Irv Ackelsberg is an attorney with Community Legal Services, where he managers the neighborhood office in North Philadelphia and heads the Consumer work of the organization. Irv is an expert in the predatory lending crisis, including the nature of the problem, legal strategies to save homes from the effects of these loans, and the various community responses that have emerged around the country to try to combat what he describes as “the housing equivalent of the AIDS crisis.”

Using the public health analogy, Irv believes that we need both to assist those who have already been “infected” by the predatory lending epidemic and to try to inoculate potential victims as best as we can.