Greetings Troublemakers... welcome to Trouble.
My name is not important.
Capitalism, as an international and inter-connected system of
economic domination, assumes different forms
in different parts of the world.
This is partly due to the need to adapt to local customs and conditions,
and partly by design.
In some territories, local life is coloured by the region's significance
to the global economy as a source of agricultural production,
or a site of resource extraction.
I come from coal country.
My grandfather was a coal miner … actually all my grandfathers.
Others, such as the Pearl River Delta region in southeast China,
have been selected for their deep reservoirs of cheap labour
and built up into global epicentres of low-wage industrial manufacturing.
Here, high-tech gadgets are mass-produced
under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party
and shipped off to consumer markets in the Global North,
ending up in any number of metropolitan cities,
each competing for prominence as hubs of cultural production,
research and development, and IT.
But although the local character of capitalist exploitation
and alienation differs, each corner of its global empire
is connected by a unifying logic,
one that aims to coerce the vast majority of us to toil our lives away
for the benefit of a tiny minority.
Gentrification, as one of the primary methods of urban transformation
under capitalism,
plays out differently in different cities and neighbourhoods for similar reasons.
But like the broader economic system it's part of,
gentrification has a tendency towards homogenization,
creating neighbourhoods that look strangely similar
to their counterparts half-way across the world.
As we saw in the first part of this series,
those caught up in this process experience these changes
through the first-hand violence of displacement,
and the general dislocation brought about by changes
to the communities they grew up in.
Many people, rather than be passive observers
to their own forced removal from their homes, decide to resist.
Over the next thirty minutes, we will look at some of
the stories of resistance coming out of the San Francisco Bay Area,
Berlin and Montreal.
Along the way, we will speak with a number of individuals
who are marking their territory, fighting back against the encroachment
of tech companies and high-price boutiques into their hoods
... and making a whole lot of trouble.
Silicon Valley is south of San Francisco and Oakland,
and emerged as this Cold War project that was receiving a lot of military and
government funding to produce different technology during the Cold War.
After the Cold War a lot of these companies became more consumer-oriented.
And we can really see this moment coinciding with the birth of the Internet
and the rise of the dot com boom.
And what we’re seeing now is that the models of Google and Apple
aren’t going to necessarily bust in the same ways
that the companies of the late 90s and early 2000s busted.
In San Francisco there are lots of smaller start-ups.
There are also now big companies, like Twitter, right in downtown.
These companies in Silicon Valley have enabled their workers
to reverse-commute to and from work,
so that they can live in these kind of cool, culturally interesting
neighbourhoods in San Francisco, or in Oakland.
Gentrification is impacting all of the Bay Area.
There are smaller, personal, beautiful acts of resistance
committed by exploited and oppressed people in their daily lives everywhere.
The largest flashpoints of resistance have been in San Francisco and Oakland.
Many galleries and artists, even the well-intentioned,
participate in this process by developing spaces and creating works
that cater to a gentrifier audience.
And by not honestly engaging with the dynamics around how their projects
actually assist the real estate industry and the erasure of local cultures.
KHY serves as a graffiti crew, a network of creatives and radicals,
as well as a broader movement through which people from various hoods,
spaces and communities express their love, rage and solidarities.
We participate in local street-rooted projects that produce
both cultural and material resistance and prioritize building with
local oppressed and exploited folks. Many who have had little or no access
to established activist and art institutions.
Most street art is legal,
thereby not challenging the concept of private property.
Nor contributing to the fight against capital for our public social spaces.
Every act of graffiti challenges the logic of property and shatters the illusion
that the state can control us at all times.
Even so, graffiti writers and their work can align with the goals of gentrification
if they are aren’t conscious of several factors.
When graffiti is both illegal and explicitly radical in intention,
it is not only a material act of resistance,
but also a way through which to communicate and inspire,
to explore and familiarize ourselves with our physical environments,
and to develop confidence in one’s agency and the capacity to execute actions
alone and as part of an affinity group or crew.
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization
and digital story-telling collective that makes web maps,
that creates community events,
and that does collaborative research to fight the eviction crisis.
We work collectively with a number of different community partners
and right now we have probably about 50 people working in it.
We’ve actually found that evictions are proximate
to these phenomenon that people call Google bus stops.
But basically they’re bus stops that big companies - not just Google -
can use to transport their workers.
So we’ve found that 69% of evictions are happening
within four blocks of these bus stops.
Around 2013, we decided we would block one.
And it was a collective of different housing activists in the Bay Area
that engaged in the first bus protest.
Afterwards other groups like Eviction Free San Francisco
created its own bus blockade.
Different anarchist collectives in Oakland also created bus blockades.
The media got very involved in these.
And everyone suddenly, I think, became aware locally
but also nationally and internationally,
of the sort of correlation between real estate speculation
and eviction and high tech.
The police are complicit in gentrification
because they provide the physical violence necessary.
The police carry out evictions,
intimidate and threaten working-class venues and projects,
harass houseless folks, criminalize sex workers, enforce gang injunctions
and just wage general violence against us to show that
we aren’t “allowed” in these spaces anymore.
In both cities there have been police murders,
primarily of Black and Latinx folks, related to gentrification.
Many were of people who were simply existing in contested social spaces,
such as working-class streets and parks in areas being targeted for gentrification.
The city has created apps so that you can reserve public playgrounds.
You can pay on this app to reserve, y'know a portion of a public park or playground.
And there was this very epic event in which some employees
from Drop Box and from Air BnB scheduled a soccer match
in this public playground through their app,
and proceeded to try to kick youth of colour off the playground because,
y’know, they had reserved it on this app.
And meanwhile these youth of colour had been playing soccer
for years on this playground and didn’t know about the app.
Never had to pay … that’s just where they played.
If you wanna play pick-up, you play pick-up like the rest of us.
It’s not pick-up. You can book the field.
Just because you got money and can pay for the field
you don’t get to book it for an hour, to take over these kids fuckin, like…
It’s like 80 bucks! It’s like 80 bucks per person.
It’s bullshit. No, it’s bullshit!
Luckily there was a protest that ensued after that incident
and the youth won their right to keep on playing in their playground
without the app.
Sideshows are essentially large, unpermitted moving car shows
that perform stunts.
These shows are hosted by mostly working-class youth of colour,
are organized in a decentralized manner and gather dozens to hundreds,
and sometimes even thousands, of participants.
Approaching police vehicles have their dispersal commands ignored
and are often attacked with bottles, other projectiles, and are stomped out.
Fuck the police!
When sideshows hold space in the streets,
it is a group effort which can relieve the alienation,
anxiety and depression that comes with living
in neighbourhoods struggling with violence and poverty.
In Berlin, average housing prices jumped more than 20% last year,
earning the city the dubious title of the hottest real estate market in the world.
Much of this increase has to do with a wave of property speculation,
triggered in part by the large-scale sell-off,
by the city’s former mayor, Klaus Wowereit,
of over 110,000 social housing units to private real estate firms
and investment banks like Goldman Sachs.
The rapid spike in property values has been accompanied
by a flurry of new high-rise condo construction
that is transforming the character of working-class neighbourhoods.
And this is happening in a city where 85% of residents are renters.
Alongside this meteoric rise in the cost of living, for years now,
Berlin has been positioning itself as the new Silicon Valley of Europe.
Already home to a growing number of global tech start-ups,
the city was recently chosen as the site of a new Google campus,
planned to set up shop in the trendy working-class neighbourhood of Kreuzberg.
This announcement triggered an immediate backlash from local residents
and digital privacy advocates alike,
transforming the proposed Google outpost into a potent symbol
of the city's IT-fuelled gentrification woes,
and the broader restructuring of the global economy
being led by the tech industry.
People are very much concerned here that Berlin would turn into
a new San Francisco, or a new Toronto, or a new London,
where the most vulnerable people got evicted from the centres
and pushed towards the periphery.
Kreuzberg has historically been the hot spot for social struggles.
Anarchist communities have thrived there since the 90s,
and many movements got organized in the neighbourhood.
Since last year, many communities and individuals
mobilized against the implantation of the Google campus in Kreuzberg.
On the one hand many people from the neighborhood
who are affected by the ongoing displacement
are fighting against capitalist restructuring of the city.
They have felt the increase in living cost during the past years
of start-ups moving into the area.
Google Campus will only accelerate this process.
On the other hand more and more people are starting to realize that Google
is at the center of a growing system of totalitarian technological control.
In a very decentralized way, a network of opponents got together.
First, posters in the streets,
then public meetings in the anarchist library, Kalabal!k.
What is really impressive here is to see these decentralized networks
of actors with no real center engaging in many diverse direct actions
from graffiti on the walls of the Google Campus, to paint attacks.
There have been unregistered noise demonstrations
every month at the campus site,
and a Molotov attack on tech co-working space Start-Up Factory Görlitzer Park.
Also, The newspaper "Shitstorm" with a print of 8000
contains articles criticizing Google and the world it stands for,
from an anarchist perspective.
Google is one of the strongest forces behind the present convergence
of information tech, cybernetics, nano-tech, neuroscience, and bio-tech.
And this is more than just an upgrade to the industrial system,
it is a fundamental change towards power-as-domination.
Therefore we don’t want this entity at all as a neighbour.
It’s not any form of hyper-capitalist driven gentrification.
It is Google.
The Google empire responsible for mass surveillance of everyone on this planet.
That actually normalized this business model based on that mass surveillance.
Where fighting gentrification also means fighting mass surveillance.
Also means fighting technological dystopia.
Also means fighting this hyper-capitalism.
Security around the site of the projected Google Campus
has tremendously increased when activists started attacking the building itself.
We don’t count anymore the number of paint attacks and graffiti attacks.
In several fonts and colours already was written ‘Fuck Google’
all over the facade of the building.
So at first they put some security guards, then some security guards day and night.
Then several security guards.
Then frequently we also see the police there.
Google has been trying to counter our efforts to articulate this critique
by throwing money at business owners,
politicians and other institutions in the city
and doing their own counter public relations.
Until recently most of the groups had been united in their practices
of not negotiating with officials.
But divide and conquer strategies are starting
to take hold within this community.
The Berlin police are reacting as a way to serve these financial interests
of Google and the ones who want to take over our city.
We also see that there is a political will by the local administration
of the city to accompany this tech-based gentrification.
This ‘start-up-ification’ of our lives and neighbourhoods.
It is clear to us that it doesn't matter what politician is in power
since they will decide in favour of capital every time.
What we hope to do is somehow to lower
the attractiveness of the city for these companies.
If we kick Google out of Kreuzberg, we hope that other companies,
other giants from Silicon Valley, would think twice
before thinking to do the same.
Within the colonially-occupied territories ruled by the Canadian state,
Montréal stands out among large cities,
both in terms of its militant culture of resistance,
and its relatively affordable rents.
But while it hasn't seen the same rapid pace of gentrification
as the country's other metropolitan regions,
such as the Greater Toronto and Vancouver Areas,
Montréal still faces many of the same gentrification pressures
seen in countless other urban environments around the world.
Namely, an increase in condo construction and other luxury development projects,
a saturation of Air B&B rentals,
and the opening of countless boutiques, trendy restaurants and hipster cafes
seeking to cater to tourists and the city’s more affluent residents.
We bought a building in, you know, what was once considered
a 'hood’ and transformed what was a, you know, disheveled building into this,
you know, overly-luxurious, fantasious, men’s club-type place,
that we could only dream of attending.
These changes are leading to significant levels of displacement
from working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods,
which in turn has provoked widespread community resistance,
including a good number of anonymous attacks
emerging from the shadowy ranks of the city's sizable network of anarchists.
In a lot of ways people tend to use a lot of settler colonial tropes
as a way of legitimizing gentrification in Parc Ex.
People frequently refer to the neighbourhood as being “exotic”,
as a “hidden gem”, or a “newly discovered neighbourhood”.
People express a lot of interest in its restaurants but very little concern
with respect to the lives of the folks who actually do live in the neighbourhood.
Parc Extension is a predominantly working class,
immigrant, and poor people of colour neighbourhood
located in sort of the central north part of Tio’tia:ke, or so-called Montréal.
Today Parc Extension is one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods.
Plaza Hutchison has long served as a community center
and meeting place for Parc-Ex residents.
In Spring 2017, the Plaza Hutchison building was purchased
by the BSR group to be converted into luxury apartment suites.
From the outset, its manager Ron Basal has been very up-front
about stating that the units are all to be rented out at so-called "market price"
and are not meant to be affordable housing.
We tried to intervene in the permit approval process,
we also disrupted a number of city council meetings in an effort
to prevent elected officials from granting the permit.
We were fairly violently forced out of the room by the police.
And committee members were actually forced to the ground,
arrested and charged.
I think it’s very clear from his actions that Basal is not in the least bit
interested in the well-being of the neighbourhood
and is only seeking to profit off of the displacement of its residents.
Our experience suggests that engaging in municipal politics
only ever brought us to a dead end.
There’s a number of instances
- be it through the rent strikes in Toronto and Hamilton,
or building occupations that have taken place in Montréal -
that there’s actually a number of tactics that exist outside
of administrative and political channels that can be
far more effective in terms of stopping gentrification.
I think we’ve drawn some inspiration from Hochelaga and St. Henri
as places where there have been broader based community movements,
but also autonomous, affinity-based groups that have been able
to engage in much more confrontational actions,
and we believe those groups have done really important work
in terms of highlighting the ways in which gentrification is a violent process
and how a lot of the cafés and vintage stores
actually are very inaccessible to the people who
live in those neighbourhoods and we definitely hope to do more work in
the coming months to sent a clear message to developers and would-be gentrifiers
that if they try to get these projects off the ground,
that they will be confronted at every step along the way.
We know that gentrification tends to be accompanied
by more police violence and state repression.
And Parc-Ex in particular is a neighbourhood where there already exists
a significant amount of racial profiling, of police surveillance and harassment.
An important question we’ve been asking ourselves is how we can work
to make the neighbourhood an uncomfortable place for would-be gentrifiers,
but also to try to limit the ways in which that could contribute
to police presence in the neighbourhood.
So, St. Henri was a historically white working-class neighbourhood.
Well... historically it’s Kanienkehaka territory
but this is one of the problems when talking about gentrification.
It can erase ongoing colonial violence and dispossession.
Sometimes, anti-gentrification struggles get framed as just
“we want to stay” and that can lend itself to some pretty shitty things,
especially in the context of a white working-class francophone population
and reactions to displaced folks from elsewhere in the world moving here.
There have been some good moments in the South West.
For example, the squat in 2013 that the POPIR was involved in
that forced the city to take a few lots in the neighbourhood off the private market.
I have nothing, no sympathy, zero!
They’re punks, they’re anarchists. They’re from the black bloc.
There is a wide range of tactics used by the struggle
against gentrification in Montreal and there always has been.
The sausage heist was an interesting one. A very Robin Hood-inspired action.
Just before closing Saturday night at Maxine Tremblay’s store,
30 people in masks stormed in.
Half of them came inside with bags, put food in their bags...
They told the employee ‘just shut up, don’t move.’
'Don’t do nothing, we just want to steal some stuff.'
They threw smoke bombs, stole food, spray painted graffiti
and glued posters to the windows.
Their message? Gentrifiers, get out.
It was a brazen attack on several businesses
at close to midnight on Saturday.
A group of individuals wearing ski masks at the time,
broke the windows of four businesses.
Dressed all in black, the vandals damaged store fronts,
as seen in this security video obtained by Global News.
If we’re just talking about attacks, I’d say that most of the communication
happens through anonymous communiques on the internet.
Sometimes there are posters, sometimes there is some graff,
sometimes, you know, people drop off flyers somewhere.
People have gone door to door to put flyers in mailboxes.
The mainstream media, they pick up the most spectacular attacks,
and they're not on our side and I wouldn't say that people rely on them
to communicate motivations and rationale fairly.
It’s no longer vandalism, it’s causing terror
to the people who are living in the area.
Corey Shapiro owns several businesses in St. Henri.
Two of them were attacked over the weekend.
A few years ago, Corey Shapiro,
the almost comical evil figurehead of gentrification in St. Henri…
Or as they call me in the area where we populate in Montreal
... ‘The Notorious Gentrifier’.
called for business owners to band together
and hire private security for their shops.
His super fancy glasses store, L’Archive, kept getting spat on
and he was pissed about it.
One person got a ticket for spitting on L’Archive cause undercover cops
were stationed outside the store at night.
Cops have always protected those with money.
In Hochelaga specifically, the coming of yuppie businesses,
the place valois, and the condos were definitely a major factor.
The city is trying to rebrand the neighbourhood by renaming the area HOMA
- which is just some fuckin’ hipster remix of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.
They wanna change the image of this neighbourhood from a rugged working-class,
like, somewhat criminal area to a yuppie playground.
And of course that is just a continuation
of the colonial capitalist project of occupation.
Montreal’s police force plays a huge role in the process.
They remove street-based sex-workers, drug-users, and homeless folks.
They can pretend to be objective and neutral all they want
but the laws that they enforce benefit business and property owners.
There’s been numerous demands by business owners,
specifically those who’ve been targeted by direct action,
for an increase in cameras in the neighbourhood.
They wanna make sure that if anyone steps out of line
there’s gonna be proof and convictions.
The collaboration between the state and capitalists is pretty fuckin’ blatant.
It’s Projet Montreal calling for so-called 'social mixity',
a fucking code word for gentrification.
These people are friends and they just can’t wait for the area to be nicer,
meaning richer and “cleaned up”.
There are community groups doing harm reduction
and mutual aid which is good work.
There’s interesting decentralized direct action
that goes on which has been effective in some ways.
Some businesses were so badly hit, they were forced to close for clean-ups.
It’s scary, because it’s not the first time.
It worries business owners. It angers the rich.
It shows that cops are somewhat ineffective,
and definitely allows for some cathartic revenge.
When we think of territoriality, we should think about it in terms of land
and not neighbourhoods as clearly defined spaces.
We shouldn’t be dividing the island into lots and smaller lots.
It’s not our decision to make and it’s usually just used by the state
to map out and better control the city anyways.
Municipal politicians try to pacify struggles constantly.
If we listened to them, action other than voting would never be the solution.
They’re inherently against conflictuality.
While it can often feel like it, the struggle against gentrification
is not a zero-sum game.
By organizing and mounting collective resistance
to the forces fueling and pushing this process,
communities grow stronger and more resilient,
even as they face the attrition brought on by displacement.
Lessons learned in a campaign to stop the construction
of a luxury condo development can be applied to future battles
to halt the selling-off of social housing units.
Tactics developed in a battle against a new cafe
can be used to bring pressure to bear against a notorious slumlord.
When we navigate new terrains intentionally,
whether they be darkened back alleyways to take out surveillance cameras,
or the hallways of apartment buildings to knock on our neighbours doors
-- each provide us with skills that we wouldn't have developed
if we hadn't first taken the initiative to act.
Confidence and militancy are contagious.
Tactics and strategies honed in one struggle can be catalytic,
spreading beyond their initial participants
and inspiring others to take similar action to defend their own blocks.
I think a great deal about the importance of, you know, of centering,
directly affected folks in organizing.
We believe it’s important to think about who’s coming to our meetings.
Who are our events being geared towards? How are we reaching out to people?
Are we doing the important groundwork of handing out flyers,
of you know, of knocking on people’s doors,
of reaching people where they’re at?
Start with homies and comrades you really trust.
You can start as small as stickering, or as big as you’d like,
but act as soon as you can.
Make sure your crew is not only rooted in shared views,
but also in friendship and solidarity.
Above all, we also think it’s important to align ourselves with
other struggles against poverty, racism, and displacement in the neighbourhood.
Learn from and grow and build with folks who occupy different spaces
and cultures so that networks grow beyond smaller, radical circles.
Organize these networks from the local perspective
but with a global objective and a global reach.
Ensure to do all to inspire the world with what’s happening.
I think it’s important for us to remember that we’re on stolen land,
to remember those who were initially displaced
and to continue to support struggles for Indigenous solidarity as well.
To create that knowledge and that fight from the ground up
and to do data work but to also do direct action work.
Different groups can prioritize different things.
Not everyone has to work on policy.
Not everybody has to produce the maps,
not everybody has to, you know, organize direct actions.
But if different groups can kind of take on different things,
or maybe different groups can, you know, work in different neighbourhoods
or have different regional scopes, I think struggles can be
more powerful and effective.
So, you gotta broaden your analysis, you gotta find ways to connect your struggle
to community autonomy and mutual aid.
You gotta be focused on your short-term goal,
but also connecting them to the longer term goals.
Try to stay in your neighbourhood,
build relationships with your neighbours who aren’t anarchists
… don’t be afraid of combative tactics, but don’t fetishize them either.
Fighting gentrification isn’t necessarily fighting capitalism and colonialism.
It has a more limited scope, and that opens it up to recuperation.
Unfortunately, I think that there has been a fetishization
of tactics and discourse on all sides.
Both in community organizing and decentralized attacks.
I guess I’d say I’m annoyed with populist discourse
and abstract community-building on the left,
and badass posing in informal circles.
I think it’s interesting to discuss these different tactics.
To be honest about what they accomplish and what are their limitations.
And to be open to different things happening.
And engaging in these fights through a variety of scales
and with a variety of tactics,
is really important, and I think it’s imperative that these processes
and these struggles maintain anti-racist, and anti-capitalist, feminist
approaches to their organizing and to their theorizing.
I think that’s extremely important.
The conscious desire for total freedom requires a transformation of ourselves
and our relationships in the context of revolutionary struggle.
It becomes necessary not merely to rush into this that, or the other activity.
But to grasp and learn to use all of those tools that we can take
as our own and use against the current existent
based on domination.
In particular, the analysis of the world and our activity in it,
relationships of affinity and indomitable spirit.
It has also become necessary to recognize and resolutely
avoid those tools of social change offered by the current order
that can only reinforce the logic of domination and submission,
delegation, negotiation, petition, evangelicalism,
the creation of media images of ourselves, and so on.
These wider tools precisely reinforce hierarchy, separation,
and dependence on the power structure,
which is the reason why they are offered to us for use in our struggles.
Fuck off Google (x 6)
I don’t know if it helps.
As our cities continue to be steadily transformed
according to dictates of capital,
tossing more working-class, racialized and immigrant populations
into new suburban ghettos,
struggles against gentrification will only become more urgent and more desperate.
But as long as people continue to live in cities,
these urban environments will continue to be sites of resistance.
The shape that this resistance takes, and the measure of its effectiveness
will depend on the concrete actions taken to build solidarity among our neighbours,
prepare our collective defences, and sharpen our tools of attack.
This process will require active and dedicated engagement
on the part of revolutionaries equipped with the patience
to build relationships of mutual trust and respect,
and the humility to learn and adapt our strategies and tactics as required.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble
is intended to be watched in groups,
and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in getting more involved in fighting gentrification
and defending your block?
Consider getting together with some comrades,
organizing a screening of this film, and discussing where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble
at your campus, infoshop, community center or even just at home with your friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show,
and a screening kit featuring additional resources
and some questions you can use to get a discussion going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website:
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch,
drop us a line at:
This month, sub.Media bids a fond farewell to one of our collective members,
Tierra Morena, as they leave to focus more attention on other projects.
Tierra has been an integral part of our team here at Trouble,
and we look forward to the chance for future collaborations
further down the line.
Last but not least, this episode would not have been possible
without the generous support of Magdalena.
Now get out there …. and make some trouble!