Campaign News

HUD has a program that sells tens of thousands of troubled mortgages across the country, many in black and Latino neighborhoods hard hit by the housing crisis, to Wall Street speculators - at a discount!  Please let that sink in.

Since 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been auctioning off pools of very delinquent mortgages through a program they call Distressed Asset Sales Program, or DASP.  In most cases, the sales have gone to the highest bidder, which have been hedge funds and private equity firms.

Lone Star Fund, a private equity firm started by a Texas billionaire, and Bayview Asset Management, an affiliate of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, have been two of the primary beneficiaries of these sales. The result? Struggling homeowners lose their homes and speculators turn the properties into high-cost rentals that contribute to displacement in communities across the country.

This month, over 110,000 people from across the country signed a petition calling on HUD Secretary Julian Castro, to change this program. This comes on the heels of a March 1st letter to HUD from 45 members of Congress issuing a similar call for reforms to this mortgage sale program. In fact, for over two years, housing advocates and national policy groups have been pushing HUD to fix this program.

In an interview on WNYC Studio’s “The New York Radio Hour,” Secretary Castro referred to our protests that his program is enriching Wall Street as “sloganeering.” We wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it is simply a fact that 98% of the mortgages sold through HUD’s DASP program are going to Wall Street, one that can be verified on HUD’s own website where they post reports from these sales. Most, if not all, of these Wall Street buyers are what the industry itself calls “vulture capitalists” – investors that specialized in distressed assets in the hopes of making them more profitable and selling them for a profit.

In an effort to suggest that he has addressed the problem, Secretary Castro touts the agency’s 2015 auctions of troubled mortgages in which only non-profits were eligible to bid. Let’s be clear. Only 172 mortgages were sold to non-profits through these auctions, while a whopping 15,309 went to Wall Street investors in 2015. So yes, a gesture was made by the agency, but at such a miniscule scale he surely cannot suggest that the problem is solved.

There is no reason to sell such a high percentage of these loans to some of the same culprits responsible for the housing crisis in the first place. In fact, it seems to be in direct conflict with HUD’s mission to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. Call me skeptical, but I don’t trust a private equity firm like Blackstone – a company whose CEO made $734 million last year - to help fulfill that mission. Blackstone and other major speculators have a goal of making as much money as possible, and in the process are chipping away at the wealth and stability of neighborhoods in the process.

There is a viable alternative, that housing and civil rights groups across the country are calling for.  HUD should prioritize selling these loans to good actors that have a community-centered plan to save homes from foreclosure when possible and, when foreclosure cannot be avoided, to meet the affordable housing needs of the community with their property disposition plans.

A growing number of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) have programs to do just this, and have raised the capital needed to buy pools of these delinquent mortgages.  But so far, they haven’t been able to get their hands on the number of mortgages that they can afford. HUD should do all it can to make sure CDFIs and other good actors are prioritized for these sales.

I have seen too many people in my community lose their homes and their wealth to Wall Street speculators. We cannot allow the same policies that ravaged our communities to continue. For me the choice is very clear: will Secretary Castro make sure that HUD helps families stay in their homes, or will he allow HUD to continue to sign over these loans to Wall Street and fuel neighborhood displacement?

It’s time for HUD to make the right choice and partner with non-profit CDFIs and other organizations that will keep our neighborhoods together. I encourage everyone who cares about the stability of neighborhoods across the country to join with me in calling on Secretary Castro and HUD to change the DASP program so that it prioritizes foreclosure avoidance and the creation of affordable housing.

By Ana Maria Archila

Source

On a Wednesday in mid-September, a group of progressive activists concerned about the stewardship of the American economy packed a meeting room on Capitol Hill with staff of Senate Democrats. Part strategy session and part pep talk, the gathering had a very specific aim.

“We’ll do whatever we can do to prevent Kevin Warsh from taking on the role of chair of the Federal Reserve,” Jennifer Epps-Addison, president of the Center for Popular Democracy, told the gathering.

Read the full article here.

When many people envision a banker, they usually think of the Hollywood image of the arrogant, Wall Street type. But they don’t think of the tellers who deal with customers every day.

All that has changed, at least with Amalgamated Bank, which announced a company-wide $15 minimum wage for all employees. The news drew praise from the likes of Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who stated that every bank in New York show follow Amalgamated Bank’s example.

“Large employers with workforces so underpaid they rely on public assistance is a story we hear all too often in connection with big-box stores and fast-food chains,” said Brewer in a statement. “But the shocking truth is that 40 percent of workers in New York’s banks rely on public assistance, and nearly three quarters of New York’s bank tellers earn less than $15 per hour.”

“While Amalgamated’s new policy is a major step forward, positive actions by individual employers are still no substitute for progress on statewide and nationwide minimum wage increases. We must keep fighting for Albany and Washington to raise the minimum wage.”

According to analysis that the National Employment Law Project provided to ThinkProgress.org, the most common occupation with bank companies is bank teller, and nearly 75 percent of them make less than $15 an hour. Close to a half million people work as bank tellers, with the median hourly wage at just $12.44. Just over 71 percent make less than $15, and wages have fallen by 3.4 percent between 2009 and 2014 as the cost of living has risen.

The NELP report didn’t stop there. It also revealed that more than 40 percent of bank customer service representatives makes less than $15 an hour. According to NELP, a quarter of the people in banking who work in maintenance, production and protective service make less than $15 an hour as well. The report further stated that bank tellers are overwhelmingly female (85 percent of the bank teller workforce) and are disproportionately Latino (20 percent of bank tellers though 16.5 percent of the overall American workforce). Close to a third have to rely on some sort of public assistance.

NELP’s analysis concluded that bank tellers should get a $15 minimum wage.

Brian Kettenring, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, praised Amalgamated Bank’s actions.

“Workers across the country are fighting for a $15 minimum wage because it means dignity and a chance for us to break down barriers that keep us from sustaining our families,” said Kettenring in a statement. “This bold step by Amalgamated Bank is what happens when sensible employers understand courageous organizing. We commend the bank for giving workers the pay they’ve earned and call on others in the industry to follow. Raising the wage is inevitable, and employers would be smart to raise wages proactively.

“Our communities will continue building the movement for $15 and a union, and we won’t stop until we’ve achieved it,” concluded Kettenring.

Source: Amsterdam News

Over the past few years, two movements have exploded into the public’s consciousness. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder and police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and many other people of color, Black Lives Matter has emerged as a powerful set of voices calling for racial justice, including an end to racially motivated violence.

At the same time, a growing movement of low-wage workers demanding higher wages and paid sick time has led some corporations to improve their policies for workers, and to dozens of localities and states adopting minimum wage increases and paid sick days laws.

The next frontier in the fight for fair workplaces is job scheduling. Protests by retail and food workers, high-profile New York Times articles, and other subsequent media coverage of workers experiencing erratic, unpredictable schedules has led to public outcry, the introduction of federal legislation to improve work schedules, and more than a dozen state and local proposed laws.

There is considerable overlap between these issues and the activists that are at the center of both movements. As Ron Harris, an organizer at the Twin Cities-based group Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), explains, people “don’t live single-issue lives. … The people getting shot are low-wage folks. … They are over-policed and under-resourced.”

I spoke with Harris to learn how NOC is leading the fight for fair scheduling in Minneapolis by taking an approach grounded in a commitment to racial justice. The campaign demonstrates the possibilities that emerge when advocates connect the dots between job quality issues and racial justice in their strategy and messaging.

Tell me about your organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC)

NOC is a non-profit that focuses on work at the intersection of race, public policy and the economy. Our members are primarily low-wage Black folks living in north Minneapolis. Our mission is to shift the balance of power between folks who have and folks who don’t have, and in our opinion, the folks who don’t have are low-income black people in Minneapolis.

We derive a lot of our ideas about what issues we will work on from the bottom up. At monthly meetings called “issue cuts,” we discuss the issues and members vet the ones we will work on.

This past year we worked on a series of local future of work proposals, including fair scheduling, earned sick and safe time [time to deal with domestic or sexual violence], a policy to end rampant wage theft and raising the minimum wage to $15. We’re also working on police reform; we made a series of demands of our local police department, and in 2016 we will take those to the state level. We led the charge in repealing two laws that only two cities in the country have—“lurking laws” and “spitting laws.”

If you spit in Minneapolis, for instance, you can get a misdemeanor. These laws were targeting low-income black people, black men in particular. We beat that law in Minneapolis—now it is gone.  

We also work on voter restoration. There are approximately 47,000 people in Minnesota who don’t have the right to vote because of a past criminal conviction. We’re working on a bill at the state level to end that. And we’re working with the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) on their Federal Reserve campaign, engaging with National Fed and Local Fed banks in town, working on influencing economic policy and who is elected to those boards.

How has NOC been involved with organizing and advocacy related to fair scheduling in the Twin Cities?

We got involved with fair scheduling because members of our base were coming in saying they were working jobs where they didn’t know their schedule until the day before or even the day of. They were forced to close businesses and come right back and open up the next morning. We call this “clopening.”

So we started to work with national partners, CPD included, to come up with a fair scheduling policy that mirrors work in other cities and states. Our state government is divided [between Republicans and Democrats], so we thought we’d take this to the city level.

NOC has been heavily involved in crafting the policy. This is where the “issue cut” came in. There were a series of generic provisions in the first scheduling policy and we laid these out for our membership and asked our membership base: “What do these sound like? Are they too strong? Too weak? What’s missing?” It led to a tailored approach that reflected the voices of the members.

On the field side, we gathered hundreds and hundreds of stories of people experiencing these scheduling issues. As we gathered their stories, we brought members to city hall and took them on lobbying visits.

Why is scheduling a racial justice issue?

If you think about the folks who are the most likely to have an unfair schedule and the least likely to be able do something about, at that intersection it tends to be people of color, particularly women of color.

If they don’t have access to a fair schedule, they are likely working a low-wage job, and if they are in a low-wage job, they likely have inadequate access to transportation… and you can see how there is a domino effect.

Why is it important to frame public discussions of fair scheduling in terms of racial justice?

We frame it as a racial justice issue because, living in Minneapolis, we have some of the worst economic disparity gaps in the country. With those dynamics, we almost had to frame it that way. We thought this could be an opportunity to close some of these gaps.

The thousand of stories we collected about employers hiring new people instead of giving out more hours to their current employees or getting schedules the day before people were supposed to work—all of those stories were coming from low-income communities of color, so frankly, that was the only way we could frame it.

We thought that our city leaders and elected officials would be sensitive to the opportunity to close the gap. In 2013, a majority of the city council was elected running on some kind of racial equity platform. So, our messages to the media and to elected officials were the same: “Hey, the folks that we donated to and endorsed ran on a racial equity platform and we haven’t seen any action from them for the past couple of years. We need this now. Here’s a perfect opportunity for you to close these gaps.”

We also tried to connect the dots, highlighting that the people most likely to suffer from [unfair schedules] are those with black and brown faces. Refusing to act means that you really don’t care about these gaps. It means, you ran on these things, but you’re really not committed to acting on them.

In your outreach to “high-road” employers, is it useful to discuss the connection between scheduling and racial inequity?

We’ve been working on really trying to engage people across sectors in fixing these gaps. So, for example, it’s not just the role of the community to advocate for itself and to bring awareness to this issue.  The business community has a role, too. We recognize employers’ value as job creators, but also emphasize that by changing some of their worksite practices, they can also be adding to the movement. 

We frame this for employers as: “Do the best you can where you are. We all have an opportunity. We all have a role.” And it really worked with some employers.

Even though the legislation wasn’t ultimately brought to vote, because of the campaign that we ran and the stories that were brought to light, some business owners are reporting that they are already changing their practices. Maybe they were giving their schedules five days in advance and now they’re going to work towards 10 days. One landscaping company used to say, you don’t leave until the job is done. Now they say if it is 6:00 P.M. and you aren’t done, just go home and be with your family.

Although we haven’t had much luck with large chain employers, one exception is Target. They have committed to changing their scheduling practices, almost in lockstep with what we have been pushing. We have talked about this as a racial justice issue with Target. We’ve said, as the largest employer in the city, they have a really unique opportunity to make an impact [on racial equity]. They also want their customers to have more money in their pockets—they need a strong economic environment, too.

The movement for racial justice has been gaining strength and momentum around the country in the wake of police killings. Within that movement, do you think there is enough attention to job quality and fair workplace issues?

Nationally, no. Locally, definitely. With NOC and Black Lives Matter, yes, we’re talking about police brutality, but also an overall culture of injustice that exists. In Minneapolis, in particular, some of the chants are we don’t want to get shot by police—but we also want a $15 minimum wage and all these other things.

The intersection of race and the economy has been really strong here. It’s a compounding effect where if you pay attention to the folks who are getting brutalized by the police, these aren’t middle class and rich folks. These are low-income black people. They are getting stopped because they are walking down the street when they are “not supposed to be,” technically. The people getting shot by police are low-wage folks—they are over-policed and under-resourced.

What could the fair scheduling movement be doing to further highlight the racial justice aspects of scheduling issues?

Really to ground the work in story telling. Make sure you have a strong base of individuals who are actually going through [unfair scheduling] who can speak from experience. No one can deny someone’s story. Stories help to justify everything you do.

Also, get the data. We gathered data that shows that the people who are most likely to work the jobs that have unfair schedules, they are black and brown, and most likely women. The data alone reflects that this is a racial justice issue.

Build a broad-based coalition, including people who understand how to do racial analysis and member based organizations, so the members can really speak for themselves.

How can scheduling advocates support the work of racial justice advocates?

If you think about it, if people are advocating for police reform, criminal justice reform, the people they are standing up for are people who are working these crappy jobs. So, fair scheduling advocates just need to stand up and say, our people are the same exact people. They don’t lead single-issue lives, they lead lives that are compounding multiple issues.