Move Your Money Day: San Francisco Residents to Dump Their Banks

​In what could be the first practical request by the Occupy Movement yet, protesters are asking everyone across the nation to take part in the "Move Your Money Day" tomorrow and divert their investments from big banks.

It might seem ambitious, but considering how the mass exodus of customers from Netflix considerably hurt the online video company, it's possible big banks could feel some pain if the 99 percent bail on them, too.

And San Francisco is no exception. Tomorrow, residents from the city's poorest neighborhoods will gather with local politicians and essentially threaten their banks. These residents, who are at risk of losing their homes, will call on banks located in their community to either modify loans, reduce principal, and invest in more home ownership, or they will move their money and push them out of the local community.

They will deliver these demands to the five big banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, Chase, and US Bank.

Supervisors John Avalos, Malia Cohen, and David Chiu, as well as Mayor Ed Lee will join these residents at a press conference tomorrow afternoon.

"I am a foreclosure victim in the Excelsior and I am uniting with my community to protest and demand affordable modifications with principal reductions," said Maria Magdalena Diaz, who got a call from Bank of America this week informing her she was in foreclosure. "Or else we will organize to move our money."

San Francisco's Excelsior and Oceanview neighborhoods have the highest number of foreclosures in San Francisco, with 1,918 homes since 2008, according to Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a nonprofit advocating for working families. The estimated loss in home values is $1 million.

On Sept. 17, Occupy Wall Street first started its movement to protest corporate greed, blasting big banks for creating the country's foreclosure crisis. Since then, the movement has spread to cities across America, including San Francisco and Oakland, where demonstrations have grown violent.

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