Senate Bashes ACORN

Until now the cowering in fear to the radical right was mainly a province of the White House. Never one to be left out, Senate Democrats got into the act yesterday by blocking HUD grants to ACORN.

The Senate voted Monday to block the Housing and Urban Development Department from giving grants to ACORN, a community organization under fire in voter-registration fraud cases.

If the House agrees with the Senate, ACORN could not win HUD grants for programs such as counseling low-income people on how to get mortgages.

Last week, the Census Bureau severed ties with ACORN, saying it does not want the group's help with the 2010 count. The group, which advocates for poor people, conducted a voter registration effort last year and became a target of conservatives when some workers were accused of submitting false registration forms with names including Mickey Mouse.

And of course, Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 thanks to 50 million big-eared human-sized mice coming to the polls and voting, right?

I thought we would want low-income Americans to have counseling on housing, but I guess if we take the community organizations out of it and let them get ripped off by predatory lenders, all the better.

More than that, this is just a pander to Glenn Beck and Fox News' whipping up of unfounded hysteria against ACORN, which they blame for everything from socialism in America to the death of Patrick Swayze. ACORN gets their own independent funding in large part, so this won't really impact them, but it's disappointing to see Democrats, in large numbers (final vote was 83-7) crapping on organizations that radical rightist forces unilaterally determine to be evil.

Meanwhile, ACORN may sure Fox News over the doctored videos they keep airing. Tell me where to send the amicus brief.

...It does go without saying that bipartisan elites in Washington fall all over themselves to distance from ACORN, but a company like Blackwater can murder dozens of civilians in Iraq and still get lucrative government contracts.

The Urban Team

I have a very good friend named Sean Donovan (not spelled the same as new incoming HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan but a sound-alike), so it's been enough of a tickle seeing Barack Obama saying things like "Shaun Donovan will bring fresh thinking unencumbered by old ideology and outdated ideas." that I haven't really looked into Donovan's policies. Call it a personal failing. But Donovan, the former New York City housing commissioner, looks like a good choice. New York over the past decade has been a place with lots of money and the wherewithal to experiment, and Donovan has gotten results.

Obama praised Donovan's record at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, where he managed a $7.5 billion plan that put a half million New Yorkers in affordable housing. The Harvard-educated architect also kept foreclosures away from New York's low- and moderate-income home ownership plan, with just five foreclosures out of 17,000 participating homes.

What's more, Donovan foresaw the housing crisis and made preventing foreclosures a top priority of his department.

In the middle of 2004, I sat down with Donovan (I was at Newsday at the time) for a chat about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's initiative to tackle the shortage of low- and middle-income housing in the city.

To my surprise, Donovan brushed aside my questions about the city's initiatives and began talking at length about the coming "flood" of foreclosures he anticipated among highly leveraged apartment buildings purchased by recent immigrants -- and a looming subprime crisis for one- and two-family homeowners in up-and-coming neighborhoods in southeast Queens and central Brooklyn.

I left the meeting a little shaken: At the time housing prices in previously depressed parts of the city were booming and the city had been able to sell off almost of all its once-massive stock of foreclosed properties to private owners and investors. The future looked bright to almost everyone -- but not to Donovan, who was planning for the looming disaster.

Maybe this is someone who understands that homeownership is not a virtue on its own, without the necessary safeguards to sustain it.

Meanwhile, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion will head up a new Department of Urban Affairs. I'm not sure why that couldn't have been incorporated as a division under HUD, but the fact that Donovan and Carrion probably worked together on a multitide of issues means that they may be able to manage any turf wars. Urban policy is going to be crucially important over the next term - urban areas will be the recipient of lots of infrastructure spending, and the recession will impact urban areas in a pronounced fashion. I would like to see resources put toward creating more walkable and livable cities, with smart growth, green jobs and lots of transit. There are a lot of good ideas for urban policy here. In this case, having a President who spent most of his collegiate and post-college days living in urban environments and working on these issues is undeniably an asset.

...incidentally, the Sean Donovan I know has a very cool art blog focused on exhibits in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Not a cabinet-level post, mind you, but worth a read.

Leaving To Spend More Time With His Lawyers

It's a good thing that we're not in the midst of a housing crisis that's threatening to swamp the economy, and thus we have no real need for the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson resigned Monday, amid multiple ethics investigations and criticism from top lawmakers.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson speaks at a news conference in December.

Jackson said he will step down on April 18. He did not mention the allegations in his brief statement Monday, saying only that he wanted to attend to personal and family matters.

The resignation came after criticism from members of Congress that Jackson has refused to respond adequately to allegations of impropriety.

Some Republican tried to tell me a few weeks back that there is no indication of corruption in the Bush White House, just incompetence. Alphonso Jackson, under grand jury investigation for giving contracts to political cronies, is Exhibit A against such a view. In addition, he punished the housing director in Philadelphia when he didn't deliver contracts to Jackson's buddies.

I just can't imagine why we're in such a crisis when we have a HUD director almost singularly concerned with profit-taking for him and his friends.