Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On A Dream Foreclosed 20140407

Everything on my mind of what had happened the other night. Last night i had gotten a house, what about tonight . I had to sleep in the car tonight. I might get a good deal tonight. What will happen . How will i get home today . I want to thank everybody, a few people to thank. I want to thank the festival of the book. I want to thank amnesty international, a lot to help me get here. I want to thank bill for the introduction, and my one man publishing super power team. And an incredible other book, the black history of the white house. Max and so many other activists across the country, take back the land and other housing disorganization as i definitely the reason i am here because they educated me to everything. I want to thank the family that are struggling, actually fighting back against one of the worst crises, financial, social, physical that this country had gone through. Without their willingness to talk to me. None of this would be here. So i am going to speak about my first book a dream foreclosed, black america and the fight for a place to call home. Is traces the story of four families during the lead up to and aftermath of the worlds worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Families in detroit, michigan, Michael Hutchins in chattanooga, tenn. In stanford, North Carolina and Marissa Biggs in chicago, with the mother of onea and jimeyea. Sometimes there is confusion, i am not a financial reporter. More than the foreclosure crisis, they choose to organize this society and the way it can be different. We will travel from burned out buildings in chicago to liberated blocks in between, living rooms and families across the country. Lets begin. You want me to chill . Hold on. We are chilling. Great, okay. Can you also hear me . Cool. Thank you. I want to start with a very simple question. What is home . It is such a simple word but almost impossible to define. The power of this word is nearly unrivaled. Think back, think back to when you were in schools like this a you will remember home was the prize of epic heroes. And the homecoming of odysseus, after decades journeying across the entire mediterranean, and finally reach the shore. Finally reacheds the house and is not quite home yet for those who remember the ending. Doesnt really become home until penelope, whose wife was besieged by suitors in his absence tests him, she says why dont you just bring out that bed from that room. I dont want a stranger sleeping in my bedroom and he says no, you cant do that because he was the only ones that new said that bed was built into that room, into a live oak tree and when she when he had that recognition, was really passed the test, that was when he was home and be long in the house, not when who can remember moms yearning for a decent home in raisin in the sun, the iconic play, perhaps one of the best place of a 20th century. The family was cooped up in this subdivision in chicago. And in the 1950s, the massive red lining, the African American families were cooped into tiny sections of the city and as a result of the incredibly predatory practice of white landlords there were four five or six families, and one of the daughters chasing down the hallway, in the bathroom is unoccupied. And i will work 20 hours a day in all of the kitchens in chicago, strap my baby on my back and scrub all the floors in america and all the sheets in america if i have to. We have got to get out of here. They move to a white neighborhood and challenged incredible violence. The united states, home is nearly synonymous with the idea of equality, upward mobility and freedom, and although everyone knows it, there is probably no more contested a word in the entire boeing which language as law professor anita hill right about the housing crisis, she writes at the heart of the crisis, an ideological disconnect between home as a basic element of the American Dream and halfway to eat quality and home as a Market Product. What is going to happen to our homes and what is happening since 2007 when the housing crisis century since late , 07 and plunged the country and the worlds into disaster. A lot about the numbers of the crisis. We let a lot about the amount that evaporated overnight, but a lot about the number of people lost their jobs and the gdp decline. And the amount of money the banks needed to be stabilized. We didnt hear about a lot, almost at all about the number of actual people, not loans, not houses, since 2007 as a result of foreclosure and being pursued. It seemed like a Pretty Simple conversation about the housing crisis i learned there was not a single Government Agency at any level whose job was to how many people were trashed out of their homes . There was not even a private company charged with tracking this company. And seatac access that information which should be funny. Through interviews, economists and journalists, and this is the conservative estimates. 10 Million People forced from their homes since 2007. How big is 10 Million People, 227 in the virginia. Of the population of new york city, it is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the state of michigan which is the tenth most populous state in the entire country. In other words in the last six years he had evicted every single man and every single woman and every child and all their pets from the entire state. How is it possible that the entire population of michigan was forced from their homes and we never really heard about it . I started thinking maybe it is not a reflection of government oversight but more a reflection of how we values this crisis in and of itself, that we valued it and quantified it more in stock prices than in mixed school days, we counted it in Property Values rather than in family dinners, that more than anything we talked about it in terms of shareholder profits rather dan shaffer driscolls in cities across the country. It got me thinking we havent only suffered from an economic crisis maybe we are in a crisis of values and meaning and the definition of our own lives. I was glad you mentioned Martin Luther king because it is probably impossible in Jefferson School which used to be an all black school during segregation, probably impossible to talk about this topic without referencing earlier this year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the historic march on washington, Martin Luther kings iconic i have a dream speech and as we were going over the speech this summer and it was all over the newspapers i went back and actually read it and noticed a portion that hasnt gained as much attention, i want to read a small segment of it tonight, today. In a sense we have come to our Nations Capital to cash a check, when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every american was to fall air. This was the promise that all men, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today, he said, that americans have defaulted on this promissory notes in so far as citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring the sacred of the asian america has given the negro people bad check which has been marked insufficient funds. In reading this now i cant help but think if people caught this, i cant help but think of hundreds of thousands of workers checks sent out by the banks as compensation after the massive robotsigning settlement. This massive legal settlement after the banks, all of them had been caught forging and signing all of these foreclosure documents in order to accelerate because they didnt even have enough people to sign up on these documents, nevertheless check what the documents are in order and they had multiple employees making minimum wage, signing the same name, linda green because it was shorter than their real name. After the banks were caught in this massive forgery and fraud scandal they were required to send out compensation checks to the families that had been foreclosed on as a result of this fraud. So they send out all these checks across the country and most of them were released mall, 5,000, obviously inadequate compensation for losing your home but the family went to the bank and they were going to catch those checks and the checks of bank of america, wells fargo, they bounced and nothing to me signaled not just the insolvency of the u. S. Financial system, but the irony of the way we treated people during this crisis. But to also return to Martin Luther kings words perhaps the entire racially slanted foreclosure crisis is the best evidence, maybe today, of the united statess continued default on its constitutional promise to africanamericans. I am not just talking about the fact that africanamericans were twice as likely to be foreclosed on although they were, or that africanamericans with high credit scores, with good credit where three times more likely to be sold sub prime predatory loan than a white family. Im not just talking about the fact that a wells fargo loan officer testified in court that wells fargo, quote, put bounties on the heads of minority buyers or that every major bank was in violation of the Fair Housing Act although none have actually been penalized for it. Though theres a lawsuit Morgan Stanley is currently undergoing in detroit over violations of the Fair Housing Act. Not even necessarily talking about the fact although i think it is incredibly important and very little understood that this entire foreclosure crisis is an outgrowth of the nations period of redlining and institutionalized racism in housing and the very fact that these major banks could go into communities of color and peddle the worst of the worst mortgages, natural outgrowth of the fact that through the majority of the 20th century the federal government had a policy of red lineing. If you dont know what that is it means the federal government, a huge amounts of the united states, put them on walls and drew red lines around any of the communities in which people of color lived and what those lines signified was there was no federal lending, no federal guarantees for private lending in those communities and as a result these laws were not revealed until the late 60s and 70s. As a result the communities were starved of capital and when these laws finally were taken off of the books the private banks have said here is an opportunity to make a lot of money really quickly by capitalizing on this nations history of institutionalized racism. I also think it is important to talk about the unique impact due to africanamericans have experience throughout the course of this crisis because as Margherita Armstrong writes africanamericans have had a historical relationship with property that differs from that of other americans. The introduction to this history was as a form of property and contemporary relationships between africanamericans and properties are still impaired. What she is saying is the only thing were not simply houses because Holding Private property and achieving full rights of personshood and citizenship have been directly tied since this countrys founding. What is really at stake in this quest for home is freedom. In other words home and landowners it gave one access to the original American Dream of democracy. It is fitting to speak a little bit about democracy because this project began when i was on a plane to a place that just lost their local democracy and that is deflate, michigan. It was the summer of 2011 and i was going to see things i had heard only whispered about. I had heard about masses of people stopping be evictions and squatting on banks that houses, whole blocks taken over by artists collectives. I was hearing about people setting up communities outside the control of capitalism. Communities they were calling liberated zones. When i was there, i had, remember a very obviously radical whispering of what i might find. I met a woman named bertha on a sunday afternoon in her living room. She had just gotten back from church. I need to explain what she looks like because i grew up in suburban massachusetts outside boston. I wasnt accustomed to meeting women who dressed like that. She wore a white suit with trim ruffles, this embroidered shawl, cream colored sock and impossibly wide white southern half. She told me she might be living in post industrial detroit but her home was a refuge and she was from the south and she had full control. For a number of hours she made local headlines and nobody slowly understood, to do what she did. Litt years she and her husband had fallen into foreclosure. The result of a second predatory mortgage. She started with a mortgage of 40,000. It balloons to 190,000 although every single month she was making her mortgage payment. She tries to fight for closure in court and hired a lawyer, called him a very sweet man and at the end of the day she couldnt do anything for her. Her husband was cycling in and out of the hospital and her sons and daughters all relied on this home as the familys home base, and before the scheduled the eviction she called up her oldest daughter and she said i am not going anywhere and later she told me that it wasnt that she didnt understand they owned a piece of paper, it was that the banks didnt bandstand thats i owned my home. This was a deeply religious woman, appealing to a moral law, a higher law, a law that in her mind completely invalidated his contract the bank was holding. That called for her and her family to leave. She called the papers and her neighbors and the church and the morning the city of detroit had scheduled to send a contractor to park a dumpster in front of her house and they had contractors haul out every single item that she and her family had amassed over the last 22 years of her life all of those items, all the out of her house and throw them in the dumpster, that morning the contractor couldnt deliver that dumpster because there were hundreds of people in the street and on her front lawn, in front of the place he wanted to park and he said get out of the way and the man in the middle of the street said you get out of the way. And so the man with the dumpster tried to park it in front of the neighborss house and the neighbors said dont parked in front of my house. I know what you are here to do. Again, remember this is a contractor. He was probably making slightly more than minimum wage and he said i am not going to benefit. I am taking this family of the house. Turnaround and went back and later that afternoon bertha went to downtown deflate to a huge office building, essentials the the wall street outpost in the toys and marched up to the floor of new york bank of mellon which told her mortgage was located and she said can i come in and have an appointment and talk about my mortgage because hundreds of people just blocked the dumpster and i dont think you will be able to foreclose on me so why dont we work something out to the secretary said you cant come in because you dont have an appointment so bursa took a deep breath and her pressed perfect suit, she laid down in front of the board of the office and when the secretary leaned out and said what are you doing, she said if i cant come in none of you people can come out. And she stayed there for a very long time and the next day the bank lawyers called her lawyer and said could you please call off the dogs cutie when i met with her on sunday she had just signed the papers to own her home out right for the first time in her entire life. On that trip i saw with my own eyes what i have only heard whispers of. Those were in fact liberated blocks on the east side of the forest and i received a 2 or from a homeless artist who had become more or less a residential real dividend i capitalist crowd in detroit. We want a bloc that would become the epicenter of this movement called the golden great Restoration Community project. Where i went that was two years ago, seven occupied homes, and explained the plan to me and it sounded utterly beautiful and also with the economic context completely and utterly insane. Here is how it works. The group of residents picked one house by living in it and call the local homeless shelter and ask them to send over a family and the family would live in the house and the group of artists and residents moved to the next house and picked up the next one and was interesting was each time they moved more and more people were joining the effort especially from the families who had gotten houses as a result. When i was there this was only seven houses at a time but i heard this, they have dozens, they had wood burning stoves and water collection and dry wall and new plumbing, artists studios and libraries and gardens and plans for making a boxing ring. One of the houses had sharpie scribble diagrams for solar Panel Briefing on the wall. Havent had the opportunity to find out if they made it but i would be surprised if they were able to. J b and his team explained to me they were fighting to preserve a neighborhood the banks had seized for cash, stripped of life and left to die. They told me we dont any of those houses but if we stay in them, keep working on them we can save them. Obviously after that trip i was totally hot. I wanted to find more liberated spaces and learn what inspired neighborhoods and not to suffer violently in these houses. And organize and fight back. Communities and resistance across the country, people in suburban, n. C. Chattanooga, tenn. Minneapolis, minn. Rural parts of western pennsylvania, and everywhere i went i heard a story i didnt think was possible. I heard about a man in toledo who National Action against foreclosure decided with a few friends would steal himself inside his home which was in foreclosure using bricks and cement. He and his friends literally built an entire house within the house filled with bricks and cement and it took the police base, this was a day before his scheduled eviction, the police came the day of the schedule the eviction and they opened the door to find a brick wall. They spent literally days chiseling him out of this house and the story made national headlines. An incredible amount of taxpayer money. As a result the local Police Forces are required to carry out the banks dirty work. They met a woman named melanie quite, single mother, incredible woman, and she had been fighting her eviction for more than a year, she protested in the local community group. And the legal process, she spoke out at the shareholder meeting, theyre quite clear that she was not going to be able to keep her home so pretty much a week before her scheduled eviction she went to home depot and ordered a dumpster truck worth of soy oil and home depot sent it to her house, delivered and it said where do you want to . The backyard. I am making a garden. They jumped all the soil and she went to the local store, bought a ton of seeds, she was out there all day gardening and when her neighbors who all knew she was in foreclosure went over and said you ok . What are you doing . That i am planting a garden because i am not leaving this house. A week later she defaulted and she still lives there and the garden is still there and they use it as a Community Garden and every story was more inspiring than the rest so i remember the words of one retired firefighter who explained the scene of her eviction blockade in chicago that saved her house. Surname is Patricia Hill and she said my daughter called and said the sheriff was here so i called j. R. One of the local housing activist and before you know what all the people were on the porch chanting fight and more people coming up on bicycles and everyone saying we are the people and the neighbors out on their porches were yelling we have a story. The construction worker down the street is coming of randal porche is filled with people chanting to tell the whole wide world this is people territory. And the eviction blockade was out in full force. It was a beautiful thing. I felt like i was floating outside myself and i was watching all these people on my front porch defending my home. J. R. With his campaign, with martha, the occupy homes, National Network is in minneapolis, take back the land is an African American network spearheaded definitely the most, in my mind, inspiring housing organizing the last five or six years. Chattanooga organizing for action that worked with michael in chattanooga and the more i traveled, the more i met with hundreds of activists and families. I realize africanamericanss unique relationship to homes, the story of struggle and dreams wasnt just the story of being victimized. Made these communities significantly better equipped to handle the crisis and significantly more visionary coming in stories and proposals and the real implementable strategies they were proposing to come out of this crisis. One of the cofounders of take back the land said to me we are in a trance formative moment because of this crisis is rooted firmly in the housing crisis. We are going to have significant changes in the way people think not just about housing but land itself. It wasnt until my second trip to chicago that i realized this organizing no matter how inspiring wasnt just taken up by people with political beliefs. Ive learned activists often didnt choose to be activists. Many had done so out of basic survival. I started by telling the story of martha and her children. I picked this cover for the book which was taken by a young photographer named brent lewis and it is a black woman and marissas children, jessica. Martha names justice when the family was homeless and she named her justice because she said it would be justice if they were never homeless again. It would be justice if they no longer had to sleep in the back of the family minivan. The story of martha is in my mind the most inspiring story in the book. She and her family had been evicted from one of the largest Public Housing projects not just in chicago but the entire country and over the course of a decade the city of chicago spearheaded by the mayor had a plan for transformation. The official title. The plan was essentially to teardown a whole lot of Public Housing projects and after he tore the inbound the plan was to build new housing. The problem was they never built that housing. The economic crisis hit, the city got strapped for funds of the planned transformation the way i can see it is a tour bunch of housing down and did nothing to help the families who had been living in the housing and did nothing to help the city have a more Affordable Housing program. So martha and her children spent time in a homeless shelter in abandoned buildings, doubling up with families living in their car, finally she said i cant live like this anymore. She was speaking with press she had heard from before and explained the situation and said i will do anything. I need to put a roof over my kidss head and have said my daughter is in foreclosure, she has given up on the situation but if you want to fight it here are the keys. Martha parked the mini van in front of the house and got to work and rehabed the entire house and rally local kids to put up the drywall and mage the house perfect and in the summer of 2011, she called all of the local media, all of the National Media and everyone came out including the new york times, everyone standing with all the cameras and notepads and she stands in front of this entire crowd of people that the essentially the entire National Media world which means all of us and she said i was effected, i was homeless, my kids were homeless, we dont want to be homeless anymore. Cant hold a job if i am moving around, cant have a job if i dont have an address, can have a job taking care of my kids my kids deserved a place to live, they deserve a place to sleep. They deserve a place to get ready for school. I dont own this house. Deutsche bank owns this house. But i am going to live here because i am declaring this house liberated. You should have seen the camera mans faces. Going to a court battle now but Deutsche Bank is not taking that home. They have been there two years now, three years now. Living in bank owned buildings and fighting Deutsche Bank and bank of america and cd and wells fargo and jpmorgan is not a longTerm Solution. I asked what is the long Term Solution . And they explained to me that what is going on now is a process of destabilizing land relationship and getting to a place where we can have different structures of land relationships in this country and one of those, one of those that is implementable right now, more than 250 across the country is a structure called Community Land trust. What a community of land trust offers is the ability for communities, not companies, communities to control the land and make decisions of what happens on that land and they do that through a system of separating the ownership of land from the ownership of the homes on top. What happens is a fiber to live in a Community Land trust or anybody here you might get a mortgage and buy a home like anybody else but you dont own the land underneath your home. Who owns the land underneath your home is a collection of all the president s surrounding residents and local leaders, politicians or Church Leaders or people in the neighborhood who are always helping. What that means is that the land is guaranteed for Affordable Housing and it takes is the collective nature, speculation out of being connected to this land. Not only does it keeps the homes on top of the land significantly more affordable but it allows communities to make decisions about what happens in their borders. Imagine a situation in which communities had the ability to make these real decisions about that what happens inside them. Imagine the effect that would have not just in terms of housing but in terms of local policeing, environmental rights, hospitals, whether to build a prison or to build a clinic. What about the local food supply . Recently it makes the ability for communities to tip the balance that always exists in this country between capitals and communities. We have the we dont have a very unfair fight but constructors like plan trust and others that allow you to tip the balance while still living in this country away it is constituted. It is important to say and i want to talk about this, as we come out of this crisis, proposing Solutions Like Community Land trust, programs for Affordable Housing, programs that actually make capital more about good capital, more available to lowincome communities, communities of color, that is exactly the opposite route than we have taken coming out of the crisis. What is important is we look back at what is happening from 2007 to 2011 when the foreclosure crisis was really at its peak. At its peak in the way i mean comparable to the foreclosure crisis during the Great Depression when you scale for population growth. Today there are tens of thousands of foreclosures across the country but the biggest challenge in terms of house and justice is what is happening with these houses that have already been seized by the banks. What we are seeing is rather than be returned to the market in a way that families can buy them particularly low income or middleincome families what we are seeing is massive private equity firms and hedge funds which are essentially like the cousins of big banks, they are not big banks, they work with big banks, they manage money and make investments. What we have seen for the first time in u. S. History massive private equity funds and hedge funds are missing rental empires, singlefamily rental empires and this is something that because after suburbanization we have always in this country had a rental industry of singlefamily, this very mom and pop. I might own a home and rent out three other homes. I lived down the block. When we are looking at these rental empires that are being a master at approximately 200,000 singlefamily homes purchased in the last two years these are owned by private equity firms and hedge funds like blackstone group, American Homes for rent and others and what they have done is buy up all these homes really cheap because home prices crashed incredibly spectacularly, and unfortunately because the district is credit and because of the fact communities lost so much of their wealth there very few families there are families who are buying, firsttime home buyers but a lot of that buying is happening on the part of these hedge funds and private equity firm so they have gone into communities, buy up these homes very cheap, blackstone bought 1,400 homes in atlanta in one day and start renting them back out to families. Thats when the system collapsed, and now we have the rental back security, more or less exactly the same as a Mortgage Backed security, but rather than securitizing the underlying mortgage on the home, they are essentially using the rental streams paid by renting families. That pays back the bond. Theres a lot of debate right now happening about this process, so what i wanted to get into, and ill stick to the promise this is not a financial talk, but i want to just seal it down to is we are boom ranging out of the crisis. We are still seeing homes as market commodities. We are furthering financial speculation and final securitization in the housing market, and last, and certainly not least, we are seeing that these types of wall street driven marketbased solutions are supposedly the only way were going to get out of this mess, and if you have a question, like i did recently to a hedge funder, i said, well, but werent you guys the ones that got us into this mess in the first place . He paused, and he said, well, yeah, but trust me. [laughter] so today in 2014, whats our responsibility . Whats our role . Whats our role of active members of the community, as residents, as journalist, social justice activist, and i come back to what my mom told me years ago with the book project, and he said, people who feel powerless gravitate to powerful stories because their own story is so disempowering. Right now, she said, we all feel powerless. I think our challenge for everyone in the room so to make a story more powerful than the current narrative, more sensible than houses are first and mother most market commodities and only secondly the places that we live. I think our job, in other words, is to open up a mental state in which you can start envisioning and articulating how we create the society anew. Book were talking about words and definitions, like what always happens at book festivals, theres two definitions of home. A home is a Market Product and a pathway to equality. I want to propose this, and make it clear this is not my definition. This is a definition that i heard from hundreds of residents of homeowners, of tenants, people who are homeless. This is the definition i heard from activist groups across the country, from journalists, from writers, this is a definition essentially reverberating from almost everybody i spoke to. What they were saying is why dont we define a home as a form of necessity for survival, and as such, buying a home is a basic human right. We dont talk about home as human rights in the country. We talk about them abroad, but i appreciate you started this conversation with the declaration of human rights because in that document, homes are a human right. Housing is a human right. Everybody has a right to shelter. My demands here today is that housing be recognized as a human right in this country. I got to tell you, what i say that on the radio or television, and i say it a lot, im often told this is an unreasonable demand. Make reasonable demands. Right . What i think is unreasonable is that in the richest nation in the world, with a government that has figured out how to collect and arian vive all of my emails, phone logs, and all my communications, that learned to wage war with Remote Control sticks, that learned how to build the largest prison system in the history of human civilization, well, it seems unreasonable to me we cant structure a society in which everyone has a place to live, especially in a country in which we already have multiple times the number of empty, vacant homes than the number of times of homeless people. Its like housing has to be a human right, and whats clear to me is that the powers these wont or cant figure out a way to ensure this right, then we all have the right to liberate homes and land ourselves. Its this type of collective liberation that families are already doing across the country, the family that i profiled in the book and hundreds more that i was not able to put in, so i think now, probably our turn to join them. Thank you. [applause] thank you so much. Wasnt that beautiful . Her book is so beautiful. Just want to open up the discussion so that you can make comments or ask questions of laura about what she just talked about, about her book. I think, michael, you had a question. Yeah, go to the microphone so people can hear you. Michaels got a good question for you. Hi, im michael, a graduate student, and one of the things that i am looking into is infant mortality in charlottesville, virginia, and in the white population in charlottesville is 4. 9, about five babies before a thousand die before theyre first birthday. In the africanamerican population here in charlottesville, virginia, its 20. 2. When i was looking into the causes and conditions it goes beyond a waive of housing that you talk about. It seems to go back to the cause of the conditions that led to the caprini green. What we have here in charlottes vim in 1960, prior to 1960, we had the vinegar hill neighborhood, which were standing on the former vinegar hill neighborhood, and the city needed i644 and highway 250, and the africanamerican neighborhood kind of stood in the way, so the city somehow had the vine gar hill neighborhood designated as blighted so it could be torn down, and we found that in the 1960s, once that once the neighborhood was torn down, the only businesses that would hire africanamerican were other africanamerican businesses, so once the neighborhood was torn down, a whole generation of leaders were lost, and africanamericans couldnt get Housing Loans to build new businesses and when they could, they were charged 25 interest. It would seem like were even further behind. Were still back in that first wave. Any ideas suggestions for us here in charlottesville . Sure, i mean, policy is an incrediblely controversial thing. I hesitate to make any prescriptions. The story you told doesnt surprise me. Doesnt it seem communities to me that africanamerican communities stand in the way of something the city was looking to build in the time of urban renewal. Thats not something just charlottesville experienced, but every sing the major American City experienced that during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, cities wanted to build something, and they always happened to have to build it on ton of africanamerican neighborhoods, particularly africanamerican middle class neighborhoods where there was a lot of stores and businesses and home, so, you know, i think that its clear that what were talking about, you know, and this is something that we really emphasize to everywhere i went is theres no way to see this crisis were going through right now as independent of the crisis that weve gone through before. In particular, if you look at housing justice questions and displacement questions in africanamerican communities. You know, that was the thing that struck me the most. I talk to families in white communities, theyd be, like, this is a cataclysmic event, you know, in the foreclosure crisis. How could this happen to me . When i talk to africanamerican families, they were, like, yep, this happened in urban renewal, before that in the 30s, before that in the 1890. This has happened to us since we got to this country, when we were brought to the country, we didnt ask to be here. I think its clear we need to understand that questions of housing justice and questions of displacement, questions of the health you start withings the crisis is rarely framed through a health lens, but it really should be because, you know, Health Impacts the health impacks communities where foreclosure rates are high a very noticeable. Emergency room vis, diabetes, high blood pressure, attempted suicide, deaths all increases in communities for displacement and foreclosure is high. I think what we need to do is start to really be willing to look at the crisis were going through now in this larger trajectory of crisis around Land Ownership and who gets to make decisions about a city and people. Theres a classic example of a policy push through by government probably likely incentivized actually definitely invent vised by private development in which the Community Living there had no say in what happened. Thats the way of thinking about our cities and thinking about our housing and communities that has to stop, not just because its unfair and unjustings but because its incredibly, physically dangerous, and its also, you know, and i think that, you know, i talking about this at the end of the book, we cant look at housing as something thats divorced from other crisis were going through right now. To me, its quite clear that the housing crisis is that the mentality that led to the housing crisis is the same mentality that is leading to the Climate Crisis right now and the ecological crisis were going through, and right now, were space facing a massive cry us in which whole countries and many u. S. Sphis are going to be underwater in the next few hundred years. A lot of people are going to have to move unless wells some move regardless, but we have to take action right now. I think we need to think about the ways in which we allow profit to be the deciding factor of what happens in our communities, and thats, obviously, detrimental when, for example, a developer or city builds a conduit through your building or neighborhood. Its detrimental when you would like to continue, like myself, living in new york city and parts of new york city will be underwater if we burn fuels at the rate we are burning them right now. Id say i dont have any i dont have any i dont have any advice for charlottesville. What i suggest is asking people in charlottesville together what people, you know, in that community, but across the town want to do. Theres an incredible amount of untapped wisdom in communities that we really never listen to. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I wanted to thank you for requester presentation, and i wanted to make a statement and ask a question. I remember growing up, my grandfathers name was solomon, and he always said, you need to understand who is standing behind the curtain. You dont want to do business with the devil. Sometimes, i think, in our nation now, we may be doing business with the devil, that, aka, the bank. If we look at our predatory system of lending, whether its in housing or whether its in education, where do we move from that . The reason im hearing the story about my grandfather is that loans were not available for him, so they purchased the land, they got the neighbors and the friends to build their homes, so they never had mortgages, and as a result of that, we still have the land in our family, and were talking about the late 1800s. Thats awesome. We need to look at another pair dime, especially for the future, and i tell my daughters the same thing. Think about not taking out the bank loan and look at a different paradigm because this gives you the impression of that. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I think youre grandfather is an incredibly wise man. Thats my initial impression. Yeah, we cant be doing business with the devil. I think that, you know, what you also spoke to about the way that you talk about it with your family today is that theres a lot of ways of doing business with the devil. Theres a lot of ways that were not aware were doing business with the devil or have an option whether or not to do business with the devil. Last year, there was a very good investigation about how the dentist in strip malls, particularly in low income communities, were essentially very many of them were own by private equity firms. I mean, people had to go to the dentist, you know, so theres a very real and obvious strangle hold over a lot of our basic needs and basic functions in the country. Its not impossible for me to sit here and say, yeah, we cant do business with them because every day they use credit cards to pay medical bills and kids who need medication, shouldnt use that credit card, but at the same time, what i like about what you were saying is, what i like about your grandfathers story is the way that he bought the land, and then he invited the neighbors, and they all built the house together, and as much as, you know, you can say and acknowledge the reality that a lot of times we dont have an option whether or not to engage with the Financial System as it is, were obligated to by the way they have their hands in all our daily needs. At the same time, i love the image of Community Building a house together, and i think theres so many opportunities that we have that we dont think about where we can join forces in our communities, between our neighbors, friends, within our church, within the school, and we can say how can we take care of some of our problems ourselves . Thats something that if we want to start doing it, we should start to look at communities like your grandfather who have been doing that forever. You know . I think, and ill say, too, that, and, again, i dont want to thb, you know, misconstrued in simple terms because people need to access, you know, medicine and food and everything, but at the same time, you know, we have to start to scale back some of our understanding and consumption and what we really need, and so, you know, we need health care. We need education. We need programs for our kids. I dont know how many flays screen tvs we need, you know. I dont know how big our houses need to be. We have to decide together. Doing business with the devil is allowing the devil to make decisions that will weaken, and that happens a lot today in the u. S. Society. Thats all i have to say. Thank you so much. You have a question . Thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation, and i have a couple comments. Its about two blocks down the road at this street at the crossing where half the people in this 60 oneroom apartments are homeless women and men, and so this home is pretty much on homelessness too for me. The other question, the other comment i have is i spent 37 years in east east africa, travg to the countries that were in and struggled, and, perhaps, as you talk about this, thinking of the larger pictures, perhaps we care about countries where so many people, thousands and millions are homeless, you know, like syria, central africa, republic, and others. We are a part of the problem with homelessness in so many other countries directly. The congo, for all those years and other countries, and one is, of course, doctorately responsible for the homelessness, i think, in palestine. Uhhuh. We could change that overnight almost if our government wanted to change it. Its the same day too much, but i wish that a person was here who can i understand Brandon Collins, hes with bill and with bob in the attemptive peace and justice, very much involved in the people here in the home area of living at home where subsidized, and just fighting going on, and i think he would appreciate very much some of the [inaudible] yeah. Anyway, i have a good voice. There you go. Yeah, i can speak without a microphone, but he would appreciate Brandon Collins and maybe he could gather people who are struggling with the local government all the time and the the National Government and State Government over the homes where nay are living with, maybe to be our time, would be great, i think, if you could hook up with them and build the public, to help you do that. Thank you very much. Thank you, thanks for coming. [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] i did in new york a study course on henry george, and henry george was a politician oh, is this working . Oh, okay. [inaudible conversations] when i was listening to you speak, it brought to mind eight or nine years ago in new york on henry george who had i just heard a random comment in a talk about him and was somewhat interested in, and he was not wellknown, he was an economist, ran for public office, san fransisco, but very simply put, his whole thing was about cop consumption, and he was very much about the difference between the right of home and property rights. Uhhuh. And how land can be manipulated for speculation by withdrawing it and that can bring up prices, and, you know, you go how far back you want to go. These are topics talk about for, obviously, decades, maybe centuries. You brought up something that i thought was interesting because it seems like that weve had resilience and the resources to let these disputes go back and forth and be very opportunity nighs tick for powers based on the short term, but when you through the environmental issue on top of it, it seems like it frames if in a different way that would not have happened. I mean when i finish the course on henry george, thats how nothing happenedded. I mean, basically, there was wisdom there, not all right or wrong, but it didnt change the system. You know, the system is power, money, leverage, opportunity, wealth. In some sense. Do you believe that some of these other growing crisises, theres a third point . Sometimes when you get into the polarized situation, it takes a third point of crisis to short of sake things up politically. Thats a really good question. I think just quickly, you know, in the past, you had the opportunity to let this debate, you know, i would say the people in power had the opportunity to let that debate go back and forth. You know, the people displaced throughout the course of this countrys history, certainly, did not have that opportunity, and nor did they have the choice on whorpt the debate would juts go back and forth, but i think that bringing the Climate Crisis into the equation is definitely a moment in which we have the opportunity to really demand real kind of fundmental changes this terms of the way property is allocated, land relations are constituted in terms of the way we think about private property, in the terms of the way we allow decisions of profit to pretty much reign, and i dont think that i think that it is taking i think it is a dangerous thing to do to just say, well, this Climate Crisis is going to comb, going to hit, things are going to change, and, you know, thats going to, in some ways, shake it up. I dont think thats a good thing, but i hear it a lot, well, its going to force things to change. We need to be very, very active right now about shaping the way that this Climate Crisis between its going to hit, but we have no control how severely it does, how it plays out. If we keep going in the way were going, were going to see real serious destruction and displacement, mostly of across the world, poor countries, poor communities, women, everybody who lives with this overwhelmingly poor communities mostly of women, communities of color, and were going to see a situation in which, you know, right now, if it happened right now, you know, even though its starting to set in, the u. S. Ultimately probably conceive to hold on to a lot of the power that it has, and we see a situation in which the effect of the Climate Crisis is unequal. The way we are going, the Climate Crisis affects the devastation it causes. It will be vastly unequal. I think, sometimes, you know, people in the u. S. , people with a little bit more privilege go into it being like, well, thank god this shakes everything up, you know, and we could create a situation if we dont organize a really aggressively in the next few decades, starting right now, and, obviously, that work is already happening very much so. We could create a situation in which all the inequalities of the current world are just magnified, and so i think that its important to use the moment to really be active in the organizing, in our neighborhoods, in the way we talk about what we want to see in the environment, in terms of government policy, financial policy moving forward because theyre already looking for marketbased solutions to the Climate Crisis. They are already looking how we can do, like, Carbon Offset program. Were already seeing a situation that we just saw in the philippines where, you know, islands nations will be hit very, very hard. Were seeing a situation in which india and pakistan and millions of deaths caused by floods last year, and so, you know, i appreciate the audience is not seeing it as in the future, but today, and i say, together, we have to see it as an opportunity to come out of it to go through it in a moral way rather than in a vastly unequal way. Okay. We have time for one more. Great, yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, i want to say, you are so radical. [laughter] i appreciate your head nodding. You kept me going. Also, in giving credit to the experience of your grfer, mr. Solomon, are rethinking of our situations and your mom prescription that when we can put these facts in very dry facts into a story with people, it will travel much further. I think it will reverberate different ways, and then maybe that action will be taken. Thank you. Thank you. I, you know, i want to say if thats okay i want to mention what we talk about last night. Oh. First of all, thank you, and thank you for being, like, a total active audience member. Sometimes, like, when im doing a talk, i look around, like, oh, okay, who is going to nod . Okay, cool. If im nervous, shes nodding, okay, i got this. I think youre really right in saying that we need to look at experiences like mr. Solomons, like your grandfather, and see them as these epic actions of resistance. You know, we dont we cant let other people define for us what real resistance is, and whats really heroic . Last night over dinner, we were talking about another book, which is incredible, and i was reading as i was working on this one, and made me totally intimidated but was inspiration, and its called the warmth of another sun, and, yeah, you know, what i love so it covered this epic migration of africanamericans from the south to northern cities to the midwest, out to the west coast. What i love about the book is that she looks at it that it was never appreciated fully through the lens of social justice, politics, and political protest, and she wrote about this migration using the story or through the stories of three people in this way that made this migration just so heroic, just such an epic, one of the modern american epics, perhaps thee american epics, you know, and she wrote about it as a protest of the feat of millions of africanamericans, 6 million africanamericans voted with their feet for, you know, a more just society, and so i think that, you know, looking at the experience of mr. Solomon, looking at the experience of other members of the communities, we need to go home and collectively decide, you know, what are heroic actions in the community . How do we duplicate them . How do we rep kate them . What are heroic acts in our own familys lives . You know . My grandmother came here as a teenager on a boat to get out of europe in between the wars, and, i mean, man, that was a time i dont think i was allowed to stay home. I had a babysitter at the age she got on a boat by herself to cross the atlantic. Theres stories of resistance in our own families, communities, and we have to define those for ourselves and value them and listen to them and then figure out how today, you know, we can implement them and move this forward. It is a question of redefinition, but its a question of simp fying actions because were on a timeline experiencing massive injustice, and today, really, is the day. A lot of the people in the room are active already, but today is the day we have to start on this. Let us all thank laura for a wonderful, good work