It’s been a busy month, and I haven’t devoted any significant time to my blog. Fortunately I now have a few days off to relax and think. Earlier in the month, I read an interesting opinion piece about the newest direction of the ‘Occupy’ movement. The author of the CNN article called it “Occupy foreclosed homes“. Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered in droves in East New York early in December to take back a foreclosed home for a homeless family of four. I chuckled at the brashness of this protest when I heard about it, but it does make two very salient points.
- Foreclosure has negatively impacted communities throughout the country. There is a monetary cost to an empty home for a neighborhood (declining property values), and a measurable cost to community stability. At our current foreclosure rate, we will have many empty homes and impacted communities for years to come.
- Our homeless rate has skyrocketed in the last several years. We often don’t talk about it. It’s a dirty secret for every city. By and large our society is not directly addressing the challenges that are driving people to ruin. Given the link of the recession, most of our social services and charitable organizations are strained to the max too.
Good points, weren’t they? Unfortunately many people won’t really think past the fact that the protesters broke several laws to make those points. At this point I guess I’m tired, and I just don’t care. Or maybe I recognize there is a point where law becomes secondary to finding the resources necessary to survive. As a teenager, I visited Brazil and learned a lesson that proved that point in the extreme. The Methodist Church in Brazil received a donation of property, but opted never to develop that property. They decided not to build because of squatters. I’m not talking dozens. I’m talking thousands. The church realized while they owned the property, any use they could receive from it, would be negated but the terrible hardship necessary to clear an entire shanty community off of it. Instead they used their rights as property owners to instill rule of law and community standards into the shanty town. They worked with the community leaders to police the area and make sure crime stayed out of the community.
I think that’s what’s been missing from the foreclosure discussion. We’ve talked about getting people to refinance their loans. We’ve talked about getting people to buy foreclosed homes. We’ve discussed the culpability of individuals and banks in this debacle for years now. We haven’t talked about the communities where every sixth house has entered foreclosure. We haven’t talked about the families on the streets and living with relatives. We haven’t read news articles where the bank heads sat down with community leaders to figure out how to make those communities functional and whole again as fast as possible.
I titled the post ‘throwing out the rulebook’ because of another article I read on 103 year old Vina Hall. She’s lived in her home near Atlanta for decades. Technically the home is in her grandson’s name. He took out a second mortgage, and eventually the bank foreclosed. When the sheriff’s deputies arrived and met Mrs. Hall and her 83 year old daughter, they refused to evict them. I would not be surprised if one of the deputies made the call to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that pressured the bank into stopping the foreclosure. Before you say it’s an extreme case, law enforcement agencies do periodically issue moratoriums on evictions especially in winter. I honestly don’t envy officers in situations like this. It’s a heavy burden when one’s responsibility to uphold the law conflicts with your ability to protect your community. The officers in Atlanta chose to protect their community. The recognized citizens in a horrible situation and chose to disregard what the rulebook said. They fortunately had the support of everyone around them in that decision. For many, the decision is not so easy, and far lonelier.
I didn’t write this post to say we should disregard law and order. I wrote this post because there are so many people that the law doesn’t protect anymore. It would be easy to point fingers. It would be right for all sides to sit down and consider what is just and work towards that goal for a while.