Help keep families in their homes!

Together with Shannon, Change.org's homelessness blogger, I will be bringing you regular updates and coverage of a terrific new anti-foreclosure action program by ACORN.   I encourage you to join ACORN today as a Home Defender,a member of a team

"prepared to mobilize on short notice to peacefully help defend a family's right to stay in their homes until a fair solution to the crisis is put into place by the new Administration.  We are recruiting allies and elected officials to support our efforts and call for a full and comprehensive solution to this crisis."

The Home Defender initiative is part of ACORN's decade-long anti-foreclosure campaign, which fights to stop and curb the impacts of predatory lending in low-income, often minority communities.  Predatory lending is a form of subprime lending that offers deliberately opaque, usurious loans targeted towards borrowers likelier to be less informed and/or lack access to traditional sources of credit - the elderly are a frequent target.  Subprime and predatory loans are disproportionately found in low-income, non-white urban communities, places that are frequently also underserved by banks, grocery stores, a diverse commercial sector, and other taken-for-granted amenities and services that shore up neighborhoods' socioeconomic base.  Now foreclosures are eviscerating many of these communities.

Shannon has some great stats on the foreclosure crisis nationwide.  I've written here about other assertive anti-foreclosure efforts to stop people from losing their homes and to stop homes from sitting empty.  Please join ACORN, one of the largest community organizing agencies in the U.S., in this important move to halt the fallout from the housing crisis.

And keep checking back with us for more on ACORN, anti-poverty and affordable housing activism.