Over the past several weeks, residents of the Ethelred Estate – a 900-unit housing estate situated just south of the Thames river in the London area of Vauxhall – have been mobilizing to resist the government’s sell-off of their estate to a housing association. This “stock transfer” of public housing to a housing association has become a common story in England since the government began privatizing public housing in the 1980s. Today, local governments are continuing the trend by using the government’s austerity measures as a justification for selling off their estates to registered social landlords. And tenants here at the Ethelred Estate know exactly what that means: higher rent prices, less secure tenancies in the long-term and for many, displacement and the destruction of their community.

The above cartoon is by “Tim” for Defend Council Housing. The caption reads “It’s a bargain but you’ll have to make some minor changes – like the tenants.” There is a for sale sign on the estate.

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Estate
by Fugitive Images, Paul Hallam, Victor Buchli, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson, Tristan Fennell
Paperback, 152 pages
Published September 24th 2010
Please buy direct from Myrdle Court Press
ISBN: 0956353924

This is an incredible book that will move you deeply, even if the true meaning of home and the trauma of losing it hasn’t been burnt into you by life itself. As someone who has experienced eviction and poverty and loss, I confess I have strong feelings about how people write about it, document it, photograph it. But here it is done with a beauty, love, and respect that comes closer to capturing the many shades of what it means and how it is experienced than almost anything I have read. There is no sentimentalization here, no glorification of the working class or a home that after years of landlord neglect has become much less than anyone would wish. Instead it is a deeply felt exploration of meaning from many angles, a teasing out across perspectives, a contextualization of loss and change through words and images and theory.

My favourite section is the first one by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johannson, the experience of living on Hackney’s Haggerston West Estate and watching it slowly emptying of people, introducing the incredible series of photographs from Haggerston and Kingsland Estates, with captions that add another level of depth to what the images make so vivid. Followed by a more literary piece by Paul Hallam, exploring estates in the plural and the singular, winding around the meaning and making of place and poverty, extracting quotes from residents that I confess made me shed a tear or two on the tube. There is much to ponder in Victor Buchli’s Archeology of the Recent Past, and a clear contextualization of the particular within the broader history of Britain’s social housing by Cristina Cerulli.

They come together in a thought-provoking, moving whole. No one can ever have the last, the final, the entire say of what estates mean to those who live in them, what it is like to live in them, what it is like to lose them. That is the point. Estate is simply a gift to those who read it, the gift of a view, a taste, an experience that will make you think and feel deeply.

In 2003, at the peak of the market, my parents proudly bought their first home.


We’re quite a large family—5 kids total, and you have to add aunts and uncles and in-laws, and nieces and nephews—and my parents felt that finally, no one can judge us for living in overcrowded conditions, since it’s “our house.”


My parents are extremely hard working and savvy, like most immigrants who come to the United States, however, they were not entirely prepared nor informed on how homeownership works. They sincerely believed that since their mortgage broker was a nice Latina who spoke Spanish, she would be a great resource and do what is in their best interest. I was only 20, and while I have been my parents’ “financial counselor” for as long I can remember, I was definitely not knowledgeable on whether my parents were “getting a good deal.”

Several years later, after my parents finally decided to talk to me about some of their financial issues and were worried about losing the house, I had to step in.

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A piece of my heart will always live in Glasgow. It is a city of incredible warmth and beauty and humour, one that welcomed me when I was sad and tired and burned out from years of work in LA. I worked in a shop where we took pride in what we did and the managers would stand up for staff against bullying customers, something utterly unknown in all of my years experience working for minimum wage. With a single question to start them off, cabbies would break down the privitisation and development of the parks or public housing in the wee hours of the morning. I remember walking the city with Bob, who could tell me the radical history of every building we passed. He also told me once that for an artist there never was a colour to equal the glorious colour of a tube of vermilion paint under Thatcher. As though Thatcher, and all who have followed her, crafted a world where the poor live in shadows and shades of gray, and it remains to us to fight for vermilion.

For a writer? The Scottish use of language is pure dead glorious. Like my beloved Spanglish, it twists English into its own cadences and rhythms, and is full of words that I have never heard the like of. Both of them are languages of resistance in their power and playfulness and refusal to bow to a dominant grammar.

Small wonder that the history should match the rest, or better said, small wonder that I should love it so, shaped by history as it is. A history that human beings have taken into their hands to wrestle into shape, to wrest from it some kind of justice for themselves, their families, and their communities.

What is Red Clydeside? A city in revolt. Known principally as a primarily socialist uprising of workers during World War I, my own favourite stories are those of the women. With the influx of workers to the munitions plants, many landlords saw the opportunity to profit from the war and drastically raise rents. A spate of evictions followed, and owners also confiscated possessions to cover arrears. Business has always been business for business people.

In 1914, Independent Labour Party (ILP) councillor Andrew McBride, and Women’s Labour League president Mary Laird, formed the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association. It was Mary Barbour, however, who made of it a movement of active resistence, forming the South Govan Women’s Housing Association in June of 1915. The third child of seven, she had worked as a thread twister and carpet printer, and been part of the Kinning Park Co-operative Guild. The South Govan Housing Association worked through a collection of committees, physically preventing evictions and ‘hounding’ the Sheriff’s officers. I’m not entirely sure what this hounding consisted of, but knowing the proud women of Glasgow as I do, I can testify that it was without doubt both terrifying and effective.

Govan proved to be an inspiration quickly taken up by all of Clydeside, with evictions everywhere being forcibly resisted. The rent strike commenced. The Independant Labour Party and the Labour Unions came to the support of the women in demanding not simply a moratorium on rent increases, but the building of social housing, this is what solidarity looks like (if nothing else, just read the top paragraph of the second column):

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Albert Lowe wrote such a useful comment on Andrea’s DIT article on How to Research a Slumlord, that I turned it into a post here.  Thanks, Albert!

I have a couple of other suggestions about acquiring public data.

1) Figure out the best way to acquire public information
2) Familiarize yourself with the physical space that houses public records

Any researcher should familiarize him/herself with the public records and their offices.  You may have the right to access public records, but let’s make it as easy as possible. Try visiting public offices (land records, tax records, planning records, court records, and housing inspection records are all maintained locally).  Find out the staff’s day-to-day practices.  They have to deal with jerks and entitled developers all of the time. Just being friendly, respectful and possibly flirty may go a long way before you threaten anyone with a lawsuit for denying you information.

Find out how these offices prefer to dispense information. They may have their own customized Public Records Act request forms or may require formal letters. If you need a quick and dirty form, try the Student Press Law Center.  They have a FREE Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) letter generator set up for each State in the U.S.  To start generating your own FOIA requests go to:

http://www.splc.org/foiletter.asp

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Andrea Gibbons, among other things, established SAJE‘s Research Department with some path-breaking work that uncovered an invisible criminal slumlord empire just by digging into the information that surrounded a single building.  Andrea was followed  by Albert Lowe (aka Uncle Joe) who laid the groundwork for the Shame of the City reports that are referred to in our recent Get the Lead Out article.  Both of their  efforts contributed mightily towards the criminal convictions of two of L.A.’s biggest and baddest slumlords.  Here Andrea share’s her 5-step method on how to research a slumlord, which is also summarized in the 5-minute video below.

So you wanna get down and dirty and research a slumlord?

How to Research A Slumlord from Gilda Haas on Vimeo.

I believe that each and every one of us has a right to a safe and secure, I’d go so far as to say cozy, place to call home. While I have not yet succeeded in making this a universal belief (and I do stress the yet), I will say there is widespread agreement that a landlord must maintain his building if you’re paying him rent. Given that most owners see our beloved homes as nothing more than income streams that are only hurt by maintenance expenses, this is always a cause of no small tension. There are, of course, those among the wider pool of investors who are out and out blankety-blanks. Buy me a drink sometime and I will tell you what I really think, especially as this post has nothing to do with the whys of slumlords, so don’t forget the larger forces at work here that also require attention!

Far too many of our people are forced to live with rats, roaches, peeling paint, mold, an absence of heat, raw sewage, leaking pipes… the list goes on, as does my fury. If you’re going to dig deep and put the hours in to finding out exactly who is profiting off of such daily assaults upon their tenants, then I would first recommend love and fury in equal measures. They will make up for your learning curve, and sustain you in your attention to numbing detail and bureaucracy.

And so! For the agony and ecstasy of corporate research in 5 “easy” steps (and my apologies that specific sources are American though the theory is the same everywhere), keep reading…

Know them up and down, backwards and forwards before you do anything, and I mean anything.  Slumlords don’t like tenants or tenant organizers getting uppity, so be extremely prepared.

• Dig out those contracts, read them, find out exactly what you’ve signed up for if you didn’t already know. I’m afraid to say there are often some nasty surprises in there.  Those lawyers know what they’re doing.

• Cities and states have different laws protecting tenants, find out which ones apply to you. All of them have basic requirements for building maintenance. At best you also have your rent control (which limits how much an owner can increase your rent), and you have your just cause eviction (which limits the reasons you can be evicted). If your town has neither, then it’s just down to you and whatever you can negotiate into your contract. Make sure you have back up, and check out Vida Urbana/City Life to see just how much tenants working together have been able to negotiate into collective contracts.

Knowledge alone isn’t power, I’m afraid.  If it were my life would be much different. What knowledge does is allow you to use your power most effectively to place pressure where pressure will make a difference. You need to consider your options on how best to use it.

You can pressure the owner directly. For example when I worked at SAJE, we once took a tenant delegation to meet with their landlord’s pastor. That stopped the harassment and threatened evictions pretty quickly.

Another obvious target is the city or county, who are more likely to try and act effectively after you have built a picture of the landlord’s evil business operations and their effects on their tenants and community.

The picture below shows the kind of  strategic information that maybe be useful and where the pressure points might lie, but don’t let this limit you!  Every landlord and city is different.  There are undoubtedly other possibilities.

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Here are some other reports on the event:

Chicago Renters Spending More of Their Paychecks On Shelter (Chicago Tribune)

Renters Caught in the Housing Collapse (Chicago Public Radio)

A Renters Nightmare (The Chicago Reporter)

Rent Key to Chicago Economy (Chicago Tribune, letter-to-editor)

State of Renters Here: Insecure (Chicago LISC)