How to Make Banks Really Mad: Occupy Foreclosures
Could the next step after camping in Zuccotti Park be camping out in homes facing foreclosure?
As people think a bit more critically about what it means to “occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think through what Occupy Wall Street might do next, I would humbly suggest they check out the activism model of Project: No One Leaves. It exists in many places, especially in Massachusetts — check out this Springfield version of it — and grows out of activism pioneered by City Life Vida Urbana. It is similar to activism done by the group New Bottom Line and other foreclosure fighters. Here is PBS NewsHour’s coverage of the movement.
The major goal of Project: No One Leaves is to mobilize as many resources as possible to protect those going through foreclosure and keep them in their homes as long as possible in order to give them maximum bargaining power against the banks. For those focused on “weapons of the weak,” this moment — with banks and creditors using state power to conduct massive amounts of foreclosures, thus impoverishing poor neighborhoods through a financialized rationality — is a crucial opportunity for resistance. From the webpage:
Post-Foreclosure Eviction Defense. We mobilize tenants and former homeowners living in recently or about to be foreclosed homes (bank tenants) to stop evictions, protect Springfield’s housing and communities, and mobilize bank tenants to fight back against major lending institutions and banks that are tearing our communities apart.
You can check out the rest of this interesting piece here…
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you are so right/!They could care less about throwing out the homeowners, this only works if the place is rented to someone else and then the bank pays dollars for them too leave, and if you think a group will join you to make a point, protest, or even help to keep your home? forget it, everyone is out for number 1 themselves, they will play both sides, you will be the last too know and they will get bucks from3000 to whatever to move, along with whatever they have managed to save not paying anything, and you will get the door plus all moving costs and closing utilities along with whatever the fees are to transfer somewhere else, unless of coarse you choose to live in your car, then you only have the gas issue, and figuriing out just where to bathe or change clothes for no charge.
Why is California never included in any of the foreclosure talks/info
Bring video cameras and video the entire event then place the video on YouTube and embarass the crooks!!!!
I think there should also be occupations at foreclosure auctions. This would be a bit of a throwback to citizen activism during the Depression when neighbors got together to disrupt auctions in their farming communities.
I’d show up.
Camp out in the empties that the bank refuses to take back. If you can find the owner(s) it isn’t even illegal. Better yet, camp an evicted and homeless family out in them. They can sit like that for years, while the homeless family has time to try to rebuild their life.
Seriously Michael…..people like us know the numbers…..they are going to rebuild their lives with what………..jobs, starting a business in a world without credit, or potential customers with money?………..the economy is collapsing…….you can see it, feel it and smell it……but putting foreclosed homeowners in these homes is a good idea….if only for the shelter it provides…
I’ve often wondered why folks who have been driven into the ground don’t show up at the front doors of the Banksters, corrupt enablers at Fannie Mae, or their contracted wealthy depraved attorneys, and ask if they could spend the night – post eviction. A four car garage has ample space for a mattress or two. Besides, since these rentier/grifters have made their own mortgage payments by extracting wealth and punishing victims of predatory lending – it only seems “moral” to do the right thing.