this was the one place where it was private family time and the roosevelts made it very clear they did not want anyone but family here.

>> next on booktv laura gottesdiener looks at the impact of home foreclosures and evictions on african-american communities around the country. this is a little over an hour. >> thank you everyone for being here. i want to start by explaining some of the news you might have heard as you walked in. it's a mixed tape created by oral historians who wrote for the production to turn the oral history interviews into a recording. it's called home come to a musical for station in the struggle for housing and you can get a free download along with the book outside. now let's began with a true story. the police were at the door.

they were running footsteps on the stairs and then mrs. bigs open up a man shouted. 9-year-old tamayo bigs remembers the pounding of fists followed by the deliberate flood of a battering ram. she and her 7-year-old sister justice had justin finish their cereal in the two were playing barbie in the living room of the flat in chicago where their family lives. it was the weekend and later that afternoon she and her sisters plan to pick up their progress report cards from salazar elementary school. outside the pounding grew louder. she rushed to the window and peered out only to see seven police cars parked below with their lights flashing. the girl's mother awoke to the commotion and rushed to the door. she opened it and she saw seven police officers a blinding flashlight and your dreams exploding once again. the year was 2010. the first year that in the

united states history the banks seized more than 1 million homes. but evicting approximately 3000 families every single day. things began to happen fast in enough house. martha yelled at big girls to get dressed. they began grabbing blagg sub -- bags of clothing. jamiah and justice emerge from the bathroom and a female police officer knelt down to remind them to put on shoes. martha rousted 3-year-old-year-old son and coax them into the car. altogether the five of them fit but it was tight. martha and jamiah in the front seat justice damien squished between coats and clothing in the back. as martha drove away from that house that had been their home and headed to salazar elementary school she knew that this

infection was not only part of the 2008 housing crisis. she knew it was part of a much longer story one that stretched back to her own childhood and even further, one that stretched back to the founding of the united states, a story of housing race and freedom that weaves through the nation's history like the crisscross stitches of the fabric of a quilt. that was the story recounted by then not 11-year-old jamiah biggs last summer as a state with the family in their home in chicago. she was 11 at the time and it was part of a brutal heatwave, the worst heatwave the city was going to have that summer. she stood in front of me in a darkened living room and the lights were off to keep it cool. she closed her eyes tightly and concentration in the words just poured out. she put couldn't forget the sound of the battering ram and the lights on the police cars.

she told me later for months afterwards she asked her mother again and again and remember she was 11 at the time, why did the police come and take her home again? is that what the police are supposed to do? i me she opened her eyes and she said listen, galore of when i was homeless it wasn't like i was dirty because my mom made sure i wasn't. but then i was going to school with everything in my mind of what had happened. yesterday i got a house but what about today? i was going to school with everything in my mind of what happened the other night. yesterday i had a house but what about today? i might have to sleep in the car today. i might get a good meal today but will i get a good meal? will something go wrong? what will happen in? how will i get home tonight? thank you again for coming tonight and there are a number of people i want to thank but i will try to make it brief. thank you to busboys and poets

for hosting and c-span booktv for coming to film and everyone who made this possible public citizen the center for the study of responsive law and the institute for policy studies and the forward to this book. i read it and it was only five pages and i said oh that was everything i was trying to say in this entire book but he said it better. i want to thank rob robertson and the tube cofounders of take back the land national housing justice african-american lead in one of the most visionary networks is showing us how we can make housing different in the united states. i also want to thank everyone who is not here. all of the activists and all of the families who trusted me with their stories and open up their homes to me obviously without them there would be no book and there would be no event tonight. tonight i'm going to speak about my first book "a dream

foreclosed" black america and the fight for a place to call home. this book traces for families during the lead-up to and aftermath of the world's worst financial crisis since the great depression. the book follows the stories of martha garrett a grandmother in detroit who worked with her community to stop her eviction. michael hutchinson chattanooga tennessee who banded together with other residents of this public housing complex and stop the city from tearing it down. briggs wimbley and sanford north carolina who fought legally and aggressively what he calls a 10 year crime spree in which he dealt with every single major wall street bank and almost every single one of the criminal servicers and martha biggs the mother of jamiah who lived with her family and her young children as a homeless single mother for almost a decade in chicago until she worked with the chicago anti-eviction

campaign to find her family is safe place to live. but i want to make it clear from the onset i am not a financial reporter and more than the foreclosure crisis i'm going to speak tonight about how we choose to organize society and how that potentially -- we will travel from the insides of burned-out homes in chicago to liberated blocks in detroit to living rooms across the country. now let's begin with a simple question. what is whom? it such a small simple word with only four letters yet the power of this word home is nearly unrivaled. it is the price of epic heroes for whom could forget they homecoming of the dizzy as? when he gets home finally after being battered for almost a decade in the seas and the mixer to his house and his wife nlb test him and she says let's bring out the bed.

he says do not do that because he knew that he had constructed around a living tree and he was the only one that knew that secret. when he said those words she said i know you are my husband and now you belong in this home. that was when he was home. not when he reached the house and the structure but when he belonged in this house. or who could forget mom is yearning for decent home in raising of the sun and lauren hansberry's iconic plait? remember the mama and the rest of the family had been cooped up in this tiny little subdivided apartment on the south side of chicago. it was one of those tiny apartments where there were multiple families living in it because this landlord had thrown up drywall and allowed four or five or maybe six families to live in them. the only reason these african-american families had to tolerate the situation was because the white communities would not allow the men in the

federal government would not lend to these families. as a result they were forced to live in is exploited and indignant situation. she says finally after living there trapped in this tiny and indecent whom she says i will work 20 hours a day in all of the kitchens in chicago. i will strap my baby on my back if i have to inscribe all the floors in america and wash all the sheets in america if i have to but we have got to move. we have got to get out of here. home. if we stretch all the way back to the dawn of civilization we will remember it was stationary homes rather than mobile tents used by your nomadic communities that were the marker the heralding of what we consider to be human civilization. fast-forward to the united states and whom home is nearly synonymous to the idea of equality of poured mobility and freedom. yet is there a word more contested in the english language than the word whom?

as law professor anita hill rights referring to the 2008 housing crisis at the heart of this crisis is the ideological disconnect between home as a basic element of the american dream and a pathway to a quality and home as a market. since 2007 an estimated 10 million people have been forced from their homes through bank rep -- bankruptcy for closers and in all reality that is a conservative estimate. some people say 20 million people in other people say 30 million people but let's stick for a moment that the conservative estimate. 10 million. how much is 10 million? its the population of tunisia. it's more than 16 times the population of washington d.c.. it's the amount that wall street banks have already paid so far

this year in campaign contributions to the lawmakers who sit on the house financial services committee which is the house committee charged with regulating those things. did i mention that was $10 million just this year? it's also the population of the state of michigan the tenth most populous state. in other words it's as if bankers have affected every single man, woman and child in the great lakes state. are these numbers that we have heard of in the mainstream media? are the numbers we have heard from the government agencies that have not been set up to track this number or at the people affected are what happens to them after? how is it possible that the entire equivalent to the population of michigan has been forced from their homes and we didn't even hear about it? perhaps it's a reflection of how we value this crisis, that we have measured it in stock prices

rather than missed school days, that we have quantified in property values rather than family dinners or that we have spoken about it as shareholder profits rather than shuttered schools. we haven't in this country since 2007 only suffered an economic crisis, we have suffered a crisis of values of meaning and of the definition of our own lives. later this month is the 50th anniversary of the historic march on washington and martin luther king's iconic "i have a dream" speech. we remember many aspects of the speech in many aspects of this march. many of us are going to go to d.c. to commemorate this event but there are also words from his speech that have been erased from the history books and i want to read to you briefly from his speech so we remember them. we remember of course all of the images of little children

holding hands in alabama but we don't remember that martin luther king jr. was also talking about restructuring society so that we could achieve the economic equality and he said in a sense we have calm to our nation's capital to cash a check. when the architects of the republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution of the declaration of independence they were signing a promissory note to which every american was to fall. the snow was a promise that all men black men as well as white men would be guaranteeguaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. it is obvious today he said that america has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as as the citizens are concerned. instead of honoring this sacred obligation america has given the black people a bad check a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

in reading this now today i can't help but think of the scandal in hundreds of thousands of foreclosure checks were sent out after the scandal and they were required to send very little money, $500 sometimes 1000 to all of the hundreds of thousands of people who i've been thrown out of their homes illegally since 2007 and yet when these homeowners receive the checks they opened it and went to the bank and to everyone's surprise the checks bounced. but speaking more broadly today there is no greater evidence that the united states continued to fault on its constitutional promises to african-americans than the ongoing and racially slanted foreclosure crisis. because i'm not just talking about the superficial statistics like african-americans were twice as likely to be -- than white americans or the fact that african-americans with high credit scores with good credit ratings were three times more

likely to be sold predatory sub-prime loans than white americans with the same credit score. i'm not just talking about the fact that the wells fargo loan officer testified in court that wells fargo and to be clear all the other companies at the same time put quote bounties on the heads of minority borrowers and how did they do this? they paid cash incentives testified to aggressively peddled these sub-prime mortgages and communities of color. i'm not just talking about the fact that morgan stanley is currently being sued for violating the fair housing act in detroit. detroit which is undergoing the largest invisible bankruptcy in u.s. history. i'm also talking about the unique impact that the foreclosure crisis has said on african-american communities because as dozens of african-american scholars intellectuals and activists explained to me and these are their words and their insights,

cannot mind, african-americans have always had a unique relationship to whom driver property and access to the full rights of the u.s. constitution. as law professor marjorie and armstrong raced african-americans have a historical relationship to property that differs from that of other americans. our introduction to this country was as property and contemporary relations between african-american african-american and property are still impaired she wrote. but it's not simply houses structures that are at stake in this conversation. because holding private property and achieving the full citizen ship rights of americans have been directly tied census nations founding what is really at stake in this quest for home is freedom and full recognition that as a striking memphis sanitation workers proclaimed in 1968 i am a man.

as the low-wage workers are currently proclaiming right now across the country and their strikes again now predominantly people of color they are saying i am a man and i am a woman. in other words whom, and, ownership and economic rights give access to the original american dream, the dream of democracy. it is fitting that we are speaking about democracy because this project again on a plane to a place that just lost theirs. detroit michigan which has been mentioned is currently undergoing the municipal bankruptcy. i was going at the time two years ago to see first-hand what i have heard only whispers about masses of people stopping in evictions. other sliding bankrupt buildings whole blocks being taken over. people setting up communities outside the control of capitalism. in other words i was hearing

about -- at the time i had been an active participant in occupy wall street in new york city so i knew something about liberated zones. in the fall i lived in zucotti park and worked in the people's kitchen we called it. a new and liberated zones would organize for the collective rather than the individual and i knew that we organize liberty zone so we could meet everyone's basic needs and any work they did however hard they were working that was valued enough to ensure. i knew it was a place where time grew long enough to listen to everyone's story and then talk to everybody and learn their names. i learned that it was a place not of utopia. i'm not foolish enough to think that that a contested zone, a zone organized and established to challenge the absolute control of money and corporations over our daily lives.

the idea of this movement that i was experiencing in new york the idea that it had spread from downtown public spaces and into neighborhoods particularly the neighborhoods that were most victimized by the banks, well that was something i found almost unbelievable. i got on a plane and landed in detroit and after unfortunately realizing they had no public transportation there i've met finally a woman named birth of there. the first day i met bertha we were in her living room late on a sunday afternoon. she had just gotten back from church and she was wearing one of the most magnificent and dignified outfits i had ever seen. i grew up in suburban mostly white america so i wasn't used to the sheer beauty and dignity of the 65-year-old african-american woman raised in alabama and still very religious in detroit. she was wearing a white pressed suit with pin ruffles and embroidered muslim shawl a

cream-colored smock and a large rimmed white southern hap. she looked to me like the absolute opposite person that i could ever imagine to take direct action to protest anything. remember i was living with a collective anarchist who rarely showered and had long hair in dreads. i was shocked as this woman told me her story over the course of six or seven hours. after 22 years her husband and she fell into foreclosure as the result of the second predatory mortgage. she tried for years to scrape by. her children pitched in. her grandchildren pitched in but finally she could not any longer pay. she tried to fight the foreclosure in court ricci contacted a lawyer but ultimately her lawyer said maam i'm sorry but there's nothing i can legally do for you. the bank owns her home. it's been repossessed. this home is no longer yours. it was about that time that people started talking about

birth of behind your back because she was saying things that sounded pretty unbelievable. she said something to me for example. she said it was not that i didn't understand that the banks owned the piece of paper. it was that the banks didn't understand that i owned my home. she said those types of things and one of her friends whispered to her eldest daughter, i think your mother might have to see it doctor. she didn't need to sit be a doctor as she called up the newspaper and her church group and called everyone in her community and the day of her scheduled a fiction that day that the city dispatch someone to park a dumpster in front of her house and then the city contractors were going to haul out all of her belongings all the thing she had amassed after the 22 years of living in her home raising six grandchildren there, six children there and many more grandchildren she called up all her neighbors and these hundreds of people amassed on her front lawn and stood in

the street in front of neighbors houses and stood in front of her own home and said you can't park that dumpster here. so the dumpster left. later that day she went downtown to meet with a representative bank of new york mellon date tank to claim her mortgage after they shuttled around as a result of the process. she spoke to the bank representative and they said i'm sorry man but you don't have an appointment today. she said oh well if i can't come in today than nobody can come out. the 65-year-old grandmother dressed in very similar quite pressed suit laid down in front of the office of the bank and refused to move. the papers got wind of this naturally in the next day the bank called up and said call off the dogs. we will sell you back this house. it is yours. we don't want it. you have to call off the dogs. a few weeks later just a few

days in fact after i had gone to visit her in her living room she sat down with a the representative and she finally signed the papers -- papers to out right on the home that had already been hers for 22 years. i've heard that story and i was hooked. i had to find out what made these liberated spaces and what inspired some neighborhoods in some communities do not suffer silently in shame as the bank stole millions of homes? i wanted to learn what spurred communities to organize for their rights while others didn't so i traveled the country and i met communities in suburban north carolina and urban chattanooga tennessee minneapolis minnesota and very rimm western pennsylvania. i heard pretty incredible stories. i heard a story about a man in toledo who on the day of his eviction got a bunch of bricks and a bunch of cement and sealed himself into his house and force

the sheriffs department to spend days literally drilling him out. i heard a triumphant story about a woman named monique white in minneapolis. about a week before scheduled a fiction sheet too called up a construction company but this time she wanted to get hundreds of dollars worth of dirt and mulch so she organized a huge dump truck to pick up the mulch and drop it at her house. when the neighbor said what does all the dirt for? she said it's to plant a garden because i'm not moving. she planted the garden and the tank caved in she is still there. when i went there she was teaching other people how to group kale and cabbage and carrots and all the good stuff you can grow in minneapolis. i heard people recount stories that made -- almost didn't believe except they were telling them. this is how one retired firefighter explained the

blockade the safer home. she said my daughter calls and said the sheriff was here so i called jr and before you know it all these people are my porch shouting fight, fight and people are coming by bicycle and everyone's saying we are people. my neighbors are on the porch is yelling we have got a story. why? the construction worker down the street is coming over in the porch was filled with people chanting to tell the whole wide world that this is people's territory. the eviction blockade she said was out in full force. it was such a beautiful thing she said. i felt like i was floating outside of myself. i was watching all these people on my front lawn defend my home. i met organizers and activists from the chicago anti-addiction campaign and occupy homes chapters across the country and take back the land nationally and cities like boston and a

moratorium and chattanooga organizing and so many more that i won't bore you with the list. the more i traveled the more i realized african-americans unique relationship to home, the story of struggle and dreams had stretched to the present day had made many of these communities actually better equipped to respond to the crisis. sure they were being disproportionately attacked by wall street but they were also better organized and most importantly to me at least more visionary in the proposals that they were imagining for how they could restructure the system. as one of the cofounders of take back the land said we are in a transformative moment. because this crisis is firmly rooted in the housing crisis i think we are going to have significant changes in the way people think about not only housing but land it self. in other words and i want to make this really clear calm kite i didn't focus on these neighborhoods because they were

hit disproportionately hard. i focused on these communities because they were the most organized in resistance and all of us of all races have something to learn from them. yet it wasn't until my second shift to chicago that i learned that organizing isn't always an act undertaken by the theory or political beliefs. i learned that oftentimes activist still choose to be activists. they do so out of a sick survival. i started with a story of jamiah and justice and martha and damien. i want to tell the story now of justice. she is on the cover. it's not the stock image of a little girl. it's a photograph of justice one of martha's daughters and it was taken and i want to say this by an extraordinary young photographer in chicago named fred lewis.

and so -- the story of justice is that she was born during the trials of martha's decade of homelessness. the story began in cabrini grain one of the most infamous housing projects in the country. at its peak it had 25,000 people. it was never intended for that many but people were in such dire need that they crowded into apartments. the mayor of chicago decided the late 1990s he was going to transform the city of chicago. his plan was essentially two-tiered the public housing projects down including the one in which martha live. he also had a plan to build 40,000 new units but unfortunately that didn't happen. martha along with 25,000 of her neighbors and children were effected and that began the cycle of homelessness that stretch throughout much of the 2000's. when justice was born -- he

named her justice because she said it will be justice if i am never homeless again. i learned that martha became an activist at the chicago anti-eviction campaign not out of political beliefs but out of sheer necessity, sheer survival because she is one of the million economic refugees in this country. ..

>> she told her story and then said, i declare this bank owned home liberated because it makes no sense if the banks own more homes than the number of people who are homeless in this country. this system is messed up, the economic system illogical, and i, frankly, need a place to put my kids to sleep at night, and so when i stayed with her in that home where she diff is and lives, she knows it's precarious, but she knows it's the safest place they've been in a very long time. when i do radio interviews, i'll be frank, people say i'm outraged by the author's position because doesn't she understand if people stop paying their mortgage and start so-called liberating homes, my interest rate is going to rise. it's a real question; right? everybody doesn't want to necessarily live in a liberated house on the southside of the chicago, but i want to emphasis, what i think is very important is the long-term strategy,

long-term visions of groups like take back the land and chicago antieviction campaign, and many more. this vision is that we have to move towards structuring and restructuring land in the country in a way that will rep di simple ris of economic disparities and exploitations, and we have to deal with this not only for those victimized, but all of us. we have to form community land truceses, legal structures that allow for community control of land. i won't bore you with details because this is not a legal analysis and books exist, and i recommend you check them out, but i want to talk about potential of these types of structures. a lot of decisions are made now, not necessarily by our communities, but by people far away with the capital. i want to proposal, imagine if

we created a society in which communities had control over not only housing, but also environmental issues like mining and fracking. also, educational policies and decisions like standardized testing, also hospitals, should they be opened or closed? prisons, should they be formed in our community, and should we arrest and incarcerate so many young people of color? the food supply, eat food with gmos or try to grow food locally? imagine if we made these types of decisions, for example, in appalachia, where mountain top removal is destroying an evicting so many rural white communities. do you think they would vote for mountain top removal? this is not necessarily a socialist policy. it's simply a pot sigh to begin to recalibrate the balance of community in the culture, one i

hope everybody will consider. i want to speak briefly about the role of journalists because, essentially, i traveled the country hearing exciting stories, witness an arrest campaign, home liberations, and i went home and shuddered myself in my apartment and wrote for about a year. what is the role of the journalist, the story teller in a social movement? well, i'll never forget something my mom told me, who is here today, and i thank you for coming. she said to me, people who feel powerless gravitate to powerful stories because their own stories are so disempowering. right now, she said, many of us feel powerless. our challenge is to make a story that's more powerful than the current narrative and just to remember what the current narrative is, a belief in competition between individuals as the driving force in history. i'm certainly not saying that individualism is a bad thing, but i am saying that if there's

no shared community tieing these individuals together, we would be no more than distrustful walking manicans wearing price tags to intimidate the others. right now, there's a grassroots surge of transformative action in communities, scorned, ignored by mainstream media, liberated neighborhoods in the country and nobody knows about it. if history is a come pielation of actions, propose narrative is a junction, a friction of meaning and stories together that tie together actions and allow us to imagine what they represent, which is a new culture that's more humane. one ben dpit of -- benefit of being a journalist, i get to hear unaccountable story, and i heard one last night i want to share with the audience coming from a man in washington state who is facing foreclosure.

he just finished my book, and he said, the story parallels my own because i, also, have reames of paper and letters sent. one eye-opening thing is the fight against spf serving as i'm the ones i'm currently dealing with. sobering. he said the sense of loneness i share is the underlying issue. i heard some people say about me behind my back, why not just get a job and pay the mortgage? that i do work, that i teach young people how to live more sustainably, and that i carry on a working farm, apparently, somehow, does not the count as work because it doesn't make enough money to pay the bank back what they've already been reimbursed for. yet, what i appreciated is that what he said next, and he said that he felt inspiration more than anything else in learning about the stories of the people who fought back. he said, ultimately, there's so

many moments of pride in our human spirits, and moments of, oh, my god, how could that have happened? since we wove our way back to words and definitions, as always seems to happen when you're in a bookstore, it's now, at this moment, that i'd like to propose a third definition of homes. remember what we began with? we began with communities and commodities, collections of where people live or a market product. it's a sharp dichotomy, but i want to cut through it in some way and propose my own definition. i'd like to say that home is a form of shelter. it's a basic necessity for human survival, and as such, home is a basic human right. we know that as frederick douglass said, how we are

conceived nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will. my demand today is that housing be recognized as a human right in this country. when i say this on the radio or television, i'm often told this is an unreasonable demand. what i permly think is unreasonable is that in the richest nation in the world, under a government that has figured out how to collect all my e-mail and phone logs, under an e-mail that is figured out how to wage war with remote controls and construct the largest prison system in u.s. history and in world history, we can't figure out how to structure society such that everybody has a basic place to put their children to sleep at night? housing must be recognized as a human right, and the power that won't or can't figure out how to ensure the right, we should figure out how to have the right

to liberate homes and land ourselves. it is this type of collective liberation that people across the country, people like bertha garret, people like martha bigs are already doing. now i propose it is our time to join them. thank you. [applause] >> thank you for that amazing, amazing summary of your book. so we are, of course, we'll have the author signs the event after the event concluded. books are available in the bookstore, and then we'll have laura on stage to sign the copy.

with that, i will open up the floor for questions for laura. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. >> what do you think of the strategy, and what do you think is going to happen? >> yeah, i think that's a great question. thank you for bringing that up. boycott is an interesting word because i call it redline, when you refuse to lend in a neighborhood, and in my book, that was made illegal in 1968 and 1977 with the passage of the fair housing act and lending agent. to summarize, briefly, if not

aware, richmond, california, and a dozen other cities across the country that have been hard hilt by foreclosure are investigating and perhaps implementing richmond could be the first to do it, a policy to use imminent domain to seize mortgages, right down the principle so reduce the amount owed by families, and then sell it back to the homeowner who then makes their regular mortgage payments. first off, let's back up for a second. why would they be in the business of doing this? in cities like richmond, california, many other cities across the country, particularly, communities of color, but all races and socioeconomic statuses, many, many people, in richmond, more than 50%, are underwater on their mortgage. what it means when you're underwater on mortgage is you owe more on the principle of the mortgage, you pay more than the home is worth. i spoke to someone in detroit, michigan, for example, that was

21 times underwater meaning their house was about, you know, worth something very low because the housing price plummeted, and they owed 20 times more on their house than their house is currently worth. it's well-documented by a number of economic agencies including the imf, the international monetary fund, one of thee most conservative neoliberal capitalist organizations in the world that when you are underwater on your mortgage, you are more likely to go into default, and that widespread principle reduction, reducing the amount owed, would help us get out of the housing crisis. the banks are opposed to doing this because we cut into their take so cities like richmond, california say, well, if you won't do it, and the federal government is not making any moves to doing it, we're going to do it. we're going to see mortgages through imminent domain, the city's right, write down the

principle, give it back to the homeowner, who will make the payments. we have to do something for the neighborhood. the banks are, obviously, opposed to it. i'm excited about the proposal, if you can't tell from my attitude,. banks are a posed, but what's interesting to me is the federal government is also very opposed to the policy, also taking a hard line in saying we will take to court any city that implements the plan, and the opponent of the policy is ed demarco, acting director of the fhfa, essentially on the way out, but overseeing the now government entities of fannie mae and freddie mack, bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars, now government entities, guaranteed more than 80% of mortgages now issued, yet even though they are owned by the government, they have been the most aggressive opponent of

principle reduction of any foreclosure prevention programs, and particularly, this policy proposed in richmond, california. to me, i think it's unsurprising that the banks would oppose this because it would be digging into their paycheck. what's disappointing to me is that the federal government has again taken the side of the banks, and, again, using its legal power and its bullying power as the federal government to say they will boycott or red line or sue any local government taking care of its own citizens. again, when we talk about, you know, control from far away versus localized control, collective control, community control, you can see there is attention, and right now, other mayors are interested in trying to move forwards a policy to

help their community. >> any other questions? >> sure, in the back. >> [inaudible] >> 30 thirty-year mortgages, i could be wrong, not that they aren't effective now, but they are under threat, and they may be under threat because, recently, in phoenix, president obama, just about two weeks ago

now, gave a speech about his unvailing brand new plan for the housing market in the united states, and if you noticed in the speech, the centerpiece was that he wanted to draw down fannie mae and freddie mack, and rather than replace them with any other type of government entity, what he wants to do is quote his own words, allow the private market to form the backbone of the u.s. housing market. when he says that, he says it to advocate that private lenders assume more risk, so if they make these speck spectacular pr, they should assume more risk. it's a false promise for two reasons. one, if they got into serious financial trouble, we learned from the bailout rounds of 2007 and 2008, we got their backs, but also that in his plan, we'd

likely have a government guarantee of the mortgage-backed securities, and mortgage-backed securities are the bundles that the mortgages are placed into so they go through the securitization chain where they were sold off from one bank to the next bank to the next bank and to investors. the process is used, banks don't actually have any risk in any state, frankly, in whether or not we pay back our mortgages because they've already been paid out. it's possible the 30-year mortgage could be under attack. we don't know yet. we don't know that obama really does want to draw down fannie and freddie or if it's possible, but i think the important part of this debate is that it used

to be the backbone and moved to the sub prime variable rates, ballooning mortgage, and many could not pay, unpayable debts, and more than anything else, dprawing back to the different ways we experienced from the housing in the united states, it used to be every white american received a 30-year fixed mortgage. you'd have to have ruined, ruined credit to get anything else, but in redline communities, you received -- african-americans received loans from lenders called loan sharks because they were so predatory, loans that mirror pretty closely the loans that we experience as the sub -- as the rise of the

sub prime mortgage market started to kind of balloon in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s. what we saw, and many scholars referred to it, is the marginalization and predatory actions, that at one point in history, only could happen in the secondary market, go completely mainstream and affect people of all races and religions, and we didn't need discriminatory lender practice to make it a mainstream market product. we're seeing the increasing radicalization of financial products wall street sells to us and defending things like the 30-year fixed mortgage or the rights local cities to reduce the principles of imminent domain or creation of structures, all ways to fight back against increasingly radical, and predatory products of wall street.

>> you were talking about a woman who was homeless for ten year, and i was wondering what strategies that she came up with to kind of raise a family while being homeless? >> yeah. >> yeah. >> thanks for that question. that was something that really impressed me. i remember speaking to her, and she, at the time, was -- she just finished 6th grade, post going to 7th grade, but they wanted her in 8th because her grades were good. it's well-documented, obviously, if you are homeless as a child, your grades suffer, test scores suffer, very difficult for you to function in society and grow up to be a thriving adult, but martha became a very fierce and protective mother in a situation where it was very hard to protect her children.

the backseat of the car was the homework section. she went to school early sometimes, her and her sisters, and they did the homework there because martha knew that getting out of the cycle of poverty was the goal not just for her children, but also for herself, and in this generation. it was difficult. she told stories of breaking up her children, all going to different relatives' houses, and children said, we used to hear the adults gossip about our mother and hear them say things, like, why doesn't she come and pick up her kids? they wanted to say, hey, you don't know what my mother is going through, but they didn't want to jeopardize the ability to stay at their house, so they held silent. martha knew they said those things too, but there was nowhere to take them. she could not. she work at numerous minimum wage jobs throughout the ten years, held the jobs, yet they didn't pay enough to represent

an apartment, so she said i knew i had nowhere to take them, so i would just let the phone ring and lay down in the back of the van. next question? >> >> going back to a collective quick because it was interesting what you mentioned earlier in just maybe, speak to the mere experience, even from interviewing everyone in the process of your book as part of the occupy movement, how effective is it, really, for people just to take over a house, live in it, like, is that something that -- have any success stories from that? >> yeah. thanks for that question. it's challenging. it's easy to idolize these types of actions and turn them into utopias. the things are challenging. that's why i really wanted to talk about the fact that sometimes people are not taking these actions out of, you know,

some negotiations, but they are taking them out of basic survival as an economic refugee in the country, but to refer to the question about collective, you know, i saw very interesting things. i saw the way that people organized communities, seeing these collectives, and i remember, for example, being inside a 24-hour home occupation in minneapolis. it was a cruise family home occupation, and for about, it was ultimately, about a month, and there was 24 hours people staying in this home because fannie mae was trying to evict the family from the home and repossess it, and they said, no, we're protecting this family. people were taking shifts, you know. you went into the house, too big shifts, and i stayed there three or four nights. no incidents when i was there, but later, the result of the theory is a very intense police raid, but you walk in, and everything's structured. there's rules on the walls, and there's lists, and there's rules about the dishes, and it's sort of like being in a house of an

overproductive mother, and you have to do everything right and you know the rules, but it was not authoritarian in any way. it was that the community was trying to come together and unlearn the type of selfish and greedy behavior that is inscribedded inside us as a result of living in a capitalist society. it was almost structured to talk about how would we organize the commute better? there were meetings, usually short, rented a protocol, what happens if the police show up, who do you call, what role do you take in that, and we watched movies, revolutionary movies, about liberation movements, ect., and i remember just feeling that, okay, there's a lot of process, a lot of process in collectives if anybody participated in that, but the point is to ensure things are fair, and maybe it makes sense to go through process to ensure

things are fair. >> i examples of a country that have fairer ways to make housing available to people whether it's privately or collectively owned so there's models, like we have models in national health care. >> yeah. >> that don't work in our current system. great question, a great question. there's a few countries, a few models, and all, if interested, you can investigate further. i was recently at a conference for latin american countries and social movements, talking to a representative, a lawyer in the ecuador government, and i was saying, well, what happened? you know, we had a massive housing crisis, that's what i'm researches, but what did you do

as a lawyer and government, what did you do? oh, we looked north. we saw what was going on with you guys, and we immediately created a national bank, and the national bank gives out most of the loans and most of the mortgages. they only do fixed rate mortgages. they don't have any of the predatory loans we have here as essentially mainstream and acceptable products, and they also have lots and lots of government programs intended for people who are maybe in default or in foreclosure to try to get out of it. their goal is to have a low foreclosure rate. that's the difference. it's not a perfect model, but their priorities, in my opinion, are better. we prefer not to throw people out of their homes rather than throw people out of their home, and we will establish a lending and governmental agency that by and large is trying to do the same thing. we have not seen that, obviously, with fannie and freddie, and we have, obviously,

not seen that with wall street banks. europe, also, most of western europe, has better models than we do, sort of one historical tidbit, was in -- i didn't get into the history, the book, there's a lot of history and the rise in public housing happened after the great depression; right? because, you know, millions of people were thrown from their home. actually, millions and millions of people were thrown out then, not now, but 2010 had pretty much the same eviction rate once you recalibrate for population changes as, you know, the 1933, 1934, but, actually, it was roughly the same rate, but, still, a massive tragedy loss of evictions with the loss of the rise of the public housing. as a adhere -- theory, it rose in academic circles, and when people looked at models, like you are today, they said, what has done it better? you know, what countries have done it better? they looked to lots of countries in western europe that after

world war i decided they would reconstruct countries by building millions and millions of units of public housing. the idea we have to build countries back up, a lot of war, bombings, ect., we need to construct public housing, and they wrote modern housing, a study of the socialized housing in western europe, and that was the proposal that became public housing in the united states. thanks for that question. i got one in the corner. >> i had a question in regards to the 1990, and the mayor at that time -- [inaudible]

did they have a plan at that time as to what to do? >> a logical question; right? >> yeah, and any other cities that have a different model in terms of dealing with, the clothing, you know, public housing, and how they have plan, you know, dc, for example? >> yeah, i have to apologize. i'm not an expert, but i can certainly speak to chicago and other major u.s. cities. i appreciate that question because it does -- it's a logical question; right? they are going to evict 25,000 residents, robert taylor, approximately 20,000 more residents, many other public housing projects, 10,000 residents, ect., where are these 50,000, 60,000 people going to go? there were two plans. one was they get section 8, these vouchers given out by the federal government, and you can acquire subsidized housing using

this voucher. the other plan was that chicago was going to rebuild 40,000 unites of public housing. deal with the latter plan first, it's simple leer, never happened, there was an economic collapse, never built any back. that maybe is an example for the future when you hear about a plan for a city destroying things they need and going to build it up, but you don't know what the economic situation will be, be skeptical about that. to talk about section 8 for a moment, because that comes up a lot in the book, and it's really contested in housing justice circles. section 8 is a federal plan run by hud, and it is, essentially, a way to subsidize people who need help living in the private housing market, so what you, lucky, get a voucher, go around and you don't have to, you know, but landlord can take you, and then hud pays, you know, the federal government pays