How ACORN Helped Save New Orleans for Katrina Survivors

[deminks]

A week after Katrina hit New Orleans, Federal Government officials and private relief organizations were still discussing how to send aid to the area. ACORN, which had been organizing low-income and working class residents in the city since the 1978, had already moved into action.

Banks were giving their middle-class, mostly white customers ninety days or more to make their payments, but borrowers who had subprime, high-interest loans (like many black homeowners in the Lower Ninth Ward) were given only one month. Three weeks after the storm devastated the city, ACORN released a report -"How the sub prime mortgage industry is sandbagging Katrina-affected homeowners"- to expose the industry's double standard. After the media publicized the report, ACORN--along with labor unions and consumer groups--demanded meetings with the banks and sub prime lenders and successfully negotiated plans to prevent foreclosures for dozens of homeowners.

With vast parts of the city's low-income neighborhoods devastated, evacuees, many with just the clothes on their backs, fled to 44 different states, but had no way to know the physical and financial condition of their homes and neighborhoods. Glued to the television news, as well as Google maps, cell phones, and newspapers, they tried to discover how much water had flooded their bedrooms and when they could return.

ACORN's New Orleans office was in disarray, but with chapters in 100 cities across the country, its member's homes in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Little Rock, Atlanta, Birmingham, and as far away as Seattle, Vancouver, and New York became refuges for the Katrina diaspora.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-atlas/how-acorn-helped-save-new_b_699586.html

I am speechless for the moment.

[applegrove]

1. I'm not surprised they then were targetted by the GOP. GOP activists

hate anything that works to help people. They hate empathy.

[G_j]

2. one can't help but think

they really hate NOLA also.

[Hannah Bell]

3. why isn't acorn suing those bastards for damages, & why, after the whole taping thing is proven

fraudulent, why isn't congress reinstating acorn's funding?

[upi402]

4. ACORN was Christlike. Unlike the pompous ape Beck

Who gorges his ego and scoops in cash from suckers - and CLAIMS to hear god talking. What a psycho.

[malaise]

5. K &R

for visibility