"Sandra and the former owner have been together 25 years as tenant and landlord," he told HuffPost. "The former owner was not able to get qualified for a loan, so Sandra applied. It's a great example of tenants and homeowners working together to keep control of their homes."
In addition hosting to community meetings on Tuesdays, Meacham said City Life works closely with a student organization called "No One Leaves" at Harvard and Suffolk Law schools to knock on doors in different zones in Boston every Saturday and inform foreclosure victims of their rights.
"A lot of times the brokers will go door to door and tell people they need to leave their houses," said Marielle Macher, a third-year student at Harvard Law and president of No One Leaves. "We tell people there's a legal process, and they can't be forced to leave until that process is through. Unfortunately, a lot of the tenants are not even aware that a foreclosure has occurred, and we aim to be the first people to tell them so we can get there before the bank does and explain what their rights are."
Organizations like City Life and No One Leaves are vital, Meacham said, because banks can be deceptive in "a whole host of ways, from the time people first buy their homes right through to eviction."
"The banks are refusing to negotiate with people until the eviction takes place and refusing to sell a house back to a former owner at its real value, because they look at it as a moral hazard thing," he said. "They want to punish people for defaulting on their mortgage. So we do eviction blockades or vigils where we sit in someone's doorway and risk arrest to keep them in their home, and the bank will then change its mind and start to negotiate."
Professor William Berman, who runs the Housing Clinic at Suffolk University Law School, said he is shocked by the "misguided, knee-jerk" way that banks deal with tenants in Boston.
"We have seen banks that leave tenants in foreclosed buildings without heat, or hot water, and with broken doors, windows, roaches, rats, bed bugs, and other deplorable conditions," he told HuffPost. "We have obtained settlements in the tens of thousands of dollars on behalf of tenants left in deplorable conditions by financial institutions in foreclosed buildings."
The grassroots method of foreclosure fighting is quickly catching fire: No One Leaves currently has about 100 canvassers from different law schools around Boston, and Macher said other schools in about 15 different states met recently to discuss the possibility of starting new chapters. And City Life -- which has proved highly successful in Boston -- is slowly spreading to other cities, including Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island.
"We're challenging the conditions that created the problem in the first place," Meacham said. "All the issues being raised in our street-level organizing are in sync with these international debates about finance and speculation and bubbles, so people can look at that and study it and take action at the block level to do something about it. There's a very powerful and emotional mass movement that's emerged."
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Even though banks piously insist that every one of their foreclosure actions is fully justified, evidence in the court system continues to prove that claim to be false. We pointed out this sorry development in October, that of banks entering and changing the locks on homes they had not foreclosed upon. Per a report from the Sarasota Herald Tribune:
The process of banks hiring people to break into homes, even when occupied, is just the latest oddity of the messy foreclosure crisis in Florida.
Some property owners are reporting the break-ins to law enforcement as burglaries. Yet investigators consider the disputes a civil matter because the contractors do not display criminal intent.
That essentially leaves the property owners without recourse…
“It is vastly underreported; it is happening in counties all across the state,” said St. Petersburg foreclosure defense attorney Matt Weidner. “The more this occurs, the more prevalent it’s going to become.”
The lack of willingness of the local police to deem destroying property and unauthorized entry as criminal acts leaves wronged parties with litigation as their only recourse. And some are filing suits.
Note that these suits likely represent only a small fraction of the actual cases of bank miscreance, since few of the victims are likely to have the financial wherewithall and intestinal fortitude to sue a bank. Per the New York Times:
When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.
When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.
The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house and thrown out her belongings, without alerting Ms. Ash beforehand….
Identifying the number of homeowners who were locked out illegally is difficult. But banks and their representatives insist that situations like Ms. Ash’s represent just a tiny percentage of foreclosures.
This, as the British would say, is bollocks. The traditional procedures around the transfer of title made the old system virtually fail-safe. Any number above zero is unacceptably high. And “a tiny percentage” across the huge numbers of foreclosures happening across the US adds up to meaningful numbers in real terms.
The examples in the NY Times story are all from middle to upper income homeowners. For someone of lesser means, the consequences of wrongful action can be devastating. If possessions are removed, or worse, put out on the street, the losses can be significant.
This is the banks’ excuse:
A clause in most mortgages allows banks that service the loan to enter a home and secure it if it is in default, meaning if the mortgage payment is 45 to 60 days late, and if the house has been abandoned, authorities said.
First, some of the homes broken into have been current on payments. Second, “abandoned” seems to be interpreted as “no one at home when the contractor showed up” which would be true during the business day for most working families.
This pattern again proves what we know all two well, namely, that we have a two-tier system of law in the US: one for the banks, one for the rest of us.
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