Advocacy Groups Move the Homeless into Vacant Foreclosures

With a chronic shortage of affordable housing in many cities and an abundance of foreclosed properties, advocacy groups for the homeless in some cities have been quietly moving homeless people into vacant, foreclosed homes, often the ones they previously lived in. Some groups operate as a kind of modern-day underground railroad, according to one advocate quoted in a New York Times story, while other groups do their work openly, sometimes with the support of neighbors in low income neighborhoods who are tired of seeing vacant homes become derelict, vandalized and increasingly unkempt.

In Miami, Philadelphia and other cities, volunteer advocates not only encourage organized “squatting,” but coordinate civil disobedience whereby owners or renters of foreclosed properties refuse to leave the premises. Overworked police departments don’t always take aggressive action.

According to the director of one such group in south Florida called Take Back the Land, those who are moved into foreclosed homes are screened for drug problems and mental illness and are also required to clean up the property and keep current paying the utility bills.

Other groups, like the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, are thinking about making overtures to banks to ask them for legal title to abandoned properties; in exchange, they promise to rehab the buildings.

Do you support the work of homeless advocacy groups in reclaiming foreclosed properties? Does it make a difference whether the squatters who move in to a foreclosed home were the previous owners, or not?

Tags: Economy, foreclosure, foreclosure squatters, living in foreclosed, living in foreclosure

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