Activists from ACORN help foreclosee Donna Hanks break back into her home.
By MELODY SIMMONS
A participant in ACORN’s national civil disobedience campaign found that after camera crews left, her situation remained bleak.Yesterday, Donna Hanks had been pretty upbeat. An east Baltimore resident in her mid-50s, Hanks stood on the front porch of what was once her home. She had lost it to foreclosure six months ago, after the adjustable rate mortgage she took out in 2001 caused her payments to balloon to nearly $2,000 a month – well above her ability to pay on a banquet worker’s salary from a downtown hotel. As members of ACORN used a bolt cutter to blast the padlock on the front door, Hanks smiled and walked into the living room once again.
The two-story row house, which faces the eastern edge of Patterson Park, had been vandalized and stripped of all pipes, plumbing and even the kitchen sink. Outside, tattered siding flapped in the sharp February wind. A makeshift back door in what once was the kitchen was surrounded by a glow of sunshine because it was too small for the doorway space. Cold air, as well as sunlight, flooded into the house.
As advocates from ACORN wandered about, Donna gave emotional interviews to the many members of the press there to record the event. It was the first of what is anticipated to be many such squatter’s rights events under a new ACORN push to help evicted families called Home Defenders.
Today, though I met up with Donna and she was less enthusiastic about returning to her home. Television news reporters told her the property has already been sold by the bank and that the new owner was considering trespassing charges against ACORN. Facing the possibility of arrest and jail time, this grandmother of three said she was not willing to continue the push to reclaim her onetime property.
Yet the story illustrates what is going on in Baltimore’s communities and across the state, where there were 50,000 foreclosures upon in 2008. Donna is the face of a crisis many are trying to fully grasp. The foreclosed properties sit vacant, adding to the city’s plague of vacant, vandalized properties. Banks sometimes unload them to investors who flip the properties and destabilize the neighborhood further.
