"Need decent housing?" Why not Occupy!

[truedelphi]

Full text at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13037/no_vacancies_squatters_move_in/

Need housing - why not Occupy?

After three years of staying in her sister’s living room, Tene Smith decided to move her family into a home that had sat
vacant on Chicago’s South Side for more than two years.

With the help of Liberate the South Side, a Chicago-based organization that targets vacant homes for re-occupation and after spending months renovating the house, Smith and her three children moved in during a public ceremony attended by community members and the media in January 2012. “I was fearful when I first made this commitment,” she told In These Times, “but as the days passed I had a sense of independence that had eluded me before."
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I live in a neighborhood (mostly rural) that has forty some homes. Between the main drag and the left turn that takes me to my home, there are eleven houses. Only three, including mine, have been occupied by permanent residents for the past five years. Six are now vacant, due to mortgages deeply underwater and families simply leaving or else due to foreclosure.

It's a shame that the banks aren't seeing to that someone lives in the homes. Should out and out derelicts end up "crashing" in the homes, I worry about fire danger. And then you have things like rodents, unwatered yards with dying vegetation (it doesn't rain at all in the summer in California) and it seems to me that if bankers had insight and self preservation, they'd be doing something about getting empty houses occupied. So I really enjoyed the article above.

[greytdemocrat]

1. So...

Let's say the bank sells the property tomorrow. The new owner tells her
to hit the road.

Now what??

[Chan790]

3. The bank is in no way interested in selling the property.

They can't sell them for what they're mortgaged for, the original homeowner is so far gone that they'd have a hard time going after them for the difference and so they'll wait to sell for <mortgage-value when the market improves and their ability to ration sales of holdings creates artificial scarcity maximizing the value of their holdings. In the meanwhile they can carry them on the books as material-assets for the mortgaged value rather than actual value which inflates the bank's on-paper value and fiscal-health.

We all get screwed by government's non-ability to compel them to sell. Sales would destroy scarcity and drive values to the floor before the rebound jump-started the economy by creating a buyer's rush.

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. The banks already got paid, by us. It's to their benefit to let large numbers of houses

sit vacant, they carry them at the make believe book value and create a shortage for the future. Win-win.