OOH Introductory Packet 2-5-2012

8/3/2019 OOH Introductory Packet 2-5-2012

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Agenda: Occupy Our Homes

5 February 2012

1. Meeting Structure (5)2. Introductions & Why did people come to the meeting today? (5)3. Occupy Our Homes: Goals & Strategy Chart (30)4. Phases of Campaign:

a. Will go over in detail next weekb. Want to mention: getting peoples wheels turning

i. Phase One: Research and Educationii. Phase Two: Strategic Campaign Planningiii. Phase Three: Coalition Building & Homeowner Outreachiv. Phase Four: Action & Implementation

5. Review Weekend Meeting Timea. Sunday from 4p-6p works for folks?

6.Additional Agenda Items?


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Since 2005, the Detroit metropolitan area has lost approximately 323,400 jobs. According to on

homes in 2010.

By

Charles B. Stockdale, Douglas A. McIntyre and Michael B. Sauter

updated 8/5/2011 7:18:42 AM ET

For three years, the real estate market has been going in one direction

primarily down. Some areas, however, have begun to recover. Recent

S&P/Case-Shiller data show that among the top 20 housing markets in

the U.S., 18 had very modest improvements in sales prices during May.

Others, like Washington and Boston, have began to at least stabilize

from a year ago.

Few markets, however, can match Washington and Boston. Robert

Shiller has been stating that home prices could fall another 10 percent

in the next year. Inventories in some major metropolitan areas would

take years of sales to get back to 2005 levels. Then, the normal

inventory of homes for sale was replaced on average every six months

and it was unusual for a house to be on the market for a year. Foreclosure rates remain high and only the robo-signing scandal has slowed the

process.

Once this is resolved, economists fear the market will be flooded with even more vacant, unsold homes. 24/7 Wall St. has taken a new look at the

housing market to find the very weakest cities by identifying those with the highest homeowner vacancy rates and rental vacancy rates. These are

markets where demand has clearly collapsed.

These are cities where the requirement for living space has dropped well below the national average. Further, vacancy rates of many cities were

stable during the recession, but accelerated sharply higher in the last year. Similarly, housing prices in several of these markets have decreased at a

faster rate in the last three quarters than during the recession.

These cities, like Detroit, St. Louis, Dayton, and Atlanta, also tend to be larger and older among the top 75 metropolitan areas. Their economieswere damaged long before the recession.

The analysis shows that some cities have home vacancy rates over 5 percent and rental vacancy rates over 10 percent. Obviously, these levels of

unused inventory have the effect of driving down both home and rental prices month after month. It also means that there is comparatively little

demand for the purchase of new or existing homes. These ten markets are essentially dead as far as real estate prices and sales activity are

concerned. (Methodology is at the end of the article.)

These are Americas ten sickest housing markets:

10. Oklahoma City, Ok.

Homeowner vacancy rates: 5.2 percent (6th)

Rental vacancy rates: 9.6 percent (34th)

Total housing units: 539,077

Unemployment: 4.9 percent

Oklahoma City had the sixth highest homeowner vacancy rate in the country as of the second quarter of this year. The citys unemployment rate is

just 5.3 percent, but this low rate has not helped improve high home and rental vacancy. From last year, home sales in Oklahoma state dropped by

7.7 percent, according to the states newspaper NewsOK. In the city, sales were flat from last year. Between the first quarter of 2010 and the first

quarter of 2011, the median home price in the city dropped by more than 8 percent.

9. St. Louis, Mo.



Total housing units: 1,236,222


In 2008 and 2009, the St. Louis area has shed more than 82,000 jobs. This loss had a negative impact on the citys real estate market. Vacancy

rates have continued to rise, increasing from under 2 percent one year ago to 3.3 percent in the recent quarter. The rise in vacancy rates has

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47% in | full results

Resultsrefresh every2 minutes

America's 10 sickest housingmarketsCombination of crushed prices, lots of vacancies and down economy have these cities reelingBelow: Discuss Data Related

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occurred while the median sales price for single family homes has fallen more than 19 percent since 2008. While rental vacancy rate, which is

currently at 11.4 percent, has decreased slightly since the last quarter, it is still 1.6 percentage points higher than it was last year. St. Louis office

vacancy rate is at 12.6 percent, according to real estate information company CoStar Group.

8. Kansas City, Mo. (tie)


Rental vacancy rates: 11 percent (22nd)



Kansas Citys rental vacancy rate of 11 percent is the 22nd highest of any major city in the country, while i ts homeowner vacancy rate of 3.7 percent

is the 13th highest. The city has a relatively high rate of unemployment, at 8.4 percent. While its below the national average of 9.2 percent, it is well

above the state average of 6.6 percent. The median home price in the city is down by $19,000, or more than 13 percent, since 2008. Most of thatdecline came in the last year. Between the second quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of this year, prices dropped by more than $25,000.

8. Detroit, Mich. (tie)

Homeowner vacancy rates: 2.4 percent (32nd)

Rental vacancy rates: 17.2 percent (3rd)



The recession hasnt been kind to Detroit. Part of the Detroit-Warren-Livonia metropolitan area, it has been among the hardest hit cities in the

country. Since 2005, the metropolitan area has lost approximately 323,400 jobs. Unemployment in the Motor City almost reached 30 percent in

2009. According to one estimate, the city had 90,000 abandoned or vacant lots or residential homes in 2010. One of the reasons the city is not at

the top of this list is that the city had so many vacant properties that a huge portion of them were demolished. Regardless, at 17.2 percent, the rate

of rental vacancy is still the third highest rate in the nation.

6. Dayton, Ohio


Rental vacancy rates: 10.7 percent (23rd)



Daytons home vacancy rate of 4.7 percent is the seventh-highest in the country among major cities. At one time, Dayton was a much larger city and

an economic powerhouse. The Ohio city, which was a major manufacturing center, was at one point awarded more patents each year than any other

place in the U.S. The city has a particularly bad unemployment rate of 9.3 percent. Median housing price, which stood at $109,000 in 2008, has

fallen by 29 percent, or $27,000, between 2008 and the first quarter of this year.

5. Baton Rouge, La.


Rental vacancy rates: 13 percent (12th)



Baton Rouge did not emerge from the recession unscathed, but it did perform better than many other cities in the U.S., in part because it is the

states capital city and in part because of the money brought in through Hurricane Katrina recovery work. However, according to one local news

station, the area has built more housing structures than it could fill following Katrina. The city has not been able to break free of this situation, as

both homeowner vacancy rates and rental vacancy rates have increased not only since last year, but since the last quarter as well.

24/7 Wall St.: Ten signs the double-dip recession has begun

4. Atlanta, Ga.

Homeowner vacancy rates: 5.4 percent (4th)Rental vacancy rates: 11.8 percent (17th)



Atlantas homeowner vacancy rate of 5.4 percent is the fourth highest among major U.S. cities. The city, which had a significant influx of new

residents, particularly from the northeast, has been hit hard. Atlantas unemployment rate of 9.7 percent is well above the national average of 9.2

percent. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the city had lost nearly 25,000 jobs between June of 2010 and June of this year. Between

2008 and the first quarter of this year, homes have lost more than a third of their value, dropping in price by nearly $50,000.

3. Memphis, Tenn.

Homeowner vacancy rates: 4 percent (9th)





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ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE:

REPORT | Race and Ethnicity

A comment on Bank of America/Countrywides

discriminatory mortgage lending and its

implications for racial segregation

By Richard Rothstein | January 23, 2012

Summary

Although Bank of America recently settled a Justice Department

complaint alleging racial discrimination in mortgage lending by its

Countrywide subsidiary, underlying issues are far from resolved.

Longstanding federal inaction in the face of widespread

discriminatory mortgage lending practices helped create, and since

has perpetuated, racially segregated, impoverished neighborhoods.

This history of law-sanctioned racial segregation has had many

damaging effects, including poor educational outcomes for minority

children.

The following commentary reviews existing research to conclude:

> Bank of Americas Countrywide subsidiary was not

alone in charging higher rates and fees on mortgages to

minorities than to whites with similar characteristics, or in

shifting minorities into subprime mortgages with terms so

onerous that foreclosure and loss of homeownership were

widespread.

> Racially discriminatory practices in mortgage lending

(known as reverse redlining) were so systematic that top bank

officials as well as federal and state regulators knew, or should


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have known, of their existence and taken remedial action.

> Complicity in racial discrimination by federal and state

banking and thrift regulators is nothing new; in the past, they

were complicit in redliningthe blanket denial of mortgages

to minority homebuyers.

> Regulatory failure has been destructive to the goal of a

racially integrated society. Redlining contributed to racial

segregation by keeping African Americans out of predominantly

white neighborhoods; reverse redlining has probably had a

similar result. Exploitative mortgage lending has led to an

epidemic of foreclosures among African American and Hispanic

homeowners, exacerbating racial segregation as displaced

families relocate to more racially isolated neighborhoods or

suffer homelessness.

> The $335 million that Bank of America will spend to

compensate victims is insufficient to restore their access to

homeownership markets and to middle-class neighborhoods. In

consequence, it will also do little to address the comparatively

poor educational outcomes of children who are now more likely

to grow up in racially segregated communities, or the damage to

learning that results when schooling has been disrupted by an

unstable housing situation.

The Obama Administrations prosecution of Bank of America is a

welcome but small step in tackling the government-sanctioned

practices that contribute to racial segregation in our cities. We should

do more.

Source [and for full report see]:

http://www.epi.org/publication/bp335-boa-countrywide-

discriminatory-lending/


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!


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Occupy Our Homes

5 February 2012

Additional Resources on Foreclosure Crisis:

Organizing for Eviction Defense & to Fight Foreclosures:

>City Life (Boston): http://clvu.org/

>Occupy Our Homes: http://occupyourhomes.org/

Foreclosure Crisis Race & Inner-City Communities

> A comment on Bank of America-Countrywides discriminatory mortgage lending

and its implications for racial segregation. Economic Policy Institute:http://www.epi.org/publication/bp335-boa-countrywide-discriminatory-lending/

> Scholars Finds Foreclosure Crisis Had Significant Racial Dimensions. PrincetonUniversity: http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Massey_Rugh_Foreclosure/Massey_Rugh_Summary.pdf

Foreclosure Crisis & KC:

> Home foreclosures fell in 2011: Many actions delayed by legal issues, so theycould resume this year. Kansas City Star. http://www.kansascity.com/2012/

01/12/3367328/home-foreclosures-fell-in-2011.html#storylink=cpy

> Foreclosure and the Inner City: The Current Mortgage Crisis and its Inner CityImplications. Initiative for Completive Inner City: http://www.icic.org/ee_uploads/publications/ICICReport-Foreclosures-InnerCity-080421.pdf

Foreclosure & the Unemployed:

> For the Jobless, Little U.S. Help on ForeclosureThe New York Times.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/business/economy/05housing.html?pagewa

nted=all

*Please share other resources, studies, news stories, and reports with the group


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PRINT [1] | EMAIL [2] | INCREASE | RESET | DECREASE

An Occupy Real Estate march in East NewYork protests bank foreclosures andencourages people to occupy emptybuildings on December 6, 2011. (Photo:Brennan Cavanaugh [3])

Published on Truthout(http://www.truth-out.org)

Home > How "Occupy Our Homes" Can Win

How "Occupy Our Homes" Can Win

By alissa

Created 2012-02-02 10:31

How "Occupy Our Homes" Can Win

Thursday 2 February 2012by: Amy Dean, Truthout | News Analysis

An interview with anti-eviction organizer Steve Meacham ofCity Life/Vida Urbana in Boston

Since most of the original Occupy encampments were evictedby wintertime, the question now is, what's next for activists?One of the most popular suggestions is "Occupy Our Homes,"a campaign in which occupiers around the country would doactions at foreclosed houses or at bailed-out banks that are

throwing people out of their homes. A national day of action[4]on December 6 focused on this approach and featured homeoccupations or solidarity marches in 25 cities, including NewYork and Chicago.

Occupy Our Homes has three particularly good instincts.

First, it takes the general critique of inequality that themovement has been voicing - something often expressed inabstract charts and tables - and makes the issue concrete.

Since so many people in America are dealing with insecurityabout their homes, the shift to doing foreclosure prevention andanti-eviction actions allows new groups of people with a clear sense of their own connection to thstruggle to engage with the Occupy movement. Social movements at their best are about helpingpeople take their individual troubles and link them to a public problem and shifting the focus fromtrying to personally cope to taking collective action.

Second, the campaign connects the Occupy movement with organizing that has been going on foyears. Community-based groups have been resisting foreclosures and evictions at least since thebursting of the housing bubble in 2008, if not before. Bringing the energy of Occupy to bear affordthese campaigns more visibility and helps scale up local struggles, which can see themselves aspart of a national movement.

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Third, Occupy Our Homes identifies an arena for concrete change. Thus far, Occupy has beensuccessful in creating enough general unrest to keep issues of inequality from being ignored and tshine a spotlight on the real economic problems affecting the majority of Americans. But as themovement progresses, it will benefit from targeting its discontent. Yes, we need to create a crisis ipublic consciousness, but the movement also needs to be able to drive specific changes.

As a new frontier for action, Occupy Our Homes raises a variety of difficult questions: How can wemake sure that protests at a home or bank are actions that get real results instead of merelymomentary occurrences? And how do we scale up so that we are not just addressing the problemof a few homeowners but instead making an impact that can resonate throughout the nationaleconomy?

I will be devoting two columns to these pressing questions.

To begin to understand the tactics and prospects of Occupy Our Homes, I spoke with SteveMeacham, organizing coordinator at City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston. City Life is one of the groupsthat has long been at the forefront of grassroots anti-eviction actions, and I was excited to getMeacham's insights.

Read more columns from author, activist, social entrepreneur and labor veteran Amy Dean here.[

First, I asked him about the history of City Life's anti-foreclosure work.

"Our organization was formed in 1973," Meacham said. "We launched our anti-foreclosure, anti-eviction effort about five years ago. It was really focused on fighting displacement more than fightiforeclosure. We discovered that other people were intervening on behalf of homeowners either atthe moment they got their loan - advising them on how to be successful first-time homebuyers - orthey were intervening at the moment people faced foreclosure. We opened up a third area: Westarted to intervene afterforeclosure, to fight eviction.

"We discovered that for people who are underwater, foreclosure itself isn't such a big deal. They

don't really have much equity in the house, so they're not losing that. What they are really losing istheir ability to physically stay in their home. They can fight that independent of fighting foreclosurethink that's especially true in Massachusetts, but it can be true almost anywhere."

I asked Meacham what made Massachusetts unique.

"The tenants' rights protection here doesn't allow anyone to say they shouldn't be evicted onprincipal," he explained, "but it does require the banks to jump through some hoops to get themevicted. The time it takes the banks to jump through those hoops gives us time to put maximumpolitical pressure on them."

Why focus on evictions rather than foreclosures?

"Fighting evictions is a much more collectivizable fight than loan modifications," Meacham said. "Ithard to take five people doing loan modifications and bring them together in one fight because thesituations are so different. There are all these different types of horror stories with loan modificatioInstead of making demands on the banks to tweak the process, we decided that the key thing wasprincipal reduction. That's the one thing the banks were never going to give, under anycircumstances, unless you force them. We saw we could use the leverage gained during theeviction fights to force them to do that."

So how does that process work?

"As one of the slogans of our movement, people put up signs in their windows before or after


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foreclosure, saying, 'We shall not be moved' in different languages. We engage people in makingthe same demand from their pre-foreclosure status right up through their eviction. That demand iswant my house back at its real value.'"

"That demand links to an understanding that the housing bubble was the real predatory loan. Yesthere were terrible, individual, bait-and-switch predatory loans. But the entire housing bubble was predatory environment. There were people who got standard 30-year mortgages but bought at aprice that was inflated to three times the historic value of a house. That was a deliberate result ofwhat the banks did, and it was equally predatory."

But is there a realistic way homeowners can base their fight on the fact that housing values wereinflated?

"The political pressure becomes: Here's the bank trying to evict a family that is saying, 'Look, we'llpay you rent.' The reason they can pay market rent but not their mortgage is that their mortgagewas at a level that was grossly inflated."

"Other families are saying, 'I will buy the building back from you at exactly the same value that yousell it if you evict me. So, sell it to me, don't sell it to an investor.' If Deutsch Bank or Bank ofAmerica is out to get as much money as possible after foreclosure, why not sell it back to the

person? What difference does it make? Of course, they won't do it. Frankly they are into punishingowners for daring to default on their mortgages - even though we all know that corporations very,very frequently use strategic default and renegotiate their principals with their lenders. So, they areasking something of homeowners that they themselves don't practice."

I agreed that, throughout the business world, everyone is trying to secure better terms andconditions on contracts now that the economy is resetting.

"That's what makes the fact that the banks won't let the vast majority of people with home loansrenegotiate all the more obnoxious. The bankruptcy procedure allows owners to renegotiate theirprincipal on their yacht, let's say, but not on their primary home. It's a bias in how bankruptcy work

In fact, in the opening months of the Obama administration, he introduced a bill to allow bankruptcjudges to lower principal. It was defeated in the Senate."

I asked about the successes they've had with this strategy.

"We've now had over 100 families get their homes back at about 55 percent loan value on averaghe said. "And a lot more tenants have been preserved from bankruptcy by the banks."

When I asked how the Occupy movement has changed the work of housing activists, Meachampointed to an increasing level of activity. But he also commented on some of the difficulties involvein expanding the work.

"We've done something like 32 eviction blockades since January of 2008," he noted. "In theprevious ten years, we'd done two or three. Eviction blockades are really hard things to do becausthere are all sorts of things that have to line up in order for them to take place. One thing is that thperson has to be willing to fight right up to the end. Our experience with tenants was that, very oftethey would say, 'You know what, I think what the landlord did to me is really unjust, but I don't wanto go through all that. My children can't take it. I'm going to move.'"

"With homeowners, in addition to a sense of injustice, they have a sense of connection to that spathat's very significant. They will fight to the last, especially given the fact that we often win. Ironicathere has been a gradual radicalization of the anti-eviction movement as it has focused more on

fighting evictions against homeowners."


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"Our ability to use militant tactics has increased as the base has grown. That's been an astoundinthing, to see many of the folks who come into our meetings - which are huge - being voiceless andshy and unwilling to even say they are in foreclosure and ready to move out. A year later, they aregetting arrested and writing articles in the newspaper about why they're getting arrested."

When I asked if he had national-level strategic insights for Occupy Our Homes, he focused onconnecting direct action to a wider organizing strategy.

"Eviction blockades and building occupations should be seen as tactics that serve a strategy. It's nthe act of occupying a building that is radical. It is how it relates to development of a base that'sradical. What that means for the Occupy movement is that if you occupy a home with folks whoaren't from the neighborhood, that could be counterproductive - especially on class and racialdimensions. We are trying to make sure that both eviction blockades and building occupations arefeeding into a base-building strategy, so that the people directly affected by this are the ones leadthe campaigns."

"Here in Boston, we have meetings of 100-plus people every Tuesday night, and there are neworganizations cropping up - there are now eight in Massachusetts and one in Rhode Island. Andthose organizations are in a network. The organizers meet by phone or in person every week anddo joint actions. They protest the same banks at the same time, or they go to each others' rallies.

We are developing a regional movement that we think can be replicated in other regions."

Finally, I asked what kind of outcome could result if this work were scaled up.

"There are so many people out there affected by this, One quarter of all loans are underwater righnow. I heard recently that if you sum up the negative equity that people have around the country,there's about $700 billion worth. Compare that to the current negotiations between the state attorngenerals and the big banks around the robo-signing lawsuit [a class action concerning improperforeclosures]. The proposed settlement was that Bank of America, Wells Fargo and the otherswould do principal reduction to the tune of $20 billion - even though the total negative equity in thecountry is $700 billion! You get an idea from that of how far apart the tepid public proposals are fro

the crisis that's out there."

"To the degree that all those people with $700 billion in net negative equity start demandingprincipal reduction - start understanding that it's their right and that they have power to get it - thatwould be a sea change. It has been a sea change in Boston. That's why some banks, in a recentpresentation, described Boston as 'ground zero' of the anti-foreclosure movement. We do twoactions a week against the banks. That's a drumbeat of activity that affects the whole culture of thearea. It affects the courts; it affects the police; it affects the banks. If you had people all over thecountry resisting displacement and demanding their homes back at real value, it would be one of tlargest radical movements the country has seen."

[6]

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License[6].

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Amy Dean [8]

New

Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/how-occupy-our-homes-can-win/1328034041

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[5] http://www.truth-out.org/walking-walk/1299744000[6] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/[7] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail[8] http://www.truth-out.org/content/amy-dean[9] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160[10] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
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