The Left and the Foreclosure Crisis: Roots,Resources and Ideology

The Political Science of Civic Engagement

My initial research indicated that the answer to the mystery of the missing foreclosure movement lay in the political science of civic organizations. For years these researchers (National Commission on Civic Renewal, 1998; Putnam, 2000; Skocpol, 2003) have expressed concern about how the decline of civic organizations in American culture has affected American democracy. In order to have effective democratic participation, citizens must have the organizational means to express their desires, making organizations such as Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, AFL-CIO, sports leagues, and so on “school houses of democracy” (Schlesinger, 1944; Wuthnow, 1998, Putnam, 2000). Not only have these organizations connected people to social networks, they have also taught members how to give speeches, run for office, and, in general, participate in the kinds of political activities that make for effective democratic mobilization. Theda Skocpol (2003, 2004) argued that this decline in civic associations was most dramatic among members of the working and lower classes. The impact of the decline of civic associations, and especially the collapse of union membership, on poor and working-class citizens was greater than on the middle class because the latter group was able to compensate for the general decline in civic organizations with elevated participation in professional (AMA, ABA ASA, etc.) and cultural (NOW, NAACP, Sierra Club, etc.) organizations, and because these lower-class groups had few other resources (money, time, connections, etc.) to compensate for this decline

This literature made sense of what I saw among the foreclosure victims who responded to my survey. However, as useful as this literature was for my initial orientation to this problem, it was insufficient once I began to look more deeply at the organizations that attempted to respond to the foreclosure debacle.

Sociology of Movements

Once I focused on the more than a dozen progressive groups with at least some concern about foreclosures in San Diego, I realized that a simple lack of civic organization was not the issue. There were plenty of housing organizations, community organizing groups, trade unions, and religious organizations in San Diego, but somehow they were not connecting with those going through foreclosure. Thus the origin of the problem was deeper than a lack of organizations, but rather with lacks inside these organizations. The literature on social movements helped clarify my thinking about this problem by pointing to the organizational resources necessary for the early development of a social movement around an issue like foreclosures.

Resource mobilization theory (McAdam, 1988 ; McCarthy and Zald, 1973, 1977; Oberschall, 1973; Tarrow, 1998; Tilly and Wood, 2009) and more specifically political process theory (McAdam, 1998; McCarthy and Zald, 1973; Tarrow, 1998) stress the importance of the structural and political resources that facilitate or retard social movement formation. In the early phase of movement formation, the resources that are most important are access to social networks, the availability and forms of leadership, and physical resources necessary in order to make a grievance known. Social networks include whether an organization has members living in the communities affected by the social problem, whether it has access to friendship networks in those communities, and whether it sponsors or participates in community social events – dances, study groups, etc. (McAdam and Friedman, 1992 ). I will term this set of resources social roots, and the lack of these roots, I will argue, is one of the most important reasons for the failure of the organizations I studied to effectively mobilize around foreclosures. Issues of leadership involve whether an organization has charismatic leaders who have strong organizational skills, and whether they are oriented toward community mobilization (McCarthy and Zald, 1973, 1977; Reger and Staggenborg, 2006). Physical resources include whether an organization has sufficient money, skilled community organizers, places to meet, and newspapers or other means of communication (Tarrow, 1998; Tilly and Wood, 2009).

Research into social movements has also focused on the importance of cultural frames that transform an issue into a social movement. At the heart of frame analysis (Bernstein, 2003; Goffman, 1974; Snow et al., 1986; Snow and Benford, 1988; Benford and Snow, 2000) is the belief that for an issue like foreclosures to give rise to a movement, it must first be defined such that it motivates people to take to the streets. This depends on the cultural beliefs with which people understand (frame) their grievances, and whether this understanding makes an issue amenable to social change.

Historians of the Left

While framing analysis pointed to the abstract importance of ideology, another analytic tradition made that importance more concrete when it came to the foreclosure crisis: historians of left political organizations (Gitlin, 1993; Zinn, 2003; but particularly Kazin, 2011). These historians have suggested that the contributions of specifically socialist and communist organizations have been essential in formulating the ideological framing important in creating social movements for a more egalitarian society. In any struggle enemies must be identified, the roots of problems illuminated, and alternatives imagined. Too often, these historians have argued, without left-wing organizations championing reforms, none of this happens. Communist, socialist, and progressive groups have been those most effective at pointing to the ways dominant groups like banks benefit from a foreclosure crisis. Left-wing ideology lifts the haze that elites impose on the origins of social problems, and helps strip away the belief that the status quo is inevitable.

This literature also emphasized a point made abstractly both in the political science of civic organizations and social movements research: that effective left organizations must be present in the day-to-day lives of working and lower-class people. The most effective organizing is not done at the time of a crisis, but before, in the social activities over the years that establish an organization in a community. For example, Kazin (2011) has argued the most effective left-wing organizing was done during the progressive era when the left was present in front rooms, churches, county fairs, and other social gatherings. Kazin also emphasizes the importance of organizations speaking in a language and within a culture that community members understand. Translations from academic texts or dispositions from left-wing manifestoes too often lead to an ideological dead-end—with these sermons ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed.

The use of these two additional intellectual traditions provided a specificity that the more general formulations of Putnam and other political scientists lacked in explaining the missing movement. The absence of roots, resources, and ideology helped me understand how so many dedicated progressive activists could have had so little success in building the movement they so desperately wanted.

Housing Organizations

Progressive housing organizations seemed the most likely to take on the issue of foreclosures, so it is appropriate to begin the discussion here. All of these organizations were concerned with the explosion of the foreclosure issue in 2008, but all failed to respond to the problem effectively. First and most importantly, all of these organizations lacked social roots in the communities affected by foreclosures. None of them had members living in these communities, access to social networks in these communities, or presence in social activities in the day-to-day lives of people going through foreclosure. Equally important, most members of these organizations were professionals of various types (professors, lawyers, researchers, low-income housing developers, etc.), with an “expertise” rather than “mobilizing” orientation to housing issues. Even when they wanted to organize discontented homeowners, there was a tendency to go to the media rather than door-to-door. No one could produce a graph showing the decline of housing affordability, give an interview on the crisis of underwater homeowners, or initiate a lawsuit demanding that the city enforce regulations affecting abandoned homes better than members of these groups. However, confronted with an issue that demanded not merely Power Points but empowered people, these very dedicated individuals and organizations lacked the social roots necessary to make this possible. Some of these leaders did try to go into the working-class communities most imperiled to organize around this issue, but without pre-existing connections, they did so as missionaries rather than socially-rooted organizers.

Second, most of these organizations lacked the resources to organize effectively. They had no infrastructure of organizers who could go into disorganized and isolated communities to mobilize them. Money was scarce or tied to grants from government or philanthropic organizations that would resist their funds going to “rabble-rousing”. Nor did they have organs of communication that could serve as means of mobilizing these working-class communities. Moreover, leadership, with one exception, was lacking. As talented, intelligent, and dedicated as almost every leader of a housing organization was, they were not mobilizing leaders so much as technocratic leaders. They were used to whispering into the ears of the powerful, not yelling into crowds of discontented people.

Finally, most of these organizations were not ideologically prepared to mobilize working-class communities. While most of them were appreciative and even desirous of mobilizing the foreclosed, they did not see this task as their responsibility. Most of these leaders saw themselves ideologically as professionals, not above the job of community organizing, but beside it. Some feared that organizing would destroy relationships with powerful groups that had been developed over the years. Others saw their responsibility as providing the expertise necessary for people facing foreclosure to find their way through bureaucracies. Whatever the specific reason, almost all of these organizations were limited by their ideology of professionalism.

The Affordable Housing Coalition of San Diego (AHCSD)

An interview with the leader of The Affordable Housing Coalition of San Diego (AHCSD) illuminates these points. The AHCSD was unusual for a housing organization – it considered itself committed to activism, and had many of the resources that I have stressed as central to effective organizing. First, it was led by arguably the most charismatic member of any organization concerned with foreclosure. Richard Lawrence is a retired African-American minister who had cut his teeth in the Civil Rights movement. He had worked with Dr King in Chicago, marched with Jesse Jackson in Washington, been clubbed in Selma, and had been at the center of most progressive efforts to promote affordable housing in San Diego since he arrived in the 1990s. Like so many African-American ministers of his generation, he was articulate and eloquent in front of a crowd. All this meant that the AHCSD had one crucial resource: an effective leader.

Second, the AHCSD had the ideological resources that other housing organizations lacked. It was consciously progressive, and viewed its task as mobilizing poor and working-class people to demand affordable housing. In the rhetoric of the AHCSD, housing was a human right that trumped property rights. While the organization itself was not consciously socialist, most of its members were. As a coalition, it attracted people out of left organizations who believed in mass mobilization and street protest as a means of moving elites to do something about the housing crisis.

What the AHCSD lacked was social roots in the communities affected by foreclosure. The group was focused around one highly charismatic leader, and though Richard had been a minister (which often meant connections to social networks), this had been back east. The AHCSD was a collection of religious liberals, college professors, and progressive lawyers without roots in low-income neighborhoods. When the foreclosure crisis began in 2008, the AHCSD tried to mobilize around the issue, but without roots in the communities it was a jump into the dark. But let Richard tell the organization’s story:

The Affordable Housing Coalition sees itself, and is seen in the community, as the ‘agitator’ organization when it comes to housing. While most of the other housing organizations are ‘responsible’, we have tried consciously to be ‘irresponsible’ if that means going into the streets. While other organizations have looked for ‘reasonable’ solutions to housing problems and brokered compromises, we have demonstrated and been seen as ‘unreasonable’. [laughing]

Richard’s eloquence shows through even in this brief excerpt. But eloquence and charisma were not enough when it came to the foreclosure crisis. Richard was the first to recognize this.

I knew we were in trouble early on. I had been out to a home foreclosure in the first few months of the crisis. A woman had threatened to chain herself to her home rather than let it be taken by the bank. It wasn’t the media reaction that bothered me. In fact, the media was incredibly supportive and concerned. When I showed up at 6 am in the morning, there were already five camera crews and a slew of well-groomed reporters there and they were sympathetic to her. It was the lack of other people that was the problem. We hadn’t been able to turn out more than me and a couple of our other members. We had no one to reach out to. I had called ACORN, but they were unable to attend, and we just didn’t have the people in the area.

When asked why he thought more people weren’t showing up at events like that, Richard responded:

I just don’t know. They had every right to be there and be there angry. They had been beaten by a system that was stacked against them, but they didn’t do anything about it. There is the obvious: that they blamed themselves. The shame they felt at losing their home must have been intolerable. … But somehow I feel that answer isn’t enough. There is something missing, and I can’t put my finger on it. There has to be more angry people, but we just couldn’t find them … [W]e had no way of reaching those people. We thought about putting advertisements in the paper or going to the public radio station with announcements of our meetings or demonstrations, but we didn’t have the money or the connections.

I asked what he thought about the other organizations involved in the crisis.

Most of the traditional housing organizations were even less able to respond to this issue. The Housing Federation and Housing Works [the two largest affordable-housing oriented organizations in San Diego county] are professional organizations that depend on being responsible. They are experts and hard-working people. But making an issue of [foreclosure] takes more than expertise. It means taking people into the streets. It means making politicians uncomfortable, and those [housing] organizations specialize in making those politicians and civic leaders feel very comfortable.

Richard’s points were well-taken about these “main-stream” housing organizations. I interviewed the heads of all of them (including the two he mentioned) and saw the same response: a vague desire for agitation, but an even stronger fear of it. Let me return to Richard’s interview:

But probably the biggest tragedies are ACORN and SDOP. Those organizations were part of the AHCSD coalition and they specialized in grassroots organizing. But they weren’t as involved in this issue as I would have hoped. We needed them organizing homeowners. AHCSD couldn’t do that like they could. We didn’t have their connections with people going through foreclosure.

Richard’s last point is telling. AHCSD lacked roots in any of the communities served, and had come to depend on other organizations for hands-on organizing. Richard, however, gives us a good orientation to other groups, especially those that would appear to be the most likely to organize around foreclosures: grassroots organizations. ACORN in particular was a key player in the left’s response to foreclosures.

Community Organizations: ACORN

A crucial piece in this discussion is what happened to ACORN both in San Diego and nationally. This story would seem simple: the organization that was most needed during this period was the victim of a right-wing mugging. Precisely because ACORN was a national activist organization specializing in protests around issues such as foreclosures, the Becks, Hannities, and O’Reillys attacked it. More specifically, a campaign originating with a couple of right-wing activists was hatched to entrap ACORN members into seeming to condone prostitution. It didn’t work (see, for example, the report of the California Attorney General, 2010), but some ambiguous episodes were edited so as to give the appearance of illegal behavior. These episodes were then sent to the right-wing echo chamber at Fox News, and the ensuing media witch-hunt destroyed ACORN.

But this description, while true, is only part of the reason for ACORN’s problematic relationship with the foreclosure crisis. While the attack significantly weakened the resources that ACORN had to mobilize around this issue, it was a deficit in another even more important area – social roots in the communities affected by foreclosure – that was equally important.

ACORN was ideologically leftist in orientation, hiring young idealistic people and sending them out to canvass inner-city communities to join ACORN. The dues and lists collected were then used for larger campaigns to empower poor people against elites. At its height, ACORN reported that it had over 850 chapters in over 75 cities, with hundreds of thousands of members. Besides campaigns around poverty-related issues (including housing for low-income people), it had also been involved in voter registration drives.

When the foreclosure crisis arrived, ACORN threw itself into the campaign around this issue even though most of the people affected were not truly poor. ACORN appeared to have both the ideology and resources necessary to effectively mobilize around foreclosures: it was ideologically leftist, and had both talented charismatic leaders and the organizational cadre so important for mobilization. Here was an organization that did more than talk the talk, it shouted the shout – complete with bullhorns and street demonstrations.

Cathy McKay (she asked me not to use her real name) was an example of everything that was right with ACORN. She was dedicated, hard-working, bright, and had that rare combination of progressive values and organizational realism. Her family was part of the progressive Irish community in New England, and she had become a Latin American Studies major in college because of her interest in the “theology of liberation movement”. She spent a couple of years in Central America after college, working with left-wing Catholic organizations. When she came back to the US she had wanted to continue to work around Central America, but a friend in Chicago offered her a job with ACORN, telling her it was “like Latin American work, but without the Latin part”. He told her they needed someone to who spoke Spanish to help the San Diego office, and she took the job.

She was in San Diego for four years, working mainly on tenant rights issues, but by the mid-2000s she switched into a campaign against predatory lending. About a year before the crash, Cathy moved to Chicago to take a national political position with ACORN, and thus she was able to see what was happening when the “prostitution crisis” broke.

[T]he case that so many people heard about was the entrapment of some low level ACORN personal by two right-wing activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend. They went to ACORN offices across the country supposedly to see if they could get help to set up a [whore] house. But it was BS. The investigations by not fewer than four separate organizations found no evidence of systematic wrongdoing on our part. Because by then I was the assistant director of political activities for ACORN nationwide at the time, I got to see the tapes. It was outrageous the way they [the right-wing activists] edited and distorted them. [M]ostly these a-holes said that they were trying to get these young women away from abusive pimps and get them out of the ‘life’. That was what most of our people were being told, but then it got edited so that we were condoning prostitution. Those jerks ended up being arrested, not us. But it all didn’t matter, ACORN was hung out to dry.

But even more interesting from the point of view of this paper was the fact that Cathy did not think any of this was the real source of ACORN’s undoing. For her, these right-wing attacks only administered a blow to an organization already on its knees from internal problems.

First, the brother of the founder of ACORN had been found to have embezzled nearly a million dollars from our organization. With so many locals desperate for cash, with the organizations forced to consolidate locals because we lacked resources, this not merely deprived us of money, but undermined the sense of mission and self-sacrifice so intrinsic to what we were being asked to do. Second, people think the loss of federal funding [after the whole blow-up about prostitution] was what destroyed ACORN, but that money was only 10% of our budget, [and] was too small to have done that kind of damage. The key was we lost so much of our foundation support. People were afraid that the IRS or the right-wing would go after them if they continued to fund ACORN.

Finally] there was our kind of ‘slash and burn’ approach to organizing. We used a lot of untrained people who had good hearts, but no experience in the communities they were supposed to be organizing. This was all part of the strategy of the brothers [founders of ACORN] before they resigned: expand, expand, expand. We had expanded much faster and grown much larger than we could both organizationally and financially support. All this meant that while our reputation grew and [our] presence in committee testimonies, etc. exploded, the real work of providing organizational infrastructure was missing.

These are telling criticisms for the purposes of this paper, and will be addressed shortly; but first let’s look at the organization that succeeded ACORN, because many of Cathy’s criticisms will apply to this inheritor organization as well.

Community Organizations: The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)

The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) is what is left of ACORN in California, and it is logical to follow the previous conversation with this one. There is, however, another reason for this focus: ACCE helped produce the only successful policy to do anything about foreclosures in San Diego County. Though a local progressive think-tank (the Center for Policy Initiatives) conceived of the policy, it was ACCE that organized around it and produced the demonstrations to dramatize the need for the legislation. The “Property Protection Ordinance” was legislation that required banks to maintain foreclosed properties or face a fine of a hundred dollars a day. It was hoped that this would not only limit the damage foreclosures did to the surrounding communities, but put pressure on banks to avoid foreclosures.

The impact of the destruction of ACORN was clearly evident in the resources for organizing available to ACCE. Where ACORN struggled to fund a national organization, ACCE fought to find money for one limited to California. Where ACORN could turn out 200 supporters for a council hearing on foreclosures, on a good day ACCE could produce 50. Where ACORN counseled people nationally going through foreclosure, ACCE campaigned for legislation that would have limited foreclosures’ impact on property values in a single city.

This is not the fault of either its leaders or the commitments of its members, but rather of resources. The leaders of ACCE and ACORN were highly competent, with both a commitment to and a background in community organizing. What was lacking were the resources to make their leadership effective. ACCE was a pale imitation of a pale imitation of what was needed. The disappearance of ACORN’s funding base meant that ACCE began life as an organization starved for resources. At the time of my interview ACCE had only one full-time paid position in all of San Diego County (though they added a second a few weeks later), and had only about 50 people as dues-paying members.

David Lagstein, ACCE’s leader in San Diego, was out of the same mold as Cathy: bright, hard-working and completely dedicated to community organizing and the struggle for social justice Again like Cathy, he was a veteran of ACORN. Because of this attachment, the implosion of ACORN in 2008 left him lost and angry. His wife had taken a job in San Diego, and he followed her there. The connection with the remnants of ACORN was a natural one, and he became the head of ACCE in San Diego.

Under his direction, ACCE’s focus:

… for the last two years has been the [Property Value Protection] Ordinance. It’s not everything we wished it was, but it’s putting pressure on politicians to do something about the crisis. [I asked him to explain it.] The Ordinance would fine banks a hundred dollars a day for leaving foreclosed homes abandoned and messed up. There have been so many of these foreclosed houses that have become threats to the community: drugs, prostitution, you name it has been going on in them. We have been organizing community forums, lobbying politicians, and a little old-fashioned demonstrating around [the Ordinance]. … It’s too bad we have to attack the crisis this way. It would be much better if we could just get a foreclosure moratorium. But it’s San Diego, and this is about as far as we can go. Though [smiling] I do like our “garbage collecting parties”.

These “parties” involved a few dozen people showing up at a foreclosed home with trash bags, wheelbarrows, and pickup trucks. The broken wine bottles, abandoned couches, and rotting fruit that inevitably piled up when a home was abandoned were bagged, thrown into the pickups, and taken to the bank that owned the property. The media was notified, and with cameras rolling, 20 people would make an announcement that they wanted to make a “deposit”. It was good theater, the local news loved it, and it added to the pressure on local politicians to act.

But for all the attention, this was a drama enacted on a very small stage. Only a few dozen people directly participated, and, for all the publicity, it did not incite neighbors to take similar actions. There was no connection to other events in the neighborhoods, nor more importantly, to any organizing effort of those neighbors. Yes, ACCE continued the work of ACORN by sending teams door-to-door to sign people up as members, but this was a much smaller effort than during the ACORN days. Without foundation funding, the canvasses were ghosts of previous efforts.

But the problem here is more than a problem with resources, it involves a problematic strategy toward organizing that many progressive organizations share. Earlier Cathy referred to a “slash and burn” approach to organizing, a criticism of an organizing approach adopted by progressive groups in areas as diverse as the environment (Greenpeace) and women’s issues (NOW), as well as community organizations like ACORN and ACCE. Cathy’s term is apropos: these are membership-exploiting organizations, not membership-developing organizations. These progressive organizations rely on idealistic young people who become organizational cannon fodder: recruits are thrown into battles to sign up “members” in canvassing drives – exhausting exercises going door-to-door or standing in front of supermarkets soliciting petition signatures, membership cards, dues commitments, etc. These same “organizers” will occasionally then get used to turn out some of those who signed up for demonstrations or the kind of dramatic events just described. Using organizers in this manner inevitably burns them out. A new crop of idealists is then brought in to take their place, and the whole process starts over again.

The communities “organized” in this manner are never really connected to the organization. Rather, residents in the community are asked to sign a membership card, pay dues, and then participate in actions the organization undertakes. What is missing is the development of these members. There are no meetings to attend, no educational functions to participate in, no social gatherings that link members to each other and to the larger organization. This approach organizes communities the same way a conductor organizes riders on a train: fees are collected, people are transported, but nothing is done to unify them into a group. All of this meant that ACORN and ACCE lacked more than resources, they also lacked real social roots in the communities they attempted to organize.

Now let us turn to an organization with roots in working-class communities: organized labor.

Labor in San Diego

Labor is the first place one would think of when looking for organizations with both presence in working-class communities and resources for organizing them. But labor was also under an attack every bit as serious as the one focused on ACORN. Labor had been fighting declining numbers for years, and more recently had to struggle against an anti-union campaign organized by employers and the politicians associated with them. These attacks left labor unprepared to risk resources in a campaign that was not directly related to its membership.

I interviewed Lorena Gonzales who, at the time, was the head of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, the umbrella organization of labor in the San Diego area. Lorena was in her late 30s, attractive, and dynamic, with an intensity, self-confidence, and intelligence that screamed that she was a force with which to be reckoned. She was a Stanford graduate with a degree in environmental law, and she had been a somewhat surprising pick to head the labor council. She had never been a labor union member nor even been involved in any kind of labor struggle.

Labor’s fortunes in San Diego, never great, began to decline in the 1980s as the national assault on labor began. Between 1986 and 2000 unionization rates in San Diego declined from roughly 18% to 14% (unionstats.com). Lorena’s arrival at the Labor Council did four things. First, as female, and young, she brought energy and life to the institution. Second, as a Latina she made connections with the fastest growing and most progressive part of San Diego. Third, she initiated a policy of outreach to the wider progressive community in San Diego, indicating a willingness to work in coalitions. Finally, her decision to form an electoral machine separate from the Democratic Party made labor one of the most effective local players in the game of politics in the county. This meant that while labor’s fortunes in the rest of the country were waning, in San Diego they were waxing. The US rate of unionization declined from 13.5% in 2000 to 11.2% in 2012, but in San Diego during the same period it increased from 14% to 18% (unionstats.com). All of this cannot be attributed to Lorena alone, but she made a contribution to much of it. Thus there was no lack of leadership among the labor community, and, even more importantly, this was leadership that was both experienced and oriented toward mass mobilization.

As to ideology, Lorena was complex and contradictory. On the one hand, she could be progressive:

Look at Obama. He gets into office and … he refuses to focus the anger of the country. [P]eople need a simple understanding of who is making them suffer. They need to have someone to direct their anger at: the banks and the corporations that got us into this mess for example, but he is too closely tied to those groups. It’s only the Tea Party that is doing that now.

On the other hand, she also told me: “[W]e have to be realistic. I am willing to support a rational Republican if I could find one.”

As torn as she was between progressivism and realism, Lorena was the most progressive head of the Labor Council in San Diego in decades. For example, she regularly showed up at rallies and marches for causes as diverse as gay marriage, Occupy Wall Street, and environmental toxics. Included in this outreach was a concern with foreclosures.

We have been involved with the foreclosure ordinance [the Property Protection Ordinance mentioned previously] at the city – though I admit it has mainly been AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees], not the Labor Council. I know [the ordinance] won’t really keep anyone from losing their home, but maybe it will disincentivize foreclosing on people quicker.

I pushed her a little at this point, and asked her if there wasn’t more labor could do.

You know if [pauses] … let’s be honest. We care, but we have so many other issues on the table right now, we don’t have the resources. Because what it would take is a real organizing effort. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but we know how to organize working-class people. We know how to talk about an issue like foreclosures in a way that makes sense to working-class people. You have to tie what is going on to the bigger issues of … growing inequality and the corporate domination of our lives. Even ACCE doesn’t have our ability to talk about these issues this way. We could organize homeowners in the same way we organize workers, [but] … right now, given everything else, we just don’t have the time. In a perfect situation, if we had everything else lined up, yes we could do it, but not now, not with what we face in Wisconsin, Ohio, and here in San Diego [attacks on public sector unions].

The biggest success of the labor movement under Lorena was the construction of a powerful electoral machine. In the past labor had contributed money to political campaigns (especially the Democratic party), but under Lorena labor developed an autonomous political machine that could choose, educate, and elect candidates willing to stand up to the business elite. The success of this labor political machine meant not only that it was able in 2012 to elect the first progressive mayor in San Diego’s history, but it also involved a more personal success for Lorena. In 2013 she stepped down from her position as head of the Labor Council after that machine successfully elected her to the California State Assembly.

This electoral success also meant an issue like foreclosures was fated to get little substantive support: the resources were going into politics. Electioneering was a big part of what labor was. Under Lorena’s leadership labor had been willing for the first time to work in coalition with community groups, but this meant it was willing to join a coalition, not lead one. Equally important, labor could not be counted on to provide major resources to organize around an issue like foreclosures. While Lorena would show up at a demonstration around foreclosures, or lend her voice to the call for the Property Protection Ordinance, the real resources of her organization went to electing politicians. Ultimately, San Diego labor had roots in the community and an ideology potentially effective at framing the problem of foreclosure, but its resources were committed to other areas.

Religious-Activist: San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP)

In my previous research I reported that the one place where San Diegans facing foreclosure had continued ties to civic organizations was in their churches (Robinson, 2013). Where political membership in a party had declined dramatically, and membership in a progressive organization like ACORN or Occupy Wall Street was non-existent, many foreclosed people still went to church. This made the San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP) of unique importance in this discussion not only because of its commitment to community organizing, but because it did so as a religious obligation. Part of PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing), a nationwide faith-based organizing project, SDOP was a kind of religious version of ACORN. That is, it saw itself as acting through a religious (largely Christian) commitment to the poor, pursuing this mission through locally-oriented grassroots organizing supported by over 30 churches and religious organizations in the San Diego area (especially the Catholic Church).

It was this base in churches that gave SDOP the most organic connections to the foreclosed of any organization discussed in this paper. It was also this base that gave it enough resources to be able to organize these desperate people. Leadership was also not a limiting factor. While none of the organizers with SDOP had the charisma of a Richard Lawrence or a Lorena Gonzales, they did have the community-organizing orientation and experience of a David Lagstein or a Cathy McKay. The one limitation on this potential was its ideology. Members of SDOP were a little too “Christian” in their love not merely for the poor but for those who oppressed them. The Christian notion of the commonality of religious membership kept SDOP from constructing the kind of class-based understanding of the problems facing the foreclosed so necessary for effective mobilization. As noble as it may have been to believe that the affluent could be made to respond to the poor through Christian love and obligation, this belief was hardly an effective tool in channeling the anger of people ripped off by banks and corporations.

There was also a less appealing limit on SDOP’s ability to mobilize around foreclosures: fear of alienating powerful members of the religious community. Taking on the confrontational issue of foreclosure meant attacking some of the people most active in and most likely to donate to local churches. With real estate agents, developers, politicians, and bankers sitting in the pews on Sunday (and Saturday), the fear of alienating these powerful church members kept SDOP from taking on a battle that might threaten the collection plate.

This ideological limitation became clear during an interview I conducted with two organizers working for SDOP. Like ACCE and ACORN, SDOP recruited young idealistic people from good academic backgrounds to serve as organizers. They were expected to dedicate themselves to organizing not 40 hours a week, but 24/7.

Laura was a graduate of Pitzer, one of the Claremont colleges, and Hannah got her degree from the University of California. Hannah was the first to arrive for the interview at a local coffee shop. She was professionally dressed, with short-cropped strawberry blond hair. Laura showed up a few minutes later. Hannah said she was 32, but she looked 23, and Laura said she was 23, but looked 13. Hannah was not merely older, but the dominant force in the conversation. Laura was earnest and fiercely dedicated, but she also seemed unsure of herself. I started the interview by asking about SDOP, and Hannah immediately took over:

SDOP is coalition of 35 churches. We don’t accept government funding, instead we apply for funds through our churches and private foundations. We work mainly on the local level, but also state and national. We have common principles: 1. Human dignity; 2. Right to opportunity; 3. Access to education; 4. Right to live in safe and secure communities. Each of us [organizers] works with a group of five to seven churches, listening, helping, and responding to their concerns. We don’t enter with a set agenda, we see what are their concerns. … Out of each of these groups common issues emerge. We call these Federated Campaigns.

At this point I turned the conversation to the reasons for the financial /housing crisis, and deliberately asked Laura for her opinion first:

I honestly believe that it was because of the banks and the power of elite influences. Ordinary people, especially the ordinary poor person, is never heard. And working-class people too, the politicians ignore them. It is special interests and their power to shape the status quo. We got into this mess because the policies didn’t reflect the needs of ordinary people, it was the elite who got served.

Hannah interrupted, seemingly a little uncomfortable with the “radical” direction Laura was taking.

I really think it is a value crisis. The values of people in power have changed so that there is no longer the concern for poor and working-class people. What we need is a renewal of the moral responsibility that we as Christians share with each other. When leaders were closer to the people they served it was easier to invest in policies for people like us. … That is why the churches are so important, because they remind those elites of their moral responsibilities. When Bobby Kennedy broke bread with Cesar Chavez and walked a while in his shoes [the march from Delano to Sacramento] we saw an example of the Christian love that brings true transformation. Look at the foreclosure crisis. …

We have a large number of our members who have gone through foreclosure, and they are isolated. If they can be given answers, they can take on their own power, and that will give them power in more areas than just foreclosures. Its bringing people together that makes for power; that solves problems like foreclosure. This is what our job as community organizers is all about. It is putting people together, making them feel their own power. These are people who have been told they are worthless and have no power. It is our job to make them see the power they already have.

The limits of this approach became clearer when I asked what specifically should be done about foreclosures. There was a long silence, as if the issue of self-empowerment was self-explanatory. Hannah again responded:

I think the government could play a more helpful role. [pauses] It could, for example, use the monies it puts in banks to pressure them to do the right thing by homeowners. Look, the city has millions of dollars that it spends each year, and that money gets deposited in local banks. That’s a lot of leverage sitting in a bank vault. You could even have a report card on banks and their loan policies. You know, if they agreed to modify loans to keep people out of foreclosure, they get an A; if they at least notify people and bring them in for counseling they would get a B, and things like that.

As would become apparent shortly, this kind of pressure on banks was attractive precisely because it was so innocuous. No enemies were delineated; no banks were burned or even a little singed.

I next asked them what they thought about the role of protest in doing something about the foreclosure crisis. I had expected the kind of vague enthusiasm I got from most progressive organizations when I raised the issue of street heat, but instead I got a surprisingly direct rejection of the tactic. Laura was the first to speak:

You know, I’m more interested in policy change. Oh, I’ve been to protests in my time, but I never really saw much in the way of results. Just a bunch of people in the streets one day, but they’re gone the next. You know, it’s kinda empty.

At this point Hannah picked up on this theme and extended it:

The mission of SDOP is leadership development. We don’t see ourselves doing protest. We are developing something more lasting. We are developing leaders. We help people to help themselves; it’s the old line about giving a man a fish [he eats for a day], but teaching him to fish makes him self-supporting. Protest is kinda the fish. … You see SDOP is a responsible organization, and we need to build lasting relationships with all kinds of organizations in our community, and that includes banks.

This was the most effective grassroots organization in San Diego, and yet they were clearly resistant to protest. While they obviously admired Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr, they had forgotten the other side of these leaders: their willingness to lead marches and other forms of protest that pushed (non-violent) confrontations. These young women were full of the moral vision of a community united by love for each other through Christ, not a campaign where enemies were punished and barricades mounted.

More disturbing and less morally attractive was the fear these young women showed at the thought of confronting banks and other elite members of their communities. With 35 churches and religious organizations constituting their support base, it was inevitable that some priest, rabbi, or imam would find something offensive about protest. A gay group might offend a minister’s opposition to homosexuality; a women’s group might defend abortion and alienate the Catholic Church. Uniting progressive organizations in the best of circumstances is like herding cats, but when you add different varieties of religious conservatism to the mix, it is small wonder that SDOP organizers were so fearful of protest.

SDOP lacked the ideology necessary to undertake the project of mobilizing against foreclosures. This was the opposite of most of the other left organizations I studied. Where the AHCSD and even ACORN/ACCE lacked roots in communities hammered by foreclosure, SDOP had those roots, but its ideology kept it from articulating the anger necessary for taking people into the streets.