By Jon Hurdle
Reuters

With the U.S. financial system in crisis due to surging mortgage defaults, a Philadelphia program designed to reduce foreclosure sales may provide a national model to keep people in their homes.

The program, based not on bailouts but reconciliation between borrowers and lenders, has been able to prevent at least temporarily the disposal of many of the properties in its purview.

The first such city-sponsored plan in the United States, it has also saved banks money because it is cheaper to renegotiate than foreclose.
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Lisa Donner, the Executive Director of Half in Ten, contributes to Politico’s “Dear 44: Ideas for the Next President” series:

What should the 44th president do about poverty in our great nation? He should make cutting poverty a clear goal of his administration and prioritize a set of initiatives that will make the most significant contributions to meeting it. We can — and should — cut poverty in half in the next 10 years.
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Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) addressed the closing vigil of Fighting Poverty with Faith: a Week of Action, urging a renewed commitment to fight poverty:

“The faith community has always played the critical role of being the nation’s moral compass on tending to the least of these. It is important and timely that we gather here during this historic moment in our history, to once again focus the nation’s attention on the quiet suffering of the millions of American families who live in poverty.

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Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) has introduced the Measuring American Poverty Act of 2008 (H.R. 6941), which would update the federal government’s standard for calculating poverty. Read more »

On August 26, the Census Bureau released new data on poverty and health insurance coverage for 2007. The statistics show that, despite economic growth over the past few years, the number of Americans living in poverty was greater in 2007 than in the recession year of 2001.
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For years, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has called for regulatory measures to stanch the increasing problem of subprime lending and the resulting foreclosure crisis. Read more about their efforts across the nation.
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On July 23 in Houston, over a hundred people joined former Senator John Edwards and local elected officials for an ACORN-sponsored round-table discussion and press conference focusing on the mortgage and foreclosure crisis and what can be done to help Texas families. Texas has been plagued by extremely high foreclosure rates – with over 50,000 new foreclosure filings this year. ACORN has offered a number of proposals to help staunch the mortgage crisis, including better regulation of mortgage brokers, slowing down the foreclosure process, and increased mediation and counseling prior to the purchase of a home. The event combined policy ideas such as these with personal testimonials, emphasizing the broad impact of foreclosures and the need to take action now.

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Dozens of grassroots community organizations gathered at the Hartford Boys and Girls Club, along with Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, and a number of state legislators. Over 120 people attended a roundtable discussion and press conference in support of an increase in the Connecticut minimum wage – recently raised by the state legislature, which overrode Governor Jodi Rell’s veto. Later in the day in Bridgeport, over 250 residents and local elected officials took part in an event at the site of a new residential development, highlighting the need for more affordable housing in the area. Speaking to reporters, Marilyn Ondrasik, the executive director of the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition, said that, “Addressing poverty needs to start right here, right now.”

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Minimum wage activists joined together on July 11 in Newark to help launch New Jersey’s Raise the Wage campaign. The state’s Minimum Wage Advisory Commission led by Governor Jon Corzine’s labor commissioner has called for substantially increasing New Jersey’s minimum wage and adjusting each year based on the cost of living so that it does not fall in value again. The Raise the Wage coalition, led by the National Employment Law Project and New Jersey Policy Perspective and made up of over 20 advocacy groups, community organizations, and workers groups, echoed the Advisory Commission’s recommendations. It is calling for increasing New Jersey’s minimum wage to at least $8.50 per hour and adjusting it each year so that it keeps up with the rapidly rising cost of food, gas and necessities.

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The New York City Coalition Against Hunger, World Hunger Year, the Food Bank for New York City, and City Council member Bill de Blasio joined Half in Ten at the Yorkville Common Pantry in Harlem on July 9. The Yorkville Common Pantry is one of the 1,200 food pantries and soup kitchens in the City that serve 1.3 million New Yorkers each year. Joel Berg, the Executive Director of the NYCCAH, told the Epoch Times, “Poverty in the U.S. and New York are unacceptable…In a society with as much wealth as modern America, hunger should be doubly unacceptable. Read more »