Students, community rally for city housing funds

There are those who believe the road to housing reform could be paved with arrest records and police citations.

Twenty-two people, in fact.

As clouds of war -- perhaps soon giving way to American warplanes -- darken the skies over Iraq, more than 200 protesters marched and demonstrated in the streets around City Hall, breaking the lazy silence of the hazy afternoon with chants for economic justice and taunts for the police, who arrested 22 protesters for civil disobedience.

"We're not just protesting the war in Iraq," Kensington Welfare Rights Union organizer Jesse Tendler said. "We're also protesting the war on the poor."

A fifth-year senior in Penn's Management and Technology program, Tendler considered the day a success.

"We definitely got the attention of the city officials we wanted to get the attention of," he said.

College senior Samantha Heller, a KWRU member, also attended the protest, and was arrested as six other University students looked on.

"She went in planning on getting arrested," said Empty the Shelters member and protest participant Martha Cooney, a College sophomore.

Blocking traffic on 15th Street near the Criminal Justice Center, the protesters choosing civil disobedience refused to move until handcuffed and escorted into waiting paddy wagons.

The march began at 2 p.m. on 13th Street, where the KWRU rallied participants for a march to District Attorney Lynne Abraham's office to urge Abraham to drop charges pending against KWRU leaders Cheri Honkala, Elizabeth Ortiz and Tara Colon.

Honkala, Ortiz and Colon, all of whom were present at the demonstration, were arrested on March 20 of last year for housing two homeless families, 14 people, in a house technically owned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city government organization under whose jurisdiction abandoned properties fall.

Though charges were initially filed against other KWRU members, including Penn students, the city is only pursuing the case against the three women, prompting some to speculate that the DA was picking her battles, avoiding a tangle with politically connected and monied students.

"The city really doesn't like... that they're constantly shedding light on the fact that the city is" failing to house and care for its homeless citizens, Tendler said.

Once a homeless mother, as Ortiz and Colon were, Honkala was arrested again during the protest.

Colon, meanwhile, offered her perspective on her and her colleagues' battle with the city.

"How was I going to stand by and watch? What kind of human being would that have made me?" she asked, wondering how the city can prosecute her for housing the homeless.

Members of American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today were also out in force. One member, known as "Spitfire," defiantly drove her wheelchair into the street to join protesters waiting to be taken into custody.

To cries of "Discrimination!" and "You have to take them all! Lift the Chair!" Civil Affairs officers diverted traffic around the woman rather than arrest her, even as the protest ended.

Demanding to be arrested, the woman was ultimately served with a citation, though Tendler, who saw the arrest, said that the officer turned to him as "Spitfire" rolled away to confide that the citation was false.

Others not so eager to taste the hospitality of the Philadelphia Police Department left the streets quickly after a second squad of paddy wagons pulled up next to protesters on the sidewalks.

Captain Bill Fisher, who directed Civil Affairs police at the scene, said that the protesters offered no significant resistance.

Protesters brought into custody were taken to the 16th Police District to be processed by the Major Crimes unit. Photographed, fingerprinted and served with citations to appear in court today, the process can be as "quick as paying a ticket," assuming the individual in question has no criminal history, according to a Civil Affairs officer.

"They'll be home in time for the 11 o'clock news" Fisher said.

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