ACORN Housing Boom

I have an article in the American Spectator today on the latest activities by the con artists who run ACORN.

The piece begins:

As ACORN gears up to use your tax dollars to influence future elections, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is conducting a “massive” probe of ACORN Housing Corp., a source familiar with the ongoing investigation says.

A spokesman for HUD’s inspector general refused to confirm or deny whether ACORN Housing was being investigated.

ACORN Housing is essential to ACORN’s member recruitment program. The housing affiliate strongly encourages its clients to pay ACORN $120 a year to be part of the class struggle. Many of the ACORN employees Americans saw on the undercover prostitution sting videos last fall are actually ACORN Housing employees. ACORN Housing’s website boasts that from 1986 to 2008 it counseled 338,025 clients, and originated 104,867 mortgages worth $15.5 billion.

The HUD probe comes as ACORN Housing, the best-funded of ACORN’s affiliates, participates in the ACORN network-wide rebranding aimed at duping funders and the public and allowing ACORN to continue to devour government grants.

Although ACORN is now converting state chapters into new shell corporations operated out of the same old ACORN offices and staffed by many of the same people, ACORN Housing opted simply to change its name.

ACORN’s latest public relations ruse may give it an opportunity to take in untold millions of taxpayer dollars under cover of darkness just in time to cause trouble during the 2012 election cycle.

The ruse consists of ACORN’s effort to pass off various state chapters as “new” groups supposedly independent of ACORN. In this rebranding charade state chapters are pretending to break away from the national ACORN group and reincorporate themselves as independent organizations.

But ACORN Housing is rebranding itself a little differently. In a marketing-savvy move, ACORN Housing has been rechristened Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc., which allows the entity to continue using AHC as an acronym.

ACORN Housing is a key component of the far-flung ACORN empire of activism which has long used its housing affiliate as a piggy bank — so it’s too important to be allowed to collapse.