At 11 o’clock on a chilly, sunny March morning, Inez Williams’ house is scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction.
Williams and her husband, Bill, bought the house—a 1,428-square-foot, three-bedroom home on St. James Avenue in Springfield—for $81,000 in November of 2000. Within a year, her husband had died.
Williams continued working at her long-time job at a local college until she retired eight years ago, and has experienced both financial and health struggles, including a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009. While her children and grandchildren were able to help out at times, Williams began having trouble paying her mortgage payments of about $1,400 a month. She hasn’t made a payment since last October, and in January of this year, her lender, Midland Mortgage, part of MidFirst Bank of Oklahoma, notified the 71-year-old Williams that her home would be foreclosed and sold at auction.
Forty-five minutes before the auctioneer is due, a crowd has already begun gathering on the front lawn of Williams’ house. But they’re not eager potential buyers—they’re here to fight the auction.
A large red banner hangs across the front window of Williams’ house: “No One Leaves!” it reads. “?Nadie Se Mude!” That’s the calling card of Springfield’s No One Leaves campaign, a coalition that formed to fight for those it considers the ultimate casualties of the U.S. mortgage crisis—the former owners and tenants left without homes, and the communities that suffer when a wave of foreclosures leaves one house after another vacant—and to fight against the real villain in this crisis: unscrupulous lenders who played fast and loose with the law, unleashing an economic crisis that’s affecting all Americans.
The circumstances of Inez Williams’ foreclosure are unique to her. But her situation is all too familiar to many homeowners, particularly in Springfield.
In 2010, almost 2.9 million properties were foreclosed on in the U.S. In Massachusetts alone, there were 12,233 completed foreclosures last year, according to statistics compiled by the Boston-based Warren Group, which tracks real estate data. Of those, 595 were in the city of Springfield—more than in any other community in the commonwealth.
Prior to No One Leave’s formation last fall, Springfield already had a number of organizations that work with homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages, or displaced former owners and tenants. They include the law firm of Heisler, Feldman, McCormick and Garrow, which practices, in the words of partner Joel Feldman “progressive poverty law,” representing poor clients in civil cases without charging up-front fees. (The firm is supported by fees collected when it wins cases.)
Much of the firm’s work over the years has focused on housing matters, including tenants’ rights and housing discrimination cases. As the mortgage crisis exploded, more and more clients sought help with foreclosures and evictions, and the firm became interested in addressing the problem in a bigger, more systemic way than their case-by-case work with individual clients allowed, Feldman said.
Working with their allies at community groups, the attorneys turned for inspiration to Boston’s Project No One Leaves, which grew out of housing advocacy work done by City Life/Vida Urbana, a community organization based in Jamaica Plain. Last fall, Springfield activists formed the local No One Leaves campaign, a coalition of social-justice groups, including the American Friends Service Committee, Jobs with Justice, Springfield Partners for Community Action, the Pioneer Valley Project, and Universal Community Voices Eliminating Disparities, as well as the Western New England College chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
The coalition has one paid staffer, Malcolm Chu, who began working as a housing activist as a teenager in his native Brooklyn and continued his activism after moving to western Mass. to attend UMass. He works out of Heisler, Feldman’s downtown office. In the early planning days, it became clear that while there were many local groups that wanted to help with the effort, none had the resources to dedicate to running the No One Leaves campaign, Feldman said. So the firm decided to hire Chu to be No One Leave’s organizer. “We felt we were in a position to have the money, and it’s what the law firm is all about,” Feldman said.
The Springfield group has adopted the “sword and shield” model used by their counterparts in Boston. The “sword” represents the kinds of actions that took place at Inez Williams’ house—public actions meant to draw attention to the situations faced by affected families, and to demonstrate the level of community support (and, if necessary, resistance) behind them.
The “shield,” meanwhile, represents the legal protections homeowners and tenants have in the foreclosure process—protections many don’t even realize they have until it’s too late, Marielle Macher of Boston’s Project No One Leaves told the Advocate.
That includes protection from being evicted without cause. Under a Massachusetts law passed last summer, lenders who foreclose on a property cannot evict tenants without just cause, such as a failure to pay their rent or other violations of their lease.
Former owners who’ve been foreclosed on have fewer rights than renters, “but they still have rights that are available,” Macher continued. “The biggest one is they can’t just toss you out without going to court.” Instead, the law requires that before an eviction can take place, the lender or new owner needs to go to court to prove that he or she has legal ownership and the right to force the tenant to leave.
While some states require a bank to go to court to foreclose on a property, Massachusetts does not have such a law. That could change, though, if an effort led by Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin is successful.
Galvin has proposed a new law that would, among other things, require mortgage lenders to get judicial approval before they could foreclose on a property. To get that approval, the lender would have to provide to the court an affidavit swearing that the lender holds legal title to the property and that the foreclosure is justified. The affected homeowners would have the right to legally contest the foreclosure.
Galvin’s proposal is especially relevant in light of recent revelations about the many cases of illegal foreclosures that have taken place, as lenders aggressively pushed through foreclosure documents without proper review—the so-called “robo-signing” scandal. In fact, it was the cases of two Springfield homeowners that shone an especially bright light on that problem. In January, the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court upheld an earlier Land Court ruling that had voided the foreclosures of two properties in Springfield. In both situations, Land Court Judge Keith Long had found, the lenders that foreclosed on the properties—U.S. Bancorp in one case; Wells Fargo in the other—had failed to demonstrate that they held title to the properties before the foreclosures.
The ruling affects not just the two Springfield homeowners, but thousands of homeowners across Massachusetts, throwing the validity of the foreclosures on their properties into question. Shortly after the SJC ruling, Galvin filed a bill that would create a special court, through the Land Court, to resolve cases involving such improper foreclosures.
Requiring all foreclosures to first be approved by a court, supporters say, would both protect homeowners from illegal foreclosures and ensure that prospective buyers could be certain that the property has a clear title. Twenty-three other states already require judicial approval before foreclosures can take place. In January, a bill was filed in the Mass. House of Representatives that would require court approval of foreclosures. Locally, state. Rep. Ben Swan (D-Springfield) is among the sponsors of that bill, which is awaiting a hearing from the Joint Committee on the Judiciary.
*
With a half hour to go until the auction, the crowd outside Williams’ house continues to grow. They form a picket line on the sidewalk, waving signs: “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “CEOs Get Bonuses, Families Get Notices,” “MidFirst Bank, Shame On You!”
Chu, the No One Leaves organizer, picks up a bullhorn and leads the group in a few practice chants. “Pain for the many, profits for the few. Wall Street banks, we’re coming for you!” they yell.
“What do we do when banks attack? Stand up, fight back!”
Earlier this morning, Chu says, he spoke to a mortgage counselor at MidFirst to ask the bank to consider modifying Williams’ loan—something she’s been requesting for months. “They continue to refuse to work with her,” he reports. The bank, Chu says, maintains that Williams doesn’t have the income to support a new loan, but that’s because the lender won’t consider the $800 a month her mentally disabled adult son, who lives with her, contributes to the household from his disability benefits. While Williams’ son has lived in the house since his parents bought it, the bank says there’s no way to prove that he’ll continue to stay there, according to Chu.
(Contacted later by the Advocate, David Collins, senior vice president of MidFirst Bank, Midland Mortgage’s parent company, declined to comment on Williams’ case. “While we can not discuss any specific loan or customer situation for privacy reasons, MidFirst Bank provides mortgage servicing functions in strict compliance with all rules, regulations, and requirements for the mortgage servicing industry,” he said in a written statement.)
This is actually the second time Williams’ home has been on the auction block. An earlier auction had been scheduled back in February. On that day, about 20 protesters had shown up, and the auctioneer, after speaking to the organizers, left without holding the sale.
“The banks expect to be able to push people out,” Chu says. “They’re definitely surprised that we’re out here every time.
“This isn’t just a one-time thing,” he adds. “We’ll keep coming back and fight and fight until we can’t fight anymore.”
That commitment to fight, as a community, is the “sword” part of the No One Leaves model.
Of the people who showed up at Inez Williams’ house to protest her foreclosure auction, many were members of community and labor groups; at one point, the picketers called out, in turn, the groups they represented: Arise for Social Justice, Jobs with Justice, Mass. Senior Action Council, the North End Organizing Network, the Springfield Institute, SEIU. (Also represented was at least one local politician: City Council President and mayoral candidate Jose Tosado, who sent his campaign co-chair, Ernesto Cruz, to tell the crowd that the councilor couldn’t make the demonstration but supports their efforts.)
Perhaps more important than the institutional support was the presence of other residents who are facing foreclosures and evictions themselves. No One Leaves includes a Bank Tenant Association, made up of renters in foreclosed properties and former homeowners still living in houses that have been, or soon will be, foreclosed on. The group mobilizes bank tenants to fight for themselves and each other. One of their goals, Feldman said, is to “allow people to bring their own power to bear.”
Every Saturday, a group of No One Leaves volunteers heads out on the streets of Springfield with a list of properties scheduled for foreclosure. At each stop, the volunteers let the tenants or homeowners know about the coming foreclosure, inform them of their legal rights, and invite them to join the group in its efforts. The Bank Tenant Association meets weekly, on Tuesdays evenings in Springfield, to discuss cases, share information and plan protests. A group of about 15 local attorneys provide legal advice to affected families, following the same, no-upfront-fee model his firm uses, Feldman said.
Sometimes, Chu said, the canvassers find that the residents have no idea their homes are about to be foreclosed on; in many cases, they know an auction is planned and are preparing to leave their homes. Some have no idea of their legal rights; others are too worried or afraid to fight for them. Families facing foreclosures are dealing with a lot of pressures and worries, and often feel isolated; joining with others in the same situation shows them that “this struggle is not just an individual struggle,” Chu said.
“This is about supporting people to fight for themselves, and it’s amazing to watch leaders emerge,” Chu said. “There’s this incredible power that’s built, that arises within people when we commit to being willing to fight back. & Folks are starting to recognize that we can fight back, and we can change the ways that banks interact with Springfield families.”
Sellou Diaite is one of the leaders who’s emerged through the Bank Tenant Association. In 2006, she and her husband bought a house on Middle Street, in Springfield’s Liberty Heights neighborhood, for $214,900. The following year, her sister-in-law in Africa became ill, and the couple began sending money to cover her medical bills, Diaite said. That, in turn, caused them to fall behind on their mortgage payments, of $2,061 a month, she said. Last year, her husband left her, adding to both her emotional and financial stress. Without her husband’s contribution, she said, the $2,000 she takes home each month from her full-time job is not enough to cover the mortgage.
Diaite said she’s spent months trying, unsuccessfully, to get her lender to modify her mortgage to reflect the home’s current market value, which would make her monthly payments manageable. The home’s current assessed value, according to the city’s Assessors’ Office, is $119,800—$95,100 less than what the Diaites paid for it five years ago, and about $10,000 less than what the bank says she still owes, according to Diaite.
Diaite first learned about No One Leaves when volunteers showed up at her door during one of their weekly canvassing sessions and explained to her what the group was doing. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This was what I was looking for, but I didn’t know where to call, I didn’t know who to call,'” she recently recalled.
After her protracted, solitary dealings with the bank, Diaite was excited to find a group where people in the same situation could support one another. “There’s a fear. Sometimes you’re afraid, because we don’t know our rights. I didn’t know what our rights were,” she said. “You try to do this by yourself, it’s very stressful. But once you go to a meeting your whole vision changes. & It’s very powerful that we are united and we are doing things for each other.”
Right now, Diaite’s case is in limbo. “Whether we fail on my house or not, whether I get a modification or not, I will always be with this coalition. I will be there for other people,” she said. “We can’t let our neighborhoods go down.”
*
By 10:45, the crowd of protestors outside Inez Williams’ house has grown to about 50 people.
Williams does not join them. Earlier that morning, she’d returned home from the hospital, where she’d spent the night after experiencing stress-related symptoms, Chu says. Now she’s resting inside.
But a number of Williams’ relatives join the demonstration, including her daughter, Priscilla Rickson. “She’s been going through hard times,” Rickson says as she stands in the front yard of her mother’s house, watching the picket line on the sidewalk. It’s the kind of house realtor ads would describe as “sweet”: not large, but well maintained, with a mix of brick and blue siding, sitting on a corner lot shaded by several large, old trees. Christmas lights are wrapped around the front-step railings, and a child’s riding toy is parked in the backyard.
All her mother wants, Rickson says, is for the bank to modify her loan so she can get back on track with her payments. “They don’t want to help. And it’s not like they don’t have the money. We gave them the money,” she says. Major U.S. banks received about $245 billion in federal money through the Trouble Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
“We bailed them out. They can’t help us out?” Rickson asks. “It’s just wrong.”
Chu takes up the bullhorn to address the crowd again. He reminds them of their dual messages that day: They are calling on MidFirst to modify Williams’ loan or give her the opportunity to buy back her house at its current market value. And they are warning any potential buyer who shows up that they will fight efforts to evict Williams and her son.
“This is about our community standing up,” Chu says. “It’s not one of us against the bank—it’s all of us against the bank.”
A big part of what No One Leaves hopes to do is recast the narrative of the U.S. housing collapse.
“The banks have done an effective job spinning the story of the mortgage crisis as the fault of owners who took loans they couldn’t afford,” Chu said. “We need to change that discourse. …
“The housing bubble that hiked up real estate prices [in the 1990s and 2000s] was created by the financial system through a process of predatory loans, selling off loans for profits, incentives for mortgage brokers to get loans out through fraudulent means” such as inflating applicants’ incomes, Chu continued.
Meanwhile, the public was being sold the idea of home ownership as the realization of the American Dream, with lenders dangling before prospective buyers offers that would allow them to buy safe places to raise their families. “There’s very few people that wouldn’t take that mortgage,” Chu said.
Macher, of Boston’s Project No One Leaves, agrees that homebuyers are being unfairly blamed for a crisis actually created by unscrupulous lenders. “Many [borrowers] were lied to; many of them just misunderstood, were not told the details of the process and just didn’t realize what they were getting into,” she said. Her group works in some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods—Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain—which were heavily targeted during the height of the real estate boom by lenders pushing questionable offers such as subprime loans. “These mortgages were pushed on them,” Macher said. “The banks were certainly aware that they were intentionally taking advantage of people.
“It’s hard to say these unsuspecting consumers that really didn’t know what they were getting into … are somehow morally worse than the big institutions that were taking advantage of them,” she added.
No One Leaves, Chu said, tries to help homeowners negotiate with lenders for modifications to their loans, often to reflect the current market value of their home, not the inflated price they paid before the collapse of the housing market. Doing so would prevent foreclosures and, he argued, would be in the everyone’s best interests: Families wouldn’t be left homeless. Neighborhoods would be spared the consequences of unoccupied houses, which can attract crimes like drug-dealing and arson and drive down property values in the area. And lenders, who often find it difficult to sell foreclosed properties, would be able to start collecting mortgage payments on the properties again.
In some instances, No One Leaves is calling for lenders to accept rent payments from former owners, rather than evict them. That’s the case with the Dunwell family, who bought a two-family home on Hughes Street, in the Forest Park neighborhood, for $138,000 in 2003. In 2008, David Dunwell was laid off from the human services agency where he’d worked for 17 years, according to No One Leaves. Eventually, Dunwell’s unemployment benefits ran out and the family fell behind on their monthly payments, Chu said. Last summer, their house was foreclosed on and Fannie Mae, which was the guarantor on the loan, assumed ownership. Fannie Mae has yet to try to sell the property, and the Dunwells continue to live in the house.
Dunwell has since found a new job at a local non-profit that works with troubled kids. His and his wife’s combined income, plus rent from a tenant in a first-floor apartment, would allow them to repurchase their home for its current market value, Chu said. (According to the city’s assessors’ office, it’s worth $125,100.) Barring that, the couple would like to pay rent to the lender in order to stay in the home, where they live with their three young daughters.
Fannie Mae, however, is moving to evict the family, according to No One Leaves, which in April held a candlelight vigil in support of the Dunwells. The family, meanwhile, is fighting the eviction in court.
“Ultimately, the question we keep coming back to is: why evict a family that’s willing to pay rent?” Chu said.
“We certainly hope that Fannie Mae will come to the table and negotiate,” he added. “But we also are preparing to take further action”—including physically blocking any eviction efforts.
The Advocate contacted a Fannie Mae spokesperson for comment on the case and at deadline was waiting for a return call.
*
Shortly before 11 o’clock, the auctioneer arrives at Inez Williams’ house. With him are two other men: a constable, and a man whom the protestors learn is there as a representative of MidFirst Bank, but who declines to give his name.
Chu approaches the three, introducing himself and extending his hand to shake. He begins to explain that No One Leaves has organized the rally with the hope of persuading the bank to negotiate with Williams. The constable attempts to intercede, telling Chu that neither the auctioneer nor the bank representative have the authority to negotiate, and that they can talk after the auction takes place.
Chu—determinedly, and with meticulous politeness—addresses the bank representative directly: Will MidFirst agree to work with Williams, he asks. Will the lender agree to reduce the principal she owes on her loan to reflect the house’s current market value?
The man from the bank stares impassively into the middle distance and says nothing. Will you answer me, Chu asks him. Finally, the second man responds with a slight, almost imperceptible, shake of his head.
“Do what you have to do,” the auctioneer says to Chu.
No One Leaves, Chu said, often is frustrated in its efforts to help negotiate new loan agreements for the families it advocates for, or even in getting the lenders to respond to their requests.
Prior to last summer’s passage of the law banning no-fault evictions, lenders perhaps just found it easier to foreclose on properties and push out the occupants, Chu said. But even with the new law in place, he said, lenders seem unwilling to diverge from the old way of doing things—even when those ways don’t actually seem to be serving anyone, the bank included.
Some banks, Chu added, hold to the “moral hazard” notion, the belief that an individual (in this case, a homebuyer) will not behave as responsibly as he might otherwise if some other entity will absorb at least part of the consequences of his actions (here, a lender that absolves him of debt owed).
“[It’s] essentially the belief that the homeowner doesn’t deserve the house because they fell into debt,” Chu said. To some, that notion might seem just; to others, it’s unnecessarily punitive—and especially ironic, given the taxpayer-funded bailout of large U.S. banks that didn’t exactly behave responsibly themselves.
Boston’s Project No One Leaves has also had “an enormously difficult time” getting banks to agree to loan modifications, according to that group’s Marielle Macher. Many homeowners, she said, could get back on track paying their mortgages if they got a modification—for instance, people who fell behind on their payments after losing their jobs but who’ve since found employment. “I don’t know why [lenders] refuse to do it for a lot of our clients,” she said. “For a lot of clients, [that refusal] just doesn’t make sense.”
Macher’s group has had some success through a partnership with Boston Community Capital, a non-profit lender that’s helped former homeowners buy back their homes after foreclosure. BCC buys the properties from the banks, then sells them to the former owners at the current market value. “The people it helps are the people who were taken advantage of [through] these subprime mortgages, who can afford to pay the real value of the house but can’t afford these inflated interest payments,” Macher said.
Some banks in the Boston area are willing to work with Boston Community Capital on these deals, although not as many as No One Leaves would like, added Macher. In some cases, she said, banks are unwilling to work with BCC when they find out the non-profit plans to sell the place back to the former owner.
The Springfield No One Leaves campaign would love to replicate the BCC model here, Chu said. A potential partner in that effort is the non-profit Springfield Neighborhood Housing Services, which offers mortgage products, home-improvement loans, credit counseling and other education programs, as well as advises owners facing foreclosure. SNHS’ mission, said executive director Charles Rucks, is to “transform families and revitalize distressed neighborhoods. And home ownership is the primary tool we use to do that.”
Rucks sees firsthand the detrimental effects the foreclosure crisis has had on entire city neighborhoods. Through one of its programs, SNHS buys blighted properties in the city’s Old Hill, Upper Hill and Bay neighborhoods, among the poorest in the city. The agency rehabs the existing houses or builds new homes, then sells them to first-time homebuyers. The houses are affordably priced and attractive; newly constructed houses listed on SNHS’s website feature solar roof panels, bamboo hardwood floors, energy-efficient appliances and heating systems.
“We invested substantial money over the years to be acquiring and rehabbing these properties and recycling them,” Rucks said. “The impact of [the foreclosure crisis] is really countering some of the tremendous improvements that we’ve made in these neighborhoods.”
Rucks called Boston’s Project No One Leaves’ work with BCC “a very interesting model,” and has been talking with Chu about whether SNHS might be able to do the same thing in Springfield—”naturally, on a smaller scale,” he added. Rucks plans to meet with BCC staff to learn more about the process, “and see what the local investor appetite is to do that.”
Such an effort, he noted, would face some “monumental challenges,” including finding the capital to allow SNHS to buy the properties, and making sure the agency could determine the proper price for the homes.
For a former owner to buy back his home, Rucks said, “the person will have to demonstrate that they can handle those new monthly payments that will be much closer to the current, real-market value of the house than what the original appraisal was when the original mortgage was [given].” Rucks does see an increase in lenders who are willing to modify loans to struggling homeowners, at least in cases where the borrowers can demonstrate that they’ll be able to keep up with the new payment plan. “That’s still the challenge for many families,” he said.
The Obama administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, created in 2009, includes a program that provides financial incentives to lenders who offer loan modifications to struggling homeowners. But, Chu said, that plan has a significant flaw: it encourages, but doesn’t mandate, modifications.
More promising is a Massachusetts bill—named “An Act to Prevent Unnecessary and Unreasonable Foreclosures”— that would require lenders to offer modifications when “financially beneficial” to the bank. “The effects of the housing crisis have rippled through all sectors of our economy, and we need to continue to address the subprime lending which largely contributed to this crisis in order to appropriately stabilize our economy,” Attorney General Martha Coakley, who drafted the bill, said upon its filing in January. “We know that voluntary loan modifications will not prevent unnecessary foreclosures. This bill establishes standards to ensure creditors undertake commercially reasonable efforts to avoid unnecessary foreclosure.” Springfield state Rep. Ben Swan is a sponsor of the bill, now before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary.
Also on the horizon is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program, which will offer a zero-interest, forgivable bridge loan to income-eligible homeowners who are at least three months behind in their mortgage payments if they can show that their household income has dropped at least 15 percent due to unemployment, underemployment or a medical crisis. Applicants will have to demonstrate that they can begin paying back the loan within two years. The $1 billion loan program, created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, met with a number of delays; it’s now in effect in some states, and Rucks expects Massachusetts to get its share of the funding—$61 million—in July.
The EHLP, Rucks said, will be a particular help to homeowners struggling because of job or income loss. In the early days of the foreclosure crisis, he said, many of the people who came to SNHS for help had bad loans, such as adjustable-rate mortgages with ballooning payments. More recently, with unemployment so high (in March, Springfield’s jobless rate was 12.9 percent, a decrease from previous months but still well above the statewide average of 8.2 percent), “we’ve got people coming in with good, solid loans but the problem is income,” Rucks said.
*
At 11 o’clock, the auction of Inez Williams’ house begins. The auctioneer reads an official legal notice, then asks, “Would anyone like to qualify to bid?”
There’s no response—at least, not from interested buyers. The No One Leaves protestors respond with boos, and cries of “Shame on you!” The noise is deafening, and will stay at that volume for much of the entire 15-minute period that the auctioneer must wait for potential bidders to step forward.
A Springfield police cruiser pulls up to the curb, and a young officer steps out and walks over to the neighboring driveway, where he stands and watches the protest. Chu approaches the cop, introduces himself and explains what’s going on. In a few minutes, he returns to the group and announces that the officer has asked them to stop using the bullhorn.
At 11:15, the auctioneer makes a second, then third and final call for qualifying bidders. When no one else steps forward, he turns to the MidFirst representative and says, “Give me the number.” The second man quietly reads a number off a sheet of paper, and, in that rather anticlimactic moment, the lender has bought back Williams’ house, for $122,000.
The sale takes place so quickly and quietly that there’s some initial confusion among the protestors about what’s happened. As word spreads through the crowd, the demonstrators unleash a new wave of “Shame on you!” calls. The auctioneer, constable and bank representative shake the police officer’s hand, then leave.
Williams’ adult granddaughter climbs the front steps of the house to thank the group for coming out for her grandmother. “If she can beat cancer, she can definitely beat this,” she says.
“And we’re going to be here to support her,” Chu calls out. No One Leaves’ next step will be to fight efforts to evict Williams, he says, and to try to get the lender to agree to let her stay in the house as a rent-paying tenant.
Inez Williams comes briefly to the front door. Chu asks the police officer if it’s okay to let her use the bullhorn. The officer agrees and the elderly woman takes it and offers a brief thanks to the group. The protestors join hands and begin another chant: “We are family, and family sticks together.”
While the bank may have bought Williams’ house, Chu reminds the group, the fight is not over. Today’s protest, he notes, drew the biggest crowd of any No One Leaves event yet. “This is the beginning of something big,” he says. “This is the beginning of a movement.”
