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Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers?

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Source: Motherjones
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Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers?
Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers?
News: Take Back the Land installs homeless families in foreclosed Miami-Dade County properties. Here's what the neighbors think.

By Tristram Korten

May/June 2008 Issue

Mamyrah Prosper steps gingerly over ankle-high grass strewn with plastic bags and empty soda bottles in the yard of a vacant redbrick house in Miami's Liberty City. She peers through a gap in a boarded-up window. "It looks in good shape," she says. "I mean, the walls aren't falling down. This is definitely one of our stronger options."

Prosper means that if the place checks out, she and her colleagues from Take Back the Land, a local group that advocates for affordable housing, will break in, change the locks, paint and clean, innovate a way to connect water and electricity, and then move a homeless family into the house. The criminal laws they'll violate in the process range from trespassing to breaking and entering (even burglary, if the police get ambitious), which requires the organization to keep a pro bono lawyer on standby.

"We call it 'liberating the housing,'" says Take Back the Land's cofounder Max Rameau, a compact Haitian American who's earned a reputation in Miami for creative activism. In 2006, Take Back received widespread attention when it took over a vacant city lot and erected a shantytown for the homeless that thrived for six months—that is, until a resident's candle burned down the encampment. Rameau's latest, and even more legally dubious, campaign targets homes shuttered by foreclosure.

In Greater Miami, there's no shortage of those. Last year, Miami-Dade County recorded 26,391 foreclosures, a nearly threefold increase from 2006, and the pace has only quickened since then. Meanwhile, public housing is in crisis; at least four people are in line for each of the 10,000 available units, and the local housing agency—spectacularly corrupt, even by Miami standards—was taken over by the federal government last year.

Communities nationwide have seen a deluge of properties left vacant by foreclosures, but housing advocates say they've yet to witness anything like Rameau's coordinated squatting campaign. "That's the first I've heard of that kind of direct action," says Linda Couch, deputy director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition. "It's incredibly frustrating for housing advocates knowing that there are so many vacant houses amid so many people on the brink of homelessness."

Rameau says Take Back's campaign has two objectives: "One is to actually house people. The other is to bring attention to the contradictions in housing policy. The problem is that doing one precludes the other." Drawing too much attention to Take Back's efforts, he explains, would also get the attention of law enforcement. So Rameau's organization has placed only two homeless families in foreclosed homes since the campaign began in October; the first was Cassandra and Jason, a couple in their late 20s, and their two small children. They'd been living in a van before Rameau moved them into a one-story stucco home in Liberty City. When I visited them in February, Cassandra, who works as a street vendor selling jewelry and incense, ushered me into the living room, furnished with two chairs, a moving trunk, and a small television. Bedsheets covered the windows, and the walls had just been painted saffron.

As far as the neighbors are concerned, the current tenants—squatters though they are—are a vast improvement over the crack den the vacant house had become. One neighbor even loaned the family electricity via an extension cord until a mysterious man sympathetic to Take Back's cause turned on power at the house. "I didn't ask any questions," Cassandra says. The new living situation, temporary as it might be, affords her and Jason the time to save up to rent a new apartment, she said. "This just takes the stress off."

According to the Miami-Dade County Housing Agency, squatters, if discovered, will be promptly removed from the premises and potentially prosecuted. So far, though, Take Back's foreclosure-squatting pioneers have avoided detection. Despite the dicey legality, Rameau says there are 14 families like Cassandra's on his waiting list. "We counsel them that they could be arrested if caught," he says. "But things are so desperate, they are willing to risk it."

There's some other sides to this that I have heard about, I knew of someone who did something similar but not all the details. Basically homes that were abandoned and had tax liens on them, you could "take over" by paying the lien and the property was yours until the owners tried to take posession back. Some people would rent out these properties, and when the original owner showed up, generally the loser was the renter. The guy who paid the taxes almost always got paid back and more because of the renter.

Here though you have someone squatting.

Squatters in NYC got prime real estate now because they stayed in dank, worthless buildings during the worst of times, citing "adverse possession" which included continuous occupancy for 10 years.

I'm looking at investment properties now because there are some great bargains, I definitely am sensitive to the idea that some homeless guys, druggies, prostitutes, or even teenagers looking for a place to party will be my inadvertant neighbors.

I think that this seems like a great cause and reason, but I don't want it to happen next to my house.

like it said in the article, would you like the shuttered up house next to yours to become a crack den or be squatted by ppl hard on their luck?

This is a no brainer as far as I'm concerned. The homeless people in this equation have an opportunity to set precedent by showing the homes respect. If they do, then it will become a lot more difficult to say not to this. Personally, I would have no problems with a vacant house in my neighborhood temporarily acting as a home for someone who needs it.

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Originally Posted by lotsofmagnets

like it said in the article, would you like the shuttered up house next to yours to become a crack den or be squatted by ppl hard on their luck?

Seriously.

I think they're doing a good thing--getting people who need housing housed. Yes, their methods are a little questionable, but I wouldn't be surprised if this caught on elsewhere, and using a home for a home is certainly an improvement over a crack den.

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Originally Posted by lotsofmagnets

like it said in the article, would you like the shuttered up house next to yours to become a crack den or be squatted by ppl hard on their luck?

I'd rather it be neither. The house should remain shuttered and unoccupied.

There are a couple buildings here in NYC that have been completely boarded up for as long as I can remember. The owners wish to keep it as such as opposed to have to put money into it to bring it up to whatever. Some of them are rather large buildings one the size of a high school, the other a smaller building maybe supports 5-6 families.

If the government would like to start a program or a grassroots organization that raises funds and pays a fee to the bank who owns the property, then I'd be in agreement with it happening. What I don't see is that the bank would allow someone to live in the property for a "nominal" fee which is less than what they could get just by the write downs (I don't when it changed from write offs, but whatever...) and the property staying empty.

Ive wondered why it is that my city doesnt contract with parking garages to provide at least a roof and walls from our winter rain and wind before I realized the big problem is liability. Who is responsible if something happens to a person on the property or if something happens to the property itself?

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Originally Posted by girldetective

That is correct. Liability is always a concern. It sucks but the last thing I want is some homeless guy suing me because he knows he can scam the insurance company.

City Harvest collects lots of food from many restaurants and "events" but the food needs to be kept with strict protocols because they cannot or do not want to be liable if people get sick. It's a shame sometimes because we'd have lots of food left over from video shoots on a daily basis... alot of which got thrown away.

What about working with the banks that own the properties to make it legal? Homeless people can get temporary housing and the bank can get a tax break. Win win.

Why don't they lower the price until someone can afford it? There are people working that can't afford houses or condos, but this just sounds like a way to get a free house.

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Originally Posted by ASU2003

Why don't they lower the price until someone can afford it? There are people working that can't afford houses or condos, but this just sounds like a way to get a free house.

Because the owners know that in time (maybe years) the price will bounce right back.

Say you bought a house for $50k in the 90s.

Last year it was worth $250k.

That's $200 in your pocket.

Bu today it's empty and you'd have to drop th price to $100k to clear it.

You know that in 10 years time it'll be worth $300k.

Why sell now at a "loss" of $200k investment income?

Under English law, if squatters move in and stay, they get rights to rent or even OWN the place after certain durations, so keeping it vacant and policing that could well be your pension fund.

You sell it cheap to help the homeless you can be sure the homeless aren't going to help you during your now unfunded retirement.

I just looked at a home that looks like it was lived in by homeless people. For me to bring it up to move in standards it will cost me about $10,000. Without the fixing up that either the homeless or idiotic foreclosee it would be about $5,000.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ASU2003

Why don't they lower the price until someone can afford it? There are people working that can't afford houses or condos, but this just sounds like a way to get a free house.

so if the person hurts themselves who is responsible? if they damage it who pays for that damage?

a house that stays empty for too long becomes a problem structurally, anyways. Like it or not, squatters living in it keep it structurally sound.

Maybe the solution would be to have an agency that oversees "renting" the foreclosed homes at a reduced rate, available only by screening income. That way the houses have occupants but they're not considered squatters because they are paying some form of rent. Or pay it by some other means, like keeping the yard and house maintained. Basically - they shouldn't get something for nothing. It encourages apathy.. but give people a way to earn a place to call home. Then maybe all parties involved could benefit.

Maybe it's too simplistic, but could it work if inspections were carried out every so often and you had to meet certain guidelines to qualify? I certainly wouldn't want to be the neighbor of a party of squatters getting into drugs and mischief. It's bad for everyone. But a struggling, working down-on-their-luck family is another matter, I think it would be nice to give them a chance to use a vacant home.

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Originally Posted by kutulu

What about working with the banks that own the properties to make it legal? Homeless people can get temporary housing and the bank can get a tax break. Win win.

Banks don't want to be real estate owners. They are in the business to be banks. Not only do they not want to be real estate owners, but they don't really don't want to be landlords.

Asset Managers are very interested in getting houses off their books.

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Originally Posted by Plummie

As a landlord I must give 24 hours notice to a tenant in order to inspect the property. This is problematic at best for this type of situation.

Some of the properties I looked at this past weekend in Las Vegas were far travels for people to get to locations of work, this means people will have to have a car and pay for gas. Yet another thing they cannot afford.