By Friends of Crime
The pale worm called ‘Progress’ wriggles on… And today we find it darkening our door under the euphemism ‘development’. We learned this unhappy news when the Northern California Land Trust (sic) recently announced plans to build condominiums on the corner of Woolsey and Shattuck that The Long Haul occupies. What details we’ve heard have predictably been couched in rhetoric around “affordable housing”, “sustainability”, “building community”, and other equivocations. It isn’t hard to discern the actual motive here: profit — as usual. This kind of progressive phraseology is now routinely invoked to allow exploitation to proceed unimpeded, with the glowing approval of the flies who feast on such shameless babble.
We have heard the braying of a few mystified donkeys in our midst (“Ye-ah, ye-ah…”) who cite the lack of affordable housing to justify and celebrate our potential displacement. To this, we say that any meaningful response to the housing crisis must end the crisis that is development. Halting environmental destruction necessarily means the total obstruction of rapacious developers. Raising condos over the ruins of our shared home in no way ameliorates the nightmares produced by the functionaries of Capital. What it does is sacrifice a space used primarily by poor and marginalized individuals to the very forces that brought about this perpetual catastrophe. This is how the death march of economic progress stalks onward: the specter of ‘The Community’ is used to annihilate living communities; the specter of ‘Ecology’ is used to legitimize the regimes currently trampling life wherever we look.
Those of us writing this do not presume to speak for or represent The Long Haul. We speak in our own capacity as wild, lawless beings fiercely protective of our home and unwilling to indulge investors and their flunkeys in steamrolling over our lives. We intend to resist this attempt to displace us to the bitter end, by any means necessary and hope you will join us in this effort.