The return of the 10-minute eviction | Hacker News Reader

The return of the 10-minute eviction

washingtonpost.com

It's good journalism when you can get a feel for the logical complexities of a situation through the narration while retaining the humanity. I wish more of today's journalism retained this kind of storytelling instead of the opinionated screeds that we're too often bombarded with.

I've enjoyed the article (though i've cried my way through it) but i think it introduces "logical complexities" where there's none. We're supposed to feel sorry for a cop and landlords (and property managers) whose job is to ensure people end up homeless. That's closest to the most inhumane occupation I can think of.

The equation is simple: empty houses + homeless people = house the people. Those who pretend it's more complicated are either brainwashed by capitalism or manipulators profiting off speculation.

You could also think of it as their job to ensure the possibility of obtaining well maintained and affordable housing for the majority of citizens who are willing and able to pay rent on time. Because if there were no eviction officers or we moved marginally towards that by having less consequential eviction there are second order effects on the market that affect all. Note I'm not saying nor am I personally convinced that that means we should have maximally punishing eviction laws or even that the ones we have are right. But you're way off the mark by not acknowledging the good they can do and calling it the most inhumance occupation you can think of when they potentially do a lot of good.

We as a species had "affordable" housing long before we had police. I'd also like to point out that housing is often not well-maintained despite broad knowledge of the problem: see for example Greenfell Tower (London) or rue d'Aubagne (Marseille) scandals. Private property as a social structure does not ensure decent quality or affordable housing.

If you insist on private property as a means to organize housing, then it'd probably be more reasonable and efficient to redistribute ownership widely: if you make everyone owner of their current residence, you'll find they'll take better care of it overall than some remote profit-seeking landlord who couldn't care less about mold and fissures.

Tell me about it. I get overwhelmed packing the car for a day trip, I can't imagine getting evicted with a baby.

What sort of legislative changes would you like to see to address this?

An actual proposal would be Georgism:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-par...

A quick summary from wikipedia of Georgism:

> Georgism (known historically as the single tax movement) is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land – including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations – should belong equally to all members of society.

Here rent and land are given precise definitions.

Personally I found the blogs above a very interesting read (or listening).

also available in podcast form

https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/your-book-review-progress-and-...

https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/does-georgism-work-is-land-rea...

https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-...

https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-...

Depends on the local context. Here in France the legislation is already very clear that the right to housing is just as important as the right to private property, and there's legal provisions for "requisition" of empty dwellings. If you reside in a place that was one someone else's home (domicile) for more than 48h hours, it's supposedly your home and you can only be evicted by court order. The problem is the armed psychopaths (cops) will often evict you illegally, and judges will prioritize private property over human life.

There's many legal approaches to the problem: fine landlords huge amounts when they have unused space (or when they don't have enough people per square meters, such as when they employ "anti-squat" security agencies), requisition without compensation all empty dwellings in order to house everyone (with public money paying for repairs if needed), forcing by law landlords to lease their empty dwellings for a reasonable price... Or simply decriminalize squatting uninhabited dwellings: if the police stops hunting down people looking for a house in order to jail them, there will be considerably less homeless people from one month to the next.

It takes quite a lot of resources (security doors, guards, alarms, police) in order to ensure people stay homeless. The problem is by framing housing as a "crisis" (which is an invention, as the statistics show), we're shooting tons of money at not fixing the problem: homeless shelters are famously unsafe and indecent, and don't even get me started on government subsidies for hotel owners (via the 115 programs) to make business out of misery while providing terrible living conditions. In this case, i believe "less is more".

In this case there was moratorium. By my fair understanding is that at first point when rent was late, the process should have been able to be started. And then the moment the moratorium ended it should be absolutely possible to throw out the property thieves. After all they have had very very very long time to find alternate housing.

The only property thieves are the people who claim to be owners of a place they don't reside in.

So you would be entirely happy for someone else to take over your house when you are on holiday?

That's not what squatting is about, and that's not what i meant (you're building a strawman argument). I was arguing that "property" is an imaginary construct and cannot be "stolen", except in the sense that some person will evict you from your residence due to Nation-State-enforced belief in this piece of paper.

Of course personal possessions can and should be protected and there are in fact regulations (even in places where squatting is legal) protecting your residence against burglary or people coming to live in your place. This is a well-defined problem that has nothing to do with private property as we anarchists understand it.

Private property is precisely the institutional system that gives power to someone else over your home. We anarchists believe the land belongs to those who inhabit/work it and no higher superstitional paper (property title) is valid.

It's more like 10 days, starting on the date the tenant misses a rent payment.

That's much faster than many other places.

I'm always floored by the rationalizations that people like this rely on to get through their day. "It's my job to carry out this order", "the law needs you to leave" ... just admit you chose this career and enjoy it.

"If I don't do it, someone else will!"

Imagine if we lived in a world where this wasn't a common viewpoint.

> The tenants he ushered outside each day into their first moments of homelessness were often inconsolable, or defiant, or suicidal, or mentally ill, or violent and aggressive, but Lennie was calm. “You have to take your own emotions out of it,” he’d told colleagues during one national training. “It’s our job to carry out the court order.”

> Lennie had done more than 300 evictions since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal moratorium expired in early August

It's super convenient for our corporate overlords that they can count on such psychopaths to execute orders nazi-style without even a glipse of empathy. The question is how can we as a society find any such situation acceptable? The empty dwellings outnumber homeless people at least two to one (probably more) and yet a State religion/delirium called private property forces people to be homeless.

Think you're squashing bugs hard to make a living when you review your git log? This person squashes about 15 "bugs" (that's us) a day for the profit of housing speculators/mafia. Such efficiency taken in the wrong direction: only police abolition can lead to better justice on this planet.

I'd get behind that, but it won't happen at this point.

I would like to see abolishment of speculative property ownership. You either use it, or it gets given to someone else.

You can't hold it and wait for the price to go up. You get a year, maybe two, and then it becomes public domain to anyone that will use it.

I find it absurd that people are born and indoctrinated to believe that because someone else says they own this bit of land that they've never used, no one else can use it.

People are literally born homeless. Their parents may have a home, and they may let their children use it, but they are born without anywhere they can legally be without someone else's permission.

> You get a year, maybe two, and then it becomes public domain to anyone that will use it.

Sounds like a reasonable policy, yet there's a loophole. What would prevent owners from trading on paper their goods so that they can remain empty under a different name? Or from lending a huge space to a single person so that the space isn't technically empty although it could house 10-100 times as many people?

> People are literally born homeless.

Love that argument. I've never seen it that way before, but that makes perfect sense!

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