Pearl River      Recently in a meeting of ACORN organizers from Canada and the United States, our solidarity guests two organizers we had worked with throughout the year, including a month of training for one in Toronto.  They had been applying the ACORN organizing model to build something called the Philadelphia Lot Tenders Union.  Talking to them on Wade’s World, they shared their progress, but first let’s set the scene.

Philly is a big city.  Over the last almost 50 years that we’ve organized there, housing abandonment has been a consistent issue.  In the 1980s, Philly was the lead city in ACORN’s squatting campaign, when we were trying to match people who needed housing with houses that needed people.  The “Squatters” documentary produced and directed by Charles Koppelman tells that story well.  Sometimes ACORN squatters would crowbar the door open and find the inside looking like a family just went out to the grocery store or for an errand a minute ago.  Other times, it would be stripped of mantels, copper wiring, and whatever.  The ACORN Housing Corporation and our national loan counseling work and actions on banks to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) all started in Philadelphia.

Vacant houses, if not occupied, deteriorate after they become city property and are abandoned, creating empty lots.  Ryan Gittler-Muñiz and Amy Gottsegen, the organizers,  estimate that there are now 40,000 such lots in Philly.  They came to understand this situation through direct experience over recent years building Iglesias Garden in North Philly.  I originally met them when visiting the garden several years ago.  They had been through the struggle with the city to piece together a number of lots and push back developers trying to gentrify the area in order to win title to the land.

They felt their experience was not unique.  Where these vacant lots existed, many had been repurposed and maintained by immediate neighbors or people living on the block as green space, play grounds, and gardens.  Amy and Ryan from their surveys estimate that perhaps this maybe the case in 14000 of the 40000 lots.  The task would then be to organize these neighbors to be able to win control and ownership of these lots next door, so to speak, and that became the mission behind building a Philadelphia Lot Tenders Union.  Working with ACORN, training in Canada, and reading Nuts and Bolts, they have been at work applying the ACORN model to building the North Philly chapter of the Lot Tenders Union.  They’ve had their first organizing committee meeting and have a launch meeting planned in coming weeks.  They’ve signed up 30 or so members now who are paying dues to support the union.  The train has left the station.

Obviously, the point of their organization is also building the campaign to force the city agency that controls the lots to initiate and implement the process that would turn over control and ownership of these vacant spaces to the community.  This is a real issue in Philadelphia. It’s not the only city facing his dilemma, so it’s worth following the organizing progress to see is this might be part of the solution.