Tag Archives: mortgages

Occupy Wall Street’s Mature Offspring, Doing Good.

Leave a reply

Rachel Maddow’s optimistic report on the OccupyNevadaCounty (OWSNC) in California — and its action that resulted in the delaying of a family’s eviction due to foreclosure, until at least after the holidays — as I say, that report was maybe a little too optimistic. Wonderful, though.

It involved homeowner Stephen Merryweather, who was about to be evicted from his home the next morning, called the Occupy Nevada County’s foreclosure group, asking for help. The Occupiers arrived very early the next morning (when he was about to be kicked out) and Occupied his front lawn. They also called up the parties involved in the mortgage and the foreclosing action, which meant a Fannie Mae rep from California Pacific Brokers, and the sheriff. They talked, and the mortgage rep agreed to delay the action of putting a family out of its home a week and a half before Christmas.

It is to be wondered if such a scenario could take place in many other locations. This would require a lot of separate elements: An experienced, able local Occupy group to respond and negotiate with several different local authorities, for a start. The Occupy Nevada County members were noticeably older people, middle-aged, not 20-somethings. This was rather remarkable, since the media pictures of all other Occupy groups tend to portray very young people. But older people are more representative of homeowners in general. The entire event screams to the sky how much older people are needed in the Occupy movement.

The next thing you’d need to repeat the success is a local sheriff who’s willing to help the two other parties negotiate, and who is willing to hold off his dogs.

And then the mortgage people. If they’d been Bank of America or Wells Fargo, what might have been likely to happen? These big bad ones have not seemed concerned about their public images lately, but are extremely concerned about keeping their f’n money. (Even though it isn’t really theirs.)

Wall Street’s Supposedly Vacant Houses and Fish; Ann Curry’s House and the Harafish.

Leave a reply

Some days on Wall Street, either you catch the fish or the harafish catches you.

Harafish is Egyptian and means the urban poor. It may be a slang term.

Bad things happen to vacant houses, when mortgage processors have gone rogue and the poor — that is, the homeless — have nowhere to go. NBC “Today” Show host Ann Curry just found out that a homeless man had been living in her empty $2.9 million townhouse on New York City’s Upper West side. The man was said to have been there for about a year. Curry and her husband have been renovating the house “for about eight years,” while living in Gramercy Park. It has been a magnet to other homeless persons too.

And why not? City shelters may have no space, and are sometimes dangerous. The homeless are chased out of public spaces like Central Park. Urban poor have been taking over rich people’s abandoned homes for centuries, just like in the novel The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz; although the story’s set in Egypt it rings a bell here.

The other fish story I’d been thinking of happened late last year. Remember when Bank of America changed the locks and shut off utilities to a house they had nothing to do with? A doctor came home from vacation and found signs all over his house saying Bank of America was foreclosing on it. The doctor had no mortgage with them, no connection whatever. He breaks open his door and the whole place reeks of rotting halibut and salmon he’d stored in his freezer before leaving — 75 pounds of it. If someone had been home, maybe that wouldn’t have… yeah, if a homeless person had been inside, maybe he’d have found the fish and taken them out before they made the place smell so bad. Maybe.

Either way, the Wall Street banks, mortgage industry, and the financial companies who helped create the changed economy we are now enjoying — are clearly responsible for a long, long chain of adverse events.