With millions of homes scheduled for foreclosure and no apparent solution to the credit crisis on the horizon, ACORN, a national coalition of community organizations, has launched a campaign to help homeowners and renters stay in their homes and to demand a a comprehensive policy that helps homeowners renegotiate the terms of their mortgage and ease repayment.
In a recent blog at , ACORN organizer Bertha Lewis wrote that 2.3 million families lost their homes in 2008, the most in a single year since the Great Depression. Experts estimate that, without significant intervention, as many as 9 million more homes will be foreclosed on in the next four years. Economic recovery, Lewis stated, should be linked to a housing policy that stops this process.
The housing crisis hasn't just impacted homeowners, however. Renters have also been subjected to eviction when their landlord cannot repay the mortgage on the rented property. ACORN has begun to organize people in local communities to help families keep their homes in a national campaign called Home Defenders. Lewis cited the example of how in Oakland, California earlier this month several dozen people gathered to help the Daniels family stay in the home they are renting. (Despite the inability to pay the mortgage, the landlord continued to take the family's rent check).
The local sheriff showed up with an eviction order, but the people helped block the eviction. ACORN organizers mobilized the media and public opinion against the sheriff's eviction order. ACORN lawyers worked with government agencies to negotiate a stay on the eviction, and the family was able to stay in the home.
In a press statement, ACORN President Maude Hurd said, 'ACORN believes that hundreds of thousands of families across the country just like the Daniels, innocent renters and predatory lending victims who are losing their homes at a record pace, can fight back by getting organized and defending their homes through old-fashioned community organizing. This system is broken and it's time we throw a wrench in it.'
The demand to end evictions and foreclosures received a huge boost when Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) recently told families facing foreclosure to stay in their homes. 'Stay in your homes. If the American people, anybody out there is being foreclosed, don’t leave,' she said on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The various schemes and business practices that led to the housing crisis have created such a mess, Kaptur pointed out, that many mortgages are not owned by a single entity. Often the owner of a mortgage cannot be found easily. The legal process for determining who owns a loan may be lengthy enough for a family facing foreclosure to stay until a settlement can be reached.
The Obama administration this week announced its first steps to help homeowners renegotiate mortgage terms, committing $50 billion to the process. To be most effective for working families, ACORN believes, this program should focus on three key things: deep interest rate reductions, term extensions, and principal write-downs to current home values, not just principal forbearance. (The collapse of the housing market has created a situation in which homeowners find themselves paying on a mortgage far higher than what their home is now actually worth.)
On top of this, a three-month moratorium on foreclosures, a demand President Obama raised during his campaign, should give families time to start the process of renegotiation.
To get help through ACORN's Home defenders program, families facing foreclosure should call ACORN for help at 1-866-67-ACORN or visit www.acorn.org.
