Around the neighborhood of Patterson Alley, papers urging renters to recognize landlord malpractice were attached to dumpsters, backs of road signs and mailboxes. An excerpt from them read, “The time is now to meet your neighbor. The time is now to organize against your landlord.” Adamant and rigid words, but after reading them, I felt no threat or malicious intent.
That was Monday of week eight. By that Wednesday, I found most of these flyers ripped up and torn off — illegible.
This was not the first time I had noticed the concerns of the neighborhood scratched out. In the previous term, a similar pattern had occurred. This time I took pictures of the flyers in case they were damaged again, and lo and behold they were. The marks don’t indicate water damage to me. Slashes and tears through the center of the paper show deliberate efforts to rip them off.
As of now, the identity and the motives of both the flyer-posting and flyer-ripping parties are unknown.
There’s still a problem in tearing them down. The act disrupts communication and discourse among renters in the community, which is already patchy in a college town.
College students, who generally move frequently, have a hard time building community with their neighbors, especially longtime residents who don’t move as often. However, Claire Herbert, professor and scholar of housing and urban sociology at the University of Oregon, recognizes the importance of establishing these connections. To her, the instance of these flyers being torn down may represent dissociation between residents.
“Place-based relationships are really important. When you live near each other you face similar obstacles and have common frustrations,” Herbert said. “If you can recognize your connection to the people that live close to you, that can lead to a sense of interdependence and promote positive relationships.”
This is exactly my frustration with the crude and sloppy censorship of the discourse on the flyer. Whether a neighbor or landlord agrees with the argument or not, the obvious tension isn’t solved by disrupting the conversation entirely. The feelings of the person who made and put up the flyers are still rattled, unventilated and could be shared by other neighborhood members.
All tearing up the flyers does is make members of the community and myself speculate why someone would want that message silenced. This doubt and isolation can only worsen tensions.
Flyers, notices and signs have been a mainstay in spreading information in conversation within a community. “Help Wanted,” “Lost Dog,” “Will Shovel Snow” and many other notices are commonplace in any neighborhood. They build a sense of rapport and accountability among community members and help begin conversations between them. The flyers in question do the same things — and therefore have the same right to stay up as the more common ones.
The flyers themselves aren’t defamatory or singling any specific person out. They are accusatory, but that’s the perspective of the disgruntled writer. They voice no threat or specific intent of harm, and only call for residents to examine their housing situations and relationships with their landlords. There is seemingly no reason to tear these down other than someone disagreed with them.
If a neighbor slipped you a paper asking you to keep your noise down at night, tearing it up and ignoring the problem would fix nothing. Going to that neighbor and having an open discussion about the issue is the correct course of action in that situation. Why should this be any different?
There were many other ways someone who felt slighted by the flyers could have handled the situation. They could have created and posted a counter-argument, hosted a conversation with neighbors to discuss their perspectives, posted online in community forums and so on.
Instead, they lazily disrupted the discourse, solving none of the problems their neighbors felt and further isolated relationships.
It’s morally wrong to halt, meddle with or block community members’ attempts to build connections through conversation in any case. Regardless of your opinion on any flyer or notice, they should always be treated as invitations for discussion on the issue they name, never a stain or pieces of litter on your block. Perhaps the person or people ripping them worried about the harm they could cause, but in reality, more harm is caused when community members put them up and are subsequently silenced.
