U.S. anti-poverty group recruits Ottawa social housing supporters

from the CBC

Hundreds of Ottawa's social housing tenants have been joining a U.S.-based anti-poverty activist group, and their eye-catching protests have led at least one housing official to criticize the group's approach.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) hung work orders for unfinished repairs to public housing from clotheslines at city hall Friday as part of its latest action.

Erin Albright, a social housing tenant and one of 400 Ottawa residents who pay $10 per month for full membership with the group, said she collected 45 work orders after talking to only six Ottawa Community Housing tenants.

"That shows you the state Ottawa Housing is in," she said. "I'm not done collecting work orders, and I'll keep going."

The event follows on the heels of the "cockroach carnival" the group held last week to protest infestations in Ottawa Community Housing buildings, using cockroaches collected by tenants.

Ottawa Community Housing head Ron Larkin calls the group's approach too confrontational.

"If they want to help, and I believe they do, then it's a matter of refocusing that group," he said, adding that he and Ottawa Community Housing chair, Coun. Diane Holmes, want to meet with the organizers.

Acorn was started by labour organizer Wade Rathke and a group of women on welfare in Little Rock, Ark., in 1970 with the goal of winning power for low- and moderate-income people.

The first three full-time Acorn organizers arrived in Ottawa in January 2006.

Since then, it says it has recruited 2,700 members and affiliates in Ottawa and led a number of campaigns, including the two recent protests and another that convinced the Prestige Hotel in the Vanier neighbourhood to stop renting rooms by the hour in an effort to reduce prostitution and crack use nearby.

Albright said the group's success stems from getting people involved who live with the problems.

"Acorn is acting more often and more frequently and hitting the politicians and embarrassing them in ways that other groups weren't willing or perhaps able to do," she said.

Sometimes confrontation is what's needed, she added, and she does not plan to stop using that approach.