These plans were implemented on May 13. Water barricades were placed on Republic, between Liberty and Green Streets, for a six month trial period. In addition to this, fencing was built around a recreation center preventing homeless people from finding shade and shelter. All of this with the supposed purpose of stopping an “open-air drug market” and stopping crime.

But who is defining what ‘crime’ is? How is a church providing for the hungry viewed as “attracting” crime? Why is a child going hungry, in itself, not viewed as a crime when it’s perpetuated by our own government? The answer is that spikes in “crime” are nothing more than code for a rise in poverty and state repression. These have been caused by the worsening economic conditions in Cincinnati and the gentrification of the neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine.

The gentrification of Over-the-Rhine has been an ongoing process catalyzed by the murder of an unarmed Black man named Timothy Thomas in 2001. This was coupled with public outrage from the community in response to yet another murder of a Black person by police. The rebellion gained momentum; boycotts and protests put pressure on the city. The Black United Front and the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement were just a few of the organizations involved in the struggle. To stomp this rebellion and ensure profitable control of the neighborhood, the  privatization of the public planning department in the form of a nonprofit development corporation named 3CDC (Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation) was implemented in 2003.  This process was dubbed “urban revitalization.”   

Dan La Botz summarizes this history as follows in Cincinnati: A Decade Since the Rebellion of 2001 — What Have We Learned, Where Are We Now?: 

Cincinnati exploded in protest and rebellion in April and May of 2001 following the April 7 police killing of 19-year old Timothy Thomas, the fifteenth African American man under the age of 50 to be killed by the police between 1995 and 2001. While several of those killed had drawn guns and shot at or shot civilians or police, others did not have firearms or were killed while in police custody. Thomas, who had committed many misdemeanors and had several warrants for his arrest (but who had no record of violence) was nevertheless chased into an alley, shot and killed by a police officer. Thomas’s mother Angela Leisure showed up at City Hall accompanied by 200 other community members, almost all of them Black, to demand that city and police officials explain why her son had been killed, but police and politicians dealt with her contemptuously.… The Cincinnati rebellion of 2001 was the largest disturbance in the city since the ghetto rebellion of 1967 and the largest in the United States since Los Angeles riots of 1992 which began with the police beating of an African American man named Rodney King.

After the riots, a real estate consultant named John Alschuler based in Washington D.C. was brought in to advise the city of Cincinnati on how to best handle the situation: “Over-the-Rhine has to be restored as a mixed-income neighborhood where poor-, moderate-, and upper-income people all have a future… create a private entity with the capacity to deliver change at Fountain Square and Over-the-Rhine, devote capital to it, and hire the foremost talent in the country to staff it.” 

In 2003, Mayor Luken appointed P&G CEO A.G. Lafley and Federated Department Stores chairman James Zimmerman to “a new private, nonprofit group charged with sparking downtown’s struggling economic development efforts.” This would come to be the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp, otherwise known as 3CDC — a non-profit development corporation dominating what should be controlled by the people. During this time, the nascent 3CDC started sending out “ambassadors of goodwill.” The clear intention was to send out wholesome and cheerful representatives to the community, but in practice they acted as private security guards, enforcing the interests of the organization and its goals. They leveraged state power to “clean up” downtown. Instead of solving the underlying problems behind poverty and crime, they simply sought to kick it somewhere else.

         One of the ambassadors themselves admitted to the reality of their role. “We’re pretty much looked at as security guards who are setting a higher standard,” an ambassador said. They essentially acted as auxiliary police units. Ambassadors would patrol Over-the-Rhine and look in shop windows “for a signal from an employee that everything is fine or something is amiss.” If they spotted an “unruly customer” or potential robbery, they would call the police. Ambassadors dealt with “everything from drug addicts ranting and raving and threatening our customers to a fight breaking out…” said Gary Gabbard, manager of Donato’s on Main St. 10. Small business owners like Gary use what little power they have to be petty tyrants towards the impoverished and call upon auxiliary police units to police communities. Settlers collaborate with the state to act as ambassadors and subjugate marginalized groups. 

St. Francis Seraph — the church that has been frequently providing aid services to the community of Over-the-Rhine — had planned on converting a nearby portion of the church into a shelter through the nonprofit Tender Mercies. A member of the local neighborhood watch and various city officials claimed this would lead to increased crime and that the neighborhood was out of control.

“You can’t put investment dollars in a neighborhood that’s out of control,” said Chris Frutkin, owner of City Center Properties. “That behavior would never happen south of Liberty Street.” 

The lives of people are easily outweighed by numerical investments to Chris and the class of business owners. They’re more than happy to demonize victims of poverty to protect their own profit, and push narratives of crime being “out-of-control.” America’s economic and social system is maintained in part through stigmatization and individualism. It attempts to place any blame solely upon the individual. Poor people are painted with a general image of immorality; stereotyped as lazy, stupid, bad, or as violent criminals. With this falsehood, a person is able to justify walking past another human begging on the street in 100°F heat without a second thought. With this falsehood, members of a community can be lulled into inaction as repressive powers are built to crack down on them as soon as medical bills get too high or the stock market too low.

“We’re hoping that it could be a form of affordable housing with supportive services to get some of these people off the street into decent housing,” said Father Al Hirt, St. Francis Seraph pastor. “The Franciscans would love to see it used that way, more than some boutique hotel or something.”

Unfortunately, according to WCPO, this was not successful: “The nonprofit Tender Mercies had hoped to buy the St. Francis Seraph friary and applied to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency for low-income historic tax credits for the $21 million project. But the housing finance agency’s board declined to fund the project, according to a May 15 news release.”

Furthermore, the barricade has been a “success” for the settlers:

“So far, so good, let’s wait and see,” said Over-the-Rhine Community Council President Kevin Hassey. “I’m encouraged… there are more police in the area, particularly north of Liberty.”

The notion that crime is on the rise and needs to be rectified in the form of more police ultimately benefits the people in power — the landowners, the police, real estate developers. The police enforce their authority for the state, but that authority is not neutral, as their power is used to protect the interests of businesses to ensure profit and subjugation of colonized peoples. The planned barricade is a fascist attack on people who have been labeled by the state as deserving of extreme poverty and violence. Systematic inequalities perpetually enforced by the state are the root causes of homelessness.

This barricade is a manifestation of the police fulfilling their historic role as slave patrols. Increases in visible poverty and the misery it causes are due to capitalism and settler colonialism functioning to keep working and colonized people exploited — the necessary counterpart to the siphoning of wealth created by workers into the pockets of business owners. Over-the-Rhine isn’t the only target. Several neighborhoods in Cincinnati are also the target. Camp Washington is one example. The Camp Washington Urban Revitalization Corporation even got the neighborhood of Camp Washington selected by the Congress for the New Urbanism for a new renovation project that will displace the renters and houseless people in the area for a walkable neighborhood benefiting wealthier clientele. It’s part of a multi-faceted approach to continue the colonization of land in Cincinnati for increased profits. The iron fist of the state and the invisible hand of the “free market” are limbs of the same body of the illegitimate settler republic of the United States of America.

Police don’t prevent crime and don’t serve the people. They exist to protect the people in power. “Urban revitalization” does not benefit communities, but displaces renters and the houseless by increasing the property values of the neighborhood and drawing in a wealthier clientele. Urban revitalization utilizes the police to displace homeless people and victims of poverty so the land can be remade into luxury condos to make a profit and draw in wealthier white residents. This is exactly what happened with the murder of Timothy Thomas by Cincinnati police and this process is continuing before our eyes. It’s manifesting as a police barricade in the very same neighborhood.

Furthermore, 3CDC is continuing its mission of gentrification, better described as urban settler colonialism: Joe Rudemiller, vice president of marketing and communications for 3CDC said, “We’re going to try to replicate what we’ve done south of Liberty… and hopefully that takes care of some of the issues that we’ve been seeing. We are definitely seeing some challenges with safety up here, and that has been a pervasive problem.” This isn’t some past event to lament. Gentrification is a process that is happening RIGHT NOW and perpetuating white supremacy and impoverishment.

Remember that gentrification is not inevitable — stand up against business interests in your neighborhood! Don’t trust the police and real estate developers who seek to control the neighborhood on behalf of the ruling classes. Protect the homeless people in your neighborhood, and find solidarity against the ruling classes which will crush you both to put a penny in their pocket.

[New Britain, CT] – We are inviting any and all media to our rally at Central Park in New Britain on April 22nd 2024 at 3:30 pm to bring attention to the gentrification unfolding in New Britain and around CT, as well as the gentrification yet to come. It is also to call out one luxury developer in particular, Jasko Development LLC and its CEO Avner Krohn. He and his company have been described as leading New Britain’s “comeback” (translation: bringing rich people in and kicking poor, homeless, and long time residents out). Like all luxury developments that have been built in once poor and underdeveloped areas across the U.S, the 3 luxury developments Jasko is building downtown will release the floodgates of gentrification. As more wealthy people, who can afford Jasko’s $1650 / month rent for a studio, move to New Britain, as more landlords in the surrounding area speculate that they can charge more for rent with the influx of rich people, the homeless, poor, and long time residents who can’t afford the rent increases and housing costs will be displaced. They will either end up homeless or be forced to move to an area with cheaper housing. It’s a process and story that has unfolded in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Boston. Look at the changes in New Haven over the past 10-15 years!

We are here to say enough! Jasko Development LLC and Avner Krohn are the face of gentrification in New Britain whether they intend to be or not. If they want to be helpful to the New Britain community, where plenty of people are desperate for housing they can qualify for, then they should meet the following demands from the community:

1. Cut the rent in 1⁄2 and don’t raise it
2. Remove 3x income requirements, disregard prior evictions, credit history, and criminal records,
   no application fees
3. Prevent police harassment, especially of homeless and poor people, on your property
4. Only rent to New Britain residents, employ residents of New Britain with a living wage
5. Subsidize rents with your estimated $7.5 million tax break

If they are unwilling to do the above, then they make it clear they are not for the people of New Britain in these desperate times, they are only about their money, and we need to evict them before they evict us!

 Rent stabilization is a legal status created by the city government under which landlords can only increase the rent by a certain percentage every year. They may not evict a tenant unless the tenant has violated the lease, and they must sign one or two-year leases with the tenant (as opposed to the landlord’s favorite type of lease, the oral month-to-month, where they can evict or eject tenants for no reason at all at the drop of a hat). New York’s rent stabilization guidelines were created in 1969 as “market-friendly” alternatives to the more stringent controls on rent increases during and immediately following World War 2. These policies had been seen as necessary to keep workers — whose labor was needed in the city’s manufacturing industry — from being displaced by soaring rents. However, by the 1970s, advances in shipping and computation technology allowed capitalists to increasingly export labor costs to the Third World. Hard-fought union struggles increased the wages and working standards of industrial workers in the U.S. Meanwhile, capitalists hired death squads to terrorize laborers in the Third World, and stymy socialist and union organizing. They then took advantage of the non-existence of strong union contracts in the Third World to pay these workers far less than their U.S. counterparts. This left urban working-class communities who had relied on these jobs to support themselves, particularly Black communities, who were also systematically denied mortgages for suburban homes, with no prospects for decent wages.

 As New York City deindustrialized, the city government cut the social services of these neighborhoods with the explicit goal of displacing the residents — what they dubbed “planned shrinkage.” The impacts were immediate and devastating. Just under 1 million people were displaced or killed by the sudden loss of social services. When it was no longer profitable to the capitalists for workers to live in the city, the state began to erode rent stabilization, including the elimination of rent stabilization for any building constructed after 1974. Real estate speculators took advantage of the many buildings in disrepair and in escrow and bought them for pennies on the dollar. Landlords invested in the reconstruction of these buildings because, once reconstructed, they were no longer subject to rent stabilization. They “reconstructed” them for the explicit purpose of evading rent stabilization requirements!

By the 1990s, corporations began to open offices in New York City, bringing their administrative workers with them. Neighborhoods that were depopulated under “planned shrinkage” were filled by office and service workers. This influx of people provided renewed ways for landlords to profit. The New York State government, in order to facilitate their profiteering, continued the attack on rent stabilization. In 1994, it legislated that any unit whose rent was more than $2,000 per month could be destabilized. Landlords began a frenzy of alteration and tweaking to their units in order to justify a $2,000 rent. Once the properties were destabilized, these same landlords left them to decay once more while they collected inflated rents.

Rent stabilization was never designed to end homelessness or housing insecurity. It was an attempt by the city to manage the contradiction between rapidly rising rents that force the poor to leave the city and the need for a working-class to fill jobs in the city, while protecting the class of people who profit from rent collection and exploitation of labor — the landlords and capitalists. 

Rather than force the landlords to rent out these stabilized units, New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave landlords $10 million to renovate stabilized units and list them at market prices. The city government revealed its true nature by protecting and facilitating the profitability of speculative enterprises. The mayor of New York City gave free money to the landlords, not free housing to the people.

According to data gathered by the city of New York, about half of non-owner-occupied New York City apartments are rent-stabilized. This allows many families and individuals to continue to reside in neighborhoods they grew up in, and prevents rent costs from eating their entire paycheck. Rent stabilization is an undeniable good; we can and should defend it. Still, we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking its protection or expansion will make housing really fair or equitable, let alone that it can bring about an equitable world. As long as the landlord class controls the production and distribution of housing, they use housing as a means to enrich themselves while bleeding the working class of the crumbs we receive as wages. One of the chief functions of the U.S. government is to manage the crises caused by this kind of speculation. However, contrary to the commonly held misconception that the government does this to help the people, their role is to ensure the bankers and landlords who gamble with the people’s money can get bailouts, handouts, and a leg up.

It is our responsibility to end this domination and bring about a society in which goods and services are produced according to ability and distributed according to need, not hoarded for the luxury of a few. We who seek to end this domination must form study groups with our friends, coworkers, and loved ones to collectively understand how this system of domination works. From these study groups, we can organize tenants to collectively struggle against our landlords for better living conditions. 

We must organize defense units, and prevent the protection racket known as the NYPD from evicting our neighbors out of their homes and displacing our homeless neighbors from their camps. It’s through these organizations that we, the working class, can exercise our power. As we do, we will take on not just the immediate effects of the housing crisis (the necessary survival programs for the houseless, eviction-defense squads, etc.) but the very institutions of government that permit the landlords to flourish and, ultimately, the landlords themselves. It’s not just New York City, as practically any working-class person can attest. Housing is either unaffordable or unattainable across the entire United States and Canada. Wherever we may be, we must embed ourselves in and establish organizations like these and put an end to the rule of parasitic landlords and bosses!

The capitalist economic system we live under prioritizes the production of profitable goods and services. However, just because something is profitable, does not mean it is beneficial to working people — in fact, our lived experience as the working class in Taos County proves that the opposite is the case! For example, it’s currently profitable for investment companies to buy housing units and convert them to vacation rental properties, which comprise at least 5% of all housing in Taos County. Even worse, a further 20% of the houses in Taos County are second homes! This means at least a quarter of all housing in the county has been hoarded by corporations or the rich, which limits the already slim amount of housing available and causes the price to skyrocket to unattainable levels for the working people of Taos. The tourist and corporate greed that makes the Taos housing market profitable forces locals to relocate further away from town or into homelessness. Clearly, the profitability of housing is not linked to prosperity for working people. 

Those who own businesses such as Taos Valley Inc. also reap the benefits of affluent tourists vacationing in Taos. But it’s not the owners who create the goods and provide the services to tourists at those businesses. It’s the workers who build, clean, and repair the rental units and hotels that we can’t afford to stay in; who serve, prepare, and cook food at the restaurants, and stock the grocery stores’ shelves. The working class produces the profits which the owners collect. The insatiable greed of the owners, and endless quest for profitability ensures the  goods and services we produce are increasingly unaffordable to ourselves, and can only be sold to the demographic that is pricing us out of town.

Worse still, the government of the town of Taos, whose ostensible responsibility should be the wellbeing of the town’s residents, encourages this grift through its partnership with two private agencies, The Center for Responsible Travel and George Washington International Institute for Tourism Studies. Together with these agencies, the local government  created a tourism plan. Though the stated mission of the plan is to ensure the industry benefits the local community, as long as the economy is based on profit, tourism will have disastrous effects on the working people of Taos County. The plan claims to promote collaboration between “residents, local governments, tourism industry stakeholders, enterprise leaders, nonprofit and social services managers” in order to benefit the community. But as we have examined, the needs of working-class residents are directly opposed to the desires of these “stakeholders”who need to displace and exploit us in order to make profits. How can a fundamentally exploitative relationship lead to mutually beneficial “collaboration?”

If the town could simply admit that the working-class economic interests of its residents are opposed to the wealthy’s, it would be a start, but the town doesn’t even bother to maintain a caring façade! Recently, some neighbors at the Taos Men’s Shelter repeatedly sought a meeting with the town commissioners to talk about the state of the shelter and how the town could improve its programs. They were denied every time. When our neighbors from the Shelter were finally able to schedule meetings with local non-profit executives, their ideas and reflections were rudely dismissed. What then, is the point of the survey and the new tourism plan? The town is sloughing off the incalculable suffering the tourism industry is causing the working people who live here. With the help of fancy firms, the town pays lip service to the grievances expressed by the people of Taos, while actually protecting and encouraging the parasitic vultures who profit from the tourism industry, and who are expanding their barrage on poor and working people.

The struggle of working people in Taos, though it has specificities, bears a stark resemblance to processes occurring across the country. The root causes and the response to the fires that wreaked havoc in Maui, especially on native Hawaiians, are connected to tourism in Northern New Mexico. In Maui, intensive construction undertaken by the tourist industry stripped the environment of components critical to fire prevention, such as water, creating the conditions for the deadly fire to take place. In the aftermath of the fire, investment firms, who operate identically to those in New Mexico, and in some cases may be the same companies who own about half of the short-term rental units in Taos, bombarded Hawaiians who had just lost their homes in the fire, seeking to buy their land. These marauding investors are seeking to further displace people in the midst of a crisis so their firms can profit. What’s happening in Maui is also happening in the midst of an economic crisis in Northern New Mexico, with bloodsucking investors coercing Hispanic and Indigenous Tiwa people to sell their land. This cruel pattern will repeat until the working and oppressed classes organize to stop it.

As working people in Taos, we must get organized to protect our communities against those profiting off of our demise. Join us at Kit Carson Park every Wednesday from 11:30–1:30 to learn about how we are organizing against this profiteering. Email us at newmexicosurvivalprograms@gmail.com or find us on Instagram at @newmexicosurvivalprograms.