in their own homes and get legal representation if they are being foreclosed upon. The strategy:

(1) Stay in your home. Possession is 9/10ths of the law. And if you live in Wayne County Detroit or Cook County Chicago, the police department will refuse to enforce the foreclosure sale.
(2) Get quality legal representation - Legal Aid and many non-profits offer this at free or reduced charges.
(3) Tell your bank to "Produce the Note." With the rush of sub-prime lending loans and the following rash of bank bailouts and mergers, it's very possible that the party claiming to own your mortgage has no idea where the paperwork is. If they can't prove they hold the deed and show the paper trail, they can't back such a claim in a court of law. At the very least, requiring them to produce the paperwork will slow foreclosure proceedings.

Municipal Elections 1: Results

Bad news for favelados, cortiço dwellers, and other Paulistano citizens in “informal/irregular/precarious” housing: results of the municipal elections came in at the end of October and Gilberto Kassab beat out Marta Suplicy to continue as the mayor São Paulo. While I am not crazy about either candidate, Marta was clearly the better choice on housing issues, and was endorsed by all the housing and social movements I have contacts with in the city.

You can see the dichotomy of support best in this graphic from the Folha de São Paulo. The poor peripheral regions of the city, which house the majority of favelas and loteamentos irregulares, voted Marta while the wealthier residential and commercial districts went for Kassab.

See full-size graphic here.

Candidate Info

Marta
Marta, of the left wing Worker’s Party, was mayor from 2000-2004 and is known for implementing an Orcamento Participativo (participatory budget), creating a system of Unified Education Centers that serve many favelas and poor neighborhoods, and integrating public transportation fares with the Bilhete Único electronic fare cards. To her discredit, she failed to make promised transportation infrastructure improvements and left the city with a pile of debt and unfinished programs. I also have qualms with the OP and education centers in practice, but they are great strides over having no programs at all.

Also critical, the city launched its first Plano Diretor under Marta’s administration, a voluminous legislative package designed to wield some pretty radical urban policy tools made legal by the federal government in 2001. These tools include special zoning protections for low income and irregular communities, processes for disappropriating under-utilized private lands for popular housing, legal instruments to regularize land tenure, and the creation of participatory councils for urbanization projects in irregular areas. Many elements of Marta’s Plano Diretor never left paper under Serra-Kassab, who later used this as an excuse to argue that the Plano should be re-written to cut out a lot of the tools housing movements were demanding be implemented.

Kassab
As his voting base reflects, Kassab is much less preoccupied with the concerns of the periphery (and not just in the geographical sense of the word). He is focused mainly on the city center and outlying business and residential districts as the engine of São Paulo’s and Brazil’s economic life. As vice mayor from 2004, ascending to mayor in 2006 when José Serra left to become governor, Kassab oversaw a series of policies that have earned him the moniker Mr. Clean, at least in my head. At its best, his penchant for a tidy metropolis is responsible for the Lei Cidade Limpa that banned all outdoor advertising in the city. At its worst, it has promoted a violent program of what housing and social activists call the higenização do centro (hygieni-ciz-ation of the city center).

I already wrote about the protests organized to condemn the inhumane treatment of the homeless population in the second half of this post back in August. But Kassab and Serra are also known for the Nova Luz program, a similar strategy to clean up a historic area of the city and make it into a powerful business district. Perhaps the most notorious part of the program is a 400-man police raid on the portion of Luz known as Cracolândia, literally Crack Land, that had the predictable consequence of simply driving drug users and traffickers west to República and Santa Cecília, while battering the homeless and forcing them to look elsewhere to improvise shelter. Kassab recently announced that revitalizing the city center on the Nova Luz model will be the principal mark of his second administration. In Luz he will further the program by attempting to give private interests power to dispossess property, identified as run down or under utilized in the Nova Luz legislation, for their commercial possession and use. He might just be successful – the municipal elections saw the city council move slightly to the right, with the Worker’s Party losing 2 seats and Kassab’s Democratas gaining 5:

Composition of São Paulo City Council, 1996-2008

PT = Worker's Party
DEM = Democratas

Full interactive graphic available from Estadão here.

Obama-Biden Urban Policy Agenda

This just showed up on Change.gov, the online office of the president elect. (Since when do you get an online office before being inaugurated? Eh, anyhow, the info is extensive). It's the Obama-Biden urban policy agenda.

I am wrapping up my time here in São Paulo and getting ready to continue work on housing and urban social justice in the States. This means learning as much about urban politics and housing policy back home as I did down here. I'll be studying this with interest in the days to come.

Everything I ever needed to know about capitalism and democracy, I learned from pirates

Great (but too short) interview with the author of a new paper on pirates, where he shares some parallels between 17th century pirate organization and modern democracy-capitalism. Says a bit about the current financial crisis too.

Dangerous inequality in U.S. Cities

A new United Nations Report "State of the World's Cities 2008/2009" finds economic inequality in American cities to to be above an internationally recognized "alert level" used to warn governments of possible negative social, political, and economic consequences. Race was seen as a central factor in the economic divide.

Unfortunately the report itself is not up for free download, but media stories on it give the general idea.

This comes on the heels of the last State of the World's Cities report from 2006-2007 which found evidence that slum dwellers in urban areas are worse off than poor rural populations.

It's not a math problem, it's a moral problem

I passed on a job and future publication opportunity today. A local research institute wanted to contract me for a literature review (in English) of Brazilian works that deal with the relationship between civil society mobilization and service delivery. The timing of the offer was really bad, but I also couldn’t bring myself to cut out something else to make time for the assignment. Mulling over what to do brought on a rant that I am now going to reproduce here in extended form.

The subject for the review fell under a collection of comparative poli sci/development studies literature you might call “the politics of service delivery.” Once a significant focus of my undergrad reading, I have come to detest the basic assumptions and central methodologies of this body of work, as well as its inaccessibility to anyone without a degree in advanced jargon.

PSD literature starts from the basic, unstated assumption that the problems generating crappy/insufficient public services for poor citizens are essentially technocratic. We simply haven’t discovered the right combination of interventions, strategies for “scaling up” good programs, optimum mix of public-private-international partnerships, or the best institutional innovations for participation that would give better quality of life outcomes.

PSD literature further assumes that sterile academic publications with complicated pseudo-scientific methodologies - surveys, samplings, charts and regression - will discover solutions. What irks me the most reading this type of political science literature is how de-politicized it is, as if there weren’t clear disputes over power, control, rights and resources that kept public services from being adequate or effective. When I think of PSD authors I imagine a person with mid-western protestant manners too ingrained to hang out the dirty laundry in public. They know there are nasty egoistic forces at work but they would only be willing to hint at such in hushed kitchen tones. Mostly they whitewash their publications in jargon, perhaps from a desire for things to really be so sterile, or more likely, because they are so removed emotionally/practically from actual political battles that they don’t even know it to be otherwise.

Just look at the buzz-words to see what I mean. “Public-private partnerships” are tossed about as if the two entities were neutral but somehow combined become the wonder twins of poverty alleviation. Forget any discussion of how private (read: business) interests might be fundamentally opposed to meeting certain concerns of the poor, or of the incentives that governments have to pander to business interests over those of the “to be serviced” populations. Forget that between “public” and “private” there is no mention of poor people as members of any partnership. Or how about “civil society participation?” People love the term ‘civil society’ – governments, businesses, and uncritical academics – because it is stigma-less and ambiguously positive. It also conveniently prevents us from confronting the fact that big NGOs and advocacy groups both foreign and national, staffed by people who are usually not oppressed nor marginalized, dominate many of our “open democratic forums for civil society participation.” They do so in place of the people whose quality of life is actually being discussed, complicit in at least one aspect of their oppression – preventing the poor from taking control of the decisions that affect their lives. But unless you unpack what the hell “civil society” looks like in practice, you wouldn’t notice this.

Now I agree that there are instances when good intentions and public resources combine, but the promise gets lost in the bureaucracy of it all. Cases like these could use technocratic tweakings (though I still doubt the utility of producing academic papers on the subject. A few pissed off people wanting to make it better is what is needed – both inside and outside the government).

Ok, I have finished lambasting the literature on the politics of service delivery and arrive at my counter-interpretation, thanks for bearing with me…

In my last 5 months here I have realized that the most glaring social problems and instances of oppression have little to do with good intentions getting lost, technocratic and bureaucratic mix-ups, and/or a severe lack of statistical regressions. They have lot more to do with a simple refusal of those who have to treat those without with common human decency, while those not directly involved in oppression and violence nod in support or look the other way. The real problem is a deep moral failing in the body politic. Some might say it is a problem with our souls.

I’ll give an example. On Monday I participated in a protest by São Paulo’s homeless population and their allies in reaction to municipal efforts to clean up the city center. The problem with this type of “hygienic” politics, alleged the protesters, was that it failed to distinguish between trash and people. To clean up public spaces, the city was sending municipal water trucks to parks in the middle of the night to spray them down with high-powered water hoses, including the human beings sleeping there. Some homeless reported having their blankets taken and being subject to pepper-spray when police aided in the operations.

Further complaints from protesters include recent efforts to shut down some of the city’s homeless shelters, some of which were already forced to close and are now trying to re-open. In an online op-ed column criticizing the event in Brasil’s version of Times Magazine, one author dismisses a protester’s claim that the homeless “have nowhere to go” by citing the ability of these same shelters to meet demand. Frustrating enough, but I also learned directly from a man who works with São Paulo shelters that most cook their books to make it appear that people who were turned away for lack of space actually left the shelter voluntarily because they did not accept rules for curfews and no drugs.

Naming and confronting the backers of this hygienic politics was the main focus of the protest. Bearing signs and blankets painted with slogans such as “clean city, dirty conscience”, the mass marched to the buildings of several entities around Centro. At the Brazilian stock market protesters awarded a “Trophy of Hygienicizing” to a staff member; at the Merchandise & Futures Market they symbolically camped out on the distinctive blankets most homeless use; at the building of the Sub-Municipality and the headquarters of the Associação Viva o Centro (Live Centro Association – an influential business consortium) they dumped soapy water on the buildings’ the front steps to clean their dirty consciences; at city hall they repeated the water stunt and attempted to turn in their letter of demands to a mayor’s representative but were not received, being kept from reaching the front door by a circle of metal gates and security guards.

[PICTURES from CMI Brasil]
www.mediaindependente.org

(These are cartadores, workers who pick through trash for recyclables to make money. The city is also trying to run them out of Centro. Here they decked out their carts with Brazilian flags and carried the water for the protest.)

We don’t need a survey with a snowballing representative sample size to tell us what is going on here or to come up with a solution. Some people want to appropriate public space for the interest of upper-class citizens and private business, and are content to treat human beings like trash to do so. The solution is to decide this is morally reprehensible and to stop abusing homeless people. Don’t steal their blankets or spray them with hoses, and instead of closing homeless shelters, open more. That’s a good first step, is that so hard to come up with?

Or in a second example, see the part of my post on Real Parque titled “evictions.” The problem here is that a coalition of people want to kick other, impoverished people out of their shacks without regard to what might happen to them in the future. Teargas and rubber bullets if necessary. Don’t f-ing kick people out of their homes!! Buy off the landowner if he/she/it has a legitimate claim to the property (often doubtful, as Brazilian land titles and ownership histories are usually a cluster-fuck of competing swindles), but let the poor folks have a damned house.

Long story short, I passed on the literature review and spent the rest of my day visiting a collectively-built land occupation to the east of the city, watched a women who had been participating in the neighborhood movement for 3.5 years get awarded a house for her and her daughter, and I wrote this blog post. Feeling good about my decision at the moment.

World Social Forum 2009 in Belém Brasil

Check it!! Jan. 27- Feb. 1

http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/

Guess whose visa expires at the end of February...

Recent translation work

A friend of mine did some architecture work with the MST (Rural Landless Workers Movement) and asked me to translate their latest action manifesto. This group is known for being the shit - if they were an urban movement I would be working for them.

MANIFESTO REPUDIATING THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE MST PROMOTED BY THE PUBLIC MINISTRY OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL.

AGAINST THE REVOCATION OF CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS, IN DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY AND IN DEFENSE OF THE MST.

We, Brazilian citizens, members of social and political organizations, want to demonstrate to Brazilian society and the international community our indignation and most vehement repudiation of the measures taken by the Public Ministry and the Military Brigade of Rio Grande do Sul against the MST (Landless Workers Movement).

In September 2007 the Subcomandant General Cel. Paulo Roberto Mendes Rodrigues sent the Public Ministry a report elaborated by the Military Brigade that characterizes the MST and the Via Campesina as movements that have ceased to realize “typical acts for social demands” and have passed to orchestrating “acts typical of criminal organizations” and “paramilitaries.”

Such measures by the Military Brigade cross into the jurisdiction of the Federal and Civil Police, violating the 1988 Constitution. State deputies, governors, members of INCRA and supposed foreigners were secretly investigated.

On December 2, 2007, the Superior Council of the Public Ministry approved a report elaborated by prosecutor Gilberto Thums that designates “[…] a staff of Justice Department prosecutors to pursue public civil action with the aim dissolving the MST and declaring it illegal […]”. As such, the Public Ministry decided “[…] to intervene in the MST’s schools, with the intention of taking all measures necessary to reinstate legality, both in the pedagogical aspect and in the MST’s external structure of influence.”

On March 11, 2008, contradicting the inquiry of the Federal Police that investigated the MST in 2007, the Federal Public Ministry denounced 8 supposed members of the MST for “integrating groups whose objective was to move the State of Law, the present order in Brazil, that would practice crimes of political non-conformity,” crimes captured in the National Security Law of the now defunct dictatorship.

The denunciation refers to the encampments of the MST as a “parallel State” and points to the existence of support from FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia), among foreigners responsible for military training.

In addition to such measures is the intensifying process of police repression of the MST’s political actions. Peaceful marches, protests, and occupations are attacked with extreme violence on the part of the Military Brigade. The images reveal shocking brutality: bombs thrown in the middle of families with children, rubber bullets shot at face level and beatings.

It is against these measures if such authoritarian and dictatorial character that we come to publicly demonstrate our support of the MST.

Democracy cannot be an empty word. To dissolve the MST, make it illegal, prosecute and criminalize its actions and its political militants to “break its spine” signifies- in no uncertain terms- to annul the democratic rights of landless rural workers.

Such criminalization of poverty and social movements represents an attack on democratic liberties and cannot be tolerated in a country that intends to be free. Since re-democratization and the end of the military dictatorship this is the bluntest threat to civil and political rights, with intent to succeed, including against other popular organizations and our people’s fighters.

One of the report’s proposals goes to the extreme: it suggests canceling the voting registration of those landless encamped or settled in a region to avoid their political influence. Suffrage without the right to organize politically is a farce. To annul suffrage is patent dictatorship.

Not one citizen aware of Brazil’s recent history can be silent before so great, evident, and concrete a threat to democracy and Human Rights. This is a shameful offense to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1988 Constitution that reserve the right to association for lawful ends.

The MST is a social movement of popular character that fights for agrarian reform for social justice and popular sovereignty. The Brazilian elites need to learn that social questions should be resolved with POLITICS AND NOT WITH POLICE!

The only way to put an end to the MST is to put an end to the latifúndio (grand agricultural estate), to agro-business, and to millions of landless families by giving them opportunity for work and income in food production. This is the political proposal of agrarian reform guaranteed in the Federal Constitution, whose promise the MST claims thought its occupations and fights throughout Brazil for the last 25 years.

For this we call on all those that fight to stand at with us at the Public Act in Repudiation of the Criminalization of the MST Promoted by the Public Ministry of Rio Grande do Sul in the theater of the Catholic University of São Paulo (TUCA), Rua: Monte Alegre, 1024-Perdizez, at 7:00PM on July 16th, 2008.

DOWN WITH THE AUTHORITARIANISM OF THE MILITARY BRIGADE AND THE PUBLIC MINISTRY OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL!

ALL SUPPORT TO THE WORKERS/LANDLESS, TO THE MST AND TO THE VIA CAMPESINA!

FOR AGRARIAN REFORM! FOR DEMOCRACY! AND FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY!