“When we fight, we win”
Frances Louis, an activist with the group City Life/Vida Urbana, was among those who occupied a foreclosed townhouse in Boston in September 2009 with the intention of not leaving.
As part of a campaign by the Boston housing justice organization City Life/Vida Urbana, they changed the locks, moved in and hung a banner from the top window that read "Organize Community Control/Unite People, Yes We Can!" Frances and her family had recently been evicted from their own home nearly a year earlier and decided to occupy an empty property and demand the right to live there.
In February 2010, Louis and her family scored another victory when they bought the property that they had occupied for six months. They did this through Boston Community Capital, a non-profit community bank that buys foreclosed property from banks and re-sells the property to building occupants at a reduced principle and at a real market value.
The occupation was part of a larger campaign in which City Life/Vida Urbana is attempting to prevent evictions through blockades and protests while fighting to convert empty foreclosed homes into affordable permanent housing, as Frances Louis told SocialistWorker.org's .
WHAT LED to you and your family being evicted from your home in 2008?
MY MOTHER purchased the house and was paying a mortgage of $2,500 per month. And then it shot up to $3,030 per month in less than a year. We thought it was a fixed-rate [mortgage], according to the broker. When the mortgage shot up, there was no one to contact. We tried calling the bank, and they were non-responsive. It was like we faded out of this earth--there was no one to contact. That was in 2006. In November of '07, they foreclosed, and we didn't get notice of eviction until January of '08.
WHAT DID you do next?
I had read in the Boston Herald that there was an organization, City Life/Vida Urbana, that was doing an eviction blockade for one of their members. So I went to one of their meetings. And City Life told us not to move. In the meantime, the case had gone to court.
WHAT DID you argue in court?
I SAID I wanted to buy the house with my father at the appraised value--what the house was actually worth. The judge was looking at me like, "you want to do what?" He had never heard of family members wanting to buy property for another family member.
The judge told me to get in touch with the broker [who was in charge of selling the house]. So I called the broker every day. I always got a voice mail. We put in an offer for $200,000. The bank wanted $245,000--much more than the appraised value of the house.
Meanwhile, I got a 48-hour notice to get out of my house, or the constable was going to come with the movers.
WHAT DID you do?
ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2008 we had an eviction blockade. Sixty people came to the blockade. People chained themselves to the porch and to the stairs. There were people marching outside of the house. The constable never came.
We had four eviction blockades. On the fourth blockade, the constable came and packed up our stuff and told us we had to leave. There were 20 cops there. Some were crying. There must have been probably about 30 or more blockaders. Even the neighbors came out. The bank hired a moving company. It took them ten hours [to move us out]. They had to get four trucks.
City Life made a deal to keep the blockade peaceful and for no one to get arrested, if [the bank] gave us time to find somewhere to go. We didn't want to go to a shelter. City Life helped us find another place.
The six of us moved from a four-bedroom house to a two-bedroom, congested apartment. It was brutal.
AFTER YOU made an offer to repurchase the house, which was rejected, and then forced to move out, the bank sold the house. How much did they end up selling the house for?
IN MARCH 2009, they sold it for $175,000--less than what we had offered to pay.
HOW DID you get the idea to occupy an empty townhouse?
I WAS still going to City Life meetings. We were talking about how the Cobden Street neighborhood in Dorchester was hit hard by foreclosures. We were talking about hopefully turning them into an affordable housing co-op for the members of City Life who were facing the same predicament.
We started talking about occupation to put the demand on the banks to sell the units at their real market value to individuals, formers owners or to a non-profit bank. And if I wasn't claustrophobic before, I was then--living with six people in a two-bedroom apartment. It's crazy. Something had to give.
So we came to this unit, and it was empty. The door was open. The previous person that lived here was Section 8 [a recipient of government rent subsidies], and they kicked her out--probably because they wanted more money. The locks got changed and we moved in. We called Boston Community Capital. People brought furniture and donations when we moved in. Then we were here.
