Alright—so it’s been two weeks since Portland was hit with May Day madness. While much of the hoopla was put to bed with the last of the unpermitted dancing Monday evening, some of the action kick-started on May 1 is still rolling along.
Remember Alicia Jackson, the woman who—with the help of Occupy offshoot, Portland Liberation Organizing Council (PLOC)—reclaimed her foreclosed house in North Portland? She’s still holding down the fort in a semi-functional home—for now. PLOC volunteers have committed themselves to being her support net, ready to attack if the bank steps in to take back her home or the police try to arrest her for occupying property that is no longer hers.
The most recent battle PLOC and Jackson took on involved the city’s Water Bureau. On Thursday, the group rallied outside its downtown headquarters, insisting that the bureau turned Jackson’s water back on. To set things straight, City Commissioner Randy Leonard, bureau head, came down to talk to the group face-to-face.
Leonard says he explained to the group that, according to city code, he could not turn the water back on at the house unless the person on record who owns the property requested so. “So I contacted the owner, who isn’t Mrs. Jackson, and they prohibited me from doing so,” says Leonard, adding that the owner said they had intentions to evict and arrest Jackson if she continued to stay.
“Randy Leonard would not cooperate with us,” says PLOC’s Taran Connelly. “He’s only concerned about the banks. We wanted to give the city a chance to do something right, and they missed it.”
Leonard said his meeting with the group was “unpleasant” due to the “confrontational and crude” nature of the crowd. He says he is personally concerned for Johnson’s well-being and offered her a card, telling the woman to call him if she wanted to be placed in temporary housing through the city’s Housing Bureau. “The whole scenario troubled me. I felt that they were using Mrs. Jackson as a pawn in their protest. While they get to go home after their rallies, she has to go back to this house she’s unsafe in.”
Connelly says that for now, Jackson is getting water from her neighbors, and that the group has no intentions of pursuing the issue further. As for the future? “In two weeks, we will go public with another person reclaiming their home. This is just the start,” says Connelly.
I HAVE THE DEEPEST SYMPATHIES FOR ALICIA JACKSON, BUT SHE NEEDS TO SMARTEN THE FUCK UP AND STOP LETTING HERSELF BE USED BY THIS GROUP.
Agree. From what I gathered in previous stories and comments on this matter, the purchaser of the house from the bank after the foreclosure is I think a small, local family owned outfit (I’ve come across them in my work experience), not some evil corporate giant. Ms. Jackson would be best served to get some sound advice from a lawyer on how this will play out, as it seems like her current “supporters” want to take this to a bad place if they are “ready to attack if the bank steps in to take back her home.”
PortlandMaps.com says the house is currently owned by Fox Capital Corp, out of Beavercreek Oregon, but I can’t find much of an online presence for them. Facebook says they are a real estate agent, though.
There’s never much information, but it LOOKS like it was sold in 2004 for $130,000, and then foreclosed on in June of 2011 with $343,000 remaining on the loan. So that’s a lot of home equity loans, maybe? Missed payments, and penalties? Then it was sold again a few days later for $192k to the current owners – that’d be the market value. The bank that foreclosed would then take a write-off for the difference between $343k and $192k.
But we don’t get names for those, and without these articles we couldn’t even tell whether it was a foreclosure, so none of that is for certain.
I would like more details on what exactly happened with her home. There are many tragic tales from the last few years. Some serious wrong doing on the part of banks; but also some people who purchased homes that they probably shouldn’t have in retrospect.
I’d like to know more about what happened in her case before I can fully sympathize.
Ms Jackson has been brainwashed by this group that is just using her as their pawn. She’s the one that will face the brunt of any legal retaliation on the bank or true owner’s part. Shame on PLOC for their irresponsible, reprehensible actions. Everyone needs to get over this sense of entitlement, that somehow they are justified because all big banks are “evil.” Sure, some of them received taxpayer bailouts. I recommend venting your frustration in the voting booth or encouraging people to stop doing business with the banks.
@ Blabby, Unless we can get comfortable with the fact that the people who took the risky loans were generally far less sophisticated, thus less morally culpable for their part in the irresponsible lending, than the Mortgage Industrial Complex, then we’re never going to get anywhere in fixing this.
We need better (and better enforced) regulation of lending AND we need to do a better job (or any job at all) of educating the citizens of this country on basic financial literacy.*
If we get in the weeds of every shaky loan, we’re just going to keep judging the applicants over and over for taking loans they shouldn’t have been applying for, and we’ll just keep justifying not really doing anything at all of substance. It galls me the same way it does you that the money of responsible, financially literate people may be used to help irresponsible people/lenders out of their jams, but that’s just the way it goes.
* Lesson 1: Purchasing a home is not a birthright.
btw is she related to Steve Urkel?
@Colin – No, I disagree. The trap is in inventing a shadowy super-bad guy to blame EVERYTHING on. I know it’s comforting to have a cartoon figure like the “Mortgage Industrial Complex” around that you can point out and yell “EEEEVIL!” But life’s not a movie, and there is plenty of blame to go around.
And specifically, I disagree that people who took out huge equity loans are less sophisticated that those who didn’t. Those are the flashy people who trying to play the odds!
Reymont, your comments ignore the effect of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the massive ability of banks to package these mortgages together into securities that could be then sold without ever leaving the company. That corporate incentive led to commission-paid reps muscling clients into loans that the bank knew the borrowers couldn’t afford, all the while knowing it didn’t matter anyway bevause the securities would be sold into the market and any defaulted debt could be recaptured through foreclosure and resale. Banks were given a free pass by lawmakers and regulators alike to engage in some of the riskiest, most one-sided investment practices ever in this country. There certainly is plenty of blame to go around, but very little of it falls on the borrowers.
CC, I also have to disagree. While it is messy, I think we have to accept that the right thing probably happened here (i.e. foreclosure).
The bank gave a loan with the house as collateral and the borrower couldn’t pay the loan. How does giving the house back to the borrower solve anything? Can she pay now? Why should the bank give away a house, plus $200k in additional loans?
If this person gets $200k in free money, can I have $200k? If this person gets a free house, can I have one? Why not?
All of you have interesting points. I emphasize with this lady, but at what point do we cease to be responsible for debts? I know bank practices are shady here, but still. Hey Occupy, I need a house! And my friend is sick of paying her student loans….whaddya say?
@REYMONT: UNFORTUNATELY, THERE ESSENTIALLY WAS A SINISTER CABAL OF LENDERS THAT TARGETED PEOPLE AND ESSENTIALLY FORCED THEM INTO SUBPRIME LOANS WITH HIGHER INTEREST RATES (THAT’S MOST LIKELY WHY THIS HOUSE WAS SO FAR UNDERWATER ON THE LOAN).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/nyregion…
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/0…
NO ONE IS CLAIMING THAT PEOPLE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO FACE PERSONAL RESPONSABILITY, BUT THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER IS THAT THE LENDING AGENCIES LIED TO PEOPLE AND TOOK ADVANTAGE OF THEM. YOUR ARGUMENT IS ESSENTIALLY ABOUT TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHICH INDIVIDUALS ARE TO BLAIM, BUT THIS IS NOT ABOUT INDIVIDUALS. THE SYSTEM IS TO BLAIM AND BOTH THE PEOPLE WHO TOOK THE LOANS AND THE PEOPLE WHO PROVIDED THE LOANS ARE CULPABLE. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO GROUPS IS THAT THE LENDERS WORKED IN COLLUSION WITH EACH OTHER TO DEFRAUD THE BORROWERS AND THE BACKERS OF THE LOANS.
“Muscling clients into loans?” What do you think actually happened? What kind of back-room waterboarding bullshit fantasy are you people living in? I said it before: life’s not a movie.
How many of you bought houses during this time period? Did you have a goon twist your arm? Did they pull a gun, and threaten your children? Or did they simply present their current available interest rates and terms? Jesus Christ…
@REYMONT: GOOD JOB ON MISSING THE ENTIRE POINT.
Trade capslock for spell-check, someone.
@ Reymont, you continue to Reymont Things Up, by which I mean your tendency to judge every human by how far they deviate from being Reymonts. I don’t think you understand how lucky and unusual Reymonts are, statistically.
Non-Reymonts make up some huge portion of our country. Millions of Non-Reymonts took on outsized loans based on shaky assumptions. Non-Reymonts also worked for mortgage lenders, and encouraged those shaky assumptions. Non-Reymonts believe (wrongly, it turns out) that they’re doing the right things for the right reasons and making the right decisions.
The difference is that the people who profited on the lending/investment side from all this were more often Reymonts (though God knows most of them were nons) at higher levels of responsibility. At some point, Reymonts should have known that extending credit to non-Reymonts at teaser rates, with ridiculous balloons, with ludicrous valuations of the underlying asset, with no regard of the realistic ability of non-Reymonts to make payments for 30 years was a stupid thing to do.
The economy took an entirely-predictable shit, the non-Reymonts went broke, many non-Reymonts and Reymonts lost their homes and lending industry businesses, but the Reymonts at the top held us all hostage by being declared “too big to fail.”
So the uber-Reymonts got bailed out of their bad bets, the mid-Reymonts moved on to the next job, and the non-Reymonts all get kicked out of their homes.
Now, instead of going after the relative handful of Reymonts whose behavior needs to be adjusted to prevent another global financial collapse, many of us are far more motivated to nitpick over the individual circumstances of millions of non-Reymonts.
I just think that’s a waste of time and somewhat fucked, morally.
Colin summed it up pretty well, but since you responded directly and derisively to my comment, I’ll add:
The reality at banks in the post-Glass-Steagall era was one in which loans were aggressively pushed on non-loan customers at banks. Loan officers’ compensation was directly pegged to two things: number of loans and the amounts of those loans. This (and it’s not rocket science) created a significant incentive for lenders at the retail banking level to sign up as many mortgages as possible and at as a high a dollar amount as possible. This, in turn, coupled with an increasingly competitive general attitude toward business in America, led managers/lenders to temporarily lower rates, provide special “act now” offers and otherwise create scenarios that would go away after 6 months, leaving the new homeowner with far more jn financial obligations than they had been led to believe.
You can laugh at teh poorz all you want, but that doesn’t change the reality of what happened during the pre-crash years (and especially 2002-2007).
What she SHOULD have done was filed for chapter 13 bankruptcy. That would have stopped the foreclosure process under the supervision of the courts, and they could have renegotiated a payment plan. Did she choose not to? It’s a little too late now.
Yo. Since none of you commenters are lawyers, lemme tell you
Several different lawyers have told Alicia Jackson and the people who helped reclaim her home that the legal system cannot
CANNOT
help her hold onto it.
And that the best thing that she could do would be to do exactly what she is doing right now. Why don’t y’all armchair lawyers and computer screen activists stop giving the lady a hard time and show some respect for brave resistance.