People probably know that ACORN registered people to vote, but that’s about all they know about the former community organization. Registering voters was never more than a sideline. They actually contracted the whole thing out to PROJECT VOTE. The main thing ACORN did was fight back against this. When you walked into an ACORN office, the people at the desks manning the phones and meeting with people were spending 95% of their time trying to help people avoid losing their homes or advising them how to navigate all the predators in the housing market. What’s been going on in Washington DC is only a particularly nasty form of something that was rampant in the 2000’s.
Buying liens is a really awful practice, particularly when it is coupled with an intent to pile legal costs on the homeowner to the point that they just have to hand over their house to you rather than just the tax money they owed to the government.
How does that work?
In some municipalities, you can buy ownership of unpaid debt (property taxes) and then receive whatever interest accrues. However, if the homeowner doesn’t pay the debt off in a timely manner, you can start charging them for any legal fees you rack up trying to get the debt repaid. And, then, when the homeowner has too much debt to ever pay you back, you can foreclose on their home. People have lost their homes this way when they initially owed less than two hundred dollars.
You’d be amazed what is legal in this country. ACORN fought on this battlefield. But they got smooshed like a bug.
