Man brought gun to foreclosure hearing

A Chicago man was charged Monday with unlawful use of a weapon, accused of trying to bring a loaded handgun to a court hearing where he was set to be evicted from his home, authorities said today.

According to the Cook County Sheriff's office, the home of Thomas Pridgeon, 48, in the 7300 block of South Laflin Street had already been in foreclosure when he arrived Monday morning at Daley Center.

When he got to the security checkpoint, Pridgeon put his briefcase on a belt passing through an X-ray machine as he passed through the metal detector. The courthouse deputy monitoring the X-ray machine spotted the outline of a gun in the case, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

Pridgeon told police he forgot to remove the .45-caliber handgun, which had one round in the chamber and seven more in the clip. He was immediately arrested.

According to the sheriff's statement, the purpose of Monday's hearing was to approve the sale of the Laflin property to a lender in North Carolina, which purchased it at a tax sale. Pridgeon would have had 30 days to vacate the property and turn the home over to the new owners.

from the Sun-Times

Lowercase: Chicago squat blog

The Lowercase Collective now has a Wordpress blog, all the better to more easily disseminate information on their upcoming eviction and defense.

http://lowercasecollective.wordpress.com/

Lowercase squat facing eviction

The Lowercase Collective has existed for over three years now. It has been a public squat for two years, and opened its doors to countless people, projects, and events. One would be hard pressed to find an anarchist who has travelled through Chicago without ever spending time in this space. When a place becomes so integral to the collective ethos of a community, as Lowercase has in Chicago, its destruction can be simply debilitating.

On December 18th, we received an eviction notice for our landlord, who is in all likelihood a fictitious entity. Shortly thereafter, we proved to the state that we ourselves have been responsible for paying the bills for the past years, making repairs, etc. Unfortunately, our attempts were only able to buy us a few more weeks, as the eviction notice for all occupants
came like a cold wind. Despite the machinations of the Federal National Mortgage Association, or any other partial owners, we have no intention of leaving this space without a fight.

Social tension has been percolating throughout our neighborhood for some time now. There is a general hatred of the police, all the more so with the existence of gangs on our street. Within a two-block radius, three other families have already been evicted in the past few months. A month ago, a black man just riding his bicycle was knocked off it by the police, beat up, and left without his bike in front of the watching eyes of the neighborhood. With all of this occurring in the context of our neighbors reproducing capital and themselves on the daily, this situation could prove explosive, as we look to push those tensions to the breaking point.

As the legal situation surrounding the house crystallizes, we will be announcing the time in which we want to invite our friends, in Chicago, the Midwest, and elsewhere, to join us for the most crucial aspect of solidarity: collective action on the day of eviction. We hope to create something truly wild around the very place we eat, sleep, fuck, dream, and share ourselves with each other. We hope for solidarity actions from friends who can’t make it here, but are more hopeful to see your faces.

Defending space in which we live, share, and combat capital is integral to revolutionary movements. Our past has connected us to so many different trajectories, and in the near future, perhaps together through our actions we can give ourselves the time and space to create so many more.

from Occupy CA

see also: Chicago Indymedia

Cabrini Green anti-eviction blockade announced

We are kicking off the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaing this Tuesday with an eviction blockade to stop Lenise Forrest and her family from being evicted from Cabrini Green for owing back rent. She had a payment plan under previous management but the new management has refused to recognize it and is trying to put her out on the street. She is appealing the eviction but the Sheriff is still scheduled to evict her Tuesday morning.

from Chicago IndyMedia

Eviction resistance in Boston

Although the intention of the postings on this blog will be focused on Chicago experiences, it is essential to learn from the experiences of others elsewhere dealing with the same problems. In this article from Boston, for instance, we find that chaining a few folks to a building on eviction day does not itself prevent eviction or seriously hamper their effort to evict.

However, it would of course be unfair to assume this is the entire strategy. In fact, CL/VU can at least claim success in contributing to the momentum of preventing one eviction last April as they had threatened at the beginning of the year to physically block evictions whenever possible. The trick, of course, seems to be in encouraging enough eviction resistance so that the one hour hold up at a single site accumulates into an unmanageable waste of police resources across the city.

The results appear to be a matter of circumstances -- on the one hand, the resident in eviction that went ahead was apparently the owner of the condo and was indebted directly to the bank. In the case of the halted eviction, it was a matter of the scummy landlord giving the renters the claim of being good tenants. It's exciting the CL/VU went ahead and took on both, although the legal claims of one were more dubious. This points to an attempt to deconstruct the logic of the social order that only "good" residents deserve to stay in their homes.

About 50 people, activists from the Jamaica Plain based organization City Life/Vida Urbana, and their supporters, gathered in front of 76 Perrin Street in Roxbury today, to try and block police from evicting one of the building's residents, Paula Taylor, 43.

Six people chained themselves to the front and back entrances of the building. After a standoff that lasted more than an hour, Boston police from the area B-2 precinct and officers with Boston Special Operations, finally cut the protester's chains and arrested four of the six activists. Shortly thereafter, workers with a moving and storage company began removing Ms. Taylor's belongings and placing them in a truck. She told reporters she was not sure where she would go.

Attorneys with the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild observed the eviction and arrests. Students and staff from Harvard Law School also were in attendance and several spoke with reporters.

Ms. Taylor's condo was foreclosed upon earlier this year. The mortgage is owned by Bank of America. She said she offered to pay rent to the bank and move out once a qualified buyer for her condo could be found, but she and spokespersons for City Life/Vida Urbana said the bank rejected that offer. The fight for tenants' rights is far from over. City Life and other organizations are stepping up to stop the banks from taking people's homes.