My daughter and her husband lost their house the other day. Yeah, right. We’re on track. . . .152
—an anonymous commenter on reuters online
Today, the United States is said to be experiencing a housing recovery. The financial press frequently pronounces that this economic rebound is “on track” and the “housing market has finally turned the corner.”153 But these projections have almost nothing to do with the vast majority of the nation. Rising home values are little consolation for the ten million people who have lost the places that they called home—and the millions more who are still threatened with eviction or foreclosure. Rising rental prices make it still more difficult for the displaced to find somewhere else to live. As for the broader economic recovery, in 2010 the top 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 93 percent of the nation’s income gains.154 Economists predict that this sharply uneven “recovery” will continue.
Black families have already lost more than half their median wealth since the economic crisis began. One Washington Post article warns, “The implosion of the subprime lending market has left a scar on the finances of black Americans—one that not only has wiped out a generation of economic progress but could leave them at a financial disadvantage for decades.”155 For all Americans, economists predict it could take the next twenty years to recover the amount of money lost between 2005 and 2010 in the housing market alone.156
No banker, lawyer, or Wall Street executive has gone to prison for the industry’s widespread illegal practices—not to mention for crashing the global economy. The lack of prosecution is widely regarded as a moral hazard, one that encourages bankers to continue flouting legislation and regulation, because there is no threat of punishment. Ironically, many deployed the moral hazard argument early in the foreclosure crisis as a justification for not reducing victimized families’ mortgage principals, with the rationale that these families and their neighbors wouldn’t learn the lesson of financial responsibility unless millions were evicted from their homes. The absence of criminal consequences even inspired a PBS investigative documentary titled The Untouchables—a reference both to the bankers’ privileged legal status and to the lowest caste in India, a class of people who are viewed as so impure and despicable that others literally do not want to have physical contact with them.
In January 2013, ten Wall Street banks paid, collectively, $8.5 billion to silence a review process of millions of mortgage documents that would have further illuminated the industry’s fraudulent practices. That same week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outlined regulations for mortgage pushers that included “a legal shield for banks [that] would largely insulate banks from lawsuits.”157 Mortgage pushers “applauded the new regulations.”158 Meanwhile, box stores like WalMart and Costco began packaging and selling a big new product: home mortgages.
This is all to say that the housing situation for Americans of all races and ethnicities has only grown worse as the so-called economic recovery has progressed. What has changed, albeit slowly, is the idea of home and housing. Like Griggs Wimbley, Bertha Garrett, Michael Hutchins, and Martha Biggs, more and more Americans are arguing that housing should be a right, not a privilege, in the United States. In 2008, in an unprecedented move, the United Nations rapporteur on the right to adequate housing made an official trip to the United States, where she toured seven cities and met with hundreds of residents who testified that the nation’s exclusive, for-profit housing system violates the internationally recognized Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The following year, the majority of Americans surveyed supported a nationwide suspension of foreclosures.159 In 2010, Take Back the Land organized a national month of live-in actions “in the spirit of the civil rights movement.” By 2011, housing activism was sweeping all major cities. Communities had orchestrated dozens of home takeovers and hundreds of eviction blockades across the country since the housing crisis had begun. In Boston, the longtime housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana had organized twenty-six successful eviction blockades. In Detroit, community members had taken over and rehabbed nearly an entire block of homes and declared them liberated of market value.
When researcher and urban planner Chester Hartman published The Case for A Right to Housing in 1998, he conceded that the idea that “housing is a human right” could be regarded as “futile, quixotic, even bizarre.”160 Today, the words are inked onto cardboard signs and paraded through the streets in dozens of cities and small towns. They are painted on banners and hung on homes where owners resisted eviction or community members took over vacant, bank-owned houses. And the principle is slowly being put into practice. In Rochester, New York, Take Back the Land has established a community land trust where de-commoditized homes can be communally controlled by the neighborhood.
As the climate justice movement exploded onto the global stage in late 2012, catalyzed by the indigenous people–led Idle No More protests and the shock of Hurricane Sandy, the importance of the housing movement became even more evident. The capitalist economic system of privileging banks over homeowners threatens society with miseries far greater than predatory loans, foreclosure abuse, and mass evictions. It also threatens the sustainability of civilization itself by profiting from war and environmentally destructive practices that accelerate climate destabilization and threaten the balance of life on Earth.
This story began with the history of how the United States’ model of property and individual ownership has rendered it an inhospitable land for generations of African Americans and other people of color. It ends with the prospect of an Earth that could become uninhabitable for all. But the heroes of the story are the people in the middle, those like Griggs, Bertha, Michael, Martha and millions of others who refuse to have their dreams foreclosed, people who fight not only to save their own homes, but to create a more just and sustainable system for everyone. Their struggle is ours. And for the sake of all of us, it is one that we must win.
This project wouldn’t have been possible without hundreds of people.
Martha Biggs, Griggs Wimbley, Michael Hutchins, and Bertha Garrett, thank you for welcoming me into your homes and sharing your stories with me. I hope you will consider this book a celebration of your courage. To all the organizers and resisters across the country, thank you for inspiring me and others to work for a more just system. A special thanks to Rob Robinson, Max Rameau and Anthony Newby for guiding me through this project with patience and generosity.
Greg Ruggiero, thank you for inviting me to become part of Zuccotti Park Press, and for the months of editing and visioning. Nathan Schneider, thank you for being a role model of an activist-journalist and for editing my articles on housing activism. Fred Strebeigh and Anne Fadiman, thank you for inspiring me to write narrative nonfiction and for showing me the power of storytelling. Jim Connolly, thank you for teaching me how to write to begin with, and for encouraging me to pursue this passion throughout my life.
My own housing was fairly precarious throughout the course of this year-long project. Thank you everyone who housed me and gave me a place to write, including: Stephanie Richards in Durham; Landon Howard and Mary-Bricker Jenkins in Chattanooga; Alejandra and David Cruz, Bobby Hull, T.K., Anthony Newby, and Monique White in Minneapolis; Martha Biggs, David Williams, Loren Taylor, and Ed Voci in Chicago; the residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Park in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania; Jim Novick and Nicole Hagner in New Jersey; Greg Chase in Cheshire, Connecticut; and Nathaniel Obler and Katherine Mullan in New York City. A special thanks to Cynthia Santos and Juan Carlos Ruiz in New York City, for providing both a home and a very close friendship.
Lastly, Diego Ibañez, thank you for the hours of editing and the endless conversations. Y más que todo, gracias por tu amor.
152. Jason Lange, “Home resales fall, housing recovery still on track,” Reuters, January 22, 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-usa-economy-idUSBRE90E0KL20130122
153. Ibid. and Chris Isidore, “Economists: housing recovery finally here,” CNN Money, October 3, 2012. http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/02/news/economy/housing-recovery-economists/index.html
154. Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” March 2, 2012. Available at: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf
155. Ylan Q. Mui, “For black Americans, financial damage from subprime implosion is likely to last,” Washington Post, July 8, 2012. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-07-08/business/35486457_1_credit-scores-auto-loan-financial-crisis
156. Anita Hill, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), p. 116.
157. Peter Eavis, “In Tighter Loan Rules, Wiggle Room for Banks,” New York Times, January 10, 2013. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/in-tighter-loan-rules-wiggle-room-for-banks/
158. Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Consumer Watchdog to Issue Mortgage Rules,” New York Times, January 10, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/business/consumers-win-some-mortgage-safety-in-new-rules.html
159. “Foreclosure Moratorium Support Fades,” UPI, October 15, 2010. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/10/15/Poll-Foreclosure-moratorium-support-fades/UPI-22751287175120/
160. Chester Hartman, “The Case for a Right to Housing,” in Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (1998), p. 223. http://faculty.design.umn.edu/jrcrump/pdf/hartman.pdf