When Aaaron Bartley and Eric Walker founded People United for Sustainable Housing last year, among their first priorities was to begin a property survey of the West Side neighborhood the organization serves. The survey, which was accomplished by means of heavy door-to-door work, took about six months.

When the survey was complete, the organization— which goes by the acronym PUSH Buffalo—held a community forum to share its findings and to listen to neighborhood residents assess for themselves the neighborhood’s most pressing problems. The top two issues identified were, not surprisingly, abandoned houses and absentee landlords. The third was lack of job opportunities.

Buffalo has had its share of poster children for property-flipping and absenteeism; among the most notorious names are Frank Parlato, Jr., Scott Wizig, Robert Palano and Jesse Isaacs. But for every soulless profiteer, there are a half dozen owner-occupants who have fallen behind on taxes or water bills and found their properties listed on the city’s annual tax auction list. Or a family that has let their house fall apart, maybe even walked away from it completely, because they can’t afford its upkeep. There is a story behind every decaying structure in Buffalo’s left-behind neighborhoods, some of them infuriating and some merely sad.

Most stories are a little of both, of course, and some are just plain perplexing. Bartley and Walker were floored, for example, to learn that the single biggest holder of neglected and abandoned property in Buffalo is not a real-estate speculator in Texas or a FHA-scamming flip artist. Rather, it’s a state agency created at the behest of Governor George Pataki, called the Municipal Bond Banking Agency (MBBA), along with its property management company, JER Revenue Services. MBBA and JER are responsible for roughly 1,500 tax-delinquent properties in the City of Buffalo, many of them empty and rotting.

“In researching abandoned houses we quickly learned from individual residents and our own research that this single state agency, MBBA, is the largest culprit right now, the largest owner of neglected property in the city,” Bartley says. “Neighbors would tell us, ‘Oh, this house is an MBBA house or a JER house,’ but no one really knew what that meant.”

So Bartley and Walker, along with PUSH’s growing community of partners and volunteers, decided to find out. What they discovered led them to initiate a campaign to pressure Pataki to make MBBA and JER responsible for the properties its controls in Buffalo, and especially those in PUSH’s core West Side neighborhoods.

The campaign kicks off on Thursday, March 23, when PUSH members will meet at the organizations headquarters at 271 Grant Street. From there they will travel downtown to MBBA’s local offices, where they will deliver a petition addressed to Pataki.

“We’re going to try to do some more creative direct actions over time,” Bartley says, “but Thursday is pretty simple: We’re going to try to get everyone packed tightly into an office, try to cause some commotion and some embarrassment. We think it’s important that this state agency be made to act responsibly toward Buffalo, its neighborhoods and its citizens.”

What is MBBA? What do they do?

In 2002, the State of New York created a public benefit agency to buy up selected delinquent tax liens from several of the state’s larger municipal entities, including Binghamton, Plattsburgh, Syracuse and Buffalo—as well as the Buffalo Sewer Authority, since the City of Buffalo tax delinquent list includes homeowners who have fallen behind on their water bills. In September 2003, MBBA bought the liens on 3,500 tax-delinquent properties in these municipalities, including 1,500 in Buffalo, through a trust created and wholly owned by MBBA.

“Rather than have a foreclosure auction with these properties, which is the typical route that the city does every year, this corporation swooped in and said, ‘There’s this new state law that Pataki passed last year. Why don’t we just buy these liens from you instead of having an auction,” Bartley explains. “‘We’ll pay you $4.1 million and the we’ll have our own auction and get the properties moving.’”

Like most debt in this era of arcane financial transactions, the debt represented by the tax liens MBBA bought was then resold—and then, most likely, sold and resold again. Initially MBBA’s trust sold $25 million in bonds to an investment bank, the collateral for which was the houses. The bonds are supposed to be supported by revenue generated by these houses, either through their sale or the collection of back taxes.

In order to realize that revenue and support the bonds, the trust created by MBBA hired JER Revenue Services, based in Noth Haven, Connecticut, to collect the back taxes on those properties. If JER cannot collect the back taxes or water bill payments, they are empowered to foreclose on the delinquent properties and sell them. The money collected from back taxes and the sale of houses is then transferred to MBBA­—minus a cut to JER for its work—and that money services the bonds that MBBA sold to investment banks.

Debt is big business—just look at the credit cards in your wallet—so long as the debtor is able to make payments against that debt. The problem is that JER has not been successful, or particularly diligent, in collecting back taxes or in selling the roughly 200 properties on which it has foreclosed since September 2003.

“What has happened ever since is essentially nothing,” Bartley says. “The properties have just sat there. There are about 1,500 of them in the city, about 200 on the West Side. Practically every block has one. Many are abandoned. And you know as well as we do what it means to have an abndoned house on a block: It usually means there is going to be a second and a third and a fourth one.”

Recently JER tried to auction off a handful of foreclosed Buffalo properties under its management. There were no bids. The problem is that JER is asking far more than the abandoned, dilapidated properties are worth. When Bartley and Walker spoke with a JER representative, he told them at first that it was the community’s fault that those houses continued to be empty and neglected. If only the community would pay the prices JER was asking, he told them, they’d be sold.

“Which is just moronic,” Walker says. “When he says, ‘If only the community would pay our prices,’ he means, ‘If we can get $35,000 out of these rotting houses, then we could sell them, because then our client’s bonds would be supported.’”

As an example of the sort of house JER is trying to sell, Walker submits 376 Rhode Island: “The windows are smashed out and it’s totally open—you can walk right into the house. Someone set fire to a mattress in a bathtub inside to keep the place warm, because they were squatting there.”

The discrepancy between what the houses are worth and what JER expects to sell them for is exacerbated by the tax liens themselves, which keep increasing as owners walk away from their properties or continue to fall behind on their taxes or water bills. The liens often far exceed the value of the houses to which they are attached. No buyer wants to take on a problem property that is saddled with so much debt.

“It’s very clear right now that these house are not worth anything near $25 million,” Bartley says. “They’re probably worth about a dollar each. Our feeling is that the reason that they have to hold these houses in limbo is that on paper they have value; their assessed value is way higher than the market value. If they start selling them, they’ll discover that they’re worth much less—meaning they have no assets and the bonds are junk. It’s a big financial deal, and it’s paralyzing the neighborhoods where these houses are sitting empty.”

On its website JER lists properties that it are supposedly ready to auction, but nothing seems to be happening. PUSH has sent letters to MBBA requesting a meeting with agency officials and further information about the deal that led to this circumstance. Among the questions they are asking: Who exactly hold the bonds for which these Buffalo properties are collateral? Do the bondholders know that their bonds are in jeopardy? Is the state prepared to step in and pay off the endangered bonds?

They sent the letter two weeks ago and so far have not received a reply. “No response yet, Bartley says and smiles. “But I haven’t checked the mail today.”

Pulling neighbors together

Bartley grew up in North Buffalo and graduated from City Honors High School. He attended Swarthmore College, then Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, he co-founded the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, which advocated on behalf of more than 2,000 of the university’s service workers. The campaign resulted in $10 million in annual wage and benefit increases for the workers it represented. When he returned to Buffalo, he was determined to turn the organizing skills he had learned in that and other, similar efforts to addressing housing issues in his hometown.

Eventually he met Eric Walker, a 2001 graduate of SUNY at Buffalo with degrees in sociology and geography. Walker had organized Buffalo Votes, a drive that signed up 9,000 new voters, during the runup to the 2004 elections. They formed PUSH Buffalo with a three-year, $30,000-per-year grant from Echoing Green, a New York City-based foundation that supports progressive causes.

PUSH’s stated mission is to build a democratic, action-oriented organization capable of addressing the lack of living-wage jobs and the poor housing conditions on Buffalo’s West Side; to increase property ownership by low-income residents; to decrease the rate of housing abandonment by reclaiming empty houses from neglectful public and private owners and redeveloping them for occupancy by low-income residents; to lead direct-action campaigns against corporations and government agencies whose practices contribute to the high poverty rate on the West Side; and to create a replicable model of grassroots neighborhood organizing and redevelopment, which can be employed in other low-income neighborhoods in Buffalo and other Rust Belt cities.

“Most other cities have engaged independent movements, whether they’re large or small, to hold people and institutions accountable,” Bartley says. “Buffalo for a long time just hasn’t had that independent voice. It’s had a lot of community-based organizatiuons that do good work, but it’s such a poor city that everybody winds up relying on block grant funds, and so they’re not really able to speak out. We’re hoping that we can try to fill some that void.”

Walker and Bartley comprise PUSH’s staff—Bartley’s position is director, Walker’s is community organizer. The board of directors comprises nine people with close ties to the communities PUSH has chosen to serve: Luis Acosta, an activist and a leader in the West Side’s Puerto Rican community; Jason Donati, who works with neighborhood youth as a coordinator of the Growing Green urban agriculture program; Jason Edwards, a small business owner and neighborhood leader who lives on Buffalo’s East Side; Michael Graham, who has been a community organizer with Citizen Action; Zoe Holloman, who works with neighborhood youth as an educator and assists in the creation of youth-led cooperative businesses; Kirk Laubenstein, who helps to run the Nickel City Housing Co-operative; Leslie Pickering, a local organizer whose interests are political education and economic literacy; Micaela Shapiro, whose community interests are affordable housing and living wage employment; and Tamar Rothaus, formerly of the Massachusetts Avenue Project.

It’s a good core group. Ideally, though, Walker and Bartley say, the real faces of the organization will be its members within the community.

“We’re developing internal leaders from our membership within the neighborhood, to help branch out and maximize our ability to connect to people,” Walker explains. “So that it’s not just Aaron and I as the faces of a group, screaming and shouting about issues.”

Community groups that become personal fiefdoms are easily marginalized or aggrandized—their effectiveness is tied to the ability or willingness of the organization’s figurehead to get things done and make change happen. On the other hand, Walker says, if a neighborhood’s residents feel that they own and direct an advocacy group like PUSH, then the group becomes more difficult for politicians and corporations to ignore. And the group is more likely to attract new members and stir its membership to direct action in the service of a campaign such as this one against MBBA and JER.

So PUSH’s members go to door-to-door three or four days of the week, weather permitting, signing up members and identifying residents who are willing and able to take leadership roles in their neighborhoods. “So, again, the face of the organization is not Aaron and I, it’s a person who lives a few blocks down the street,” Walker says. “We want to have a connection to everyday people, and not so much a connection to the existing infrastructure that determines how complaints are trickled up to those in positions of power.”

PUSH also spends a lot of time speaking with other neighborhood institutions, of which there are many—so many that it is easy to imagine PUSH as just the latest in a proliferation of community-based organizations. Walker says that what differentiates PUSH is its independence, its expertise and its exclusive focus.

“Every community group, every block club, every church and every person in the area that we organize pretty much wants what we want,” Walker says. “On that level there is a lot of redundancy, but there is a difference between the want and the capacity to do. Many organizations spring up for specific purposes or to address a specific issue—to get a particular house knocked down because it’s a mess, or to get certain people evicted because they’re bad noisy neighbors. Some community organizations spring out of a specific need that they address—teaching kids to read, for example. Then there are churches that don’t have the membership to support a large community canvass that’s going to last five months.”

PUSH, Walker says, understands the mechanics of organizing people and mounting campaigns. So PUSH can organize the members of other groups in the neighborhood to campaign for causes in which everyone has a stake.

“We can outsource another community group’s need to organize their members,” Walker says, then smiles. “Part of it’s about making a capitalistic argument for our existence. In the old days of hip-hop they used to call it flipping the script—where the language is used in a productive way, the ideas are being used in a productive way, even though now they’re being used in a not-so-productive way, destablizing families and destabilizing communities.”

The size of the problem

At this year’s city tax auction, the pervasiveness and gravity of Buffalo’s housing problem was hammered home for Walker and Bartley, who found the process chaotic. Every year people lose their homes in Buffalo—and many deserve to, but others simply don’t know that their houses are about to go on the auction block, or don’t know that if they just show up in court and plead their case, a city judge will likely work out a payment plan so as to prevent their eviction.

“This year the judges were doing a decent job of cutting deals with owner-occupants, if they would come down and show the city that they wanted to stay and get on a payment plan,” Bartley recalls. “But very few people knew that, so we did a lot of canvassing of owner-occupants who were on the list to tell them to get downtown to court today.”

The city sends out letters to homeowners whose properties are in danger of going to auction. But Bartley and Walker don’t think that’s sufficient, especially in a city where so many residents live below the poverty line—a city where a delinquent water bill is enough reason to take away someone’s house.

“There’s a greater responsibility there,” Walker says. “You don’t want to foreclose on people who have spent their whole lives in a neighborhood, or who have spent their whole lives in a city, and this is the thanks they get. It seems like backhanded way of eviction. When you start looking at your homeowners and your residents and your taxpayers as dollar signs, something has been lost in the translation of ‘stakeholder.’”

There are three possible results for a property that goes to the city’s tax auction. First, the city might sell the property to somebody, for better or for worse. Maybe the new owner has good intentions and maybe he’s looking to flip it for a profit without investing in repairs. Or maybe, like MBBA, he’ll just sit on it and let it rot.

Second, if it does not sell, the property can be struck to the city, which means the city takes title. For the last 20 years or so, that has become increasingly rare. The city does not like to take title unless it is land-banking property in a neighborhood where a developer has expressed genuine interest in initiating a project. Additionally, the city will take title if a house is in desperate need of demolition and the city has the money to tear it down. Otherwise, the city hates to make itself responsible for negelected property—and arguably can’t really afford to do so on a large scale.

The third outcome, if a property doesn’t sell, is adjournment. That means nothing happens to the property until the next year’s auction, when the city tries to sell it again. It just languishes.

At this year’s auction 300 houses were struck to the city and about 850 were sold. There were 1,300 adjournments.

“So the bulk of the properties did not sell and no one took responsibility for them,” Bartley says. “They’re in limbo.

“A quick review of the numbers: You have 1,500 properties in limbo because of the MBBA deal. You have 1,300 properties in limbo because they didn’t sell at auction and no one assumed responsibility for them. You have about 400 that the city owns itself that are just sitting there. And HUD at any given time might have another 100 properties.

“There are probably 40,000 houses in Buffalo. That’s almost 10 percent that are unaccounted for. Even if you want to buy one of those houses, you can’t—you don’t even know who to call to ask about it.”

The 1,500 properties the MBBA controls are essentially unavailable for purchase ata reasonable price. JER Revenue Services has no staff in Buffalo, so it’s possible that they have no idea how unrealistic their asking prices are.

Making MBBA responsible

“We’re doing our best to get our members in the community invested in this campaign against MBBA, to make it a grassroots effort,” Bartley says. “We have our work cut out for us because, with these issues, there are layers of abstractions. Even though you could have a rat-infested house on your block, making the connection to a larger state structure can be hard. Keeping it simple and feeding off the people’s own self-interest is a challenge.”

The campaign my take a long time, Bartley acknowledges, and PUSH is still small. Also, it has plenty of irons in the fire: The group is rehabbing a house at 19th Street and Massachusetts that it bought at this year’s tax auction, using a combination of volunteer and professional labor. When it’s finsihed, the four-unit building will become a housing co-operative.

PUSH is also talking to city officials about implementing a homesteading program, which would enable prospective homeowners to buy a derelict house for $1, free and clear, if they meet an income requirement and demonstrate the wherewithal to accomplish the necessary repairs on the house. PUSH is also talking to city officials about reforming the way it goes about foreclosing on and then auctioning off properties whose owners are delinquent in taxes or water bills.

That’s a lot of projects for a small organization. And, of course, there is the nagging need to raise money. PUSH is in reasonable shape right now, having attracted support from some local foundations to complement the seed grant from Echoing Green. They hold parties every few months to raise donations. But long-term stability will require a consistent fund-raising strategy.

Bartley acknowledges that all this may mean that PUSH might not see the campaign against MBBA all the way through, and begins to say that at some point they may have to cut their losses, when Walker interrupts him.

“I don’t like that language,” he says. “Let me rephrase what Aaron is saying: This campaign is going to take us a long time. And we’ll have to periodically reassess how successful we have been and step up our level of intensity as we see or don’t see the results we want.

“But I don’t like to lose. There is a lot of power out there on our side; there is a lot of power behind the ideas that we bring to the table. Like I said before—every person, every block club, every community group, every church philosophically supports what we’re doing. I don’t conceive of us ever losing any fight. I see it as a matter of how successful we are in reaching the people who feel the same way we do.”