Free Republic

Fast Company reports on a Chicago company that is betting big on modular apartment construction. Just beyond the snowy streets and neatly packed three-flats of Chicago’s southwest side, the factory at 3348 South Pulaski appears like a low gray monolith, spanning nearly 10 normal blocks and serving as a boundary between the residential neighborhood and the city’s industrial freight hub. Inside, the Chicago general contractor Skender is setting up what amounts to an apartment factory: An assembly line that will crank into gear in the spring, producing standardized apartment units ready to be bolted into a steel-framed stack on a...

White woman who confronted her black neighbor at St. Louis condo building defends herself against accusations of racism and says she was just concerned for her safety Hilary Brooke Thornton, 32, was filmed blocking D'Arreion Toles, 24, from entering the St. Louis loft building where they live Thornton was fired from her job as a luxury realtor after the footage went viral Toles said he was coming home from work on Friday night when the confrontation took place Thornton, who was holding her dog on a leash, demanded to know what apartment he lived in She has since denied that...

SEOUL, Jun. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — Yang Jong-moon’s routine for the past few months has involved dropping by his apartment complex’s community center once or twice a week to pick up breakfast before he heads off to work. In September, the Banpo Riche apartment building where he lives began to offer breakfast to its residents at the reasonable price of 4,500 won (US$4), although that has recently been adjusted to 5,500 won. The decision to offer the meal reflected demand from students, single-member and double-income households and seniors. “I prefer a light meal in the morning and think five minutes...

Honolulu rents plunge 19%. Landlords scramble. In the still ludicrously expensive rental market of San Francisco, the median asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment dropped 6.1% in May from a year ago to $3,370 and is down 8.2% from the peak in October 2015. For a two-bedroom, the median asking rent dropped 6.3% year-over-year to $4,500 and is down 10% from the peak in October 2015. Reality creeps into rental la-la land. The last episode of year-over-year rent declines in San Francisco ended in April 2010. So this is a rare occurrence. Last time, the declines started well into the...

Customs seize Berezovsky's videos about explosions in Moscow, Volgodonsk 'We've already convicted the Chechens...let's move on' Interfax. Sunday, Mar. 10, 2002, 1:07 PM Moscow Time MOSCOW. March 10 (Interfax) - State Duma deputy and member of the Liberal Russia movement Yuli Rybakov said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio that the customs department of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport has confiscated 100 video cassettes about the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk. The film was demonstrated by businessman Boris Berezovsky at a recent press conference in London, and is evidence of the Russian special services' involvement in...

Technically Incorrect: The owners of a Salt Lake City apartment building change the tenancy agreement and give tenants five days to like the building on Facebook. Or else. There's something forced about Facebook relationships. If someone "friends" you, you feel duty-bound to reciprocate. Even if that person is, well, entirely unknown to you. That forced feeling can go too far. As KSL-TV reports, residents of an apartment building in Salt Lake City, Utah, say they found a curious piece of paper stuck to their doors. Headlined "Facebook Addendum," it had fascinating stipulations. It insisted that tenants had five days to...

The apartments in a new Manhattan building boast little balconies, tall ceilings, dishwashers and storage space. All in 360 square feet or less. It's micro-living in the nation's biggest city, and New Yorkers could be seeing more of it. Planning officials are proposing to end a limit on how small apartments can be, opening the door for more "micro-apartments" that advocates see as affordable adaptations to a growing population of single people. Critics fear a turn back toward the city's tenement past and question whether less space will really mean less expensive.

Covert scheme to cram us all into socialist cities and  'compact' America along Euro lines moving along briskly... Our disingenuous, hyper-left president's myriad hidden agendas are hard to keep track of sometimes, but one that caught my eye a couple years back was betrayed in a 2012 book by Stanley Kurtz: Obama aims to destroy the famed American suburban lifestyle, cram us all into tight city neighborhoods, spike the price of gas/taxes, put us in 30-mi-range electric cars, etc. The idea is to end urban sprawl while mixing cities and suburbs into one tighter, mediocre mix. Like court-ordered bussing destroyed schools...

These are good times for U.S. landlords. For many tenants, not so much. With demand for apartments surging, rents are projected to rise for a fifth straight year. Even a pickup in apartment construction is unlikely to provide much relief anytime soon. That bodes well for building owners and their investors. Yet the landlord-friendly trends will likely further strain the finances of many renters. That’s especially true for the 50 percent of them who already spend more than one-third of their pay on rent. A 6 percent rise in apartment rents between 2000 and 2012 has been exacerbated by a...

U.S. builders broke ground on homes last month at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.04 million, the highest level since June 2008. The gain, driven by a surge in apartment construction, showed continued strength in the housing market at the start of the spring buying season. According to the US Census Bureau, privately-owned housing starts in March were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,036,000. This is 7.0 percent above the revised February estimate of 968,000 and is 46.7 percent above the March 2012 rate of 706,000. Single-family housing starts in March were at a rate of 619,000;...

Millions of Californians would not be able to smoke tobacco inside their own homes under new legislation that would raise the bar nationwide for fighting secondhand smoke. No state ever has ventured into personal bedrooms and living rooms with its smoking restrictions, but California is going even further than that by targeting owner-occupied residences as well as rental units. Specifically, the measure would prohibit lighting up a cigarette, cigar or pipe in condominiums, duplexes and apartment units. The push would extend a lengthy list of places where smoking already is barred, including restaurants, workplaces, playgrounds, public buildings and cars containing...

A cleaning woman stole an empty commuter train in a suburb of Stockholm and crashed it into a house, injuring herself, Swedish officials say. The four-carriage train was driven out of the depot for about a mile until it jumped the tracks, becoming wedged into a three-storey building. Police arrested a woman, who was flown to a Stockholm hospital with serious injuries. Nobody else was hurt. A railway official confirmed the woman in custody was an employee. "We have only heard good things about her," Tomas Hedenius, a spokesman for train operator Arriva, was quoted as saying by AP news...

New York City’s diminutive apartments have long been the butt of many a housing joke, but now developers are poised to take the concept of downsizing to a new low. City planners believe that tiny studio units measuring 300 square feet – or six times the size of a standard jail cell at Rikers Island - could be the answer to a growing population of singles and two-person households. Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday invited developers to come up with ways to fill 335 East 27 Street with what officials are calling ‘micro-units.’

ELK GROVE (CBS13) – You’ve heard the saying smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. But if you got ‘em and you live in an apartment complex in Elk Grove, the luxury of lighting up may soon go up in smoke. “i think it’s a pretty good idea,” one apartment resident said. He’s talking about the possibility of banning smoking in all apartment complexes in the city. A Sacramento-based trade association that works with landlords is against the idea, however. “We don’t think it’s necessary,” said Cory Koehler with the Rental Housing Association. We support an owner’s right to choose the...

Fire extinguishers could be removed from communal areas in flats throughout the country because they are a safety hazard, it has emerged. The life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building, risk assessors in Bournemouth decided. There are fears that their recommendation, which has seen the extinguishers ripped out of several private, high-rise flats in the town, could set a national precedent. Under the Fire Safety Order of 2005, fire assessments must be carried out to 'eliminate or reduce risk as is reasonably practical'. But Mike Edwards, who lives in one of the blocks,...

I am moving to Tucson, AZ for six months and I need an apartment. Where are the best places to live?

The Crisis Was Obama's confrontation with Israel premeditated? JERUSALEM—Suddenly, my city feels again like a war zone. Since the suicide bombings ended in 2005, life in Jerusalem has been for the most part relatively calm. The worst disruptions have been the traffic jams resulting from construction of a light rail, just like in a normal city. But now, again, there are clusters of helmeted border police near the gates of the Old City, black smoke from burning tires in the Arab village across from my porch, young men marching with green Islamist flags toward my neighborhood, ambulances parked at strategic...

They do their dishes in the shower, sit sideways on the toilet and need to watch their weight just to fit into their bathrooms. But these cramped New Yorkers wouldn't have it any other way. A week after The Post told the story of Zaarath and Christopher Prokop and their 175-square-foot micro-studio on Sunday, other New Yorkers lined up to share their tales of living small, including a 55-square-foot apartment in Hell's Kitchen and a 90-square-foot home on the Upper West Side. "To me, it's all about location," said Eddie Rabon, 24, who lives in a microscopic Hell's Kitchen abode....

I was going through, calling apartment complexes, and despite the fact that rents are sky high, they don't include electricity and heat! It's disgusting! With one place, they charge up to seven hundred and they also make you pay 1/3 water bills and heat and electricity. As if they were helping, they said they didn't charge through garbage services! Has anyone else had bad times finding a place that doesn't bleed you alive? Here comes the worst part: this place that has a one bedroom, small apartment requires that you have an income of 1,660 in order to be able...

Apartment vacancies hit their highest point since 1986, surging in cities from Raleigh, N.C., to Tacoma, Wash., as rising unemployment continued to chip away at demand during the traditionally strong summer rental months. The U.S. vacancy rate reached 7.8%, a 23-year high, according to Reis Inc., a New York real-estate research firm that tracks vacancies and rents in the top 79 U.S. markets. The rate is expected to climb further in the fall and winter, when rental demand is weaker, pushing vacancies to the highest levels since Reis began its count in 1980. Meanwhile, the air leaving the market is...