Red House eviction defense

Red House eviction defense
The Red House, pictured on December 8, 2020
Date	September 2020 – present
Location	4406 North Mississippi Avenue, Portland, Oregon, U.S. 45°33′20″N 122°40′31″W
Caused by	Eviction of the Kinney family

The Red House eviction defense is an occupation protest that began in September 2020 in the Humboldt neighborhood in the Albina district of of Portland, Oregon. The demonstration has occurred in the vicinity of a property that has become known as the "Red House", which is located on North Mississippi Avenue in the Humboldt neighborhood. After a Black and Indigenous family was evicted on December 8, 2020 after owning the house for 65 years, activists reclaimed the property, creating a barricaded area surrounding it. Police and demonstrators have clashed as police have tried to clear demonstrators from the area.

Background

North Portland, especially Albina and the Red House's Humboldt neighborhood, is historically the home of large portions of Portland's Black populations. The Portland Realty Board passed a rule in 1919 banning the sale of property to a Black family in a white neighborhood. The Black population boomed during the World War II shipbuilding efforts, increasing by 400% from 1940 to 1950. The Housing Authority of Portland built temporary housing for the defense workers, and restricted Black workers to Vanport and Guild's Lake. By 1945, the Chamber of Commerce noted, "No section of the city has yet been designated as a colored area which might attract them from Vanport". The 1948 Vanport flood led to resettlement in the redlined Albina area, and white flight occurred, drastically increasing the nonwhite percentages of the neighborhoods: in 1960, 80% of Portland's Black population lived in the Albina area.

The construction of the Memorial Coliseum (now part of Rose Quarter) resulted in nearly 500 homes being demolished in the area, and I-5 was placed through the area in the same time period. In 1962, the Portland Development Commission (PDC) began a study for urban renewal with Emanuel Hospital. They did not inform the residents until 1970, when PDC received a federal grant to condemn and clear 76 acres of supposedly blighted property, including a key Black commercial center. Emanuel canceled its development in 1973, but PDC sold the remaining property to Emanuel in 1980 with a 10-year timeline for its use. Fifty years after the demolition began, many of those blocks are still unused, serving as what the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce described as a "visible reminder of urban neglect, broken promises and a decades-long failure of leadership" by PDC and Emanuel. Legacy Emanuel formally apologized in 2012.

Boise's Black percentage peaked at 84% in 1970, and Humboldt's peaked at 69% in 1980 and 1990. Black homeownership rates continued to decline in Portland in the 1990s due to a combination of factors, including absentee landlords renting substandard properties, higher unemployment rates, and usurious mortgage financing. One lender, Dominion Capital, owned over 350 homes, selling and reselling them to unsuspecting Black residents with high interest payments, balloon payments, fake appraisals, and even without having the title. Dominion's owners were sentenced in the early 1990s for fraud and racketeering. By 2000, less than one third of Portland's Black population lived in Albina.

By the 1990, the Boise/Humboldt area was deemed blighted, so it qualified for tax increment financing of an urban renewal area. Planning for the Interstate MAX light rail line occurred from 1992 to 1999. Other factors, including the relatively low land and housing prices from the segregation and property tax caps (from the Oregon tax revolt, especially Oregon Ballot Measures 47 and 50), made the area attractive for gentrification: the systematic reinvestment in property and infrastructure. While this lifted home values for the remaining Black homeowners, it also "priced out" the majority of residents who did not own a home. Real estate values in Portland's urban renewal areas increased at twice the rate of the rest of the city from 1996 to 2010, and many properties doubled or tripled in value in the 1990s.

By the 2000s, the trendy Mississippi Avenue area surrounding the Red House had developed, and many single family houses had been torn down to make way for retail shops and multistory buildings.

Kinney family

Overhead view of the Red House and the surrounding area on December 12

Pauline and William Kinney sold the Red House to William Kinney, Jr. and his wife in 1995. In the early 2000s, the younger Kinney family mortgaged their home, which had by that time been in their family for 65 years, in order to pay legal fees after their son pled guilty to killing a man and injuring the dead man's wife in 2002 while driving on a suspended driver's permit. The mortgage was from Freedom Mortgage Corporation in May 2002. In March 2004, they refinanced that loan with Beneficial Oregon Incorporated. In December 2016 the loan was reconveyed–without the Kinneys' knowledge. According to a website created by supporters of the Kinney family, the family began receiving bills from the previous mortgage company and from the new one, and so began putting payments into an escrow account instead of paying the bills while the billing issue could be resolved. However, a process began to consider the family in default on their loan, and eventually led to the eviction. The Kinneys owed $97,000 in 2018 when the house was put into foreclosure and purchased by a developer for $260,000. The family states it has had trouble finding an attorney who would take their cases, often needing to be represented by their son, William Jr. William Jr. has also frequently spoken out about the situation on social media. The Kinneys have alleged that the mortgage lender and an investment company deliberately tried to remove the Kinneys from the house in order to redevelop the land. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler took a different view, writing on Twitter, "There was a lengthy, thorough judicial proceeding resulting in a lawful judge's order to evict people illegally occupying a home."

The home has been the subject of legal conflicts and political actions ever since the foreclosure. In September the family petitioned a judge to be allowed to stay in their home, pointing to Oregon's moratorium on evictions that had been implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The courts have allowed the eviction to go ahead on the basis that the foreclosure was in 2018, prior to the pandemic. Protestors have argued that an eviction during a pandemic is cruel nonetheless. The Kinneys began residing in hotels and with friends, and eventually in a North Portland home owned by the elder Kinneys since 1966.

William Kinney, Jr. has espoused the rhetoric of the sovereign citizen movement in his court filings and on social media. J.J. MacNab, a research fellow at the George Washington University's Program on Extremism, said that his rhetoric was very similar to that of Ammon Bundy in his occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. His social media posts have also referred to QAnon and other conspiracy theories.

Demonstration

Initial eviction and community response

In the summer of 2020, Multnomah County sheriffs forcibly evicted the Kinney family. Members of the community rose in support of the family.

Since September 2020, activists, including those who have protested against systemic racism as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, have gathered at the home to protest the eviction of "a Black and Indigenous family that has lived there for over six decades and as a stand against further gentrification of the city's historically Black Albina neighborhood". The house has become known as the "Red House on Mississippi", or simply the "Red House". Predatory lending and the criminal history of the family's son have been cited as reasons for financial difficulties leading to the foreclosure. The home was purchased at auction by Urban Housing Development LLC in 2018; the family disputes the new ownership of the house. A judge ordered the family to be evicted in September 2020. The family filed a federal lawsuit attempting to overturn the eviction.

The sheriff's department stated that protestors have been "camping on adjacent privately owned and city-owned properties", and that 81 calls for service were made between September 1 and November 30, because of fights, shots fired, burglary, thefts, vandalism, noise violations and threats by armed individuals.

December 2020 escalation

Graffitied dumpsters near the site of the occupation on December 8, 2020

Around 5 a.m. on December 8, 2020, the Portland Police Bureau and Multnomah County Sheriff's Office arrived to evict residents, clear property, and render the house uninhabitable. They evicted the residents and arrested seven people with a small number of protesters present. The police left while anti-eviction activists threw rocks and paint balloons. Police returned to supervise the erection of a construction fence around the house, and protesters repelled the police around 10:30 a.m. Several police cars were damaged and had their tires deflated, and an officer drove into a parked car while retreating.

While the day progressed, an estimated 200 activists reoccupied the property and constructed barricades to block all access to the house. Protesters sealed off the intersections of North Mississippi Ave and North Albina Ave to the north of the house, as well as the surrounding entrances from North Skidmore Ave and North Prescott. They also positioned guards at the entrances to the barricaded area.

Part of a barricade near the Red House on December 8, 2020

Later on December 8, Mayor Ted Wheeler authorized the Portland Police Bureau to "use all lawful means to end the illegal occupation" and said, "there will be no autonomous zone in Portland. It's time for the encampment and occupation to end. There are many ways to protest and work toward needed reform. Illegally occupying private property, openly carrying weapons, threatening and intimidating people are not among them." Supporters said that the Wheeler and Lovell statements seek to "criminalize the right of Afro-Indigenous people to bear arms". They further said that the enforcement of Oregon gun laws were being more aggressively applied against Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC), stating "We are threatened upon speculation, while known white supremacists continue to brandish arms without consequence." A representative from Community Alliance of Tenants stated that "This is not a story of an autonomous zone. This is a story of systemic oppression."

On December 9, The Oregonian reported that guards, at least one of which was armed, had been posted at each intersection blocked by protesters, and that spike strips made of boards and nails were outside one of the barricades. That same day, the Portland Police Bureau spoke to the illegality of the occupation and the possibility of violence on the site. Describing this, the Portland Mercury stated that "the police continued spinning fear-mongering disinformation about the occupation". On December 10, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that protestors have been forbidding people from taking pictures or video from within the occupied zone. Most such confrontations have been verbal, though that policy has at times been enforced through violence.

That same day, a co-owner of Urban Housing Development LLC offered to sell the property to the family for the price he paid at the foreclosure sale in 2018, stating that "we're overwhelmed by the attention to this" and that he fears for his family's safety. The co-owner has been described as a house flipper and investor.

On December 11, the county district attorney, Mike Schmidt, praised "the neighbors and community members who have refused to stand by silently" and who spoke out about what was happening, but stated that some neighbors were scared to leave their homes and that "continued violence, property damage, and harm to our community is inexcusable and will be met with aggressive prosecution."

On December 13, the Kinney family reached a tentative deal with the City of Portland, which would prevent the eviction as long as barricades would come down in the neighborhood. However, the deal does not to seem to indicate that there is an effort to sell the home back to the Kinneys.

See also

• Institutional racism#In housing and lending
• Black Lives Matter art in Portland, Oregon
• Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
• Dignity Village, a 20-year-old autonomous tent city in Portland
• George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon

External links

• Official website