By Mary Ellen Podmolik, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — Since moving into a home eight weeks ago, Tene Smith has hung one of her paintings on a wall, a reminder of her youthful aspirations to become an artist. She’s hosted a community group in her living room. Her daughter had a friend sleep over, and they danced much of the night.
It all sounds so normal. But the 40-year-old mother of four is never sure when she’s going to have to gather up her family and their possessions and leave.
Smith and her children are squatters, or as Liberate the South Side, the community group that placed her in the vacant home calls them, “tenants without a lease.”
And while Smith has started calling the Chicago property “my house,” she recently discovered that it is owned by a private individual who is trying to sell it and repair his own finances.
In cities throughout the country, community groups and homeowners have rallied to protest what they decry as the inequities between bailed-out megabanks and financially strapped consumers. The Occupy Wall Street movement turned its attention to the housing crisis last fall, and groups around the country have worked to keep people in their homes, place the needy in properties that are seemingly abandoned and rid neighborhoods of blight. The size of the movement isn’t clear because most go unpublicized.
Mortgage servicers, reeling with hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes, aren’t necessarily giving in. But they must tread carefully in their dealings with consumers and activists, lest they risk more national media attention and another black eye resulting from news accounts of bankers putting families out on the street, regardless of whether they have a legal right to the home.
Around the country, community groups affiliated with Occupy Our Homes, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and others are fighting the evictions of homeowners from foreclosed properties and placing the homeless in vacant residences.
In New York, a group garnered much publicity late last year for moving a homeless man and his family into a vacant home. Last month, according to media accounts, the owner, who had moved to an apartment while he tried to negotiate a mortgage modification with his lender, returned to find the home gutted.
In Atlanta, protesters pitched tents in the front yard of a home that had gone to foreclosure sale, which the daughter of the owner didn’t know about until after her mother died. Now, Chase Bank is working with the family to find a resolution agreeable to all parties.
And in Minneapolis, community activists drew attention to the plight of a former Marine whose home is in foreclosure, and he eventually was offered a mortgage modification.
Still, the efforts haven’t always gone as planned, as evidenced by the turn of events at the duplex home where Tene Smith is living, after the owner of the vacant home suddenly reappeared in the picture.
And that is worrying to well-established groups like the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, which plans to significantly ramp up the visibility of its “live-ins” before May’s NATO summit.
The anti-eviction campaign, which trains groups like Liberate the South Side in home takeovers and has participated in seven since June, calls the situation a public relations “nightmare.”
A spokeswoman for Liberate calls it a “calculated risk.”
Yet Smith, who will eventually have to uproot her family, is more optimistic, saying the home occupation, for however long it lasts, “lifted my spirits. It inspires me to do more extraordinary things with my life.”
The two-bedroom, one-bath duplex on a quiet, wide street in Chicago’s Calumet Heights neighborhood sold in March 2006 for $114,500 to Benjamin Dodd, according to public records. In July 2007, it fell into foreclosure. By June 2011, the home was listed in the city’s vacant building registry as a partially secured troubled building.
Late last year, a group of Chicago neighborhood activists incorporated Liberate the South Side with the state as a nonprofit and received training in how to find, fix and occupy vacant homes. An “entry team” broke into the home to see its condition. They also determined, incorrectly, that it had been repossessed by Bank of America.
Volunteers pried the plywood off the windows, pulled up the carpeting that revealed stained hardwood floors and repainted the walls white. A furnace, water heater, refrigerator, towels and toiletries were donated to the home and family. Rotted drywall in the basement was ripped out, but dried brown sludge still covers the floor, and a broken sump pump sits crooked in its hole. Labor was donated by local contractors. Altogether, about $3,000 was invested in the home.
“We looked at a lot of houses in various communities, and this was one of the better ones,” said Shani Smith, a member of Liberate and Tene Smith’s younger sister. She sees the work as a move toward economic justice and away from the neighborhood blight that has, she said, unfairly affected communities of color. “We don’t feel like we’re breaking the law compared to what (banks) are doing to everyday families.”
