In this new report, "Road to Rescue: How the Philadelphia Model Can Reduce Foreclosures Across the Country", ACORN warns that the foreclosure crisis shows no signs of stopping, and that local and state governments have a critical role to play in mitigating foreclosures and rescuing the economy. 

Almost a year into its existence, the Philadelphia Foreclosure Diversion Program, a pre-foreclosure mediation process that is preventing more than three in four owner-occupied foreclosures, has proven to be the best model in the nation.  Other jurisdictions are following suit and adopting mediation programs, which are less successful because they are not mandatory, lack effective community outreach, are difficult for homeowners to access, or do not make effective use of housin...

Mortgage Industry Warming Quickly to Obama Foreclosure Plan

Just two weeks after President Obama's Administration revealed the details of his Making Home Affordable plan to prevent unnecessary foreclosures, leading mortgage servicing companies are already committing to the plan in droves. This industry momentum signals strongly that the Obama plan will achieve near-universal industry consensus on foreclosure prevention protocols in short order, something the industry has been unable to do in two years of record foreclosures. These protocols, based on the pioneering work of the FDIC, require due diligence to be performed on each loan before foreclosureto evaluate whether a loan modification to affordable terms would be less costly. Any servicer that takes incentives offered under the Obama...

Over the past two years, a foreclosure crisis has hit New York more severely than any other time since the Great Depression. The number of homes lost to foreclosure has hit record levels in 2008, with some of the most seriously impacted neighborhoods (such as Jamaica, Queens) seeing rates as high as one foreclosure filing for every thirty-five homes. Predictably, this crisis has serious consequences.Individual homeowners are not the only ones affected by this crisis. Entire neighborhoods are feeling the negative impacts as foreclosures increase and spread. With neighborhoods losing residents and gaining abandoned homes, community safety is put at risk. Abandoned homes have been shown to attract looters, squatters, and criminals looking for goods to sell and places to stay. In addition, the...

America today faces its most significant housing crisis in three generations, as record numbers of Americans lose their homes to foreclosure while the frozen credit markets and recession economy keep homeownership a distant dream for too many. Homeowners of color and low-income homeowners have been particularly hard hit, as they were early targets for unregulated predatory lending.

For nearly forty years, ACORN has stood on the front lines of the movement to fulfill the American dream of safe, affordable homeownership for people of modest means, and has learned many lessons that can guide an informed and effective response to the current crisis.

Thus far, the federal response to the crisis has been patchwork, feeble, and transparently indifferent to the needs of struggling homeowners t...

With recent reports in key swing states uncovering a coordinated GOP election strategy for suppressing votes of foreclosure victims, ACORN has released a report that examines the facts and potential impact these challenges can have on the Presidential election.

Foreclosure victims are at risk of having their votes challenged at the polls by using foreclosure filings as a basis to prove the voter no longer lives at that address. This shameless challenge adds insult to injury to those who have been hit hardest by the economic crisis.

This report chronicles and analyzes the roles played by both ACORN and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) over the past decade leading up to the economic crisis that the United States faces today. Although perhaps an odd pairing on the surface, this comparison was invited by the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign when it released an advertisement on Friday, October 10 blaming ACORN for the crisis, claiming, "ACORN forced banks to make risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today." This ad was the culmination of weeks of punditry from conservative circles that blamed community organizations like ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 for the mortgage meltdown that triggered the broader financial crisis.

It is true that comparing the records of a com...

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has been building organizations and developing leadership among low and moderate income residents in neighborhoods throughout the United States for thirty-five years. During that time, ACORN chapters have worked individually and collectively to organize innovative grassroots campaigns on a number of critical issues. While these victories have been documented in various publications, they have rarely been quantified in a way that demonstrates the scale of wealth redistribution ACORN has achieved. Whether getting more cops on the street, putting more money into the pockets of workers, or reducing crippling debt for homeowners, ACORN has and continues to redirect resources from public and private institutions to families and co...

In the first effort of its kind, the new report from ACORN analyzes the attorneys general of all 50 states and Washington, D.C., collects examples of the work that all 51 attorneys general have done and highlights and recommends the best practices and cutting-edge strategies they have employed. The report also compares their efforts and willingness to engage in solving this crisis and preventing the next one with those of their colleagues around the nation.

The foreclosure crisis sweeping across America is as tragic as it was entirely avoidable – strong anti-predatory lending protections would have prevented the worst abuses that led to loans that were simply unaffordable for millions of homeowners. Now the question facing policy makers is what to do to stem theforeclosure crisis, prevent homelessness, stabilize the economy, and save the American Dream for millions of families.

This report discusses policy options both large and small that many states will consider this year and next. With the Option ARM crisis threatening to supplant the subprime crisis as a leading cause of foreclosures, this problem shows no signs of abating. Policymakers will be rewarded who look forward and seek to stem the problem before it gets even worse.

>> Read th...

>> READ THE FULL REPORT

New York ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a grassroots community organization representing over 30,000 families.  NY ACORN members work together to fight for justice in their communities and citywide with neighborhood, tenant, and parent groups in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Upper Manhattan, and Queens neighborhoods.

One of the primary foci of New York ACORN is to create and preserve affordable housing in New York City.  The lack of affordable housing in New York City currently forces 25% of residents to pay over half of their household income toward rent.  Affordable housing is defined as housing that costs a resident 30% of his or her household income.

The Housing Choice Voucher Program, or Section 8, assists low...