People called the campaign every day in January to sign up to go to Lansing on Jan. 29, when a demonstration took place outside the Capitol Building prior to Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s “State of the State” address. Activists are pressuring the governor to use her emergency powers under the law to declare a state of economic emergency and impose a moratorium to halt foreclosures for a five-year period.

MECAWI organizers report that the Jan. 29 demonstration has received the endorsement of the Greater Lansing Area Network Against War and Injustice. Activists with the North Star Center, a radical community group in Lansing, contacted MECAWI to also lend their support.

The editor of a community newspaper in Benton Harbor called about the demonstration and offered to set up a town hall meeting to publicize the campaign for a moratorium. She stated that 60 percent of the homes in that predominantly Black city are in tax foreclosure.

A Growing Campaign

The response to the demand for a moratorium is overwhelming.

On Dec. 13 community activists leafleted and petitioned a mortgage fair sponsored by state Attorney General Mike Cox at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Activists were ejected from the hall by security for attempting to give moratorium information to the thousands of people attending in an effort to find some relief from the foreclosure process. Only banks and lenders were allowed to give out information inside. Undaunted community activists distributed moratorium literature outside.

A Detroit News article on Jan. 5 reported on a MECAWI community moratorium meeting and channel 2 Fox News reported on MECAWI’s call. At this meeting many living in Metro Detroit participated including United Community Housing Coalition coordinator Ted Philips, who is involved in stopping tax foreclosures in Detroit. Philips advised on how to forestall evictions and told meeting participants about show-cause hearings Jan. 7-9 for Wayne County tax foreclosures which activists leafleted.

The moratorium campaign was also bolstered by an hour-long community radio and television program hosted by Agnes Hitchcock on Jan. 5. MECAWI organizer and people’s attorney Jerry Goldberg was Hitchcock’s guest and reported an overwhelming positive response to the moratorium call. On Jan. 9 Goldberg was interviewed by the public radio station in Boston. MECAWI received an e-mail from a woman in Massachusetts who heard the interview on her local NPR station and was moved by the foreclosure crisis in Michigan that Goldberg described. She sent a donation along with a message of solidarity.

From Jan. 9 to 13, a crew from the government-run Korean Broadcasting System in South Korea met with MECAWI activists. The KBS television station is putting together a one-hour documentary on the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S.

According to MECAWI organizer Mike Shane, “The KBS crew came to Detroit from Florida. They said they thought much of the crisis in that state is from investors losing money from the practice of ‘flipping’ houses. In Detroit the producers could see that a much deeper crisis is at work, a crisis of unemployment, racism and urban degeneration.”

Shane said that the KBS crew was “stunned” by what they saw in Detroit and expressed disbelief that nothing was being done by the government to help people. “Like in so many other places around the world, the Korean TV team had held a view of life in the U.S. based on Hollywood lies, and at first they couldn’t comprehend that the richest country in the world has such dire poverty, with so many people losing their homes.”

The KBS crew followed MECAWI activists to a neighborhood in northwest Detroit on Jan. 12 where Thelma Raziya Curtis faces eviction from the home her daughter owns, a home that has been part of her family for decades but is now in foreclosure. Curtis was interviewed extensively and filmed as she went about her daily activities.

Organizers went door to door in the neighborhood, distributing literature, petitioning and talking to residents about Curtis’ plight and the struggle for a moratorium on all foreclosures and evictions. Everyone expressed concern for Curtis’s situation and many asked to be contacted if necessary for more support.

At the Jan. 5 community meeting participants unanimously agreed to fight to keep Curtis in her home. An emergency response task force is in place to plan an action to prevent the bailiff from evicting Curtis.

The KBS crew filmed a block on Strathmoor Street where 10 out of 12 houses stood empty, where most of them had items taken by poor people looking to make a little money from bricks, pipes, abandoned furnaces and the like. They filmed other areas in Detroit with block after block of fields and vacant homes.

On Jan. 11 MECAWI organizers and community activists packed a hearing of the Housing Task Force of the Detroit City Council hosted by progressive Council member JoAnn Watson. The participants overwhelmingly supported the foreclosure moratorium campaign.

Watson reported that a resolution was passed unanimously by the City Council in late December calling on Gov. Granholm to declare a state of emergency in the city and a moratorium on foreclosures. She said that legislation was being drafted to beef up the city’s blight ordinances so that banks and financial institutions would face stiff fines for abandoning foreclosed homes and allowing them to be stripped. Progressive attorneys are drafting language that other municipalities will be able to use as well. Foreclosures in the metro Detroit area are up 100 percent from a year ago, with over 72,000 homes now in foreclosure.

Build the movement!

Says Goldberg, “The racist and predatory lenders aren’t going to solve the crisis they’re responsible for. Nothing is abating the situation. All the proposals are like putting a thumb over a bursting dam. The only way to get a state of emergency declared and a moratorium on foreclosures is by mass pressure. Our task is how to build this movement.”

For more information on the struggle for a moratorium on foreclosures in Michigan, call or visit www.mecawi.org.