Often the most effective way to defeat wrongdoing is to shed light on the condition. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now with the airing of sexual harassment in Hollywood, in government, in tech, and in all places where those who have power over others—often white men—believe this power gives them carte blanche to take what they want from the lives of others. Like my “neighbors” and their bullying friends, or at least those who claimed to “represent” or to “be” them, said about their use of harassment in real estate using directional speakers and clandestine sound piped into my home after they had unveiled themselves to me as “mobbers,” “The industry is built on it!”
I am a writer and an historian by degree. I’ve studied the wars of the 20th century, I’ve studied displacements and diaspora. I’ve studied the Holocaust and other genocides. One of my core beliefs is in the absolute importance of resisting, fighting, and exposing, those who would advocate or effect the evisceration of others’ human rights. I believe one has the obligation to speak when he or she is made victim or witness.
One of the most basic human rights is the right to home, a concept intrinsic to the post-Holocaust philosophies of “dwelling” and interiority written by Emmanuel Levinas: “To be at home in the world is literally to have a home.” (https://drwilliamlarge.wordpress.com/tag/dwelling/) When I located United Nations and Amnesty International documents that described “real estate mobbing” as a major cause of forced eviction and homelessness, and as a phenomenon that disproportionately affects women who dwell even for short periods of time without men, it was clear that what was happening to me at the hands of a corrupt neighborhood watch and its cronies in real estate in northeast Seattle was unlikely to be an isolated event.
I had seen casual exchanges about forcing the sale of homes by the filing of civil code violations on the propertymob.com website out of Florida, for example, a site that boasted of coaching investors in “badass” and “gangsta” strategies for house flipping. I came to believe that my own mobbing in northeast Seattle was an escalation of a “property war,” as the mobbers called it, that began in more mundane neighborhood bullying including the constant filing of civil code violations by the nasty neighborhood watch lady of the northeast and her corrupt neighborhood watch friends, as well as other low-end bullying tactics. This made it clear that it might not just be a recurring event, but part of a business plan to force the turnover of homes onto the speculative market by hiring bullies to intimidate and, if need be, terrorize residents into leaving their homes. This made it clear that there may be an alliance between real estate speculators and technologies of hate or perhaps between speculators and hate groups themselves, groups willing to use strategies and technologies learned in the trades and perhaps even in boot camp—radio—to war against their neighbors with real estate profit the booty.
I should not have had to go through what I’ve survived here along the lakeside in northeast Seattle. I have lived much of my fifties as a women in a neighborhood, and rather obviously real estate related, bullying situation. My time has been stolen. My health and my life have been damaged and continue to be. I could end up being murdered as a result of refusing to be terrorized out of my home and due to the failure of the City of Seattle and the courts to listen to my account, to investigate it, and to take action against the neighborhood watch of this northeast neighborhood and their bullying speculator friends. I could end up being murdered not because I failed to report a crime, but because others failed to believe me.
If others had resisted the strong-arm tactics of these modern racketeers, this would not have happened to me. The neighborhood watch in this northeast Seattle area thought they and their low-end bullying speculator friends could get away with literally assaulting me in my legal home for years because they are protected by white privilege, at least the appearance of money, and the covert use of technologies including radio and directional sound to isolate and terrorize a woman out of her home. They had their real estate agent friends from a large Washington State real estate company call my landlords threatening “gag orders” and lawsuits for “valuation.” They spread gossip to make legal renters look like degenerates and criminals, and when those renters spoke up, they managed to sucker the Seattle Police and—so far—even the courts, with their innocent statements claiming that the only possible reason for the accusations must be that the renter suffers from delusions or is a paranoid schizophrenic.
If hoaxes, scams and cons are truly powerful enough to threaten reporters with having legal challenges to their competency and with conviction for “harassing” those whose crimes they report, these hoaxes, scams and cons must be disabled and defeated. This can only happen by shining a light on real estate mobbing, modern racketeering in American speculation.
A history of real estate scams should be written and published, and this compendium should detail the telltale signs of neighborhoods gone to speculation including threats by real estate agents, harassment by nuisance complaint, the silent transfer of infrasonic sound, and a phenomenology of sound so unfamiliar that racketeers misdirect the police simply by claiming that their victims are “crazy.” These signs, these “clues,” must be detailed in a manner that is intelligible to those who are experiencing this unfamiliar phenomenon. No one should be tricked into believing that they are losing their mind by criminals. The signs of real estate mobbing must also be recognized by police and the city that should stand guard against racketeering in the local real estate market.
Racketeers and their methods—digital or otherwise—must be exposed to protect people, and to ensure that the phenomenon is recognizable to those and can be prosecuted by those who should protect people like me from paying for “home” with their lives.
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