WADE RATHKE is the founder of ACORN, Chief Organizer at ACORN International, and Author of "Nuts & Bolts", "Citizen Wealth", "Global Grassroots", and "The Battle for the 9th Ward".
New Orleans Home ownership rates are declining globally for the first time in one-hundred years, while tenancy is rising. I have mixed feelings about these trends. On the one hand, I hope that greater numbers of tenants equals more power in the bargains with landlords, and look to Germany and the rent freezes in …
New Orleans When I first read an email about Washington University’s law Professor Gerrit De Geest’s book, Rents: How Marketing Causes Inequality, I thought, right on! Soaring rents for tenants are absolutely driving inequality in city after city. Actually, looking at the book was different, but perhaps more important. When De Geest is talking …
Little Rock One somewhat nagging problem the ACORN Home Savers Campaign has confronted over the last several years, especially when we looked at the frequency of “contracts-for-deed” was the lack of definitive data. Sure, we knew in Detroit that more contracts-for-deed were being registered under real estate transfers in recent years than were any form …
Little Rock Cause and effect. Truth and consequences. What goes around, comes around. Pick your favorite, but it was virtually inevitable that when you have a residential housing bubble explode, a recession, massive foreclosures, wipe out 30-years of home ownership gains among African-Americans and Latinos, and tighten credit markets and standards for low-and-moderate income families, …
New Orleans Increasingly it seems that we are going to have to decouple the issue of home ownership and affordable housing at least in the traditional sense of small footprints in the dirt with picket fences around them. Home ownership due to harder loan standards, tighter credit, and the Great Recession has now fallen to …