Housing for All!
Guest post by Chris (aka Emo Dragon)
I’m excited that my fellow TYT Army member and friend Chris, aka Emo Dragon, has agreed to start things off for the eclecticmisc.org weekly guest post series!
Chris is a proud Democratic Socialist and recently launched his own substack, theemodragon.substack.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @TheEmoDragon. Without further ado, here’s his guest post!
Hey everybody!
I wanted to start out by going over issues that shaped me and pushed me to the Left.
In the fall out from the Great Recession I lost my home to foreclosure. This was a home that I grew up in from the age of three and bought from my parents. I even rented it with my wife for a time before buying it. This also caused issues as my parents didn’t treat us like actual tenants and caused a rift in our relationship by not being respectful of privacy or boundaries, unfortunately, the boundary issue still existed after buying the home but that’s a different story altogether.
This is something that I still have a hard time talking about as I felt great shame at the time. Nobody likes to talk about real shit, a lot of times if you do, people don’t want to hear it and want to pretend everything is okay or just don’t listen because they think you’re being negative.
At the time I was working in a shipping/receiving department at a local semiconductor company. Previous to that, my wife and I both worked in the clean room there. She was pregnant with our first son and was on restrictions, she even filed the paperwork with the company from the doctor but our foremen wouldn’t honor it and still tried to make her do everything anyone else did including lifting 50 lbs at a time. It got to the point that she had to quit at about 8 months pregnant.
“She was pregnant with our first son and was on restrictions, she even filed the paperwork with the company from the doctor but our foremen wouldn’t honor it and still tried to make her do everything anyone else did including lifting 50 lbs at a time.”
Luckily I was able to move to a first shift job in receiving but now we didn’t have two incomes like we previously did, with our son being born, we had a lot more expenses - baby formula, diapers, wipes, etc. eventually I fell behind a payment. When I called the mortgage servicer they told me not to send in a payment unless I had two months principal and interest. I was too proud and didn’t ask for help, when I needed it, kept it to myself (which caused problems later) and back then I was still in the conservative mindset, where I wouldn’t take handouts either.
The company servicing our mortgage was Central Mortgage, never do business with them, they’re a subsidiary of Arvest Bank, which has ties to the Walton family of the Walmart fame. I applied for the HAMP program twice but was denied. We tried short-selling the house and had three different offers but the mortgage company dragged their feet each time and potential buyers lost interest or found other homes.
Eventually we had to face the fact that we would be evicted, so we wound up applying for a rental and moved on. This was a terrifying experience facing the potential to be homeless and coupling that with feeling like a colossal failure as a husband and father, let alone person at the age of 26.
I faced many more struggles in the coming years trying to survive and eventually repairing my credit to what it is now. This caused some lasting issues, I keep working on myself trying to ensure this will never happen again and make sure I learned from past mistakes but I learned that it’s okay to ask for help and that we do live in a system that is rigged against working class people. I was only making $13/hr at that time for a family of three. We had no support from my parents or my wife’s no built in daycare/babysitting so my wife could go back to work either. Today after all the hard work we own a home again and it was a major struggle to get there, lived life as a second class citizen with poor credit for years! This experience really shaped my political beliefs today.
“I learned that it’s okay to ask for help and that we do live in a system that is rigged against working class people.”
Housing for All is something that I hold near and dear to my heart! Nobody, I mean NOBODY should be homeless! Not because we’re the richest country but because humans deserve the dignity of having a shelter regardless of race, religion, profession or income!
See Bernie’s plan for Housing for All. https://berniesanders.com/issues/housing-all/
This is a great start toward assuring everyone has a roof over their head!
A personal point of contention for me is ENDING predatory loan practices and putting them all out of business!!
Rent control is critical and so is forming tenant unions! DSA helps with this as they organize to form tenant unions especially in a larger metro areas. We need to create a system that works for working people and not venture capitalists looking to make profit off a home or property, who don’t care if they destroy lives to get that money.
“We need to create a system that works for working people and not venture capitalists looking to make profit off a home or property, who don’t care if they destroy lives.”
I’m sure I could go on about this but this is more a stream of consciousness telling my story and why I support Housing for All!
Peace and solidarity comrades!
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