Activist Moving Homeless Into Vacant Foreclosed Homes – And Ruining Lives
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This story makes my blood boil. A homeless advocate in Miami is finding empty foreclosures and moving homeless families into them. Then the Chicago Sun-Times does a story on him, using his real name as if he is doing a noble thing.
And the expectation is that the readers will think it is a feel good story.
So why does it make me irate?
First, we have a person who is advocating theft of property. Sure it seems to be a good cause, but it is still someones property that is being taken over and stolen.
But the second reason is even worse. The people that he is recruiting to move into these homes are being recruited to be thiefs! Now I am not saying that all homeless families are not intelligent, but we can all agree that many are not.
- So what happens to the homeless family when Mom and Dad are taken off to jail because they committed breaking and entering and theft of services?
- Where do the children go?
- Where the hell is this Max Rameau then?
He heads off to another project that gets his name in the paper as a do gooder while others who fell for his scheme end up paying a huge price.
The problem then is exasperated as law enforcement officials and social service folks get caught in the middle of a situation that never should have happened. They are forced to make tough choices for a family that was suckered into a bad deal.
And I will bet my bottom dollar that the ilk like Rameau are out there screaming about the ills of the subprime lenders. All the while he is commiting worse acts by putting families at risk.
Rameau is an activist who has been executing a bailout plan of his own around Miami’s empty streets: He is helping homeless people illegally move into foreclosed homes.
‘We’re matching homeless people with people-less homes,’ he said with a grin.
Elsewhere around the country, advocates in Cleveland are working with the city to allow homeless people to legally move into and repair dilapidated houses. In Atlanta, some property owners pay homeless people to live in abandoned homes as a security measure.
‘Within a couple of months, this place would be stripped and drug dealers would be living here,’ Rameau said. via CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Comment by chris on 3 March 2009:
first off, let me guess you are not homeless, nor have you ever stoped to talk to a homeless person and heard their story, because if you had then i guarentee you wouldent be spewing this garbage out of your mouth, housing is a right, its a human necissity. denying another human being of this is a crime not moving into somewhere were nobody lives. well its ” advocating theft of property.” Anybody who owns a house and dosent use it while someone else freezes to death on the street is a criminal not the person who is keeping someone from dying. i make the recomendation that you educate yourself a little you ignorant fuck!