Surviving Arkadia

The building collapsed of course. People tried to say it was something else, both at the time and afterwards. None of the conspiracy theories really stuck though, because none of them were quite as dramatic and sickening as what actually happened.

First there was the rent hike. The Landlord would later claim that it was justified because the building needed so many repairs.

Then there was the rent strike. The tenants refused to pay because the repairs had never been made in the past and they had no faith that the Landlord was going to suddenly make good on their many broken promises.

Then there was the threat of evictions. Which had absolutely no effect on the Tenants because they’d been expecting it. However it did not go down well with the rest of the local community. The people of the building were popular members of the community. There were several households with very young children and some of the children were ill because of the mould. There was a frail elderly woman and also a couple of disabled people who were all trapped inside their homes because of the building’s shocking state of repair.

The locals resisted the evictions and that led to the siege. Nobody was expecting the siege. Certainly neither the tenants nor the Landlord were prepared for it.

The tenants had barricaded themselves in their homes to resist eviction and they expected the Landlord to call the cops to drag them out. What made it a siege was a combination of the local community barricading the entire hilltop and refusing to let the cops in and then the cops very publicly beating a local activist into a coma while being filmed by a dozen different phones.

Battle lines were drawn.

The cops were kept out. The locals chose to remain in.

The community turned out to have quite a lot of food stock piled and the city authorities wouldn’t let the cops turn off the water. Once the siege made national news people started arriving with food and other supplies. The police stopped them of course but they would sneak in after dark.

Several times individual officers tried to sneak in too but they would be handed back the next morning, mildly beaten, and stripped of any weapons or armour they’d taken in.

No-one could see a non-violent path to end the siege and of course, there wasn’t one.

It was early morning when the cops pushed forward. The locals pushed back but the cops had brought a ridiculously over the top armoured vehicle with them. Some army surplus bullshit, as the locals always referred to it later.

At some point during the attack petrol bombs were thrown. Then either the barricade or the corner of the building caught fire. It didn’t really matter which caught fire first because it wasn’t the fire that killed people.

What killed people was that the bullshit army surplus vehicle ramming the corner of the building, and the whole building collapsed. The Landlord maybe should have checked out that one, badly cracked pillar, like everyone kept saying.