Archives May 2024

The tenants rights movement, when it’s functioning well, is an inclusive movement that invites anyone to be involved who believes in the cause of tenants rights, rent control, organizing a fightback against the skyrocketing profits of the corporate landlords and the ever-declining standard of living for renters in America.

To join a protest, a gathering, or an eviction defense action, there is no vetting process to determine whether someone has the correct political analysis of everything, or anything.

Having said that, all the individuals who got this network started are outraged by the ongoing war against all the people in Gaza, and the destruction of most of the buildings in this long-besieged strip of land.  Whether someone “owns” or “rents” is a completely irrelevant point these days in Gaza.

Artists for Rent Control Minister of Staple Guns, David Rovics, has been actively writing songs about the ongoing genocide, and performing them locally in the Portland area and around the world.

More participants wanted — musicians or other kinds of artists, and anybody else — for the Sing Out for Gaza event in downtown Portland on May 25th!

The rent strike is coming.  It’s just a matter of when, and how much organized solidarity might be involved.  Let’s build an eviction defense network in the Portland, Oregon area.  Sign up down at the bottom for text notifications.  Click the “donate” tab if you can help with printing costs for propaganda materials.

When the time comes that there are people ready to stand their ground and demand an end to the madness of ever-increasingly unaffordable costs of housing, our aim is to have an eviction defense squad ready to stand with them, and keep them in their homes.  The tactic worked brilliantly across the US in the 1930’s, and there’s every reason it can work just as well again, and on just as wide a scale.

We need rent control, again.  The fact that it was taken away from us is a crime of the plutocracy in the first place.  Housing as an investment market must be stopped, if our society is to have a chance of not descending into a complete caricature of any notion of “the American Dream.”

Actually affordable housing for everyone is completely achievable, right now.  If we fight for it.