Focused Organizing: A Question of Legal Support

For anyone in a long enough foreclosure battle, a legal strategy will likely come into play. The basic issue here is that a foreclosure is a form of a lawsuit, where one party (the bank) is suing the other party for a back debt. Unlike a criminal case, a civil case does not guarantee the defendant a lawyer because they are unable to afford one on their own. This form of litigation is a commonly accepted route for fighting a foreclosure, so much so that it is the standard way the bank expects to deal with resistance on the part of the homeowner.

As part of an organizing campaign, when a person is attempting to save their home from the suit-clad repo men, it is going to naturally be suggested. Granted, this is often an important part of the strategy as legal council will be one of the ways that negotiations end up taking place and can even gain some traction in the courts. While this should never be ignored, it presents stark problems for those organizing as a community to fight the foreclosure and eventual eviction.

The most primary reason for this is that we simply are not a legal organization. While we may brush up on the legalities of real estate law, and begin to understand how the foreclosure process goes, we will never be able to give legal support in a way that supplements or replaces proper legal counsel. As much as we would like to think we can do these things on our own, this is really downplaying the fact that to get real legal victories you have to have a solid lawyer taking on the case. This means financial commitments, often special time commitments for the lawyer, and a great deal of support. This is all time that we are, however, not organizing.

As a movement focused on housing justice through direct action we see the primary force that can turn individual cases into systemic change is the collective action of affected people. This primarily means that we need to develop cases around these issues and bring them together to form a larger movement. We are not a legal organization, and at any point we attempt to act as such will be a failure by any proper legal perspective. Likewise, entering into a legal strategy will nearly diminish all the resources that we have available, taking incredible periods of research and outreach. All of this is fine when it continues to build class power, but a legal strategy individualizes the problem and looks to conventional institutions to solve them. If we are here to create a counter-power and confront those institutions, then a success in this framework only gives us certain results.

Instead, it is important to isolate the kind of organizing that a group does around the specific tactics and projects they are willing to take on. In locals of organizations like Take Back the Land, Occupy Our Homes, Solidarity Networks, and others, this often means taking on a case, building community support and pressure, and creating an escalation campaign that will force the change through confrontation. This is not in opposition to a legal strategy, and can often work complimentary, but they are fundamentally different. What we can do well is the organizing, while the legal support will have to come from the outside.

What this really does is presents an argument for creating permanent working networks between groups and different institutions. In a perfect organizing situation, when the legal issue begins to creep into a foreclosure campaign we can then direct them to sympathetic lawyers or collectives that can handle that aspect while we continue the community organizing. A successful housing justice movement will have multiple organizations working together from different angles, finding every possible way to challenge the issue. We need to isolate what we do so that we can ensure a more committed set of successful tactics. Unless the organization is made up of a group of lawyers we should not claim to give successful legal advice, and instead we can only promise solidarity and the willingness to support people going through foreclosure through organizing.