5 weeks in Europe, 3 of them with my wife Anna, ended in 2 full days spent in airplanes and airports from Porto to Brussels to Berlin to Heathrow and finally, back to San Francisco.

Max, who had spent the last 3 weeks playing foster parent to our dog Wolfgang and staying in our house, picked us up in our black Prius, indistinguishable from the other dozen black Priuses doing pickup at SFO except for the driver sporting a giant red beard longer than a baby's arm. A strange sight, not because of his appearance, but because I've never seen Max drive a car, his preferred transportation being a bicycle.

Even though I'd had 4 hours sleep in 48 hours, I insisted on driving and, about half way to the Bay Bridge, Max started to fill us in on the state of our home.

A week earlier the property had apparently gone in to foreclosure and our landlord was no longer the lord of our land. A new man, claiming to be the new owner, had been by twice.

On the first visit nobody was home and he spoke with a neighbor. He wondered if we were actually inside the house, hiding being the drawn blinds, our car was parked there so we were surely home! The second visit is when Max finally met him, having already been warned by our neighbor. On both visits the new owner asked how long we had been there and was informed that we were in fact renters and were not the prior owners of the property. He probed Max a little more. What were our occupations? Software Developer. Why weren't we at home? Honeymoon in Portugal.

A third visit must have come while Max was picking us up at SFO but a greeting was left, taped to the metal screen door. 3-Day Notice to Vacate.

We pulled our bags out of the car and rather than unpack Anna started calling her legal team. Anna's father, and nearly all uncles on both sides of her family, are lawyers. Their expertise ranging from Lemon Law to Corporate Law and, lucky for us, an uncle in Pasadena is a California Real Estate lawyer.

I turned to Twitter. My post about our welcome home gift lead to an outpouring of support from friends with offers to stay as long as we needed and the occasional 140 character legal advice, mostly variations of "that's not legal".

I made it all the way till 8pm before I crashed. I awoke the next day to Anna already on the phone. We had lawyered up. A great local attorney, not too expensive and well versed in Oakland rent control, was now our counsel.

We also got in touch with our (former) landlord. He was heart broken. He explained that they were reworking their mortgage, trying to get better terms, and that over the last year and a half Bank of America had lost or failed to process nearly every document he sent them. This lead to the house being vulnerable and going in to pre-foreclosure but he had been told that they were under review and that even if there was a foreclosure date posted it would be delayed because of their in review status. He had found out about the sale only a few days before we did and was trying to figure out how this could have happened.

On the way to the lawyers office the guy next to me on the elevator smelled so strongly of marijuana I couldn't help but smile. "I wonder if he's also seeing his lawyer?". He wasn't. On the way out I realized that the 3rd floor housed one of Oakland's most vocal business lobby: medicinal marijuana vendor.

"I have no interest in speaking to this man". The notice taped to our door was illegal. You can't post a 3-day notice to vacate on a renter, ever, anywhere, it's a federal law. Even if you evict them they get 90 days to leave. And as we were also just informed by our lawyer, you can't even evict someone in Oakland without cause, and buying a house and wanting to flip it isn't cause. So no, I wasn't going to speak to him, I'd let our lawyer do that.

The phone call was still painful, even to watch. Our lawyer must be used to talking to people that are infuriating but this man still started to get the best of her at times. Not the smartest man in the world though: at one point he actually admitted he knew the notice was not legitimate but stopped short of admitting it was not legal.

The next day he offered to sell us the house at 5% below market value.

We moved in to this house about 2 years ago. It's a 2 bedroom house in Temescal, a neighborhood that has gone from up and coming to outright gentrified in the short 6 years since we moved to Oakland, although the remnants of what the neighborhood used to be like are still visible, a half a dozen korean restaurants, 5 active black churches within 4 blocks and nearly as many salons. When we first came to Oakland artists and foodies in their late 20s were moving in to this neighborhood because it was cheap and close to a convenient BART station, now they're in their 30s and the streets are overrun with tattoos and baby strollers. The latest hot restaurant only serves Mac & Cheese and beer in mason jars and is 2 parts hipster and 3 parts toddler.

Before we lived here our former landlord did. He and his wife raised 3 girls in this house, a tremendous feat considering it only has one bathroom.

He spent a year working on the house before we moved in. The kitchen has new floors, counters, appliances, and sky lights. He's a contractor so he did all the work himself. He took his time, the work is perfect. I love this kitchen.

This street only exists because the Oakland street car needed to cut between the adjacent streets. When the street car was decommissioned the back lots were sold to the home owners and the yards extended, leaving all the houses on my side of the block with yards 3 to 4 times the size of an average urban backyard. Strict zoning and permit laws have kept any of the back lot yards from growing another small home and every fence has a gate that opens to a neighbors yard, although most are now either locked or blocked off permanentely, the gate hinges remaining as a reminder of when the spark of a single neighbor's grill might invite half the block to an impromptu BBQ.

The previous owner paid a lot of equity in to this home. It's a gem in a neighborhood that is only going up in real estate value. It's a property worth investing in and holding on to if you were so inclined.

5% off market rate.

My friend Joe just bought a house nearby with the help of his family. It took nearly 3 years. One of their biggest problems was what Joe called cash deals. When regular people want to buy a house they pick a property, make a bid, and continue to work with a bank to secure a loan in the amount of the bid.

Joe was constantly losing his bids. The strange thing was that he wasn't losing to people bidding more than him, he was losing houses to bids significantly lower than his bid.

The difference between Joe's bid and these other bids was that Joe was a person who had to get loan from a bank. These other bids were from investors. They didn't need to talk to a bank, they had the money ready to go. Rather than wait a few weeks for more money from Joe after he finalized a loan with the bank they would take less money just to get it right away. They could make tens of thousands of dollars just by being patient and taking Joe's bid but they consistently opted not to.

As it turns out, the bank doesn't lose tens of thousands for it's impatience, that's what TARP is for. So afraid that sales of houses under market would bankrupt our poor banks the federal government decided to make up the difference. So if a bank has an under water mortgage and has to sell the house at a loss TARP (our future debt) will cover the difference.

So, our house in a well valued neighborhood with a ton of equity goes in to foreclosure. The bank doesn't need to get much for it, since a portion of the mortgage is already paid off, and since Obama is fitting the bill for the difference why not just take the first offer that doesn't seem insulting?

5% off market value could be a hundred thousand in profit for these investors. I don't know any of the specifics, but I know they are self proclaimed investors and they were able to finalize the purchase of the house in a day. The previous owner will get nothing for what he's put in. We get nothing for the taxes that may have closed the deal.

This system isn't just broken, it's dead and decaying, and these are the vultures.

We turned down the offer to buy. Who would want to own a house in this country right now? I guess it makes people happy, to invest in some illusion of permanence, but I'm not interested.

With our lawyer we've worked out a cash for keys agreement. They can't kick us out, not legally, but they can arbitrarily raise our rent, which I'm sure they would if it seemed like their only option. In the end we might get just a little something for our trouble, more than the rest of the tax payers or our poor landlord. We can take the money as long as we leave quietly, the contract says nothing about blog posts.

There's always a part of me that feels like this is giving in, that I should stay and fight it out, but I've got too much on my plate to fight for a house I don't even own.

I'm just glad that we can put it behind us. This month I started a company with good old Redbeard and we've got a lot of biking and coding ahead of us. It's a pain in the ass to look for a new home, and move, and start a company, and plan a conference, and speak at a conference, all in the same month but I'm used to having more shit to do than I think I can get done.

It could be worse.

Tear gas is being fired on a protest about a mile from my house. An attempt to suppress Occupy Oakland.

In his last email the previous owner of the house mentioned Occupy Oakland, many days before city hall decided to rip it out and send in the riot squad. He ended his email with the words "OCCUPY, OCCUPY, OCCUPY.  Let the movement grow.".

He is not a radical. A giant basketball hoop is installed in our backyard, he and all his daughters play, and you can't get 2 minutes in to a conversation with him before there is a basketball metaphor, about how he's gonna go "full court press". He's just a regular guy who invested in the system the way you're expected to.

When I looked around at the Iraqi war protests during the Bush years I saw a whole lot of normal looking people, people that look like my landlord, or my doctor, or my dentist. No matter who you were your could probably identify with someone you saw at that protest based solely on appearance. But we all knew that the day after the protest, they'd all just go back to work. Nobody was going to change their life, nobody was willing to give anything up, mostly because very few of them had really lost anything. It was symbolic protest and as symbols go it had the depth and conviction someone might have when they wear a nike swoosh.

The Occupy protestors don't look normal but they are willing to give something up. They don't want the life that is being offered to them, they aren't going to invest in this system, and there's more of them every day. And now, even my "full court press" landlord is starting to identify with them.

You don't have to be a radical to know that the change we need, it's radical.