Free Republic

The nation’s largest home builder is betting voice-activated digital assistants and smart devices will become as expected in a new home as garages now are. Lennar announced Wednesday that standard features in its new homes will include built-in Wi-Fi, smart locks, doorbells, thermostats and lights — all controlled by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated digital assistant. Each house will come with two Alexa-enabled smart speakers, an Echo Show and an Echo Dot. New homeowners will also get a free visit from an Amazon technician to help set everything up and teach them how to use it. ... The 3,600-square-foot model home in...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s proposal to add toll lanes to three of the most congested highways in the Washington suburbs reaches beyond similar proposals that stalled over the years after being deemed too expensive or disruptive to adjacent communities. Hogan’s $9 billion plan would add four toll lanes each to Maryland’s portion of the Capital Beltway (I-495) and to I-270 from the Beltway to Frederick. It would also widen the Baltimore-Washington Parkway by four toll lanes. The project would be built using a public-private partnership in what Hogan (R) has said would be the largest such deal for highways in...

Could chatbots lend a non-judgemental ear to people making decisions about the end of their life? A virtual agent that helps people have conversations about their funeral plans, wills and spiritual matters is set to be trialled in Boston over the next two years with people who are terminally ill. People near the end of their lives sometimes don’t get the chance to have these important conversations before it’s too late, says Timothy Bickmore at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. So Bickmore and his team – which included doctors and hospital chaplains – built a tablet-based chatbot to offer spiritual...

Think You Own Home? Well You Don’t And Never Will! Even if you think you own your home free and clear, you really don’t own it at all. You lease it from the State and it sets the terms and conditions that allow you to occupy the house or sell it to another lessee. The State owns the house and land in perpetuity and you can not alter this arrangement.

Foreigners snap up record number of US homes Foreign buyers closed on $153 billion worth of U.S. residential properties for the 12 months ended in March. That marks a 49 percent jump from 2015-2016, according to the National Association of Realtors. Florida, Texas and California drew the most international buyers. Diana Olick | @DianaOlick 6 Hours Ago CNBC.com Foreigners snap up record number of US homes ï…„ Foreigners snap up record number of US homes 3 Hours Ago | 00:57 Foreign purchases of U.S. residential real estate surged to the highest level ever in terms of number of homes sold...

You'd be forgiven for thinking that all is right with the housing market these days. With prices and sales both soaring nationally, the housing panic of 2007 seems like an all-but-forgotten nightmare. But it's still very much with us. The prestigious State of the Nation's Housing report for 2017, published by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies just last week, touts the newfound health of the housing market. "A decade after the onset of the Great Recession, the national housing market is finally returning to normal," the report says. "With incomes rising and household growth strengthening, the housing sector is...

The actress's hip museum of a house in the Hollywood Hills, an ode to the obsessive joy of collecting, is as charming, imaginative, original and fun as the actress-author herself ....Originally, the house belonged to Robert Armstrong, the ship's captain in King Kong, who uttered the last line in the movie, It was beauty killed the beast,' " explains Carrie Fisher, documenting the uniquely star-studded pedigree of her spectacular three-acre spread high in the Hollywood Hills. "After that, Bette Davis lived here for a while before it was bought in 1933 by Edith Head, who did most of the major...

The UN Security Council resolution will not slow down construction in the 1967 liberated parts of Jerusalem, according to the municipality’s Local Planning and Construction committee. In fact, on Wednesday, the committee plans to vote to approve thousands of new housing units in Jewish and mixed neighborhoods across the 1949 armistice line, a.k.a. the “greenline.” The planning committee will approve 2,600 new housing units in the neighborhood of Gilo, another 2,600 units in Givat Hamatos, and 400 units in Ramat Shlomo – altogether 5,600 units in eastern Jerusalem.

Migrants, Alfano’s Blackmail: Jail for those who resist requisitions According to sources in the Interior Ministry, the Viminale Plan foresees enforcement agents and detention measures for those who resist requisition of their premises for migrants. The Interior Ministry in the figure of Angelino Alfano is preparing to requisition the real estate of Italians to place migrants. It will be done, explains Il Giornale, beginning only as of December 4 or after a consultation referendum, in order to avoid allowing protests by citizens to influence the outcome of the vote. Because it is indeed the protests that worry Alfano. The barricades...

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A tale of woe comes to us from the Left coast. Trouble has reared its head for Californians who enrolled in a special government program designed to allow them to use taxpayer funds to upgrade their homes with solar panels, wind turbines, unicorn flatulence converters and any number of other green energy improvements. Tens of thousands of Californians signed up for the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing program which provided them with funding for installing such energy efficient goodies over the past several years, but now they’re finding their homes stalled on the market when they want to...

The city needs to move away from the idea that all families can live in their own home on a piece of land, according to a draft letter from a Seattle advisory committee. If adopted, ideas being considered by a Seattle housing committee would be devastating to the city's appeal, KIRO Radio's Dori Monson said. Get rid of single-family zoning in Seattle. That's the big message in a draft report being worked on by Mayor Ed Murray's housing committee, obtained by The Seattle Times. According to a draft letter, the city needs to move away from the idea that all...

Campus Reform Correspondent Cabot Phillips played "Candidate's Cribs" with young people in front of the White House. After trying to guess which Presidential candidate has lived in a series of mansions, many of them were shocked to find out that Hillary Clinton had lived in all four of them.

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...

A group of homebuilders are beginning work on a project slated to bring about 1,194 homes to a 500-acre development along Lake Lewisville in Denton County, which is being developed by Charlotte-based Crescent Communities in partnership with Taylor Duncan Interests. The builders — K Hovnanian Homes, Highland Homes and MHI McGuyer Homebuilders — expect to soon begin construction on the model homes of the community, called Wildridge, with the first models completed by June. The homes will range in price from the $300,000s to the $500,000s. The homes will range from 1,800 square feet to 4,800 square feet of living...

News segment of live demonstration, including machine guns, of new bulletproof plaster. http://on.aol.com/video/new-bullet-proof-homes-517761322

This weekend the Vatican formally hosted one of Britain’s most virulently pro-abortion and pro-homosexual writers, as well as the head of an American organization promoting female ordination, at an officially sanctioned event inside Vatican City walls. Organizers spoke to Vatican Radio as well as the secular press, praising the new atmosphere within the Church’s leadership that made the conference possible.

One-fifth of people in the U.S. speak a foreign language at home, according to a report being released Monday by the Center for Immigration Studies, which found Arabic and Urdu — the national language of Pakistan — among the fastest-growing. The report found that nearly half of all California school-age children speak a language other than English at home, as do a third of Texans and Nevadans, according to the report, which is based on Census Bureau numbers.

It's an old saying: First we shape our buildings, then they shape us. But like many old sayings, it may be more pat than true. It may sound like a great tribute to the power and influence of architecture in our lives, but it's too neat. It sounds too much like an insight to be one. Which explains why it's become more a cliche than an observation. Because the power of architecture surely depends on the power of the architect -- and our own power to accept or reject it, or adapt it to our own idea of what constitutes...

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — The federal government wasted millions of dollars in building a housing project for Border Patrol agents in Arizona near the Mexican border, spending nearly $700,000 per house in a small town where the average home costs less than $90,000, a watchdog report found. The analysis by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection overspent by about $4.6 million on new houses and mobile homes in the small town of Ajo southwest of Phoenix. The agency has spent about $17 million for land, 21 two- and three-bedroom houses and 20...