The entrance to the building was surrounded by a high wrought iron fence, reinforced by a dense lattice of chicken wire. Its porch was almost completely enclosed by high wooden panels painted an imposing dark gray. The home of Mary Lee Ward at 320 Tompkins Avenue, in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, looked more like a heavily-fortified bunker than the dwelling of a kindly eighty-two-year-old great grandmother.

In a sense, that’s exactly what it was last Friday morning, when a New York City marshal was scheduled to evict Ms Ward from the home that she has lived in for the last forty-four years. She would have become the latest elderly, African-American victim of predatory lending if a crowd of about 200 people from around the city hadn’t shown up to stop the marshals from carrying out the eviction notice and putting her on the street.

Ms Ward’s years-long battle with a subprime lender called Delta Funding is illustrative of the many ways in which real estate speculators have targeted, manipulated, and victimized countless homeowners, particularly the elderly and people of color, across the country in recent years. As the New York Times tells the story,