Page 6
December 23, 2015
O PINION
Do We Need a City-Wide Rent Strike?
Priced out
of housing
l ew C hurCh
The Portland Observer’s
excellent cover story (“No
Where Left To Go,” Dec. 6 is-
sue) hits the nail on the head:
Because of skyrocketing rents,
lack of foresight and plan-
ning by public officials, and a
mainstream media which sees
housing as just an “amenity”
of some sort, many folks in
Oregon and throughout the
country are finding themselves
as tenants who are priced out.
Poor folks are sleeping out-
doors in tent cities or at camps
or shelters like Right to Dream
Too in downtown Portland --
and finding themselves to be
by
people who are simply mar-
ginalized with no where left
to go.
At Portland State Univer-
sity, the Progressive Student
Union and Tenant Rights Proj-
ect have joined hands, in the
words of an old rap song, to
“fight the powers that be.” We
have organized a rent strike on
campus against a subcontract-
ed student housing manage-
ment corporation and launched
pickets and demonstrations
against two of the landlord’s
retail businesses. We have
held 104 Sunday night meet-
ings with low-income tenants
at the Butte and Biltmore
buildings, downtown, housing
owned and managed by Cen-
tral City Concern, a nonprofit
that runs on a $38 million an-
nual budget.
We have held a dozen tenant
organizing meetings where we
have also encountered down-
right interference and opposi-
tion from some landlords and
some conservative tenants.
This fall, we have advocat-
ed for low-income tenants in
a Home Forward housing au-
thority building, The Jeffrey,
at 1201 S.W. 11th Ave., across
from the downtown Safeway.
Some of residents at the
Jeffrey have been targeted
for de facto evictions by the
landlord, Income Property
Management. In one case,
when a Tenant Rights Project
sought to put up pro-tenant
union posters, the landlord
said no way, and in another,
a tenant organizer was not
allowed back in the building.
This would seem to violate
both the First Amendment and
Oregon landlord-tenant law.
Management claims of tenant
and roommate disputes would
seem to violate laws against
false statements or libel.
There is a housing shortage
in liberal, progressive Port-
land, and city officials, like
Josh Alpert, Charlie Hales’s
chief of staff, keep saying that
there needs to be “more re-
search” about why the rents
are so damned high.
For those of us who have
been organizing for tenant
rights for many years -- (I or-
ganized years ago, as a VIS-
TA Volunteer in Macon, Ga.
with the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s orga-
nization) -- it means that it is
time for tenants to do what Dr.
King and Gandhi both worked
on, vis-à-vis, to address hous-
ing and exorbitant rents with
a city-wide rent strike to stop
the evictions, make sure that
all people are housed no mat-
ter how “marginal.”
Does Portland belong to the
affluent only or to all of us? We
need to put a stop to evictions,
legalize rent control in Salem
for our state, pass inclusionary
zoning, and start getting people
indoors, out of the rain and the
cold, and in houses!
Lew Church is an organiz-
er for Tenant Rights Project
at Portland State, where he
serves as Coordinator of PSU
Progressive Student Union.
A Bleak and Similar Path to Polarize the Public
Instead, let us
build bridges
d r . m ajd i sreb
At times of increased ten-
sion, both ISIL and racists in
the west are taking a similar
path to polarize the public.
I’d propose an alternative ap-
proach to avoid a bleak future
with limited civil liberties.
Coming back from a med-
ical mission that treated the
unfortunate Syrian refugees
in Jordan, I could imagine the
customs and border protection
officer denying my entrance to
the country of my citizenship
because I am a Muslim. “I am
sorry, doctor, but the rules have
changed since your departure,”
he would say. Sitting in that
cold waiting room waiting for
an airline to take me some-
where in the world, my past 18
years would flash in front of
my eyes. This is a situation that
I hope would never transpire.
Born with blue eyes and fair
complexion to a father from
Latakia, a town on the coast of
Syria, and a mother from the
heart of Damascus, I can’t say
that my experiences have been
similar to other Arabs or Mus-
lims. I have witnessed, howev-
er, the horror of 9/11/01 and the
by
backlash experienced by many
of them and even by non-Mus-
lim Indians wearing turbans.
We are living today in similar
times with high tension since
the Paris and San Bernardino
attacks. Of course these cow-
ardly attacks do not represent
Islam just as the Oklahoma
City bombing does not repre-
sent Christianity. The heart of
the matter, nevertheless, is that
we are all falling into a ploy
leading us to believe in a clash
ISIL was, therefore, formed.
The latter, however, does not
represent Islam nor the Syri-
ans. Its extreme ideology has
been supplemented by spectac-
ular, horrific and televised acts
of terror.
Since then, the whole world
determined that it is the enemy
and countless countries com-
missioned airstrikes in Syr-
ia with no regards to civilian
lives.
Meanwhile in the West,
validated the racist rhetoric and
assessment and, thus, increased
its popularity.
Both ISIL in the Middle
East and the racists in the West
have the same agenda: polar-
izing the populace into an “us
against them” mentality. With
every televised horrific ISIL
act and the ensuing bombings,
more civilians in the Middle
East are turning to ISIL for
safe haven. On the other side,
with every racist action in the
Both ISIL in the Middle East and the
racists in the West have the same agenda:
polarizing the populace into an “us against
them” mentality.
of civilizations or religions.
In 2011, a group of Syrians
started a nonviolent uprising
against the injustice and lack
of political liberty imposed
upon them by the Assad re-
gime. They were met with bru-
tal force. Unfortunately, some
started carrying weapons to de-
fend themselves. Many neigh-
boring countries, with blessing
from major world powers, add-
ed fuel to the fire by allowing
foreign fighters to enter Syria.
there is a rise of fascism with
racist slurs and religious big-
otry. It is built on a rhetoric
that ignites fear and rage in a
population that is not familiar
with foreign events, and leads
to alienation and cornering of
minorities. Hate crimes are on
the rise and Muslim minorities
are finding themselves in a de-
fensive position. Two of them
with sick brains in San Ber-
nardino adopted an extremist
reaction. By doing that, they
west, more Muslim youth feel
alienated and regress into an
extreme religious propaganda
available all over the Internet
and thus more join an extremist
organization.
This closes the loop on a vi-
cious cycle. Unfortunately, the
media is falling into this trap
like many of us. They are over-
playing and overanalyzing ev-
ery action and contributing to
the division.
Sitting in that cold room,
I could remember abandon-
ing the medical specialty that
I loved the most because it
was popular among American
graduates and choosing a less
popular specialty. I could rec-
ollect practicing in an under-
served area with a salary below
the reasonable wages for my
specialty for several years. I
could remember the countless
number of US patients that I
treated from the heart without
ever asking them about their
religion or nationality. I would
wish that people stood together
across all religions and races
and stopped this slippery slope.
I would hope that instead of
bombing Syria, we shut down
ISIL’s social media and bank
accounts, arrested their oil ex-
ports to Europe and halted the
flow of weapons to Syria. I
would desire that we called out
racists when we saw them, that
we wrote to the media when
they produced biased reports,
that we networked with each
other and rallied to tell the
country and the world that that
was not the trajectory we want-
ed for humankind. I would
wish that we built bridges, not
destroyed them.
Majd Isreb, M.D., an immi-
grant from Syria, is a U.S. citi-
zen and resident of Vancouver.