XPost: ba.market.housing, sbay.housing, alt.california
XPost: sac.politics, alt.politics.republicans, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
From: leroysoetoro@hrc-rejected.com

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/04/retake-the-house/

When I ask Christine Hernandez, a mother of four, slender in stature and
bold in manner, how best to scout for abandoned homes—the bleak dwellings
with the boarded-up windows and ripped-out drywall, their innards packed
with leftover syringes, rotting debris, and the peculiar loot of previous dispossessed tenants—she says it’s best to send someone who won’t draw too
much suspicion from cops or neighbors. “I’m a woman, and small,” she
notes. “Not super intimidating, you know?”

It was about two years ago when Hernandez, who works at a community
development organization, and her husband, Emilio, a painter, were forced
to leave their ramshackle home in Oakland, California, after trying to get their landlord to make repairs. They started touring listings and seeking
out “For Rent” signs in windows. But in the nutso housing crisis plaguing
the Bay Area, where one-bedroom apartments in Oakland rent for more than
$2,000 a month—never mind a home with space for a family of six—they found themselves, like so many others, hopelessly priced out. What they did
notice was a shocking abundance of forsaken properties. They started
performing reconnaissance. “A lot of them were already occupied, so, you
know, that’s that,” she says. “A lot of them had burn damage, so you can’t really do much with that.”


Fifteen-year-old Marcus opens the gate to the Hernandez home. The
Hernandez family lives behind a locked fence in order to prevent
unannounced and potentially unlawful entry by people trying to get them
out of the home.

Then on a clear October morning in 2015, they found a three-bedroom, one-
bath house that had been a haven for drugs and prostitution. They pried
open a section of the chain-link fence surrounding the property, scurried inside, and explored by flashlight. The kitchen had no counter, no sink,
no pipes. Burn marks scoured the home. “It was a total mess,” says
Hernandez, but a mess could be cleaned up. They got to work.

The right to adequate housing—not just four walls and a roof, but “a safe
and secure home and community in which to live in peace and dignity”—is
decreed by the United Nations, but you wouldn’t know it by looking around California, where nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless people live.
The housing crisis is often described as a shortage, the only solution
being that we build our way out of it. But for every American living on
the street, there are 13 empty, off-market units. In Oakland, where buyers routinely offer hundreds of thousands of dollars over asking prices, there
are nearly four vacant properties for every homeless person. It’s not so
much an issue of scarcity, but of distribution.

A snapshot of Christine Hernandez and her family in West Oakland,
California

Christine Hernandez and her daughter Sofia Lina, four years-old, repot
plants in their Fruitvale, California, backyard.

Emilio Hernadez holds a bullet that entered Madeleine Hernandez’s bedroom. Squatting, or “occupying,” as its practitioners tend to prefer calling it,
is a shaky existence, Hernandez’s family immediately discovered. On their
first day, they encountered an outraged neighbor. “She was like, ‘You have kids? You’re going to be living in that filth and squalor?'” The cops came later, walking in on them as they were patching the walls, interrogating
them about how they had gotten inside. A nearby house would occasionally
host illicit gambling nights that would “inevitably involve gunfire.” Two
days before their eldest daughter’s 17th birthday, a bullet entered her
bedroom window, bounced around, and slammed a hole in the wall two feet
from her head. She still has the slug, a smashed-up metal keepsake, on her dresser.

But the worst was when a representative from a bank busted in. Christine
and Emilio arrived home to find the front door smashed and the locks
changed. The house was ransacked, their valuable possessions stolen. The
water was turned off and the power had been shut down. Flyers from a
company called M&M Mortgage Services, which offers “debris removal” and “eviction services,” festooned the house: “This property was found to be
vacant and/or unsecured,” they read. “It has been secured against entry by unauthorized persons to prevent possible damage.” The company operatives
had let the family’s dog loose and it went missing for days.

Scouring the internet for information on how to fight back, Hernandez came across an organization run by an Oakland man who had used a little-known
law called “adverse possession” to gain ownership of a home he’d occupied
for more than a decade. Passed down from common law, the legal doctrine
varies from state to state, but the basic gist is that anyone can legally
claim an abandoned property if he or she occupies it and pays its back
taxes for a set time and as long as no one else steps forward and proves ownership.

Outdated electrical wires extend from the walls of renovated squat
properties. Legal prosecution and future instability prevent squatters
from ongoing renovation investment in properties that they may be forced
to vacate in the near future.

Vaughn, Marcus, and Sofia Lina Hernandez (left to right) share a birthday breakfast for Emilio in their Fruitvale home.

Christine Hernandez and her daughter Sofia Lina rest on the hammock in
their backyard.
The man was Steven DeCaprio, and his organization, called Land Action, was dedicated to helping squatters. Hernandez and her family went off to find
him.

DeCaprio is 45 years old, with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and beard. About
15 years ago, unemployed and recently evicted, he was living out of his
van when he first saw the home that he now owns—a turn-of-the-century
bungalow in a poor West Oakland neighborhood. Plywood stood in for the
front door, the back of the house hung off the foundation, the kitchen
floor was burned down to charred beams, and an acacia tree had grown
through a hole in the roof. The top floor, open to the sky, was littered
with animal carcasses.

Steven DeCaprio provides legal and administrative advice from Berkeley, California’s Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, where he is the
executive director.

He researched property records and learned that the previous owner had
died in the 1980s and no one had claimed the house. DeCaprio broke in, and
with a crew of friends he started what would become a yearslong process of rehabilitating the property. They added locks, installed a solar power
system, drew baths over a propane stove, and had fires in the backyard.
“Wild West meets cyberpunk,” he says.

After countless run-ins with the police, DeCaprio finally gained title to
the home. In California, adverse possession requires five years of paying
taxes and navigating a bureaucratic maze of tax assessors, the courthouse, property records, and in some instances litigation to force a county to
accept tax payments. It also requires an extraordinary amount of good
fortune: Until they become adverse possessors, squatters are trespassers, subject to criminal charges whether an abandoned property’s owner
complains or not.


A light fixture hangs from the ceiling of a renovated squat property.

Steven DeCaprio enters his West Oakland home, acquired through persistent, law-abiding squatting.

A cot welcomes guests in the living room of Steven DeCaprio’s West Oakland home.

DeCaprio’s idea to create Land Action came after the Supreme Court’s
infamous 2010 Citizens United ruling, when he had an epiphany over the
phrase “Corporations are people.” “Homeless people should form a
corporation,” he thought. He modeled Land Action off a tactic he had seen
real estate speculators use: They form a collection of limited liability corporations to act as titleholders to conceal their ownership. Land
Action would function as a title holding company to shield squatters until their paperwork cleared.

DeCaprio pursued a law degree through an independent study program and
passed the bar exam. The State Bar of California has declined to issue his
law license, saying that an old misdemeanor trespass charge may make him ineligible on moral grounds. He is appealing. But with or without the
license, he’s become a squatting guru, leading seminars to often desperate people up against eviction.

This activism has come with costs. Not long ago, DeCaprio was facing
several years in jail and tens of thousands of dollars in fines for felony conspiracy charges stemming from assisting two Oakland squatters in 2015.
When those charges were finally dropped in late 2017, DeCaprio and his colleagues interpreted it as a confirmation that adverse-possession claims might be a viable strategy for housing for at least some of the Bay Area’s burgeoning homeless population.

On a stormy night in January, I tagged along with DeCaprio as he drove to
a city commission meeting about a homeless encampment in Berkeley. As he steered through the rainy streets, he said that in his nearly two decades
of working on housing rights, he’d “never seen such an acute amount of displacement and homelessness.” The dot-com boom and the foreclosure
crisis were nothing compared with the speculation that’s occurring now,
“this new real estate bubble that keeps expanding.”


Shown in an upstairs bedroom of his West Oakland home, Steven DeCaprio
recounts ongoing legal trials and persecution endured in order to maintain
his law-abiding squatting.

Lasting hints of humor, community spirit, and teamwork essential to
renovate Stephen DeCaprio’s West Oakland squat decorate the walls
surrounding recently updated electrical wires.

A perimeter fence and large dog named Remus protected Steven DeCaprio from police as well as burglary over the years.

For some squatters, adverse possession is a goal, but it’s not necessarily
the goal. “Most of the people I’ve worked with, squatting has been more of
a temporary solution to their problems,” says DeCaprio. “You can get a lot accomplished if you have a few months or a few years in a house to get
your shit together. When you have no other housing available and you’re squatting, every fucking day is a victory.”

Take Hernandez. After the house was put up for auction, she brainstormed
with Land Action and went back armed with a stack of bright yellow notices
to hand out to potential bidders: “[This home]…is currently occupied by a family wishing and intending to continue tenancy,” the flyers read. “We
know our rights and intend to assert and defend them.”

The place they had called home for the previous two years—the one they had relieved of layers of rotting refuse, and where they had installed
appliances, gotten the plumbing and electricity up and humming, won over
the neighbors, and planted a garden—was the first property auctioned that
day, for one penny over the opening price to a sole bidder who intended to
flip it. Soon, an eviction notice arrived.

Hernandez filed a motion to quash, which stated that her family hadn’t
been properly served. “A lot of these eviction mill lawyers are not
putting the names of the occupants on the complaints,” says DeCaprio. It’s
a tactic used to expedite an eviction, he says. “These attorneys are
making their money by volume and not really doing their jobs, and actually benefiting the speculators and the developers and the landlords who get
these really fast evictions.”

“They know our names,” says Hernandez, when I visit her. “We met the new
owner. We sat at this table. I made sure he had an opportunity to see
this,” she adds, gesturing around the dining room. On a computer nearby, a slideshow of the house’s transformation plays—holes in walls are patched
and painted, plumbing and appliances are installed, burn marks disappear.

As she talks, her four-year-old daughter, Sofia Lina, occasionally
interrupts with a facetious grin and a whisper, each time bearing new
items in her tiny hands. “I want to show you my toys.” “Will you draw a
circle on this?” “I want you to hear this song. It’s the Queen of Pony
song.”

“But he was, you know, it’s an investment for him,” Christine says. “The
longer we’re here, the more it cuts into his potential profit.”

In January, the court granted Hernandez’s motion; the owner will have to restart the eviction process. She’s been preparing a backup plan. “There’s
a house that I’m looking at that isn’t occupied, and it has a hole in the
roof and some other damage. It has a lot of debris in the yard,” she says.

“A person recently inherited the house. I want to reach out to that
person and say, ‘We’re happy to completely clean your house. We’ll paint
it. We’ll fix your roof. We’ll take care of any business that needs to be
taken care of, in exchange for you allowing us to live there for some
agreed upon period of time.'”

Hernandez looks up. “We did this because we needed to do it,” she says,
“and we do it without apology.”



--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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