By Tiburcio Garcia with Kimo Umu, Ziair Hughes, Amir Cornish, Akil Carrillo and all the Poor and houseless mamaz and grandmommas who brought them into this journey
(Editor's Note: All the authors are students, themselves victims of gentrification and eviction and displacement and homelessness, at the liberation school known as Deecolonize Academy. They “learn” through books, and study, action and liberation the tru Her-Story of this stolen land- they all collaborated with their teachers, also poverty, indigenous skolaz to create the attached “FactSheet.”)
“RAD has been around for decades, and now it’s being enforced”, Leroy Moore, founder of Krip Hop co-founder of Homefulness and writer for POORMAGAZINE said with frustration written on his face, squinting in the morning sun. It was a clear day, on the morning on April 20th, the day that POOR Magazine and all of us youth and family “poverty skolaz” at Deecolonize Academy & Homefulness demonstrated in front of City Hall to protest RAD and Hope VI, two bills that have been used by devil-opers (like my mamá Tiny calls them) such as Mercy Housing, John Stewart Company and many more in the Bay Area recently to evict large amounts of families to make room for higher paying tenants. “Repeal it Biden.”
“We’re here because we’ve been receiving Letters of Eviction, and they are offering nowhere to go, they are just taking our homes away”, Teresa Molina, a tenant and a resident of San Francisco who is currently fighting RAD and HOPE VI, said, talking about her fellow tenants in her apartments. The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), is a bill put in place by the Department of Public Housing that allows big housing companies to privatize their previously public housing, making it easier for them to remove the tenants who relied on Section 8 to pay their rent.
“I was born and raised in Filmo’”, Mama Queenandi XSheba, povertySkola, public housing tenant and writer with POORMAGAZINE said when she got up on the mic, gesturing rapidly. “...cuz even when me and my children’s lives were in danger, the quote un-quote housing authority still didn’t look at us and that out Black Lives Mattered," she finished.
“Non-profiteers CONtinue to profit off of our poverty and problems while helping to create our problems,” my Mama Tiny, known as “PovertySkola”, a poet, teacher, visionary and co-founder of POORMAGAZINE, Homefulness and Deecolonize Academy where we are all students. She went onto explain that RAD and No Hope VI was launched under Obama and “housing advocacy” non-profits in San Francisco were some the authors of the RAD program which has effectively killed all the public housing across the “United Snakes” as she and other revolutionaries call it .”We are demanding equity and reparations for Black and Brown and indigenous Houseless residents of these no-longer public housing buildings so we can build our own solutions like we are with Homefulness,” she said and then concluded, “E-RADification to Reparations.”
Tiny and Queennandi XsheBa at POOR Magazine wrote extensively about RAD in 2013 when they snuck it through. No-one but the BayView Newspaper and POOR MAgazine published these stories (links below) but they were powerful “Wesearch” as Mama Tiny calls it - (poor people-led Research) on these evil moves for our youth and family created “FactSHEET” on RAD that we did in Mama Tiny’s Deecolonize English Class (see attachment).
I had to agree withQueennandi and my Mama, and I felt for everyone at the mercy of RAD and HOPE VI, it’s predecessor, nearly being evicted and put on the streets, because me and my mother have been in that situation before. This was a powerful action, and I loved the words that were being spoken, that often go unheard, and the point they made.
“If we fight back we can resist this removal, like we have done in Westside,” said Uncle Greg, a powerful organizer and member of this movement of POORMAGAZINE to help launch a tenants union amd resist the politricks( as my mama calls it ) of RAD. “you all inspire me, we have power," he concluded.
“We are poor people who resist with our voices,” said Mama Junebug, teacher, poet and povertySkola describing the powerful principles of POORMAGAZINE. “We can speak for ourselves and solve our own problems!”
