Ramon Suero left the Dominican Republic for Boston over a decade ago because he believes in the American Dream. That belief remains intact, even though Suero has spent the past three-and-a-half years in court, fighting government lawyers who are trying to kick Suero’s family out of their Dorchester home. Suero bought his tiny slice of Upham’s Corner a decade ago, but whether he gets to keep it largely hinges on two questions: whether state laws aimed at bringing Wall Street’s worst actors to heel can also protect Massachusetts residents from their own government, and whether government-controlled mortgage businesses are in business to save money, or exact revenge on foreclosed families.

Suero is the kind of borrower that subprime mortgage lenders got paid to exploit during the housing boom. In 2005, the notorious subprime lender Option One gave Suero a no-money down mortgage with an exploding interest rate — the kind of mortgage that brought down the entire economy. The loan allowed Suero, who was working two full-time hotel jobs, to buy a condo in an Upham’s Corner triple-decker. Massachusetts later sued Option One, alleging that the firm illegally steered high-risk loans to non-native English speakers and poor communities of color; the company paid a $10 million settlement.

Suero refinanced into a vanilla loan that wound up in the hands of Freddie Mac, the nationalized mortgage investor. He fell behind on his loan due to a family illness, and, he and the local hotel workers union say, because he was fired for union organizing. Freddie foreclosed in late 2010. Suero has been fighting to get his home back ever since.

The fight has taken Suero from the Boston Housing Court to the federal courthouse on Fan Pier. An eviction battle has morphed into a tug of war over whether the federal government can exempt itself from Massachusetts’s consumer protection laws.

Boston Community Capital, a local nonprofit, runs a loan fund that works with foreclosed families. It buys foreclosed homes and sells them back to their former owners, stabilizing families and neighborhoods in the process. Boston Community Capital has cleared Suero to borrow the money he needs to buy his Upham’s Corner home back. The problem is, Freddie Mac refuses to sell to Suero and Boston Community Capital, or anyone like them.

Freddie Mac and its larger corporate sibling, Fannie Mae, won’t sell foreclosed homes back to their former owners unless they receive the full value of the foreclosed mortgage — sums that are normally well above what the properties are worth now. Fannie and Freddie will charge market prices to any other buyer of a foreclosed home. But to those properties’ former owners, they charge a foreclosure premium. This premium all but assures that foreclosed homeowners won’t stay in their homes.

Foreclosure is a costly proposition for any bank, but Fannie and Freddie are picking and choosing whom they’re willing to lose money to. This policy is not something any large commercial bank subscribes to.

Fannie and Freddie also refuse to sell to nonprofits like Boston Community Capital that work with foreclosed homeowners. So when Boston Community Capital put in repeated offers to buy Suero’s home out of foreclosure, they went unanswered.

A 2012 Massachusetts law makes it illegal for any lender to put stipulations on a sale to a nonprofit. The law was aimed at lenders who refuse to do business with firms that work with foreclosed homeowners, and Fannie and Freddie are by far the biggest offenders. Suero sued Freddie last fall for violating this law.

Freddie’s lawyers have already made noises about claiming that, since they’ve been federalized, they’re immune from the state law. Last summer, lawyers representing Fannie and Freddie successfully maneuvered out of a Chicago ordinance requiring them to register, and pay fees on, vacant foreclosed properties. So there’s clearly a chance that the Massachusetts law might fall to the same arguments about federal powers that knocked down Chicago’s foreclosure efforts. The bigger question is what Freddie Mac actually gains by sinking untold sums of money into a years-long legal battle to wrest an Upham’s Corner condo from a family that wants nothing more than to see Freddie get paid and walk away.

The Cambridge City Council voted unanimously Monday to support the boycott of the Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Hotel, a sign of support for hotel employees trying to unionize.

 

The boycott, which was launched last month, is a part of ongoing efforts by DoubleTree employees, Harvard’s Student Labor Action Movement, and area union UNITE HERE! Local 26 to get the hotel to allow workers to unionize by fair process. Workers and activists are also working to push Harvard to put pressure on the DoubleTree, which is located in a Harvard-owned building, in hopes that managers will become more receptive to allowing fair process unionization.

 

Several DoubleTree employees clad in UNITE HERE! Local 26 union t-shirts testified at the City Council meeting Monday evening asking the City Council members to endorse the boycott. Workers cited a lack of adequate insurance and a lack of respect, among other grievances, about their treatment under DoubleTree management.

 

“They don’t respect me. They don’t appreciate what I’ve done for this hotel,” Celia Li, a DoubleTree housekeeper who said she has worked at the DoubleTree for over 30 years, said in front of the Council.

 

The hotel said at the start of the boycott that it does not believe that a true majority of DoubleTree workers wish to be represented by any union. Hilton, which owns DoubleTree, could not be reached for comment on the most recent developments. Hotel workers and advocates said that management has not addressed the boycott, and it does not appear that the hotel has suffered losses from the boycott.

 

University officials maintain that Harvard will support any fair process of unionization agreed upon by Hilton and its employees.

 

“It’s still a lot of the same,” Student Labor Action Movement member Gabriel H. Bayard ’15 said. “I think there’s a lot of community momentum but our main job right now is to get people not to stay at the hotel.”

 

Although DoubleTree managers have not addressed the boycott, workers said they have noticed difference in the work environment at the hotel.

 

“We see the change already. We have benefits already,” DoubleTree houseman Victor Bernabe said. “We have more respect. Now it’s [totally] different.”

 

 

 Demand For Better Healthcare TIANA A ABDULMASSIH

Sandra Herandez, an employee of the Doubletree Hotel in Allston, waits to give a statement at the Cambridge City Council meeting on April 28. A housekeeper at the hotel for twenty two years, Hernandez exclaimed “I’m here for a fair process”.

DoubleTree employees and advocates claim the hotel is making working conditions better in order to give workers fewer reasons to push for fair process of unionization. Still, Bernabe said he had doubts.

 

“I want [the union] 100 percent more now,” Bernabe said. “You know why? I don’t want to go back to before. I want it better and better and better. I know if we win the fair process it will 100 percent be better.”

 

Although unsure about tangible successes thus far, students and advocates continue to promote the boycott.  Last week, several advocates distributed flyers at a conference at the DoubleTree to publicize the boycott.

 

“I didn’t ask anyone to change their reservation. We just want people to know about [the boycott] so they don’t come back next time,” said Harvard Kennedy School student and activist Michael “Mick” R. Power. “You could say [the guests] felt a bit dirty being there when they heard it.”

 

Employees and activists said that they view the city council support as a success.

 

“That’s very good for us. [It’s] not only inside, we need [support] from outside too,” Bername said.

 

—Staff writer Mariel A. Klein can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @mariel_klein.

 

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