Fighting on Frontlines of the Foreclosure Crisis: Citizens Take on the Monster Banks

East Boston is one of those urban neighborhoods that is easy to pass through and hard to get to. It's separated from downtown Boston by a river, bisected by two tunnels and a freeway, and hemmed in by Logan Airport on the east. Sonny Noto's restaurant is a reminder of the days when it was heavily Italian, but it's now overwhelmingly Latino, mostly Mexican, Salvadoran and Colombian immigrants, their desires for ice cream and cumbia CDs catered to by the Heladeria al Jardin and El Poder Musical.

East Boston has been hard hit by foreclosure. More than 400 buildings there have been foreclosed, says Dominic Desiata, a community organizer for City Life/Vida Urbana. He estimates that out of a population of 40,000 people, 500 to 700 have faced eviction because of foreclosures.

Unlike the rest of the country, most of the victims of foreclosure in the Boston area are renters. Steve Meacham, a longtime City Life/Vida Urbana organizer, estimates that three-fourths of the people facing eviction in foreclosed properties are tenants.

"The foreclosure crisis is mainly affecting the three-decker," says Zoe Cronin, an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, referring to the three-story, three-apartment wood buildings that are urban New England's iconic working-class housing.

But Boston has also seen a strong campaign against foreclosure evictions. Combining grassroots organizing, legal action, political and media pressure on the banks and eviction-day sit-ins, it's so far been able to keep dozens of people in their homes.

"We've kept many, many people in their apartments," says Desiata. "We don't want to be displaced at the right price. We want to stay and keep the community together."

The banks, he says, don't want to renegotiate mortgages, and want the buildings vacant once they've been foreclosed. So they have to be pressured to let residents stay and pay rent, or to sell the building at the current appraised value instead of the housing-bubble mortgage value.

Canvassing

Salvadoran immigrant Alfredo Martinez became an organizer with City Life/Vida Urbana two years ago, when he was fighting eviction. A short, stocky engaging man in a brown outdoor-work jacket and a baseball cap, Martinez first came to the United States in 1973 and settled in East Boston after several trips back and forth. He's worked in restaurants and construction, as a bricklayer, tiler and plasterer.

In 2007, Citizens Bank foreclosed on Martinez's landlord, and then moved to evict him. He got a Legal Services lawyer to contest the eviction on the grounds that the building needed repairs. Eventually, he won a $12,500 settlement and the right to stay, signing a lease with the new owner, although his rent was raised to $900 and he's still trying to get repairs done.

Now he spends Saturday afternoons canvassing East Boston. Organizers—mostly tenants who have fought their own evictions—trek through the neighborhood in pairs, knocking on the doors of recently foreclosed buildings to try to get the residents to join the movement against displacement.

On Brooks Street, a toddler peers out the window of a two-story clapboard home. Someone immediately pulls the curtains shut. A lot of immigrants have miedo—a fear of strangers, Martinez explains; they're scared that outsiders could be immigration agents or police.

The upstairs apartment has five names listed on the mailbox, a common sight in the neighborhood. That's nothing, Martinez says. He once lived in a house with 24 people.

No one is home at the next building, on Lexington Street. On Marion Street, the three-decker of beige clapboards and stone facing already has a padlock on the front door. The white three-decker on Prescott Street has a for-sale sign. A real-estate Web site says a two-bedroom condo in the building sold for $100,800 in March and $83,605 in October, slightly below the average for the area.