Wells Fargo: Turn This Home Over To A Community Who Cares (Occupy Our Homes)
…my family and my friends at Occupy Homes Minnesota have come up with the best solution to address Wells Fargo’s bankrupt business practices, the devastation of homelessness, and the blight of vacant homes. The home at 3325 South 2nd Avenue, had been broken into and was being used as a drug/party house.
I spoke with the neighbors around the block and told them of a plan to move into the home, fix it up, and contribute (not take away) from the community. They are very supportive and are thrilled, especially after their experience with the last vacant home down the block that had been taken over by drug dealers, who were also using it as a place to house the violence of the sex trade.
Duluth group wants city to acquire vacant homes, use them to house the homeless (Duluth News Tribune)
… her friend’s bungalow… has sat empty for four years, ever since a notice arrived about foreclosure proceedings. That foreclosure remains in limbo, which has angered Wright and others in the community for a variety of reasons.
Open House Duluth has three aims: asking the city to use eminent domain to claim vacant houses, calling for a citywide review of housing stock and lobbying for the “housing as a human right” declaration.
4 commit suicide in Spain over evictions as EU struggles with unemployment (RT News)
A 46-year-old man has killed himself in Alicante, Spain, over the threat of being evicted from his house. It was the fourth case this week in Spain of a suicide committed over an eviction…
On Tuesday, a retired couple took their lives by taking an overdose of prescription drugs in their apartment on the island of Majorca, AP reported. The 68-year-old man and the 67-year-old woman left a note saying they were going to lose their home due to debt. The couple’s son found their bodies.
And at the beginning of the week, a 56-year-old man committed suicide in the town of Basauri Vizcaya because he couldn’t pay his mortgage.
The Spanish parliament has agreed to debate the country’s harsh eviction laws, though it has so far resisted adopting new legislation on the issue.
Old, Female and Homeless (Alternet )
Every homeless advocate and shelter monitor I spoke with told me the older homeless population in San Francisco is exploding. The problem is bound to get worse as the price of housing reaches new heights. San Francisco is the most expensive city in the country for renters, according to a March 2012 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Small studio apartments are going for as much as $2,000 a month, which requires a salary of at least $70,000 a year.
Detroit rally hits back at government foreclosures and evictions (Worker’s World)
Anti-foreclosure and anti-eviction activists and victimized homeowners from across the Detroit metropolitan area gathered at the Metro Detroit AFL-CIO union hall for a kickoff rally introducing a new campaign aimed at stopping government foreclosures.
((The group)) includes the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shutoffs; the People Before Banks Coalition; the Occupy Detroit Eviction Committee; Jobs With Justice; and individual homeowners and activists.
The reason foreclosures will continue (Boston Globe)
Principal write-downs work, but Fannie and Freddie have dodged them because they’re politically poisonous. So even as one branch of the government has forced the country’s biggest banks to use principal reduction as a tool for keeping homeowners out of foreclosure, the two mortgage companies that taxpayers own, Fannie and Freddie, won’t join in. The companies would rather foreclose than write down principal for troubled borrowers. They’re refusing to sell foreclosed homes to nonprofits that sell foreclosed homes back to their former owners – a post-foreclosure tool for reducing principal – even in the face of a Massachusetts law banning such restrictions.
Foreclosure Defense Group 