We Live Here
Detroit Eviction Defense and the Battle for Housing Justice
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A graphic novel featuring uplifting stories of combatting—and beating—calls for their eviction in Detroit, showing how everyday people are fighting to stay in their homes, organizing with their communities, and winning.
We Live Here! is a graphic novel biography of the members of the local activist group Detroit Eviction Defense combatting—and beating—calls for their eviction. By illustrating the stories of families struggling against evictions, the book gives a voice to those who have remained in Detroit, showing the larger complexities at work in a beleaguered city. These are everyday people fighting back, organizing with others, going into the streets, and winning their homes back.
What will Detroit look like in the future? Today cheap property entices real estate speculators from around the world. Artists arrive from all over viewing the city as a creative playground. Billionaires are re-sculpting downtown as a spot for tourism. But beyond the conventional players in urban growth and development, Detroit Eviction Defense (DED) members—like others engaged in place-based struggles all over the country—are pushing back, saying in effect, “we live here, we’ve been here, there is no Detroit without us.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson follows up The Instinct for Cooperation (an illustrated dialogue with Noam Chomsky) by partnering with co-artist Kramer for this galvanizing chronicle of hardscrabble victories won by a grassroots coalition dedicated to rescuing Detroit families from home foreclosure and eviction. In most of the firsthand accounts, success for the Detroit Eviction Defense hinges on preventing the delivery of a dumpster, which signals the final step in an eviction. "If that happens, they'll remove you physically from the house," says an organizer at a meeting with a family threatened with eviction. While battling evictions in courtrooms and bank cubicles, the DED's most potent tactics include picket lines and crowding properties with parked cars to block dumpster deliveries. These efforts may take months, and depend on extensive volunteer commitment. In capturing the powerlessness felt by individuals pitted against unresponsive mortgage lenders, the portraits lay bare the racial disparities baked into Detroit's much-celebrated revitalization. But as DED efforts repeatedly force banks to the negotiating table, the accounts also serve as testaments to organized action and strength in numbers. Kramer's lightly stylized sketches lend each firsthand narrative a verisimilitude shaded with pathos and dignity. Personalizing the lingering aftereffects of the subprime mortgage crisis, this collection of resilient first-person testimonies is comics journalism at its most vital.
