Disrupting an auction in NYC

February 6, 2012

NEW YORK--More than 70 activists gathered in Brooklyn's courthouse on January 26 to raise their voices against a public auction of foreclosed homes and properties.

Foreclosure auctions happen once per week in each of the five boroughs of New York City. The auctions are usually quick events, attended only by a small handful of investors or bank representatives looking for potentially profitable opportunities.

However, activists from several housing rights organizations, including Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing Is a Human Right and a new group called Occupied Real Estate (ORE), were joined by members of community groups and Occupy working groups from around the city. Headed by O4O, participants developed a strategy of peaceful civil disobedience to effectively disrupt the auction proceedings.

When the auctioneer began taking bids for the first property, activists began singing a simple yet powerful song, asking the auctioneer to stop all the sales immediately. This action was modeled on a similar action on October 13, which resulted in nine arrests and the effective cancellation of the foreclosure auction that week.

Inspired by the video from the first action, perhaps four times as many activists joined in this time, filling the seats of the courthouse.

Court officers and officials had time to strategize about how to minimize the effect of the action on the foreclosure auction. As people filed in, phones and cameras were confiscated, and anyone planning to document the public proceeding was threatened with arrest. When the singing began, police filled in the aisles of the court immediately and informed activists that anyone who didn't wish to be arrested needed to clear the courtroom immediately.

As more than 35 activists were arrested and escorted, one by one, to a holding area on another floor of Brooklyn's City Hall, they were cheered on and joined in song by the dozens of activists in the hallway outside the courtroom. In addition to the time spent arresting each singer, resumption of the auction was further delayed by the dozens still singing in the hallway outside the courtroom.

The auction officials seemed unsure as to how they should proceed--hoping that singers would follow their suggestion to quiet down and disperse, but suspecting that they might enter the auction and foil it with singing and arrests, as they did earlier.

In direct violation of the law stipulating that foreclosure auctions must be open to the public, officials attempted to bring investors back in and restart the auction, while banning activists and sympathizers waiting in the hallway outside. A journalist from the Village Voice who tried to come in was told that his regular press pass wouldn't be good enough, and that he would need an NYPD press pass to enter the "public" proceedings.

Ultimately, only one of the listed properties was auctioned, and there is a strong basis to challenge the legality of that sale, as it wasn't open to the public as required.


THAT MORNING, as activists prepared for the day, one of the organizers read aloud the New York state court's formal statement about the purpose of the auction as a means of "preserving community housing" by making opportunities available to "savvy investors, buyers and others in the real estate industry and related professions."

In preparation for the day's action, lawyers from Common Law, a firm that focuses largely on housing law and that founded the group O4O, also explained the practical purpose of interrupting the foreclosure process when it gets to the auction stage.

They explained that when a home is announced in the auction, that is the first moment when the homeowner no longer owns the property, at which point, they become tenants who have to be evicted from their property, like a renter, in order to force them to leave.

Stopping a home's auction extends what has already been a long, bureaucratic process. This halt in the process gives the homeowner more time to negotiate a workable solution for their mortgage with the bank. And given this delay in the process, banks are more likely to listen.

O4O organizers and other housing justice activists have already begun planning how to make future iterations of this action even bigger, more strategic and widespread. "There are people around the country also doing this, including Tampa, where they did this last week and shut down an auction," said one activist. "I hope that this goes viral, but in the real world, not just online."

Activists in other states have also begun using the song to stop auctions in their cities as well. Shortly after last October's auction blockade in Brooklyn, Tampa Florida activists took the same song and helped an 80-year-old Second World War veteran postpone the sale of his home.

A newly formed mock real estate company called Occupied Real Estate (ORE) also attended the auction. A "broker" for ORE mingled with the investors at the auction and handed out ORE business cards and pamphlets featuring the properties up for auction that day.

The photos that accompanied the property listings in the pamphlet depicted ORE construction workers ready to clean up the property to make it hospitable for a new occupation. Photos also depict groups of activists outside the properties ready and willing to defend it for the homeowner from the banks foreclosing on them or whoever wins it in the auction.

Once launched, ORE's website hopes to feature homes available for occupation from all over the country, allowing anyone to upload properties to the website.

With the foreclosure crisis being put forward as a priority in the Occupy movement for 2012, activists are energized by the powerful act of civil disobedience to assert that housing is a human right, not a commodity. Participants are determined to keep singing down auctions until there is a moratorium on all foreclosures and evictions and no one is denied the human right to housing.

Blair Ellis contributed to this article.

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