ACORN Housing
Part of the political onslaught against ACORN is to blame ACORN Housing Corporation for the mortgage crisis. ACORN Housing helps low and moderate income families purchase their first home, sometimes in neighborhoods that have been historically red-lined by banks.
The talk radio reasoning is that ACORN is to blame because they pushed low income people into buying homes they couldn't afford. The poor and people of color are popular scapegoats for right-wing demagogues, so this attack is hardly surprising.
I've never worked with ACORN Housing but I've seen them work with people enough to have a pretty good idea of what they do. They help people do things like:
1) Evaluate their finances to figure out what mortgage payments they can afford.
2) Improve their credit score to get a lower interest loan.
3) Steer clear of high-interest predatory lenders.
4) Better understand the complicated process of buying your first home.
Basically, they're doing all of the good things that irresponsible lenders don't bother doing anymore. The mortgage crisis was caused by predatory lenders giving high-interests loans to anyone who would take one whether they could afford it or not. ACORN has been fighting against those kind of predatory lenders for years.
If all mortgage companies had acted more like ACORN Housing Corporation then the housing crisis would have never happened.
Comments
Why is it that whenever there is a major problem that conservatives either caused failed to avert, prepare for, or have any reasonable plan to solve it, they seem to find the least powerful and influential members of society to blame it on.
At one time it was "welfare moms" then illegal immigrants, the Iraqi Army, and now it is irresponsible use of credit by consumers and home owners. If we had all just paid our mortgages no matter what the financial and real estate industry charged then we would not have caused this mess.
If all of the usual scapegoats got together they would not add up to one tenth of the political power, control and money the conservatives have and yet the conservatives are still able to figure out new groups with no influence to blame for problems that the conservatives not only had the power to influence but were usually the ones that created the problem.
Oh! and if I hear one more republican talk about the fiscal irresponsibility of the "tax and spend" democrats I swear I will scream. What is up with that? Bush started with a budget surplus and the republicans have put us in a whole so deep that one bank failure lead to a worldwide collapse. This is after financing 3 wars a bank bailout we will never see the light of day. If they get us out of debt then I might listen, but probably not.
Posted by: Lethal Librarian | October 13, 2008 8:20 PM
Because Librarian, no matter how many times Bill O'Reilly complains about "liberal elites" the main force in the conservative movement always has been and always will be about protecting the financial interests of the wealthiest powerbrokers in society. Whether it means protecting a plantation owners right to own slaves in the conservative movement of 150 years ago, or the right of a corporation to poison the air and water without having to pay to clean up their own messes in the conservative movement of today.
Posted by: Will | October 13, 2008 10:21 PM
Uhm.......aren't the folks who defaulted on their loans, and caused the current financial crisis, the very same folks who ACORN 'helped' get sub-prime loans? So wait, who's fault is this again? Hell, you didn't even deny any of these facts, just pounded the table and started talking about 'blaming poor people'....but if ACORN pushed banks in to giving millions of sub-prime loans in to the hands of people who couldn't pay, and is now trying to blame the banks for doing what they wanted them to do in the first place......one would have to be a brain-dead partisan hack not to follow the simple logic of who's to blame for this mess.....
Posted by: Mac | October 25, 2009 9:00 AM
No, Mac. Only if you believe everything you hear on Fox. ACORN spent years fighting the kind of unregulated, high-interest predatory loans that caused the collapse. You can thank Bush for weakening the regulations that prevented this kind of financial crisis from happening for decades.
More defaults were from unregulated lenders who put middle class people in homes that were bigger than they could afford. Those lenders did not work with ACORN and were not subject to the same regulations that forced them to give loans to low income buyers. If the federal government had listened to ACORN when they said we need to regulate these fly by night mortgage lenders then the collapse never would have happened.
Posted by: Will | October 26, 2009 2:03 PM