Bertha Lewis, national president of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), issued a news release yesterday repeating a claim she has previously made that “every 13 seconds another American family loses its home.”
Curious about how that figure was calculated, I called the contact person on the release, Austin King, director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center. “Oh, we got that figure from the Center for Responsible Lending,” he said. “We have been using that figure for about five months now.”
When asked if he had double-checked the accuracy of the figure, King said “we’ve ball-parked it, but I didn’t do the numbers. They maybe [CRL] did some different benchmarks.”
So, I pointed out to King that if a home is lost every 13 seconds, there would have to be at least 2.42 million homes lost in a year. But, according to Business Week, only about one million homes were lost in 2008.
“Well, we’re talking about the legal loss of your home, which varies from one state to another. There were about 2.3 million foreclosures started last year,” King said. He said he didn’t know how many of those foreclosures were completed or how many did not result in a family losing its home.
“Maybe we should be more careful and have Bertha say ‘every 13 seconds a family is foreclosed,” he said.
Sure enough, a visit to the CRL web site and a site search for “every 13 seconds” quickly turned up a study headline proclaiming “a new foreclosure every 13 seconds.” And the study obviously is focused on the number of foreclosures that are initiated, which is not exactly the same thing as ACORN is claiming.
So, it appears that ACORN has taken CRL’s calculation that every 13 seconds a foreclosure is started, and turned it into “every 13 seconds an American family loses its home.” In politics, they call this “spin.” In Sunday School, they call it “lying.”
It’s only a slght difference in wording but it’s one that makes a hugely different impression on uncritical or casual hearers, demonstrating yet again that with ACORN you can never be sure that things are exactly as the group claims.
I’ve emailed CRL’s spokesmen for the 13 second study, asking: “Do you have a figure for what percent of all initiated foreclosures are completed with the result that an owner loses the property? Also, do you know how many of the projected 2.4 million foreclosures this year will be on properties that are first homes, how many are second homes and how many are business properties?”
I’ll update this post as soon as I receive a response from CRL.
UPDATE: Most foreclosures are owner-occupied
Kathleen Day, a spokesman for CRL and former long-time Washington Post financial reporter, actually returned my email last night, but I only this morning was able to get back to her. As I suspected, there is little data available to indicate the breakdown of foreclosures by completion rate.
But 90 percent of the foreclosures, as measured using Mortgage Bankers Association data, are of properties that are owner-occupied. So, I’m confident it can accurately be said that ACORN is mis-stating the situation. Let’s hope the suggestion from ACORN’s King that Lewis should be more precise in her use of the 13 percent figure will be taken seriously by the organization’s leadership.
