The Foreclosees Protest An American Dream Turned Nightmare

This first day of October happens to be the launch of a new program called "HOPE for Homeowners," designed by HUD to "help more struggling families keep their homes," according to the news release.

The visitors want to take HUD up on the offer. Now.

Nobody does this anymore. Nobody goes down to fight city hall. Nobody mau-maus the flak catcher in person.

And yet, how strangely bracing it is. On Capitol Hill and on television, so much disembodied theory is being spewed in order to explain a hypothetical apocalypse caused by the virtual trading of unseen paper. This encounter between the Man and the Foreclosees restores your faith that maybe, after all, there is a there, there, at the heart of this crisis.

Today the Man is incarnated as James Kelly, director of this field office. He gets a call from the overwhelmed guard.

Unflappable and human, with his collar askew, no chance for a look in the mirror, Kelly comes downstairs.

The Man and the Foreclosees stand facing each other in the marble lobby.

"I don't have my reference materials," Kelly says. He doesn't know the exact name of the new program.

"That's a program you apply to a lender for," he says. "We don't lend money, but we can insure the loan."

It's all very civil. No voices are raised. And nothing is resolved.

What the Man is saying, very gently, is the visitors have come to the wrong place.

The new program offers federal insurance on troubled mortgages if the lender will agree to accept a smaller payback.

"Nobody understands this blight better than those of us who have had to live with this devastation," says Gloria Swieringa, ACORN's feisty Maryland chairman, wearing a pink track suit. She almost lost her house several years ago.

"Say I'm in arrears," Swieringa says. "I go find someone to save my bacon before my ship sinks. Is that the way it works?"

Basically, yes, says Kelly.

"We've come to a heck of a place where the people on Wall Street can make a mess, and those who are the victims of the mess have to pay for it, and no one spreads a mantle of mercy over them," Swieringa says.

"HUD can only do what Congress says we can do," Kelly says.

The Foreclosees like this Man, all right. "We're not castigating you as an individual," Swieringa says. "We're speaking out against the inequity of the system."

It's over in about 20 minutes, the Foreclosees and the Man go their separate ways.

"We were sort of expecting to be disappointed," says ACORN Maryland lead organizer Stuart Katzenberg, "but we wanted to prove the point" that while Wall Street gets bailed out, the only program for Foreclosees may be insufficient.

Since January, 425 people on the brink of losing their houses or already evicted have asked ACORN for help, and 70 percent of them were victims of deceptive loan pitches, Katzenberg says.

Kelly says he's used to being the Man at public meetings around the state. Sometimes, people "want somebody to hear them, whether or not the person hearing them is someone who can change what they want to see changed."

Veronica Peterson picks up Ryan and returns to the house of a friend in Columbia, who is letting the mother and her four children stay there, while she figures out what to do next.