60 years ago today, this man stopped the Cuban missile crisis from going nuclear

Why a Soviet submarine officer might be “the most important person in modern history.”

By Bryan WalshVOX

This newspaper map from the time of the Cuban missile crisis shows the distances from Cuba of various cities on the North American continent. Bita Honarvar/Vox; Bettmann Archive via Getty Images

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Homo sapiens have existed on the planet for about 300,000 years, or more than 109 million days. The most dangerous of all those days — the day when our species likely came closer than any other to wiping itself off the face of the Earth — came 60 years ago today, on October 27, 1962. And the person who likely did more than anyone else to prevent that dangerous day from becoming an existential catastrophe was a quiet Soviet naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov.

On that day, Arkhipov was serving aboard the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59 in international waters near Cuba. It was the height of the Cuban missile crisis, which began earlier that month when a US U-2 spy plane spotted evidence of newly built installations on Cuba, where it turned out that Soviet military advisers were helping to build sites capable of launching nuclear missiles at the US, less than 100 miles away.

That led to the Cold War’s most volatile confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union — 13 days of high-stakes brinkmanship between two nuclear powers that seemed one misstep away from total war.

President John F. Kennedy had ordered what he called a “quarantine” of Cuba, stationing a flotilla of naval ships off the coast of the island to prevent Soviet ships from carrying weapons to Cuba and demanding that the USSR remove the missiles. On October 27, the Russian sub B-59, which had been running submerged for days, was cornered by 11 US destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. The US ships began dropping depth charges around the sub.

The intention wasn’t to destroy it but to force it to surface, as US officials had already informed Moscow. But unknown to Washington, the officers aboard B-59 were out of contact with their superiors and had every reason to believe that their American counterparts were trying to sink them.

“We thought, ‘That’s it, the end,’” crew member Vadim Orlov recalled to National Geographic in 2016. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.”

A US Navy Aircraft photograph shows a Soviet attack submarine as it moved along the surface in the vicinity of Cuban quarantine operations during the Cuban missile crisis. Bettmann Archive via Getty Images

The end in this case meant not just the fate of the submarine and its crew, but potentially the entire world. Cut off from outside contact, buffeted by depth charges, its air conditioning broken, and temperatures and carbon dioxide levels rising in the sub, the most obvious conclusion for the officers of B-59 was that global war had already begun. But the sub had a weapon at its disposal that US officers didn’t know about: a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo. And its officers had permission from their superiors to launch it without confirmation from Moscow.

Two of the sub’s senior officers wanted to launch the nuclear torpedo. That included its captain, Valentin Savitsky, who according to a report from the US National Security Archive, exclaimed: “We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

Thankfully, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his assent. He convinced the sub’s top officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface — there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub — and that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.

Arkhipov’s cool-headed heroics didn’t mark the end of the Cuban missile crisis. The same day, US U-2 pilot Maj. Rudolf Anderson was shot down while on a reconnaissance mission over Cuba. Anderson was the first and only casualty of the crisis, an event that could have led to war had President Kennedy not concluded that the order to fire had not been given by Soviet Premier Nikolai Khrushchev.

That close call sobered both leaders, leading them to open back-channel negotiations that eventually led to a withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a later pullback of US missiles in Turkey in response, and the end of the closest the world has yet come to total nuclear war.

In a situation as complex and pressured as the Cuban missile crisis, when both sides were operating with limited information, a ticking clock, and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads (most, it should be noted, possessed by the US), no single act was truly definitive for war or peace. But Arkhipov’s actions still deserve special praise. Trapped in a diesel-powered submarine thousands of miles from home, buffeted by exploding depth charges and threatened with suffocation and death, Arkhipov kept his head. Had he assented to the decision to fire a nuclear torpedo, likely vaporizing a US aircraft carrier and killing thousands of sailors, it would have been far more difficult for Kennedy and Khrushchev to step back from the brink. And the most dangerous day in human history may well have been one of our last.

For his courage, Arkhipov was the first person to be given the Future of Life award by the Cambridge-based existential risk nonprofit the Future of Life Institute (FLI), in 2017. It was posthumous — Arkhipov died in 1998, before the news of his actions was widely known. But he may well be, as FLI president Max Tegmark said at the award ceremony, “arguably the most important person in modern history.”

No nuclear weapon has been used in war since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. But as tensions between the US and Russia only grow over the war in Ukraine, and as Russian President Vladimir Putin makes veiled threats about wielding his country’s nuclear arsenal, we should remember the awful power of these world-ending weapons. And we should celebrate those, like Vasili Arkhipov, who in moments of existential decision, choose life rather than extinction.

The Roots of War

To discern why we fight, we should ask why we do not.

Chris Blattman Boston Review

An inmate in a Colombian penitentiary first told me about the Billiards War. I’ll call him Carlos. Lean, muscular, in his late twenties, he had run a drug corner for a Medellín street gang before his arrest.

If we take our eyes off the roots of war and focus on misleading causes, we are unlikely to make the choices that will promote peace.

A powerful criminal group called Pachelly ruled Carlos’s cellblock, selling drugs and charging inmates for beds and phones. Revenues from these activities made the prison hallways profitable territory, just like the streets Pachelly controlled on the outside.

A rival gang, El Mesa, lived in the same prison block. Their power was growing outside of the prison’s walls, and they had begun to resent Pachelly’s rule. Tensions between the two groups came to a head one afternoon as men from both gangs were playing billiards. Though Carlos cannot recall why they started arguing, he does remember that the fight got out of hand quickly. Members of El Mesa pulled out their guns and fired. Miraculously no one was killed, but twenty-three were injured in the shootout.

Over the next few days, the prison saw a series of retaliatory attacks. Soon anger and recrimination spilled outside of the penitentiary. Pachelly and El Mesa activated their alliances. Hundreds of gangs lined up on either side. Medellín’s underworld geared for war.

Over the following weeks, however, the city never spiraled into bloodshed. The Billiards War never happened. Instead, tense negotiation ensued. Pachelly ceded some territory—a prison hallway here, a street corner there. None of these territories were worth a battle.

The reason was simple: violence seemed too costly. Fighting kills little brothers and friends, and no one wants to pay protection money or buy drugs in the middle of a gunfight. Most of all, though, a war between the gangs would have brought police attention to the crime bosses and risked their arrest. These leaders could not care less about civilian casualties. Mass violence would have compromised leaders’ bottom line and their freedom.

So Pachelly and El Mesa compromised, negotiating an agreement to avoid violence: El Pacto del Fusil, or the Pact of the Machine Gun. Some things have not changed, of course. The gangs still despise one another. They maneuver for drug corners and prison hallways. They occasionally have skirmishes (where things can get pretty rough). But they steer clear of war, knowing that it would result in vastly more damage. Today their pact has been held for a decade and Medellín’s homicide rate is nearly half that of U.S. cities such as Chicago. 

Medellín’s hostile peace is not unusual. Indeed, its gangs are an allegory for our wider world. The globe is a patchwork of rival territories. Controlling them brings wealth and status. Different groups covet their neighbors’ resources and prey on the weak, but most do their best not to wage war.

Now, when I say war, I don’t just mean countries duking it out. I mean any kind of prolonged, violent struggle between groups. This includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. At every one of these levels, compromise typically wins for the same reason it does in Medellín: war is ruinous.

Nothing destroys progress like conflict. Fighting massacres soldiers, ravages civilians, starves cities, plunders stores, disrupts trade, demolishes industry, and bankrupts governments. It undermines economic growth in indirect ways too. Most people and business won’t do the basic activities that lead to development when they expect bombings, ethnic cleansing, or arbitrary justice; they won’t specialize in tasks, trade, invest their wealth, or develop new ideas. These costs of war incentivize rivals to steer clear from prolonged and intense violence.

Of course, it seldom feels like peace is our natural state. “The story of the human race is war,” said Winston Churchill, “except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world.” Certainly it often seems so, especially today as a major conflict rages in Ukraine and the number of civil wars in the world climbs to levels not seen since the 1990s.

But that sentiment is misleading and comes from ignoring the quieter moments of compromise. One example of peace came two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan. Pakistan was outraged, but violence did not break out. Calm ensued, as it has for decades. War would have been so costly that both sides strove to avoid it.

Likewise, for two decades, President Vladimir Putin tried every means possible to co-opt Ukraine without invasion: dark money, propaganda, political stooges, assassinations, and support for separatists. War was his last resort. He succeeded in subjugating neighbors such as Belarus and Kazakhstan without a major fight, and he hoped to repeat the trick in Ukraine.

Look around and tense instances of peace appear everywhere, whether it’s the gloomy impasse between North and South Korea or the constant deadlock over Taiwan. We see it at lower levels too. Take ethnic and sectarian groups, who are mostly covered in the news when they purge or pillage their neighbors. When social scientists tallied the number of rivalries in the world and counted how many turned violent, however, they found that fewer than one in a thousand actually fight.

We forget this because few people write about the conflicts avoided. Instead, our gaze is often pulled to the horrific, violent struggles that do happen. That’s natural. We have to pay attention to wars, but we shouldn’t focus solely on the hostilities that do occur.

Solely examining the times that peace failed is a kind of selection bias—a slanted accounting of the evidence that distorts our view of the world. It is a mistake that has two important consequences. One is that we exaggerate how much we fight. Yes, our natural condition is conflict and competition, but most of the time this jostling is not violent. Enemies prefer to loathe in peace.

The second and greater harm of selection bias is that we mistake the roots of war and follow fruitless paths to peace. When we trace the steps leading up to a fight, we find familiar features: ancient hatreds, poverty, historical injustices, and an abundance of arms. But when we look at the times rivals did not fight, we often see many of the same preceding conditions. We ought to be skeptical, then, that these are the causes of the violence. To discern why we fight wars, we should begin with why we do not. 

 Most nations, political factions, ethnic groups, and gangs behave strategically. Like players of poker or chess, they try to think ahead, discern their opponents’ strength and plans, and choose their actions based on what they expect them to do. Even when they’re poorly informed, mistaken, biased, or impassioned, they still want to attain the best outcome. Strategic behavior is thus a good starting point for thinking about war.

Solely examining the times that peace failed is a kind of selection bias—a slanted accounting of the evidence that distorts our view of the world.

The science of strategy is game theory, which works out how one side will behave based on what it believes its opponent will do (knowing that the opponent is thinking in the same way). Consider the decision facing Pachelly and El Mesa in the aftermath of the billiards shootout. The foes were evenly matched, and so each gang had a roughly fifty–fifty chance of winning a winner-takes-all war. The two rivals also knew that war would have dire consequences, regardless of the winner.

Let’s suppose that the territory they contested was worth $100, and that both gangs expected fighting to cost one-fifth of that total, $20. War’s destruction means that both sides are better off finding a peaceful split than going to war. The $20 is a peace bonus they get to divide. It creates a whole range of territorial splits both sides prefer to fighting it out. Consider Pachelly. Fighting gives them even odds for gaining a shrunken $80 prize. That means that any peaceful split that leaves Pachelly more than 40 percent of the $100 territory is a better deal. The same is true of El Mesa, and both sides know it. The $20 that will be saved by not fighting gives the rivals an array of acceptable compromises—what political scientists and economists call a bargaining range.

This strategic insight is decades old. The early applications were not to military conflict, but to commerce. Take negotiations between firms and unions, for instance. Just replace “war” with “labor strike,” and the result is the same. Both groups want the best deal for their group—shareholders and management on one side, workers on the other. Strikes and stoppages are costly to both sides. Thus, most firms and unions try to avoid them. Or consider court battles. Lawsuits are expensive and inefficient. It’s better to settle, and most litigants do. Long, messy court battles happen only when something hijacks the normal incentives for settlement.

Now we should not use this game theory blindly. Some employ these models to paint a picture of humans as unreasonably rational—Homo economicus—but this species still manages to commit an awful lot of violence. Groups and their leaders are not always logical or all-seeing, and  people rarely hold coherent beliefs that the body politic faithfully represents. Still, game theory serves as a base frame of reference—not because people are necessarily peace-loving, but simply because they are self-interested. The losses from violent conflict usually outweigh the gains.

The five reasons for war

This allows a new perspective on violence. If societies avoid war because it is ruinous, then every explanation for fighting is the same: a society or its leaders either ignore the costs of war or choose to pay them. Whether it is Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the gang wars that have (on occasion) turned Medellín into the most dangerous place on the planet, something overcame the usual strategic incentives for peace, pushing opponents away from nonviolent politics and toward bloodshed.

There are five main reasons incentives for peace break down: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, misperceptions, uncertainty, and commitment problems.

And while there’s a reason for every war and a war for every reason, there are only so many logical ways that the incentives for peace can break down. There are five main reasons it happens: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, misperceptions, uncertainty, and commitment problems. Each eliminates the incentives for compromise in a distinct way. To explain them, I’ll step away from the gangs of Medellín and consider the great conflict of this moment: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

1. Unchecked interests

Like gang leaders, autocrats and oligarchs can ignore many of the costs of war because the soldiers and citizens who pay them cannot hold their leaders to account. Think of Putin. Dictators like him must only heed the damage and risks to themselves and their cabal—a fraction of the total costs. They are quick to use violence because others pay much of the price.

Unchecked leaders are also free to pursue their private interests, and this can lead them to go to war against their society’s interests. Again, consider Putin. Ukrainians had tossed out two Russian-facing leaders in the previous two decades. But while an increasingly restive and democratic Ukraine was hardly a danger to ordinary Russians, from Putin’s point of view, Ukrainian democracy was a dangerous example to dissidents at home, potentially threatening his system of control. Co-opting the regime and installing a puppet government could eliminate that threat. War was not in the interest of Russia at large; it was in the interest of Putin’s narrow regime.

Democratic societies are vulnerable to unchecked interests as well, such as a president who hopes to boost popularity ahead of an election, military leaders who see opportunity in a conflict, or extremist splinter factions who want to spoil the peace. Each of these examples involves decision-makers who are imperfectly accountable to the populace. Dictators are the most extreme and dangerous of the lot, because they are accountable to the fewest people and bear the least costs.

2. Intangible incentives

Sometimes violence can deliver value, such as glory, renown, or justice. Any ideological rewards might offset the costs of war, spurring sides to fight instead of bargain.

Consider status. A desire for glory and dominance has driven kings of the past and tyrants of the present to warfare. This is probably the most common explanation for Putin’s invasion: nationalist pride and a desire to see Russia restored to its imperial glory. If it adds to Putin’s personal renown and place in history, so much the better.

Our natural condition is conflict and competition, but most of the time this jostling is not violent. Enemies prefer to loathe in peace.

This sounds like a case of unchecked interests, and it may be true that Putin prizes glory most of all. But he is not alone; at least some Russians support him. Unaccountable leaders are not the problem if the populace shares nationalistic and ideological goals. When they do, the leader is faithfully representing the group’s ideals by going to war. Most commonly, however, rulers and their cabals seek personal and national glory.

Another example of intangible incentives is the value societies place on certain pieces of land. When rival street gangs split territory in the example above, their interests were mostly mercenary. The neighborhoods had no sacred value. The soil wasn’t tied to their identity. But there are other times when a territory is hallowed. In those cases many fight because the idea of compromising over a sacred space or ethnic homeland is unfathomable.

Similarly, sometimes fighting is a society’s only path to achieving other righteous ends. Throughout history colonized and repressed peoples have decided to fight for their freedom because compromise was abhorrent. One example is the American Revolution. The colonists rebelled against a tyrannical superpower because they did not want the semi-sovereignty on offer (even if that is all their military weakness could reasonably earn them).

This is possibly the most important and least talked about explanation for the conflict in Ukraine. Putin demanded Ukraine sacrifice its sovereignty, a price other neighbors have paid. But like the U.S. revolutionaries over two centuries before, Ukrainians refused the bargain. In both cases they were willing to bear some costs of war because compromise on freedom and sovereignty was simply repugnant.

3. Misperceptions

A third way rivals get the costs and benefits of war wrong is when they form and hold mistaken views, even when evidence piles up to the contrary. In this scenario decision-makers do not stop acting strategically, but rather strategize from a set of delusional and biased beliefs.

We often misperceive others. Humans are prone to demonizing their enemies and attributing to them the worst intentions. We often treat opponents too harshly—repressing protesters with deadly force, striking insurgent leaders with imprecise drones—and then wonder why they angrily reject the miserable deal on offer. People are especially prone to these errors when the conflict follows ethnic and religious cleavages: the troubles in Northern Ireland, the civil war in Syria, or the U.S. war on fundamentalist Islamic armed groups.

Other times we misperceive ourselves, overestimating chances of victory or underestimating the costs of a fight. Sometimes we owe this overconfidence to psychological biases. Other times it arises from an institutional problem that insulates decision-makers from bad news.

When social scientists tallied the number of rivalries in the world and counted how many turned violent, they found that fewer than one in a thousand actually fight.

The best evidence of overconfidence comes not from politics—where the assurance of leaders is hard to pin down—but rather from business. Whether it is mutual fund managers, CEOs, or entrepreneurs, economists have shown that many are prone to repeating the same overconfident mistakes—repeatedly overestimating the success of a merger or investment strategy.

Political leaders could overestimate their chances of victory, underestimate the costs, and be too quick to take their society to war. This is one of the most common charges laid against the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also one of the most familiar narratives for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: an isolated and insulated ruling cabal overconfidently expected to easily topple the Zelensky regime, so much so that they were unprepared for the possibility of failure.

4. Uncertainty

Misperceptions are important, but generally speaking, people attribute too much influence to mistakes, and too little to uncertainty. After all, Russian leaders weren’t the only people surprised by Ukraine’s military resistance. Most leaders simply do not know the strength or resolve of the other side. The fourth root of war is this uncertainty.

The first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed how hard it is to estimate the probability of victory or the costs of violent struggle. The competence of Russia’s forces, resolve of the Ukrainian people, and the west’s sweeping sanctions were all fundamentally hard to judge in advance. While it was always possible that Russia would get a bad draw on all three, almost no politician or military expert predicted it—least of all Putin. The problem was not simply overconfidence, it was also the tremendous unpredictability of the situation.

Granted, war is so ruinous that both sides ought to invest enormous time and energy in discerning their rival’s strength and resolve. And they do—this is the function of diplomacy and intelligence. Moreover, no nation wants to be mistaken as weak. To avoid attack, most rivals signal their true strength through military exercises, missile tests, and (if necessary) skirmishes. In many cases, however, an opponent’s strength is hard to determine. Arguably neither Ukraine nor Russia knew their own strength or resolve before testing themselves on the battlefield. That uncertainty makes war a gamble.

More importantly, it is hard to trust any signals from a rival. While no nation wants to be underestimated, everyone would like to be overestimated. If you have played a game of poker, you grasp the game theory already. You don’t know what cards your opponent holds, but you do know that the uncertainty gives them an incentive to bluff. Your best response is not to believe them and fold every time.

The economic costs of war incentivize rivals to steer clear from prolonged and intense violence.

Likewise, in war, enemies do not know the other’s strength or resolve. They may be bluffing. The optimal approach is to play what is called a mixed strategy: occasionally you ought to fold; occasionally you ought to call (risking war). Each time is a gamble. If uncertainty explains why wars break out, it also helps to explain why the average war is so brief—typically counted in weeks rather than years. Once the uncertainty dissipates, each side prefers to bargain rather than fight.

5. Commitment problems

Commitment problems comprise the fifth and final strategic dilemma—one that lies behind many of history’s longest wars. Commitment problems arise whenever one side believes its opponent has an incentive to renege on a peace deal—to use some future advantage to attack. Knowing this, a deal unravels before it can even begin.

A classic example is the preventative war, where one side expects its adversary to become more powerful in the future and renegotiate the deal in their favor. One side capitalizes on its ability to strike while still strong. When neither side can commit to future peace, a quintessential commitment problem ensues—both sides would prefer a deal that avoids the ruin of war, but that bargain is not always credible. Historians and political scientists use this dilemma to explain conflicts as varied as the Peloponnesian War, World War I, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Commitment problems also arise when leaders are unable to make credible deals. Both democrats and autocrats face this challenge, though for different reasons. Elected presidents, such as Ukraine’s Zelensky, can agree to peace terms, but a year down the road, should circumstances change, a legislature could refuse to ratify the agreement, or citizens could elect a leader who rejects the previous terms. Again, a deal unravels before it begins. Meanwhile, dictators such as Putin have even greater difficulty making deals because nothing constrains them from changing their mind later. Why should Ukraine agree to peace terms if they worry that Russia might use any pause to regroup and renew its strength, only to attack again? Part of the problem here is an autocrat’s inability to credibly keep their word. 

These five roots of war provide a diagnostic tool to discipline our thinking. Every time a conflict is explained by reference to a specific factor, we can use this lens: “How does that factor obscure or override the incentives for peace? How does it fit into the five?” It may not. There are many misleading ideas about war that arise from focusing on the failures and attributing the conflict to false causes.

Take poverty, which most people associate with a risk of conflict. War is expensive, though, and poor societies often have even more to lose. This is why sudden financial crises, price shocks, and droughts seldom lead to war.

Another common mistake is to blame inept and ideological leaders alone. This is the dominant account of war after war: World War I, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or Putin’s attack on Ukraine. But in all these cases a set of subtler strategic factors—unchecked political systems, uncertainty, and commitment problems—narrowed the range of peaceful settlements to a sliver, to the point that glory-seeking, overconfident leaders and chance events could take their societies to war. We need both the psychological and strategic explanations if we are to understand why fighting happens.

For the same reason, we must resist the allure of chance events. History books on wars are filled with random human foibles, economic tumult, natural disasters, lucky coups, new technologies, and assassinations. These play a role, but perturbations matter for war and peace only when the five fundamentals have left rivals with little room to maneuver. Peace, in contrast, is what happens when societies are insulated from the five roots of war and can find ways to compete without violence.

The paths to peace

“Peace is not the absence of conflict,” Ronald Reagan once said, “it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” Indeed, successful gangs, ethnic groups, cities, and states all share the same strategy: they develop institutions and interventions that pay attention to the fundamentals and seek to minimize all five kinds of breakdown. They check the power of centralized leaders. They share information. They make commitments easier to hold. In short, they compel rivals to consider the costs of war and to make peace strategic.

Consider the gangs of Medellín. Long before the Billiards War, they built a governing board called La Oficina—The Office—to manage these kinds of disputes. After the shootout in Bellavista prison, the kingpins that dominated La Oficina sat El Mesa and Pachelly down to negotiate, to clear up any uncertainty and misperceptions. Both sides wanted revenge and spoils, but La Oficina countered those unchecked interests with powerful threats, promising to sanction anyone who continued to break the peace. The kingpins lorded over an unequal and illegitimate system, but to some degree it has worked. Medellín remains a dangerous place, but its murder rates are far lower than those of most U.S. cities.

When a society fails to contain violence, it is usually because it has allowed one or more of the five logics of war to flourish.

Once again, the gangs of Medellín are an analogy for our wider world. We too have kingpins and organizations that steer rivals from violence—the member states of the UN Security Council or NATO, for instance, and the institutions and tolls they have established, from peacekeepers to sanctions regimes.

Like La Oficina, these institutions are imperfect. The promise of sanctions was clearly not enough to deter Putin from his prize. And, also like La Oficina, our tools are unequal. International institutions work poorly against great powers, such as the United States or Russia. (For the same reasons, La Oficina is powerless to constrain a major kingpin. When one of the great powers of Medellín decides to fight, the city becomes the most violent place on the planet.) Still, the evidence suggests our international institutions and tools work, to a degree. The world is a more peaceful place with a general assembly, peacekeeping forces, sanctions regimes, and ranks of mediators than it would be without.

Nations and cities have been even more successful, as they have built social and legal institutions that counter the five roots of violence. Their states and social norms sanction violent offenders. Their political systems check the power of elites and compel them to consider the interest of wider groups. Their institutions share information and dispel fake news and other misperceptions. Everyday work and social life integrate one group with another, giving them shared interests and additional incentives not to fight. And their ideologies emphasize shared identity—as citizens, or as people possessing universal human rights—blurring the factional boundaries that separate competing groups.

Of course, many people worry about the erosion of these checks in their societies—and they should. When a society fails to contain violence, it is usually because it has neglected these fundamentals and allowed one or more of the five logics of war to flourish. If we take our eyes off the roots of conflict and focus on false or misleading causes, we are unlikely to make the choices that will promote peace.

Editors’ Note: Adapted from Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace by Chris Blattman (Viking, 2022). 

 

How the ‘Black Death’ Left Its Genetic Mark

How the ‘Black Death’ Left Its Genetic Mark on Future Generations

By Carl Zimmer New York Times

Scientists have discovered several genetic variants that protect Europeans from the bubonic plague — but also increase the risk of immune disorders.

Scientists examined the DNA of people who lived centuries ago, extracting genetic material from human remains buried in three London cemeteries.Credit...Museum of London Archaeology

Many Europeans carry genetic mutations that protected their ancestors from the bubonic plague, scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

When the Black Death struck Europe in 1348, the bacterial infection killed large swaths of people across the continent, driving the strongest pulse of natural selection yet measured in humans, the new study found.

It turns out that certain genetic variants made people far more likely to survive the plague. But this protection came with a price: People who inherit the plague-resistant mutations run a higher risk of immune disorders such as Crohn’s disease.

“These are the unfortunate side effects of long-term selection for protection,” said Hendrik Poinar, a geneticist at McMaster University in Canada and an author of the new study.

Bubonic plague is caused by Yersinia pestis, a species of bacteria spread by fleas. Although the plague has been infecting people for thousands of years, it struck medieval Europe with intense ferocity that led scientists to wonder if the Black Death had changed the genetic makeup of Europe.

“We would expect to see a major shift,” Dr. Poinar said.

The idea makes basic evolutionary sense: When a lot of organisms die off, the survivors will pass down mutations that protected them from death. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, peppered moths changed from a light speckled coloring to dark. That shift was driven by the coal smoke that blackened the trees where the moths rested. Dark moths were better able to hide from birds and survived to pass on their genes.

The Italian artist Raphael and the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi produced “The Plague” (Il Morbetto) in 1512 or 1513. It captures the horror of the bubonic plague, which devastated Italy during the Black Death and then repeatedly returned over the next 300 years.Credit...National Gallery of Art

When the Black Death struck, there were no evolutionary biologists to document its impact. In the 1990s, some scientists searched for clues by studying the DNA of living Europeans. A mutation in one gene, called CCR5, is present in 10 percent of Europeans but rare among other people. In 1998, researchers proposed that the gene might have offered protection during the Black Death.

But later research showed it was impossible to rule out that the CCR5 mutation spread in response to another disease at another time in history. “It’s something that a lot of people talk about but is very hard to demonstrate,” said Luis Barreiro, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago and an author of the new study.

Instead of studying living people, Dr. Barreiro, Dr. Poinar and their colleagues examined the DNA of people who lived centuries ago, extracting genetic material from human remains buried in three London cemeteries. They found fragments of DNA in 318 skeletons that had lived between 1000 and 1500. The remains included 42 victims of the Black Death.

Comparing the bones from before and after the plague hit, the scientists found a striking difference in DNA: Hundreds of mutations in genes involved in immunity became more common after the epidemic.

This shift was not proof on its own that the mutations conferred some evolutionary advantage. Biologists have long known that mutations can become more common in a population thanks to the vagaries of history — a process called genetic drift.

It can be challenging to determine if a common mutation came to be because of genetic drift or natural selection. One way to tell the difference is speed: Under extreme conditions, natural selection can make a mutation spread far faster than genetic drift can.

To compare natural selection and genetic drift, Dr. Barreiro and his colleagues went back to the DNA of the Londoners for another look. They took advantage of the fact that large stretches of our DNA contain no working genes. Mutations that strike those stretches are unlikely to cause any harm. They’re also unlikely to bring any benefit. They only spread thanks to genetic drift.

Dr. Barreiro and his colleagues found that some of these neutral mutations became more common after the Black Death. But 35 of the mutations in immune genes spread far faster than the neutral ones — so fast that only natural selection could account for their success.

Researchers extracted DNA from the remains of people buried in the East Smithfield plague pits, which were used for mass burials in 1348 and 1349.Credit...Museum of London Archaeology

The findings provide evidence that pandemics may have shaped susceptibility to disease and suggest that they may continue to do so in the future. .Credit...Museum of London Archaeology

Researchers at McMaster University extracted DNA from fragments of bone dating back centuries to look for genes that provided protection against the Black Death .Credit...Matt Clarke/McMaster University

For another test, the scientists repeated their experiment, this time in Denmark.

They found DNA in the skeletons of 198 Danes who lived between 850 and 1800. Mutations in immune genes also rapidly spread in Denmark after the Black Death, they found. When the scientists lined up the mutations from the London and Denmark samples, they found four that had spread in both populations. These four mutations spread so quickly in London and Denmark that they must have provided an impressive protection against the plague.

The researchers found that carrying two protective versions of a gene called ERAP2, for example, made people 40 percent likelier to survive the Black Death — the largest evolutionary advantage ever found in humans, Dr. Barreiro said.

“It’s actually shocking,” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the new study.

Dr. Enard said the study was particularly compelling thanks to the way the scientists ruled out genetic drift. “What really gives this study its power has to do with this whole approach of designing careful comparisons,” he said.

ERAP2 makes a protein that’s involved in the immune response to invading bacteria and viruses. When an immune cell swallows a pathogen, it presents proteins from the invader on its surface. They serve as an alarm to the rest of the immune system. ERAP2’s job is to snip off bits of the foreign proteins to prepare them for their display.

Billions of people have a version of the ERAP2 gene with a mutation that makes it impossible for cells to make its protein. But people with this version of the gene don’t suffer major harm. That’s most likely because humans have many other genes that help present foreign proteins to the immune system.

During the Black Death, Dr. Barreiro and his colleagues found, natural selection favored the working version of ERAP2. To better understand why, they mixed Yersinia bacteria with immune cells from people with both versions of the gene.

The researchers found that two working copies of ERAP2 allowed the immune cells to wipe out the bacteria. Without it, the cells did a significantly worse job.

But that version of the gene also increases the risk of Crohn’s disease, a disorder in which the immune system attacks friendly bacteria in the gut and causes damaging inflammation. Dr. Barreiro said it was possible that ERAP2 could be too good at its job, sounding the alarm against friends and enemies alike. The other mutations he and his colleagues identified from ancient DNA have also been linked to immune disorders.

Dr. Barreiro and his colleagues are continuing to study the genes that evolution favored during the Black Death, not only to understand that chapter in history, but also to understand the genes themselves. The fact that they underwent such strong natural selection most likely means they are important in the fight against diseases — and perhaps not just the plague.

“It was important in the past, and it most likely is going to be important today,” Dr. Barreiro said.

The Rent Revolution Is Coming

 The Rent Revolution Is Coming

For the 44 million households who rent a home or apartment in the U.S., inflation keeps pushing costs higher and higher. Anger is rising too. It could be a breaking point.

Tiana Caldwell, a co-founder and Board President of KC Tenants, outside the East Patrol Division Station in Kansas City after being arrested during the group's disruption of a city council vote on a new set of housing ordinances. Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times.

By Conor Dougherty

Reporting from Kansas City, Mo.

Oct. 15, 2022

Here’s a list of places you might imagine seeing an argument over housing policy. A city council meeting. A late-night zoning hearing. Maybe a ribbon-cutting to christen a new affordable housing complex.

Instead, there was Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., on a stage dressed as the pope with a half-dozen hecklers in yellow T-shirts berating his new housing plan from the audience in front of him. Mr. Lucas had arrived at the outdoor Starlight Theater on a warm August evening for a cameo appearance in a local production of “Sister Act.” Just before he walked onto the stage, the demonstrators, who belonged to a group called KC Tenants, unfurled a banner that read “Mayor Lucas: Developing Displacement.”

A pack of uniformed security guards promptly smothered the scene. During the slow procession to the exit gates that followed, members of KC Tenants chanted, “The rent is too damn high!” while the audience tried to focus on the mayor/pope and the dancing nuns.

Such is the state of housing in America, where rising costs are flaring into pockets of resistance and rage. Take two-plus years of pandemic-fueled eviction anxiety and spiking home prices, add a growing inflation problem that is being increasingly driven by rising rents, and throw in a long-run affordable housing shortage that cities seem powerless to solve. Add it up and the 44 million U.S. households who rent a home or apartment have many reasons to be unhappy.

That unhappiness extends across the economic spectrum. At one end are renters who aspire to buy a home but have had their dreams dashed by high home prices and, now, rising mortgage rates. At the other are low-income tenants who make up the bulk of the 11 million households who spend more than half of their income on rent. In between is a hollowed-out middle class that is steadily losing ground, although not enough to qualify for much sympathy or help.

The confluence of all these forces has fueled a swell of tenants’ rights activism that has brought organizing muscle and policies like rent control to cities far beyond the high-cost coasts. Kansas City, Mo., is a leading example. With a population of 500,000, where the avenues are lined with brick buildings and side streets have modest homes with raised porches, the city offers little to suggest a renters’ revolution. Zillow’s home value index puts the typical Kansas City home at $230,000, or more than $100,000 below the national level.

But with a steadily expanding economy driven by the logistics and medical industries, Kansas City has seen its rents increase 8.5 percent from a year ago, outpacing the rest of the nation, according to rental search site Apartment List. Over the past decade, Kansas City, like many places, has added a collection of high-end towers and apartments even as its stock of low-income housing has withered. The strain from rising rents, which landlords say they need to cover their costs, is creeping from people working in low-income service professions to middle-income teachers and city workers, part of a festering affordable housing crunch that spreads more widely across the nation each month.

KC Tenants is one result. Pairing aggressive protests with traditional lobbying, the group exploded onto the political scene during the pandemic and has since become instrumental in passing tenant-friendly laws like an ordinance that gives renters a lawyer during eviction proceedings. It has also left a trail of embittered opponents who find the group’s tactics, such as protesting outside judges’ homes, ill-suited to what many residents describe as a cordial Midwestern town.

Organizers with KC Tenants protesting a new set of housing ordinances during a council meeting at City Hall.Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times 

“It’s a transition in politics for us,” said Mayor Lucas, a Democrat, who says he meets with the leaders of KC Tenants regularly, despite being a frequent subject of the group’s protests. “There is a new, almost tougher political edge, in the sense that there are people who are organizing and intrigued by politics and are very angry and are not coming out of the same institutions that built a lot of us.”

America’s housing problem was simmering long before the pandemic, and tenant organizing is a well-established trade. What’s changed is the depth of the housing shortage and the suddenness with which Covid-19 and inflation have tipped smaller cities into an affordability crisis. This has opened the aperture for policies once deemed politically impossible, in a wider range of markets.

Unlike homeowners, whose budget problems are blunted by a litany of tax breaks and fixed-rate mortgages, renters are mostly unprotected from rapidly rising prices. Once cities around the country passed widespread eviction moratoriums and emergency rent caps that were followed by tens of billions of dollars in pandemic rental assistance, it was only natural for housing activists to push for some of those temporary policies to be made permanent.

Politically speaking, inflation has only helped. Nationally, rents are now 20 percent higher than they were in early 2020, creating an opportunity for renter-friendly laws to get baked into long-term policy.

“People take for granted that rent is always going to go up,” said Tara Raghuveer, a co-founder of KC Tenants. “There’s so little political imagination about what could be different, and now I think that’s changing.”

A hyper-focused worker who blends the rhetoric of a revolutionary with the efficiency of a chief executive, Ms. Raghuveer also directs the Homes Guarantee campaign, which works to create tenant unions around the country. She described KC Tenants as both a local movement and national experiment through which organizing ideas can be test-driven.

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“I think every national organizer should be accountable to a local base,” she said.

During a three-day visit in which I hung around the office and shadowed meetings and protests, Ms. Raghuveer returned repeatedly to an idea that has become a refrain among tenant groups: the hope that growing resentment over housing costs is fostering a broad tenant identity that will inspire a wide range of renters to organize and vote with a shared interest. In the activist nomenclature, this is known as “tenants as a class.”

That’s an audacious goal in a country where homeownership is all but defined as success. An irony of the nation’s housing problem is that it’s become so pervasive that it has created as many opportunities for cleavage as it has for coalition. Need has grown faster than resources, making housing policy a prism through which a stealth conflict between the middle class and the truly poor is filtered.

Even so, what’s clear is that in Kansas City and elsewhere tenants are becoming a real constituency. That’s not something you could say as recently as a few years ago. But a few years ago the rent wasn’t quite so high.

Tara Raghuveer, KC Tenants’ founding director, working outside the East Patrol Division Station where the group camped out waiting for Board President Tiana Caldwell to be released on bond.Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times

 

KC Tenants began, more or less, as homework.

Ms. Raghuveer, now 30, was in her final year at Harvard when she settled on a topic for her senior thesis: evictions, inspired by the work of Matthew Desmond, the Princeton sociologist and author of “Evicted,” the 2016 book that explored the housing struggles of low-income families in Milwaukee. She’d grown up in Mission Woods, a suburb on the Kansas side of the Kansas-Missouri border, and conducted her thesis research in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

After college, Ms. Raghuveer was invited to talk about her thesis in policy forums, and that’s how she met the women who would help her start KC Tenants.

One was Tiana Caldwell, whose husband contacted Ms. Raghuveer as the family bounced between hotels after being evicted from their apartment amid Ms. Caldwell’s treatment for ovarian cancer. Another was Diane Charity, a 72-year-old retiree who rents a two-bedroom townhouse and who met Ms. Raghuveer during a presentation at the local health department.

“She gave all these stats and I said, ‘I need to talk to you,’” Ms. Charity said. “We’ve been telling these stories forever, and no one’s listening. But she had what it took — I’m sorry to say this, but to talk to white people and people in power, you got to have data.”

KC Tenants was founded in 2019 by a group that included Ms. Charity and Ms. Caldwell. A local union allowed the group to work out of its offices, and a folding table there formed KC Tenants’ first headquarters. That’s where Ms. Raghuveer was working when the Covid-19 pandemic erupted.

‘Shut it down’

For all the uncertainty that the pandemic wreaked on markets and the economy, there seemed to be at least one prediction that housing experts and policymakers agreed on in its early days: a “tsunami of evictions” was imminent.

Nearly three years later, that prediction has yet to materialize. The economic recovery from the immediate shock of Covid was faster than many expected, and in the meantime trillions of dollars in federal stimulus spending and eviction moratoriums helped plug the gaps. Still, the attention that Covid brought to housing insecurity is poised to be a lasting remnant of the pandemic economy, even after rental assistance wanes and the patchwork of moratoriums expire.

It shows up in cities like Los Angeles, where the City Council this month voted to expand tenant protections for renters in the same meeting that it voted to end its Covid-related eviction moratorium. Last year, voters in St. Paul, Minn., passed a new rent control ordinance. The uneven rollout of federal rental aid, in which bureaucratic hurdles frequently prevented cities and states from getting money to tenants, inspired a number of cities to experiment with cash assistance programs that are now becoming a permanent feature of the policy landscape.

For organizers, the pandemic provided an almost perfect opportunity to build their ranks. Here was a crisis that affected large swaths of renters pretty much all at once, in contrast to the normal state of affairs in which tenants who are falling behind or evicted are dealing with problems that seem unique to their lives and mostly handled in private.

“Embedded in tenant organizing are deeper questions about the structure of our political economy,” said Jamila Michener, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell who has studied tenant organizations. “It’s getting people to think about not just how you can leverage power against your landlord or get the city council to help you, but also questions like: Why does the economy seem to be rigged against people like you so systematically?”

In 2019, Jenay Manley was making $11.50 an hour at a QuikTrip gas station when a paperwork error cost her a voucher that covered a portion of her rent through the federal Section 8 housing program. To help make up for the loss, she allowed a former boyfriend who she said was abusive to move back in. One night, she texted a friend who had been displaced by a rent hike to ask what she could do. The friend, Maya Neal, suggested that she go to a KC Tenants meeting. There, she heard Ms. Caldwell tell her story of being evicted during cancer treatment.

 

Maya NealCredit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times

 

“It was just this clarifying moment of, We’re not OK. People are not OK,” she said. “We are struggling, and no one knows. And the more of us who tell our story, the more of us realize our story is worth being told.”

A few months later, after leaving the night shift at QuikTrip, Ms. Manley, along with her sister and three children, stationed herself along Interstate 70, next to a minivan with “#CancelRent” scrawled across a window in purple marker. She was there to protest the burden of Covid on tenants in a socially distant manner.

In July 2020, KC Tenants protested the end of a local eviction moratorium and tried to halt eviction proceedings by logging onto virtual court hearings and continuously reading a script — “Every eviction is an act of violence” — so that judges and lawyers couldn’t hear one another. By October, the group’s members were chaining themselves to the courthouse doors.

They also started targeting lawyers and public officials, including through a rally in the front yard of Judge J. Dale Youngs, who oversees the circuit court in Jackson County. Mr. Youngs said in an interview that at one point the group spray-painted “FU” onto a flagstone path in his yard. He added that he did not know if “FU” was the completed thought or if the vandal was interrupted before the message could be finished.

“I’m a pretty big supporter of the First Amendment, and I’m the first to admit democracy is messy,” Judge Youngs said. “But when you go protest in front of someone’s private home, I think the only reason you’re doing that is to let them know that you know where they live. And there’s something kind of inherently not cool about that.”

Locals argue over how effective these protests were, but there’s little doubt that housing pressures brought on by Covid helped open the door to policies that otherwise would never have happened. The biggest, by far, is a new right-to-counsel ordinance in which the city will pay for a lawyer to represent any tenant facing eviction. The measure was drafted by KC Tenants, according to Andrea Bough, the City Council member who introduced it.

In an interview in her office, Ms. Bough expressed the same anxiety I had heard all around town, including from the mayor and from low-income tenants: even though Kansas City remains inexpensive compared with larger cities, it is spiraling into the same affordability problems as those places and is no more equipped to solve them.

“We aren’t to the point of a widespread housing crisis, but if we don’t do something we’re going to get there,” she said.

The right-to-counsel law, which went into effect this year, has already changed the landscape. Julie Anderson, a Kansas City attorney who represents a number of local landlords, said that the cost of an eviction had risen by a factor of five and that the process now took from three months to a year, up from a month or so. Her clients are unhappy, but it’s also been good for business: Ms. Anderson said she had hired two lawyers and three paralegals to handle the extra work.

“That part of my practice was very uneventful,” she said. “Now, post-Covid, almost everything is contested.”

The Tenant Class

Image

 

Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times

 

KC Tenants now has 4,300 members, seven full-time employees and piles of yellow T-shirts ready for distribution. The nonprofit organization operates out of a second-floor office inside a Methodist church, and is funded through a mix of individual donors and foundations. It has a $450,000 annual budget.

This month, members launched a separate entity, KC Tenants Power, that is registered as a 501(c)(4) and has more leeway to engage directly in politics. Like everyone else these days, Ms. Raghuveer seems to spend most of her time on video calls, talking in front of a banner that reads, “Eviction Kills.”

Tenant-organizing has been central to any number of social justice and civil rights movements stretching from the turn of the twentieth century, but, in recent decades, it has rarely been successful outside localized pockets. An enduring issue in organizing tenants as a class is that homeownership is still most families’ goal.

Covid has illustrated this. Once remote workers could live anywhere they wanted, many renters left big, expensive markets for smaller cities where they could afford a home.

Ms. Raghuveer believes in a growing tenant identity, but she has no delusions. She doesn’t imagine that one day she’ll lead a protest march in which public-housing tenants lock arms with residents of luxe buildings, where one-bedrooms start at $3,000 a month and include access to rooftop pools and private dog parks. What she does believe is that housing instability, however it is experienced, can be a catalyst for a broader coalition that operates across traditional political lines.

She pointed to a recent effort to help a local trailer park where the county was evicting residents in order to build a jail on the property. This would normally have been an organizing no-brainer. However, during a meeting, several members of KC Tenants said they were reluctant to get involved because a number of the cars and trailers in the park had Trump stickers and flags on them. Other members responded by recalling that the group’s community agreements, which they read before every meeting, declare that KC Tenants does not make assumptions about anyone.

So a group went to knock on doors.

“This little skinny gal comes to my door, and I’m like, ‘Who in the hell is this?’” said Urban Schaefer, a resident of the park who helped organize it after meeting Ms. Raghuveer. “A lot of people were skeptical about it.”

In the end, about a dozen members of KC Tenants worked with residents to demand a better deal. And the county sweetened its offer: six months of free rent and at least $10,000 in relocation costs.

An organizing meeting for tenants Gabriel Tower Apartments, in Kansas City.Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times

There weren’t any MAGA hats at the KC Tenants meetings I went to, but it was a generally diverse group with a range of motivations for being there. There were Black women, who are among the people most affected by eviction, both locally and nationally. There were white men, who began whatever they were about to say with acknowledgments of privilege. And there was a child of the housing bust, whose faith in the American dream was shattered when his family was foreclosed on and a chain of moves followed.

During a meeting of a tenants’ union in the gentrifying Midtown neighborhood, I met an economics professor who had come because she had wanted to better understand the housing problem. Later, at meeting in a Section 8 building on the other side of Troost Avenue — long the city’s dividing line between its Black and white residents — several attendees sat in wheelchairs, and one said he’d recently slept under a bridge.

Small frictions abound. At one recent meeting, a young man talked about the “carceral state,” only to have Ms. Charity reply: “Are you talking about jail?”

This diversity is, unintentionally, the policy conundrum that Mayor Lucas and other officials are grappling with as more people look to the government for help with housing.

Around the country, developers have spent the past decade building mostly higher-end units. Eli Ungar, the founder of Mac Properties, which is based in Englewood, N.J., and owns about 9,000 apartments, including 2,000 in Kansas City, bluntly laid out the economics. The cost of development is now so high that the most reliable way to make money is by building apartments for tenants who regard the cost of rent as “a matter of curiosity.”

This leaves two groups behind.

“The folks who think of themselves as middle class and are feeling increased worry and pressure as rents go up faster than incomes, and the people who are most vulnerable in our society and desperately need housing that no developer can provide without a massive subsidy,” Mr. Ungar said. “As a citizen, I would be entirely comfortable with my taxes being higher to provide well-maintained housing for those who can’t afford it. The question is how that is achieved, and market-rate developers are not unilaterally going to say, ‘I will reduce my income to achieve this goal.’”

Caught in the teeth of a housing problem that is growing faster than local budgets, public officials inevitably try to solve both problems at once, pitting the middle class against families who live on minimum wage or fixed incomes. This was the crux of the “Sister Act” protest.

 

Mayor Quinton Lucas, in Kansas City, last year.Credit...Chase Castor for The New York Times

 

As part of a new housing plan, Mayor Lucas had proposed a $50 million bond issue to fund low-income housing, but at the same time he wanted to loosen the city’s regulations for apartment projects that receive tax breaks through a program designed to create affordable housing in market-rate projects. The shift would allow developers to substitute middle-income units for those reserved for families in the lowest income brackets.

KC Tenants framed the change as selling out families closest to the edge. The mayor’s retort was that the previous iteration of the program had resulted in no new units for anyone, and his hope was that the revisions would push developers to build middle-income housing, which the city needs as well.

In the interview, he cast himself as a leader trying to navigate a difficult problem in world of limited resources.

“We don’t have a Scandinavian tax structure,” he said. “Maybe we can get to it, but I don’t know that it starts in Kansas City.”

Two days after the “Sister Act” protest, when the City Council held its vote on the plan, the chambers were packed with yellow T-shirts. After a 9-to-4 vote in favor of the new policy, Ms. Neal, an early KC Tenants member, yelled, “How dare you!” Security hauled her out with her arms behind her back in a scene that members’ cellphones captured from every conceivable angle.

Ms. Neal being escorted out of the council meeting at City Hall.Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times

When Ms. Neal was gone, Ms. Caldwell, the once-evicted tenant whose cancer is now in remission, continued the chant. “Not another penny for the slumlords!” she shouted. She was removed just as fast, only instead of getting booted to an outdoor bench, like the one where Ms. Neal sat after she’d left the building, Ms. Caldwell was arrested and taken to a local police station.

An hour later, the lawn outside the station was crowded with yellow shirts. Members of KC Tenants lay on the grass typing on laptops and eating pizza. A slice was waiting for Ms. Caldwell when she emerged a short time later to cheers.

“I’m feeling great,” she said to the crowd, as her 15-year-old son joined her. “I’m doing this so that my baby will never have to.”

After a chant of “Tiana, we got your back!” a small group that included Ms. Caldwell and Ms. Raghuveer went to a wine bar to relax. The bar was closing, but Ms. Raghuveer said she’d called the owner, who’d promised to keep it open for them. She added that he was a renter.

Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter and the author of “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.” His work focuses on the West Coast, real estate and wage stagnation among U.S. workers. @ConorDougherty