Agenda: Occupy Our Homes

5 February 2012 1. 2. 3. 4. Meeting Structure (5) Introductions & Why did people come to the meeting today? (5) Occupy Our Homes: Goals & Strategy Chart (30) Phases of Campaign: a. Will go over in detail next week b. Want to mention: getting peoples wheels turning i. Phase One: Research and Education ii. Phase Two: Strategic Campaign Planning iii. Phase Three: Coalition Building & Homeowner Outreach iv. Phase Four: Action & Implementation 5. Review Weekend Meeting Time a. Sunday from 4p-6p works for folks? 6. Additional Agenda Items?

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America's 10 sickest housing markets

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Combination of crushed prices, lots of vacancies and down economy have these cities reeling

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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 economies were 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. Homeowner vacancy rates: 3.3 percent (19th) Rental vacancy rates: 11.4 percent (18th) Total housing units: 1,236,222 Unemployment: 8.6 percent 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

Since 2005, the Detroit metropolitan area has lost approximately 323,400 jobs. According to one estimate, th homes in 2010.

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) Homeowner vacancy rates: 3.7 percent (13th) Rental vacancy rates: 11 percent (22nd) Total housing units: 883,099 Unemployment: 8.4 percent Kansas Citys rental vacancy rate of 11 percent is the 22nd highest of any major city in the country, while its 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 that decline 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) Total housing units: 1,886,537 Unemployment: 11.6 percent 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 Homeowner vacancy rates: 4.7 percent (7th) Rental vacancy rates: 10.7 percent (23rd) Total housing units: 385,160 Unemployment: 9.3 percent 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. Homeowner vacancy rates: 3.9 percent (11th) Rental vacancy rates: 13 percent (12th) Total housing units: 329,729 Unemployment: 8.4 percent 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) Total housing units: 2,165,495 Unemployment: 9.7 percent 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) Rental vacancy rates: 13.5 percent (11th) Total housing units: 550,896 Unemployment: 10.1 percent

24/7 Wall St.: Cities with the most post offices on the chopping block Memphiss slow economic recovery has kept vacancy rates high. The metropolitan areas homeowner vacancy rate has increased from 2.5 percent in 2010 to 4 percent in the second quarter of 2011. In the citys defense, its rental vacancy rate has decreased from a staggering 21.2 percent in 2010 to 13.5 percent. This is still among the highest in the country, but it is an improvement. The unemployment rate remains at 10.1 percent, which is significantly higher than the national average of 9.2 percent. 2. Indianapolis, Ind. Homeowner vacancy rates: 5.2 percent (5th) Rental vacancy rates: 13.5 percent (10th) Total housing units: 757,441 Unemployment: 7.8 percent The average home price has dropped by $20,000, or 15.3 percent, between the second quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of this year. Indianapoliss home vacancy rate of 5.2 percent is the fifth-highest in the country. Its rental vacancy of 13.5 percent of units is the tenth highest in the country. In 2009, while vacancy had not even reached its worst point, the mayors office of Indianapolis recognized the serious problem the city faced. The citys plan to help solve the abandoned home issue states: Indianapolis, like many communities, faces a significant challenge in dealing with vacant and abandoned properties. This challenge is exacerbated both by weaknesses in the local and regional housing markets including an oversupply of housing relative to demand and by the high and growing rate of foreclosures. 24/7 Wall St.: Why the dow will plunge to 7,000 1. Tucson, Ariz. Homeowner vacancy rates: 6.8 percent (1st) Rental vacancy rates: 15.9 percent (6th) Total housing units: 440,909 Unemployment: 7.8 percent Tucsons homeowner vacancy rate was 3.2 percent one year ago. It is now over double that. The city had a booming residential housing market before the crash. Since then, demand is so low that median home prices have dropped 18 percent in the past year and 33 percent since 2008. In addition, the city has among the highest rate of foreclosures in the country. Methodology 24/7 Wall St. pulled Census data on the 75 largest U.S. metropolitan areas and ranked the cities with the highest overall vacancy rates for both homeowner vacancy and rental vacancy for the second quarter of 2011. We picked the cities with the worst rates in each of the two categories to create meta-data ranks. We then removed the cities that had either improved homeowner vacancy rate in either the last twelve months or the last quarter. We believed that any sign of improvement in homeowner vacancies, the more telling of the vacancy rates, should disqualify a city. To improve our analysis, we also looked at unemployment rates for these cities provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We also used historical median home prices, as provided by the National Association of Realtors. 24/7 Wall St.: Frontier dividend at risk
Copyright 2012 24/7 Wall St. Republished with permission. 99

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

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-countrywidediscriminatory-lending/

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. Princeton University: 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 they could 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 City Implications. 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

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
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How "Occupy Our Homes" Can Win

Thursday 2 February 2012 by: Amy Dean, Truthout | News Analysis An interview with anti-eviction organizer Steve Meacham of City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston Since most of the original Occupy encampments were evicted by 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 do actions 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 home occupations or solidarity marches in 25 cities, including New York and Chicago. Occupy Our Homes has three particularly good instincts. First, it takes the general critique of inequality that the movement has been voicing - something often expressed in abstract charts and tables - and makes the issue concrete.
An Occupy Real Estate march in East New York protests bank foreclosures and encourages people to occupy empty buildings on December 6, 2011. (Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh [3])

Since so many people in America are dealing with insecurity about their homes, the shift to doing foreclosure prevention and anti-eviction actions allows new groups of people with a clear sense of their own connection to the struggle to engage with the Occupy movement. Social movements at their best are about helping people take their individual troubles and link them to a public problem and shifting the focus from trying to personally cope to taking collective action. Second, the campaign connects the Occupy movement with organizing that has been going on for years. Community-based groups have been resisting foreclosures and evictions at least since the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, if not before. Bringing the energy of Occupy to bear affords these campaigns more visibility and helps scale up local struggles, which can see themselves as part of a national movement.

Third, Occupy Our Homes identifies an arena for concrete change. Thus far, Occupy has been successful in creating enough general unrest to keep issues of inequality from being ignored and to shine a spotlight on the real economic problems affecting the majority of Americans. But as the movement progresses, it will benefit from targeting its discontent. Yes, we need to create a crisis in public 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 we make sure that protests at a home or bank are actions that get real results instead of merely momentary occurrences? And how do we scale up so that we are not just addressing the problems of a few homeowners but instead making an impact that can resonate throughout the national economy? 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 Steve Meacham, organizing coordinator at City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston. City Life is one of the groups that has long been at the forefront of grassroots anti-eviction actions, and I was excited to get Meacham's insights. Read more columns from author, activist, social entrepreneur and labor veteran Amy Dean here. [5] 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, antieviction effort about five years ago. It was really focused on fighting displacement more than fighting foreclosure. We discovered that other people were intervening on behalf of homeowners either at the moment they got their loan - advising them on how to be successful first-time homebuyers - or they were intervening at the moment people faced foreclosure. We opened up a third area: We started to intervene after foreclosure, 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 is their ability to physically stay in their home. They can fight that independent of fighting foreclosure. I think 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 on principal," he explained, "but it does require the banks to jump through some hoops to get them evicted. The time it takes the banks to jump through those hoops gives us time to put maximum political pressure on them." Why focus on evictions rather than foreclosures? "Fighting evictions is a much more collectivizable fight than loan modifications," Meacham said. "It's hard to take five people doing loan modifications and bring them together in one fight because their situations are so different. There are all these different types of horror stories with loan modification. Instead of making demands on the banks to tweak the process, we decided that the key thing was principal reduction. That's the one thing the banks were never going to give, under any circumstances, unless you force them. We saw we could use the leverage gained during the eviction 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

foreclosure, saying, 'We shall not be moved' in different languages. We engage people in making the same demand from their pre-foreclosure status right up through their eviction. That demand is, 'I want my house back at its real value.'" "That demand links to an understanding that the housing bubble was the real predatory loan. Yes, there were terrible, individual, bait-and-switch predatory loans. But the entire housing bubble was a predatory environment. There were people who got standard 30-year mortgages but bought at a price that was inflated to three times the historic value of a house. That was a deliberate result of what 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 were inflated? "The political pressure becomes: Here's the bank trying to evict a family that is saying, 'Look, we'll pay you rent.' The reason they can pay market rent but not their mortgage is that their mortgage was 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 you'll sell it if you evict me. So, sell it to me, don't sell it to an investor.' If Deutsch Bank or Bank of America 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 punishing owners 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 are asking something of homeowners that they themselves don't practice." I agreed that, throughout the business world, everyone is trying to secure better terms and conditions 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 loans renegotiate all the more obnoxious. The bankruptcy procedure allows owners to renegotiate their principal on their yacht, let's say, but not on their primary home. It's a bias in how bankruptcy works. In fact, in the opening months of the Obama administration, he introduced a bill to allow bankruptcy judges 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 average," he 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, Meacham pointed to an increasing level of activity. But he also commented on some of the difficulties involved in expanding the work. "We've done something like 32 eviction blockades since January of 2008," he noted. "In the previous ten years, we'd done two or three. Eviction blockades are really hard things to do because there are all sorts of things that have to line up in order for them to take place. One thing is that the person has to be willing to fight right up to the end. Our experience with tenants was that, very often, they would say, 'You know what, I think what the landlord did to me is really unjust, but I don't want to 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 space that's very significant. They will fight to the last, especially given the fact that we often win. Ironically, there has been a gradual radicalization of the anti-eviction movement as it has focused more on fighting evictions against homeowners."

"Our ability to use militant tactics has increased as the base has grown. That's been an astounding thing, to see many of the folks who come into our meetings - which are huge - being voiceless and shy and unwilling to even say they are in foreclosure and ready to move out. A year later, they are getting 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 on connecting direct action to a wider organizing strategy. "Eviction blockades and building occupations should be seen as tactics that serve a strategy. It's not the act of occupying a building that is radical. It is how it relates to development of a base that's radical. What that means for the Occupy movement is that if you occupy a home with folks who aren't from the neighborhood, that could be counterproductive - especially on class and racial dimensions. We are trying to make sure that both eviction blockades and building occupations are feeding into a base-building strategy, so that the people directly affected by this are the ones leading the campaigns." "Here in Boston, we have meetings of 100-plus people every Tuesday night, and there are new organizations cropping up - there are now eight in Massachusetts and one in Rhode Island. And those organizations are in a network. The organizers meet by phone or in person every week and do 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 right now. 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 attorney generals and the big banks around the robo-signing lawsuit [a class action concerning improper foreclosures]. The proposed settlement was that Bank of America, Wells Fargo and the others would do principal reduction to the tune of $20 billion - even though the total negative equity in the country is $700 billion! You get an idea from that of how far apart the tepid public proposals are from the crisis that's out there." "To the degree that all those people with $700 billion in net negative equity start demanding principal reduction - start understanding that it's their right and that they have power to get it - that would be a sea change. It has been a sea change in Boston. That's why some banks, in a recent presentation, described Boston as 'ground zero' of the anti-foreclosure movement. We do two actions a week against the banks. That's a drumbeat of activity that affects the whole culture of the area. It affects the courts; it affects the police; it affects the banks. If you had people all over the country resisting displacement and demanding their homes back at real value, it would be one of the largest radical movements the country has seen."

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Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/how-occupy-our-homes-can-win/1328034041 Links: [1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/12073 [2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/12073 [3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/brecav/6472759625/in/set-72157628324966181 [4] http://www.occupytogether.org/2011/12/04/national-day-of-action-to-occupy-our-homes/ [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