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September 19, 2009
Tough week for ACORN
The Sports ITeam Blog (Daily News)
We now know that there are no guarantees when or if affordable housing in the proposed Atlantic Yards project will be built. This certainly doesn't bother Forest City Ratner or its paid-for ally, ACORN.
It’s been a tough week for ACORN and its chief executive Bertha Lewis: Conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe (no relation to I-Team member Michael O’Keeffe), released secretly recorded videos that apparently show ACORN employees in Brooklyn, Baltimore and Washington advising them on how to evade taxes and buy a house to use as a brothel.
To the right-wing crusaders have long accused ACORN of voter-registration fraud and other sins, the videos were proof that the community-organizing group is a pit of corruption. Washington officials moved quickly to cut ties to the organization. The House of Representatives voted to deny federal money to the community organizing group (ACORN’s critics claimed has received an estimated $53 million in federal aid since 1994). The Senate voted to deny ACORN housing and transportation funds. The Census Bureau, which had planned on using ACORN to conduct the 2010 census, cut ties with the group.
But one longtime ally -- Nets owner Bruce Ratner -- will continue to stand with the bruised and battered organization. Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco said ACORN has been a forceful advocate for civil rights and working families, and the company isn’t about to abandon its friend simply because of criticism from Fox News.
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“We like working with ACORN,” a Forest City Ratner executive told the Brooklyn Paper in 2005. “They have that radical feeling, they really fight for what they believe in. We just love their history, how they started, and feel it really represents what we're working to do here.”
The final version of a state plan for the project weakened guarantees that promised affordable housing would get necessary funding, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Law by Atlantic Yards Report blogger Norman Oder suggest. A draft of the plan said state and city subsidies would be available to fund affordable-house units, but that language was deleted in later drafts. The current plan says the affordable housing is "expected" to be paid for with tax-exempt bonds from city and state housing programs.
ACORN has not protested; Atlantic Yards critics say that may be because the organization, which had been rocked by an embezzlement scandal, received a $1 million low-interest loan and a $500,000 grant from Forest City Ratner last year.
“We’d argue that ACORN has actually sold out its core constituency as there is likely to be very little ‘affordable’ housing if Atlantic Yards is ever built,” Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Atlantic Yards’ main opposition group, wrote on its Web site this summer, “and what ‘affordable’ housing there may be will nearly all be UNaffordable to those ACORN claims to represent.”
Posted by steve at September 19, 2009 10:40 AM