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Amanda Ricketts is a graduate employee at the University of Oregon and researches, among other things, environmental sociology, gender and social movements. Claire Herbert is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and researches urban sociology, housing, crime/law, property, race and colonialism. 

In issue #119 of The Internationalist, we feature Ricketts and Herbert's piece from Dispatches from the Threshold
Tenant Power in Times of Crisis (forthcoming, Fernwood Publishing). Here they explain how the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), the largest public housing provider in Philadelphia, faces criticism for accelerating gentrification and displacing communities, while grassroots group Philadelphia Housing Action (PHAct) resists by occupying vacant PHA properties and advocating for affordable housing.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), established under the federal Housing Act of 1937, is the fourth largest public housing authority in the United States and largest landlord in Philadelphia. It is also responsible for providing affordable housing for low-income residents. The PHA manages an estimated 12,894 public housing units, and as of July 2020, the PHA had over 25,700 households on waiting lists. Despite being a significant source of affordable housing in Philadelphia, residents and activists have accused the organization of accelerating gentrification through the sale of scattered sites of housing and land, contributing to the harmful displacement of communities of colour. Residents complain of non-profit homeless service providers infringing on personal autonomy, of racially charged police violence, and of the violence of family separations. Regarding the latter, Philadelphia has the “highest child separation rate in the country — three times that of New York City and four times that of Chicago.” Resistance to these various forms of state violence coalesce in this case study.

A small local organization, Philadelphia Housing Action (PHAct), had worked to intervene in problematic housing authority practices years before the events of 2020. PHAct is a grassroots coalition of longtime housing and homeless activists, whose members “are grounded in years of agitation, work, and advocacy informed by collective experiences of homelessness, institutionalization, incarceration, family separation, foster care, public housing, interpersonal violence, immigration, substance use, mental health and all other forms of discrimination and oppression.” Central PHAct actors were galvanized by the PHA’s private police force activity and role in gentrifying neighbourhoods (such as in North Philadelphia, where they flipped disjointed public housing sites and had plans to turn some sites into Temple University student housing). Near the end of 2019, PHAct and affiliated organizations, like the Workers Revolutionary Collective, had begun discussing the problem of housing in Philadelphia. By February 2020, PHAct had a broader scope, with increased community support, though the organization’s core members never numbered more than five. Viewing PHA as paradoxically violating its own mission and obligations, PHAct decided they should move families into vacant PHA housing.

Soon COVID-19 began impacting the wider community. Stay-athome orders were put in place, and the CDC issued guidance prohibiting homeless encampment evictions. The pandemic made problems of homelessness more acute, as shelter capacity dropped and doubling up became riskier. On March 23, 2020, PHAct and its allies, including North Philadelphia Food Not Bombs, challenged the eviction of an encampment at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. PHAct members recall that the PHA’s private police force was “basically paid by the convention center to do so.” Later the same day, PHAct occupied its first vacant PHA property, opening it to the homeless community. Vacant sites were chosen and subsequently selected for occupation through visual surveys and community knowledge networks. PHAct members acting as “surveyors” leveraged their privilege to go undetected by neighbours while entering PHA-owned housing. One PHAct member explained the process: “If a neighbour came out and asked what I was doing, I would tell them I [was] surveying vacant city owned property for emergency housing. And that was good enough for most people, especially at the very start of the pandemic.” Through April and May, PHAct identified and moved mothers with children into ten more empty PHA-owned houses. Many families agreed to participate not because of political alliances but because they wanted housing: everyone who was moved into a house was homeless.

In May 2020, the George Floyd uprisings and subsequent critiques of state endorsed police violence further galvanized PHAct members and their allies. Members felt that collaboration between organizations was an essential tactic to maximize political cover. This broad collaboration enabled PHAct to organize local academics, frontline workers, and health care professionals to oppose evictions and CDC guideline violations. Allyship offered additional support and credibility in framing the organization’s critiques of PHA’s private police force and the intensity of violent state interventions: weeks of protests and marches locally were met with militarized policing that also included the eviction of homeless encampments from Center City areas by the National Guard. As a result, activists felt it was time to move forward with the comparatively less visible PHA housing occupations. However, there was not necessarily consensus on which tactics and outcomes to target; some organizations were wary that a focus on encampments would take away from housing objectives.

PHAct’s framework of abolitionist politics and its diversity of tactics was particularly important, as organizers realized “the revolution [would] not be funded.” At the same time, the occupations were preventing the PHA from making money from the sale of these houses. This entwining of government with the business of selling real estate further explains the persistent and violent enforcement of PHA’s private police force throughout the summer. The PHA’s role as a public agency operating as and with the interests of a “private property management company” betrays its public-serving operative.

On June 10, 2020, PHAct and homeless activists initiated a protest encampment, Camp James Talib-Dean (Camp JTD), under the collective cause of Housing Now. Housing Now is a slogan, a goal for the future, and an organizing objective for asserting the universal right to housing. The encampment occupied prime space in Center City, on Benjamin Franklin Parkway adjacent to several prominent museums and a Whole Foods store. Camp JTD quickly swelled to over 150 residents. It was additionally declared a no-cop zone, banning homeless outreach and defying police orders. Harm reduction was an important frame used to unite activists and motivate housing and land occupations as solutions, particularly concerning safe injection sites and controlled supplies of drugs. Harm reduction directed toward housing suggests that an important first step is allowing people space to live free from punitive state intervention. Citing the recent death of a resident, for whom the camp was named, an activist said the encampment was a “really good example of why people need a safe space.… More work needed to be done because the place [encampment] was not that safe, but the whole point was to create a space that was safer for people than the outside world.” Reducing harm by creating safer spaces for unhoused community members through both housing occupations and organized encampments, particularly mothers with families, is a central organizing tenet for PHAct members. Having no place to legally be subjects unhoused community members to additional risks and instability. Policies that illegalize community members leave people susceptible to further state coercion or violence. PHAct organized around solutions that met individuals where they were, creating spaces of security and belonging entirely separate from state surveillance.

Tactics both shifted and persisted over the next several months. On June 27, 2020, Camp Teddy, a smaller encampment — more strategically assembled through planned deliberation and prominently situated — occupied PHA-owned land in North Philadelphia. This encampment impeded breaking ground for a new $52 million mixeduse development, a project many nearby residents supported but that raised concerns about escalating gentrification pressures in a distressed neighbourhood. These two camps persisted for four months as residents continued their protest occupations, media showered attention on the encampments, and activists continued moving homeless families into PHA-owned homes.

In response, the PHA used their private police force to “eject squatters without a legal court process,” bypassing the city police force, which does not typically evict squatters if they have established tenancy. Instead, the landlord is instructed to use the civil eviction process through the court, proceedings that could take between four and twelve months.

The unique politics of the coalition surrounding PHAct expanded and finally motivated the city to negotiate. Few non-profits were collaborators, or even allies in these occupations, because they were hesitant to risk their funding by directly opposing the PHA. Non-profit actors may have positioned themselves as rhetorical allies to the cause of housing justice, but PHAct members emphasized that these organizations had legal and philosophical limitations that were fundamentally misaligned with the political and strategic goals of PHAct. PHAct’s housing occupations were particularly concerned with creating safe spaces outside of state structures that perpetuate housing injustice, particularly for homeless mothers and children. Abolition is the central politics orienting the activists’ relations to the PHA and the demands of Camp JTD and Camp Teddy occupiers. At the same time as activists were identifying the limits of the non-profit industrial sector’s support for PHAct’s more extralegal and political strategizing, they found a bounty of ever-expanding support from affinity groups and individual activists. Activists noted that the prominence of PHAct’s political mission resulted in an abundance of resources in the form of allies and educational materials, as everyone was “working really hard not to be racist, and [the input] wasn’t necessarily useful for what we were doing, and there’s many ways that it was very fraught, but nevertheless, there was a lot of energy.”

This immense energy garnered the attention of the city, and eventually a begrudging PHA, which set off negotiations over housing involving PHAct, the mayor, other high level city officials, and the CEO of the PHA. Camp residents, affinity groups, and individual activists united behind a common aim: to leverage these visible, spatially disruptive encampments to carve out access to more affordable housing, to ensure the stability of the homeless families squatting in PHA-owned housing, to hold PHA accountable to its mission of providing affordable housing, and to push back against forms of state violence.

Activists with PHAct achieved multiple successes. The particular historical moments of encroaching gentrification, evictions, policing violence, and Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the way the COVID-19 pandemic stressed formal housing solutions but provided some protection for informal housing solutions (like encampments) were integral to this outcome. On September 1, 2020, PHAct demanded that PHA transfer vacant city-owned properties to a land trust to be held as permanent low-income housing. The PHA announced on September 26 that the city had agreed to transfer fifty houses to a community land trust if all PHAct’s encampments were dissolved. On October 1, the PHA promised “nine fully rehabbed houses, two empty lots, the transfer of any squats that have already been approved for disposition to the land trust, amnesty for all Philadelphia Housing Action squatters, an end to extrajudicial ejectments and evictions by PHA Police, jobs for encampment residents to rehab the houses, a one year moratorium on sales of PHA property and an independent study on the impact of PHA property sales, participation of PHA Police Department in City of Philadelphia reform initiatives, and to fully implement the Continuous Conservation Reserve Program (CCRP) with up to 300 vacant properties” for the dissolution of Camp Teddy. On October 12, 2020, following multiple assemblies and canvassing at the encampment, PHAct signed an agreement to vacate Camp JTD on short notice in exchange for an additional fifty houses from PHA to hold in the land trust. 

Despite previous criticisms of non-profit organizing, PHAct created a non-profit called the Philadelphia Community Land Trust to be a “container” for the newly acquired property, though it was conceptually “decoupled” from their political work. PHAct members internally approved of the land trust legal format for taking property off the speculative market but lamented that the format does not in and of itself challenge private property, noting that the necessity for a legal entity to own property reflects settler colonial relationships with the land. Furthermore, members criticized land trusts for not serving the people, as community processes and decision-making were replaced with a corporate board structure. However, community land trusts are arguably the best legal vehicle in US common law for the creation of communal property, though the full desired extent of this form of relationship to the land has no clear articulations yet. This dispute shapes how PHAct continues to frame their work. The organizers note the contradictions inherent in creating a land trust, as the central organizational values of PHAct oppose the hegemonic structures of private property present in land trust policy. While housing struggles often pressure the state to uphold responsibilities such as the Fair Housing Act, tenant protections, and habitability standards, the case of PHAct and their allies shows the importance of carving space away from the violence of the state, which is often ever present in the lives of unhoused or precariously housed populations. Squatting may be a radical assertion of belonging, and in this case PHAct also successfully claimed housing as belonging to the community.

Excerpted with permission from Dispatches from the Threshold: Tenant Power in the Times of Crisis, forthcoming from Fernwood Publishing. 

The Internationalist Archive