“This is a crowd that won’t scatter,” James Steele wrote in the pages of The Nation some seventy-five years ago. Early one morning in July 1933, the police had evicted John Sparanga and his family from a home on Cleveland’s east side. Sparanga had lost his job and fallen behind on mortgage payments. The bank had foreclosed. A grassroots “home defense” organization, which had managed to forestall the eviction on three occasions, put out the call, and 10,000 people — mainly working-class immigrants from Southern and Central Europe — soon gathered, withstanding wave after wave of police tear gas, clubbings and bullets, “vowing not to leave until John Sparanga [was] back in his home.”
And some version of this is happening again as we speak. Read: Resistance to Housing Foreclosures Spreads Across the Land
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Here in New Mexico this week a man was killed in a shootout when he refused to evacuate his foreclosed home. He was a veteran. A woman presumed to be his girlfriend was wearing a bullet poof vest and lying on a shot gun in one of the inner rooms.
I’m sure you’ve also heard by now about the parents who shot their 5 children and committed suicide after losing their jobs on the same day.
As the economy gets worse, I fear more and more people are going to die, not just from starvation or exposure, but from anger and despair.
It’s just so bizarre that the banks would act like that. Surely they are in business to make money, yes? But they lose a lot of money when they foreclose and auction….. maybe they needed the money fast, I guess.
The only long term solution will be to get the cost of housing down. There is no real reason anyone has to work full time for 9 years to get an insulated box. The average income to mortgage ratio is 9:1!