Squatting Through the Tough Times?

by Leigh Graham

Published April 11, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT

Across the country, non-profits such as the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) and Miami's Take Back the Land are assisting newly homeless households occupy foreclosed homes.  The Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philly

"maintains seven 'human rights houses' shared by 13 families.  Cheri Honkala, who is the national organizer for the [PPEHRC] and was homeless herself once, likened the group’s work to “a modern-day underground railroad,” and said squatters could last up to a year in a house before eviction.

Up to one year?  Considering that 75% of Americans will experience at least one year of poverty at some point in their lifetime, should we reconsider these illegal yet sensible squatting actions, especially during this economic crisis?

We've written previously about such aggressive steps against homelessness and blight (here, here and here).  We've made the points that neighbors often support these steps in an effort to maintain their own property values, and city officials and banks are ambivalent about such actions.  What I hadn't considered is the temporal dimension to this - i.e., could this be a shrewd step to buy families some much needed time to recapture some income they can ultimately use towards owed or new housing payments?

In my own romatic myopia, I've seen these efforts mainly as acts of resistance, logical if belated ones against an unfair playing field that overburdened lower-income families with dubious loans, unrealistic promises of an American Dream, and a lack of appropriate economic supports to alleviate what becomes a rapidly increasing economic crisis when that first payment is missed.  Now I see that these squatter placement programs are a formalization of grassroots actions that we might consider scaling up in this particular moment, and perhaps codify for future economic crises.

From what I can tell timelines to vacate foreclosed properties vary by state and case, but the common thread seems to be that once the sale occurs and/or eviction notice arrives, foreclosed owners need to get out and quickly. Given the number of foreclosures and their geographic concentrations, what if we had some sort of law that at some measurable level of crisis (sort of like a disaster/national emergency trigger) municipalities/states and banks were obliged to work out a slower transition with foreclosed homeowners, automatically converting them to renters and/or giving them a set six to nine month period to vacate the premises?  Is this similar to the "cram-down" legislative proposals?  Where are my legal advocates and housing policy people here?

It just seems to me that such a program would make a lot more sense than this, which is what it's coming to in communities around the country.

(Photo of Bank of America protest in Boston by Adam Pieniazek)