As part of its strategy to build membership from the ground up, ACORN often first focuses on very local, neighborhood issues. ACORN correctly recognizes that if people can successfully organize for change in their own neighborhood, they will be more willing to organize for greater change in the overall community. A manual it provides its organizers suggests focusing on items like speed bumps, street lighting and vacant lots, as examples.
The manual provides a bit of background on the issue, some suggested actions and, helpfully, identifies “targets” for these actions.
Basic Issue Development for Organizers –
We draw your attention to two interesting sections. The first is on speed bumps:
If you’re tired of beating up on the City for speedbumps, and the City allows people to pay directly for speedbumps, you can do an ACORN safe streets pledge campaign targeting local businesses, and get each of them to sponsor a speedbump. Targetting autodealers would make a lot of sense here. This gives you a private-sector target. You could also do a campaign to set up a special taxing district to tax local businesses (or downtown businesses, maybe, this may be legally harder) to pay for traffic calming. (emphasis added)
The second deals with the issue of vacant lots:
This would be a massive neighborhood level campaign, but feasible where we’d built something. The strategy would be to force the City to make a plan to turn the vacant land it owns, or where taxes are delinquent, into an opportunity for decent housing affordable to our members. We demand the City pool the land, and go after a developer to agree to develop it at an affordable level. To add a smart growth twist to this, we could go after a big sprawl developer with deep pockets and demand some development in our neighborhoods as payback. The developers will argue they need subsidies to make it all work out affordably, which may be true. Call AHC…(emphasis added)
Again, this is an ACORN manual suggesting what is very close to a “shakedown” of private businesses. We’re stunned that the word “payback” is actually used in this document.
We assume “AHC” is “ACORN Housing Corporation,” the ACORN affiliate that receives considerable taxpayer support.
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