"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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This searing photo essay show in stark relief the landscape of the foreclosure crisis, in this case in Florida. By now we all know the details. Foreclosures are continuing at a reord pace, three years after the beginning of the recession. This massive turnover of property has turned entire neighborhoods into ghost towns and continued to be a drag on the economy. While there are higher incidences in “sand states” where the housing bubble inflated larger than elsewhere, this crisis is far from being localized to one region, and is prevalent all over the country. The potential damage over the next few years is even greater, as one out of every three homes in cities like Boise, Idaho are underwater.
We know that banks and loan servicers have massive incentives to foreclose, and then in many cases keep the homes off the market and in shadow inventory, avoiding the realization of a loss on their books. Banks who made crucial errors in the origination and securitization stages don’t want to be held responsible for those mistakes, and think the best way to go about that is by burying the evidence. So they have rushed to foreclose on borrowers who could have handled a loan modification, in many cases illegally so. And the stories keep getting tallied up day by day. Banks are foreclosing on the wrong homes, ones that don’t even have mortgages. Homeowners who are current on their loans are getting thrown out of their homes. Banks are faking summons, faking documents, faking notarizations, even faking lawyers, all in a desperate and chaotic effort to foreclose.
Amidst this chaos, some heroes have really stepped up. There are foreclosure mediation groups and activists, like NACA, who are setting up face-to-face meetings between lenders and borrowers. There are successful advocacy groups like ESOP in Cleveland, also mediating on behalf of homeowners. And there are the lawyers, foreclosure defense attorneys who have uncovered virtually every seedy game the servicers and the banks have been playing, who have effectively represented their clients.
If anything, the government should strongly support these efforts. The status quo is hopelessly broken, and it threatens economic recovery. The Treasury Department should demand that banks stop the rush to foreclose, and having effective representation for borrowers goes a long way toward that. But when given the option to allow TARP funds to be used for legal aid for foreclosure victims, the Treasury blocked it.
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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Tagged: airline deregulation, airline industry, airlines, alfred kahn, civil aeronautics board, cornell university, m i economic economic indicators inflation, national news. Related Searches: air travel, airline news, ...
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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Tagged: airline deregulation, airline industry, airlines, alfred kahn, civil aeronautics board, cornell university, m i economic economic indicators inflation, national news. Related Searches: air travel, airline news, ...
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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Alfred Kahn, 'Godfather' of Airline Deregulation, Dies at 93
Tagged: airline deregulation, airline industry, airlines, alfred kahn, civil aeronautics board, cornell university, m i economic economic indicators inflation, national news. Related Searches: air travel, airline news, ...
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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Alfred Kahn, 'Godfather' of Airline Deregulation, Dies at 93
Tagged: airline deregulation, airline industry, airlines, alfred kahn, civil aeronautics board, cornell university, m i economic economic indicators inflation, national news. Related Searches: air travel, airline news, ...
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bench craft company scam'NBC Nightly <b>News</b>' Wins 4th Quarter Ratings
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Alfred Kahn, 'Godfather' of Airline Deregulation, Dies at 93
Tagged: airline deregulation, airline industry, airlines, alfred kahn, civil aeronautics board, cornell university, m i economic economic indicators inflation, national news. Related Searches: air travel, airline news, ...
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