October 2008
Too Young to Vote, But Not Too Young to Engage
The Obama campaign headquarters were bustling five days before the election and two high school journalism students I brought there to report for their school paper were enthralled. They came from Little Village Lawndale High School in a mostly immigrant…
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DOJ Passes on Ohio
Well, not so fast. After a report in The Washington Post last weekend indicated that the White House had requested that the Justice Department look into 200,000 names on the voter rolls that were in question, the DOJ has reportedly…
It’s The Great Election, Charlie Brown
Halloween approaches and, as always, we’re found waiting for the Great Pumpkin, er, Election. Immediately following the broadcast Tuesday of the Peanuts classic that tells the story of the mythical Great Pumpkin that Linus van Pelt waits for year after…
Rationale for Obama’s Tax Policy
On the campaign trail, Barack Obama was asked a question about his increasing taxes for those making more than a quarter million a year. In his impromptu exchange with the now famous “Joe the Plumber,” Obama used the phrase: “when…
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Doesn’t Voter Fraud Require Actual Voting?
John McCain’s peculiar, over-the-top attacks on ACORN were initially a little hard to take seriously. Even when he kept on, it just left us asking, “Where is he going with this?” But when McCain slurred the grass-roots group during the…
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Uncage the Voters!
Here at Rooflines, we’ve been tracking recent reports from key swing states uncovering a coordinated GOP election strategy for suppressing votes of foreclosure victims. ACORN yesterday released a report that examines the facts and potential impact these challenges can have…
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Renters Still Facing Foreclosure Evictions; Help Arrives, But Is It Enough?
Last week, I wrote about Cook County (Chicago) sheriff Tom Dart angrily suspending evictions of renters from foreclosed buildings; since many of these renters were dutifully paying their rent and may have had no idea and no warning that the building was in foreclosure. Now, Dart’s department has resumed evictions, but with increased safeguards making sure renters have 120 days notice to find a new apartment. Before banks had to give renters at least 90 days notice, but this often didn’t happen. Now they are required to prove they have made contact with tenants. Meanwhile grassroots housing groups in Chicago and other major cities continue to struggle to show the impact of the foreclosure crisis on low income renters. It was actually a scrappy neighborhood group which brought the issue to Dart’s attention — the Albany Park Neighborhood Council. The Metropolitan Tenants Organization also convened a Congress of Tenants in September and has been working to keep the issue in the public eye and make sure renters know their rights. more
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Frayed Democratic Fabric? Try Tissue of Lies
In his post today on Rooflines, my colleague Matthew Hersh lays out the “What If” scenarios aswirl in the zeitgeist in the weeks leading up to the election. With the memories of the 2000 and 2004 elections still painfully fresh…
The “What If” Scenario
At the third and final presidential debate, when John McCain proclaimed that, Acorn, the darling target of conservative advocacy groups like FOXNews, could have committed voter registration fraud, he said the group “may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds…
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Lions and Lambs or Vultures: Who’ll Prevail?
The House Financial Services Committee met this morning to begin, ever so tentatively, to redraw the regulatory landscape for the financial services industry in the wake of the nation’s economic earthquake. The question is, has the Washington status quo that…
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Trash: Pick It Up
Though questions about how we’re going to buy stuff in post-credit America may dominate the news, some interesting stories about what we’re going to do with that stuff once we’re done with it have percolated up, too: Fight the power?…
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Transient America
This morning I read about the dismay of residents of a New York City neighborhood who have watched as people who owned homes on their block have suddenly disappeared. Foreclosure signs have popped up on lawns up and down the…
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Chicago Sheriff Stands up for Renters
Losing a home to foreclosure is a nightmare, causing at least one person — Carlene Balderrama of Massachusetts — to commit suicide in recent months. Seeing all the money, work, love, care and dreams put into a home seized out from under you is a frightening and heartbreaking experience, to say the least. But an under-reported part of the whole foreclosure crisis — ongoing for months and likely to get even worse with the recent economic crash — is the eviction of renters often with little or no advance notice. When a building is foreclosed upon the owner has several months’ notice, but renters usually have no idea about the owner’s financial status. So when sheriffs are sent to evict people from a foreclosed building, it may be the first the actual residents have heard of it. Most states have laws mandating advance notice to renters, but these laws commonly are not adequately enforced. This means countless scenes of life-shattering chaos, with families thinking they are starting another regular day and ending up with their belongings on the street and nowhere to go. more
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Keeping Hope (And Housing) Alive in LA
Wall Street is in meltdown. Banks are collapsing. Developers can’t get loans to build homes. Housing values are plummeting. Millions of Americans are facing foreclosure. But in Los Angeles late last month, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, speaking at a crowded union…
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In the Nation’s Service
When I was a newspaper reporter in New Jersey, one of my beats was Princeton University, and I’m always reminded of what is always referred to as the school’s “unofficial motto”: “In the Nation’s Service and in the Service of…
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Affordable Housing and the Financial Crisis
It’s been interesting to watch the conservative conga line blame the affordable housing expansion effort for the country’s current financial crisis. But, as writers on Rooflines displayed when community organizing fell under attack at the Republican National Convention, what’s equally…
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Not Your Clinton’s Foreclosure Holiday
First the gas tax holiday, then the Columbus Day holiday, now again with the foreclosure holiday. Everyone should be wary of “holidays” in taxation or government function largely because it (if not directly) gives the perception of putting off a…
Smart, Sustainable Development Can Aid Economic Recovery
Whatever Wall Street does next, we’re going to have to find more efficiencies in our economy. Consumers are going to have less to spend on things like housing, utilities, and transportation; developers are going to have less to invest; local…
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McCain Hearts ACORN
Just picked this up from the Jed Report: more
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Restructuring in the works for some CDCs
What do you do when your CDC can’t afford to buy pencils or print business cards, and certainly can’t buy land or buildings? You consider a major change in the way your CDC functions, is what. An idea is developing…
National Housing Institute
