A victory for one homeowner? It looks like it,
thanks to an unprecedented pushback from that homeowner and other protestors:
Rose fell behind a few weeks on her payments after her brother was shot and killed. Her bank, OneWest, refused to accept her payment and then a rollercoaster of paperwork, bureaucracy and finally, denial followed. Rose has the income to pay if OneWest and Fannie Mae would cooperate, but they refuse. So last week she announced that she is is fighting her eviction by refusing to leave her home. She has been joined over the last week by family, neighbors and supporters ready to resist efforts by the LA County Sheriff’s Department to carry out the eviction.
Rose and supporters took a number of actions, including showing up at the bank chairman's mansion, at the Fannie Mae offices, and finally:
Right now, the intersection of Figueroa and 7th outside Bank of America has been overtaken by marchers and over 25 protesters are occupying Bank of America in downtown LA, they are refusing to leave until Bank of America commits to keep families in their homes, pay their fair share of taxes and help rebuild hard-hit neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, outside the bank, homeowner Rose Gudiel, a member of the Alliance of Californians of Community Empowerment (ACCE) and the ReFund California campaign, who was arrested at a Fannie Mae office in Pasadena protesting a foreclosure just made the following statement in front of over 1000 supporters:
“I’d like to announce that the bank called me today to arrange a meeting, to discuss a modification proposal from Fannie Mae. I have also learned that my eviction has been canceled. We are very happy that they have finally come to the table, and I hope they are serious about negotiating a reasonable modification, which is what I have been requesting for over two years. And I hope that they will change their policies to stop taking the homes the thousands of hardworking families facing preventable foreclosure. Thank you.”
This has been an interesting case, especially against the larger background of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
There are two slightly separate things going on here. First, the concrete demand of stopping the eviction of this one homeowner. Second, the larger movement demanding fairer treatment for all homeowners. The larger group easily embraced the specific case of this homeowner, making it part and parcel of their own. And it worked. In this case, the bank officers were clearly being asses about this foreclosure against one homeowner, and clearly were not expecting the sort of organized pushback that happened next, and in the end I think we can all imagine that this one bank was more than happy to review this one mortgage modification once the alternative was being continually highlighted in public as a poster child for all that was wrong and incompetent about their industry.
Most people facing unfair foreclosures are not Rose Gudiel, however, and do not have ready access to a hundred or a thousand people willing to take to a street corner to make the case for her and people like her.
Occupy Wall Street has been accused of having no actionable demands (I think there are plenty of ways outrage over the preferential treatment given to the wealthy, the corporate, and especially the financial sector can be made actionable, but that's for another post.) But there are plenty of small actionable demands. The people being injured by unfair or outrageous bank practices are not rare; people looking to demonstrate specific injustices should not have far to look. And the more individual homeowners can make their voices heard, the more powerful their aggregate story becomes.
Now, that might not be the direction Occupy Wall Street as a whole is likely to go in: their concerns are much more related to the co-opting of national politics and policies by the wealthy. But there is clearly increased anger out there, and a much-increased willingness to take to parks and street corners to protest both the large outrages, affecting many and the so-called smaller cases that might affect only one or two families.
A movement to resist evictions, a movement to collectively protest the most outrageous treatment of individual homeowners? If such a thing started to take place with regularity, I wonder how quickly the industry would move to repair the practices in question.
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