EUGENE, Ore. – Eugene police served an eviction warrant on Monday at several houses on Almaden Drive, which had for months been the focus of an ongoing rent strike after a tenant stopped paying rent after a quarrel with their landlord.
Officers from the Eugene Police Department arrived at Almaden Street at about 7:30 a.m. on September 25 to serve an eviction warrant for two tenants living in homes on the street who had, according to a court verdict, violated their lease by allowing protestors to camp on the property they had rented. The protesters were there to show solidarity with another person on the street who had been evicted earlier in July, but had returned to the home she was evicted from. Protestors said that although they had set up a blockade on the shared driveway leading to other houses on the property, the eviction was unjustified because they were not actually protesting at the residences of those evicted, they claim.
“We feel that it’s completely unjust to evict us from our home just because we didn’t feel comfortable calling the cops on people. That’s not a reasonable expectation to have over a group of folks who ultimately were never our responsibility to begin with,” said one tenant facing eviction.
The new evictions represent another chapter in a long story centering around Candice King, a woman who had stopped paying rent at a home on Almaden Street. According to King and protestors, her landlord had failed to perform basic maintenance on the property for several months on end. When King offered to buy the property for what King and protestors said was fair market value, the landlord refused and King stopped paying rent.
King was evicted from her home on Almaden Street on July 5 for not paying rent, but moved back into the house shortly afterwards and was living there ever since. Protestors and other residents on the street sympathetic to King camped along the street to show support and “stand against evictions everywhere and stand for reparations for the black community and wealth redistribution.” With Monday’s evictions, it is unclear what will become of the rent strike movement on Almaden Street.