Fighting Foreclosures.

• Author: Asher, Colin
• Position: Essay

IT TOOK FOUR ATTEMPTS but constables from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts finally got Frances Louis, her three children, and her parents out of their house last November, on the day after Election Day. Movers hired by the foreclosing bank worked through the morning to fill four trucks. When they were done, the house was sealed.

The bank that took possession of the two-story, 2,000-square-foot gray house put it back on the market for $199,900. Members of the Louis family moved from their four-bedroom house into a two-bedroom apartment.

Their story began in May 2005, when Yvonne Price, Louis's mother, bought a home in Boston's Mattapan neighborhood. Price is retired but her loan agent claimed she was employed on her loan application, which allowed her to borrow $365,000, at what she thought was a fixed rate, to buy the home.

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A little more than a year after moving in, the family discovered its loan had a variable interest rate. The mortgage jumped from $2,500 to $3,100 a month, and the clock started ticking toward the hour they could no longer scrape up enough to make the payments. In November 2007, their home went into foreclosure.

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With homelessness hovering before her, Louis read an article in the Boston Herald . It told the story of Ghislane Gustave, a woman in a situation much like Louis's, and a group named City Life/Vida Urbana that was threatening to "forma human blockade" around Gustave's home "if and when the constables come to evict her."

Louis contacted her city councilor, who told her how to get in touch with the group. When constables and police officers flooded her block the first time on November 11, 2007, they found the family unwilling to move, with a coterie of housing advocates ready to be arrested.

"It was amazing," Louis says. "I never realized that so many people would be willing to go against the police." The constables backed off. That skirmish was the opening salvo of a conflict that would drag on for twelve months.

Before the family was finally evicted a year later, it had blockaded its home four times, appeared in court repeatedly, secured two restraining orders against the bank, and offered to buy the house back for its current value of $200,000.

Frances Louis is an unlikely radical. She lived in Mattapan nearly her entire life, working as a student loan reviewer for American Student Assistance. She was laid off from her job when the bottom fell out of the student loan...