Irresponsible and Human: The Story of Rainbow Village
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // Sept. 5, 2024
In 1984, local elections in Berkeley swept a social democratic third party into power; they immediately attempted to adress a burgeoning homelessness crisis. Rainbow Village was created.
Originally published by Street Spirit.
Landing on the landlords: The great Berkeley rent strike of 1970
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // June 27, 2024
In 1970, the Berkeley Tenant's Union (BTU) organized a rent strike of nearly nine hundred units. Some of the collective bargaining agreements lasted years.
Originally published by Street Spirit.
‘People’s Pad’ and revolutionary gentrification
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // June 17, 2024
“You can’t trust an ally who is doing you a favor. You can only trust comrades who are in it for themselves.”
Originally published by Street Spirit.
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California Communism and Its Afterlives: On Robert W. Cherny’s “San Francisco Reds”
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // May 27, 2024
San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919–1958 by Robert W. Cherny
Originally published by Los Angeles Review of Books.
‘Bodies and force’: Lessons from Alameda’s tenant organizers of the 1960s
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // May 8, 2024
Lessons from Alameda’s tenant organizers of the 1960s.
Originally published by Street Spirit.
"They're watching you; don't let them down": the 1985 anti-apartheid occupation movement at Berkeley
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // April 28, 2024
Today's pro-Palestinian student organizing bears a striking resemblance to the mid-1980s movement for university divestment from apartheid South Africa.
Originally published by Notes from Below.
Who Owns the Park?
By Matt Ray, Matt Wranovics // Aug. 11, 2022
The continued existence of People's Park proves something dangerous: you, too, can seize something from the most powerful people in town, make it into whatever you want, and hold it for half a century.
Originally published by Verso Books.