This is a bit of a no big deal victory, but the St Louis Federal Reserve has quietly dropped ACORN Housing from their list of foreclosure and homebuying resources.
While looking for ACORN housing in St Louis, the only references that came up besides the recently shut-down office were links from the St Louis Federal Reserve, who listed ACORN Housing as a contact for getting help on Learn Before You Leap, and Foreclosure Survival Guide, two pdf's on their consumer information page. Notice both documents now have a 09/09 date on the bottom right.
I called into the Federal Reserve on September 18 and left a message with an editor, asking for information on ACORN Housing and how they were affiliated with the St Louis Federal Reserve. My call was not returned, but when I came in to check on this afternoon, the online resources had been altered. There seems to be a lot of that going around. The two pdf's I just linked no longer have ACORN Housing on that list. Here's a screenshot of the September 18th document. Check out the bottom right. This is the 5/08 version.
Now, ACORN Housing hasn't been live in St Louis for a few months. No one yet has been able to help me understand where they went, or where the $100,000 Mayor Slay gave them went, or why they shut down, or how exactly Glenn Burleigh's ACORN branch has offices at the same location as ACORN Housing or why he still maintains his ACORN staff was helping people with foreclosure and homebuying.
In other parts of the country, like Baltimore, ACORN passes referrals to ACORN Housing to handle. According to the lawsuit filed against Andrew Breitbart, Hannah Giles, and James O'Keefe, "As one of its activities, ACORN does initial intake for people with home ownership and mortgage problems and refers qualified applicants to ACORN Housing, Inc, which helps homeowners in need of mortgage assistance."
How does Missouri ACORN do it? If there is no ACORN Housing left in St Louis, who do they refer homeowners to? Are the ACORN reps trained in mortgage documents? If they are, then what is the difference between ACORN and ACORN Housing? And what happened to that $100,000? And is there anyone in the St Louis area who can say ACORN has helped them, and not made their foreclosure more difficult?
Does Missouri ACORN actually help the poor, or are they simply another front to use the poor to gather political power? Where exactly is the proof that ACORN Missouri has ever helped anyone?
Those are separate questions I'm astounded to see no newspapers tackling, but we can say that at one point, ACORN Housing was considered legitimate enough to link to. When did that end? And for what reason was this entry scrubbed from the official site? Did they pull it because of my phonecall, or was it because they were disassociating the bank from ACORN Housing?
And can we expect that the general public will have to do the work of digging up these relationships, or can we expect companies and government entities to take care of it on their own?
And most important. Most important. What happened to the $100,000 Mayor Slay gave ACORN? Who was in charge of that money, where did it go, and who did the accounting? ACORN Housing charged $750 per person to review mortgage documents. If ACORN Housing received that money up front for loan modifications, were they successful? Did they help 130 people? Mayor Slay was on a phone call in June with Bertha Lewis talking about how great ACORN was. Can we get a little accountability here?
And while we're at it.
Dear Bank of America:
You still have ACORN Housing listed. ACORN claims there is no ACORN Housing in St Louis. Think it might be time to change that?
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