Worcester Speaks #9: Grace Ross
“People basically get stripped of all their wealth."
This column is one of four—all totally unique to themselves—supported by Worcester Sucks subscribers! Please think about signing on with your $5 a month to help us continue to build up a proper digital alt weekly in this city!!
There’s also a cool new shirt design in the merch store! Merch orders help a bunch.
—Bill
Grace Ross is a community organizer, activist, and co-founder of the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending, a coalition that includes the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team, where Ross is chairperson. Both organizations exist to keep people from losing their homes to byzantine legal processes and/or scams. If you or someone you know is dealing with foreclosure/eviction, you’d do well to have Grace on your side. I’ve condensed our very long conversation and edited it for clarity.
Liz: For folks who aren't familiar with the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team, or WAFT, what do you all do?
Grace: The Worcester Anti-Foreclosure team was started in 2008, when it became apparent in the wider world that there was a historic number of foreclosures coming. Of course, we didn't know that it was about to get even worse. But in 2008 it felt pretty bad. And the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team started with local community folks who knew there was a problem. And we started going out door-knocking to talk to people. When there's gonna be a foreclosure auction, you can see it in the newspapers. So we started collecting lists and door-knocking and talking to people.
The statewide organization, the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending, was started first. I was one of the founders of that. Those of us who started that had been told by someone--one of the few people who actually knew anything at that point--he said, “follow the money.” So we went and followed the money. And what we knew was that the primary source of money, like for the hedge funds and uber-wealthy folks, was coming from predatory illegal loans. And that it was such a huge part of the financial makeup of the world that it was gonna crash the market. So we knew that we were following a money trail of illegal lending that was bad enough it was gonna crash the market, but even the folks who watched the market were saying it wasn't going to.
[WAFT] tries to support people, to work together to save their homes, and not just reverse illegal foreclosures, but actually make our way back to the beginning with the illegal loans. If WAFT wins, what we win is a huge financial windfall to our communities. When people buy a home, they usually invest every single cent they've got. And when that home gets foreclosed, they lose one of their three fundamental, unalienable rights, which is the right to your home: life, liberty, and real property. When they wrote the Constitution, they meant your home, your farm, small business. So one of our three fundamental rights. But to get there, to win, we would have to get a lot closer to justice around housing. And a huge amount of money that's been stripped from our communities has impacted small business development. When the school-age population is being thrown out of their homes a lot, it harms the school performance of every single kid in that school when the class turnover is a lot in a short period of time. So this is one of those places where you're dealing with a foundational building block of what it means to be a community and a civil society.
Can you walk me through what that looks like for a homeowner facing foreclosure?
Ralph Gants, who became the chief judge of the [Massachusetts] Supreme Judicial Court, coined the phrase “doomed to foreclose.” Day one, you think you've signed a loan for 30 years and you've been assured you can afford it. But it turns out the person in the room with you knew you couldn't afford it, and had you sign it illegally anyway. And at some point you ran into trouble. People always think it’s a personal problem, like somebody lost a job, there was a divorce, whatever. But that's not true, 'cause you were carrying a debt that was far beyond affordable from day one.
Massachusetts allows foreclosures to be done by auction. More than half the states require judicial foreclosure, but we don't. So you go through a series of notices and they go to court to see if you're in the military. And if you're not, you're not allowed to go to that court case. Eventually you get a notice saying “we're gonna do an auction.” They show up, they do something that's not a legal auction, but has all the trappings of looking like an auction. I think of the 130,000+ foreclosures in Massachusetts in the last 20 years, probably maybe two handfuls were done legally, all the rest of them were illegal and actually don't even exist legally. But in Massachusetts, your right to own your home and your right to live in your home are two separate areas of law.
And since you don't get a right to court before the foreclosure, most people, if they know to stay in their home, their first guaranteed day in court is gonna be for an attempted eviction, which then puts us in the same system that tenants are in. For the homeowner, if they've gotten in touch with WAFT and learned their rights, they know there was no legal foreclosure. They have been shown how to read the documents to show there was no legal mortgage. But instead of being in a court that decides those things, they're gonna be in a court that's just talking about whether you have a right to live in the home, what's referred to as possession.
The housing court [situation] came out of the moratorium for evictions, which we all fought for [during] COVID so that people could have a home to quarantine in. They suspended all the due process rules, and it was supposed to be short-term because they had to restart all these cases. And so they went, “Oh my God, the caseload is too big. We're not gonna be able to reopen as a court.”
So they asked to suspend your rights to notice, to defend yourself, to ask for discovery and get the legal evidence that you need to defend yourself in court, [and] your right to be heard, your right to appeal, the right to an impartial judge. All those rights got suspended, but they're suspended to this day.
A lot of what you're doing is educating people about their rights, as you mentioned. And I have to imagine it's incredibly daunting for the average person.
People come and they almost always think it's an individual problem. They go, “so and so died, we lost our income, blah, blah, blah.” Court is a very isolating experience. Most of the time people are alone in court arguing something in front of a judge, totally intimidating. And it can feel like it's your individual fight. And it's very much not. But it’s having the confidence to have to stand up by yourself in front of a judge. We used to always have a crew of folks in court for every hearing. It's been hard since COVID to organize that. But even if somebody's just giving you a hug and now you're going up in front of the judge by yourself, it's hard to feel like you've got a whole army of people behind you, even if you do.
When WAFT puts out a call for people to come to a specific address on a specific day, what takes place when people show up there on the day of an eviction?
Any time that one of our three unalienable rights are taken, the courts are supposed to pay attention to how the “sentence” gets carried out. The housing courts are supposed to make sure that even though you've, in theory, lost your right to live in the home, they're supposed to be making sure that you're still protected through the process, even if you're gonna be evicted.
So by the time we're asking folks to show up, we've already got a court judgment that is pretty much guaranteed to have been illegal and wrong because the foreclosure was illegal. So an eviction from a house that couldn't have been legally foreclosed is also wrong. But we're only working with those folks. Tenants face this all the time, and they should have their rights to a safe eviction also. So we ask people to show up because if someone's gonna show up and potentially put their hands on you, you should have witnesses.
People are much less likely to get hurt or have their stuff stolen. If you've got witnesses, it's much less likely that people who are supposed to be following the law will act out. Some of the folks who come to evictions are willing to actually put their body in the way of something if something that's gonna happen is gonna be criminal, criminally illegal. So a fair number of folks are willing to do that. And that's allowed us sometimes to stop an illegal eviction just based on that.
It's only the bricks and mortar, so to speak, that the court is ordering to be taken away from you [not your belongings]. So they have to hire a moving and storage company to take your stuff and put it somewhere safe that's bonded and licensed. In Worcester for many years they've been using a company that is not legally licensed, therefore could not be bonded. And they dumpster people's belongings. They will go through and find your valuables and take them. And right now we've got one or two truckloads of stuff that's been in the wind since September 10th.
But now that we've got the right to not be evicted by somebody who could harm you, we're beginning to see them use warehouses that actually might be operating legally for the first time. So it's having an additional beneficial effect. The concept was that it would be a civil eviction. The police would not have a role that would criminalize the situation. And that as long as everybody is following the law, folks would leave under a legal order carried out legally and have their possessions safely stored.
Now when folks show up, we have all sorts of variables we have to take into account like, is this person who's threatening to physically move you trained to not do it in a way that could potentially kill you, like George Floyd. That's where the state law came from, was to make sure that we don't have any George Floyd-style lynchings going on in Massachusetts. So we're trying to protect people from those folks who aren't trained, aren't certified, and could harm them.
And are you a lawyer by training?
No.
How did you acquire all of this knowledge?
Well, I'm a community organizer. And I always found no matter what issue I was helping with, people organize around that by reading the laws. Our laws are required to be written in plain English, but the reality is it's daunting for people to try and figure out what law applies here? And what does it mean?
When this fight started, it became clear pretty early on that when people have invested every last cent they own in their home, which most people do, and if it's under attack and you feel like, well, if I could pay a little bit more, maybe I can save the home, people basically get stripped of all their wealth. Every cent they've made in their lives that wasn't spent on food and gas and heat is in their house. So they lose everything. So we figured out pretty early on that people were not gonna be able to afford lawyers. And that created an unusual movement of people working together not on policy change, which is what we're used to thinking of is how you alter things, but literally on enforcement and enforcement is the courts. So our movement mostly works with protest and court action. And the last movement that did that was the battered women's movement. And before that, of course, the Civil Rights movement, which was expert at combining protest and legal action.
That's a lot of good inspiration.
Yeah. We walk in those shoes.
Just to add one thing to that, it's not surprising because these practices of overpricing the home and charging people more than it was worth for a loan, were actually first instituted to stop Black freedmen from owning any property coming out of slavery. So that we happen to be in the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement is not surprising.
I was reading about the law that passed last July to make equity theft illegal. When someone is behind on their taxes, the city can put a lien on their home, sell that lien to a private company, and then that company can take the entire value of the house, or it could–
So these are property tax foreclosures?
Yes.
It's very frequent compared to bank foreclosures. I hadn't heard it called that. Our representative, John Mahoney, has been lead sponsoring a bill to end that on behalf of the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending for at least 10 years. But the legislature wasn't interested, nobody cared. And the vulture companies that came in to take that property because Worcester sold the tax titles, they would come in, they'd wait a year, so now you're $16,000 under, way back on your taxes, instead of $3,000, let’s say. And then at that point, they'd go into court, and now people couldn't possibly pay it off. Nobody has $16,000 sitting in a bank account somewhere. And so they would foreclose and take the full value. So it wasn't Worcester that was taking the full value. They were selling it, they were selling it to private vulture companies who would go, when Mahoney's bill, our bill was getting heard in the legislature, they would go to the legislature and say you can't change this law, it would ruin our business.
You seem really determined and obviously you would need to be to do this.
Relentless, I think, is the term that's usually used for me.
Whenever I do these interviews, I try to think about an uncharitable reader or a resistant reader, and try to ask –
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the resistant reader, the attack meme is you bought too much house and you set yourself up for this situation, and now you're just reaping the fruits of your overreach, your attempt to own more than you should own. And of course, it's easy for women heads of household and people of color to get told that they own more than they should own, right? So it fits right into that pattern. And you can only get to that thinking if you don't have the backstory, right?
If you remember when the market crashed, [Alan] Greenspan, you know, who was considered the guru of our economy, was brought in by congress. And they said, man, what happened? How did you not predict this? And he said, well we blew it. So they knew this, but they didn't understand the meaning. And when someone said, you bought too much house as Mr. Morris, [a WAFT client] who represented himself at the Supreme Judicial Court got asked one of the standard oppressive, racist, sexist comments of, “Well, what do you expect to live in a house for free?” And as Mr. Morris said, “I didn't buy too much house. I bought too much debt and not enough house.”
My last question is sort of a moral question. What you would say to someone who is like, “Listen, it is so hard to buy a house. Can't I buy a foreclosed home?”
Well, bad or not, we're gonna win. And then you're gonna lose that home. Because the fact that it's that cheap should be a signal. You get what you pay for. If you're buying a foreclosed home that was illegally foreclosed, if we get justice, you're gonna lose your title. So you're buying bad paper, as they call it, and shouldn't do it. If you value your own investment in the home, then you should know that.
And the other thing is, what makes you think if you're buying a property that was foreclosed and cheap, that they're not gonna foreclose on you? People don't understand that these properties have usually been flipped numerous times. Why do you think you are gonna get the only honest lender out there for your purchase when that property has been consistently targeted by predatory lenders? They're setting you up next.
Know someone we should talk to for this series? Send us a line at billshaner@substack.com.
And a reminder work like this on Worcester Sucks is 100 percent supported by paid subscribers. We’re able to do as much good work as you’re able to pay for!