Free Republic

Fake rental applications are proliferating across the country as the U.S. rental market has become increasingly unaffordable and competitive. Greystar, the country’s largest apartment landlord, told FOX Business that it has seen a clear increase in fraudulent applications nationwide. "Fraud in rental applications has become increasingly sophisticated across the industry, with some of the most advanced cases involving AI-generated documents and fabricated payroll systems," Greystar said. Eric Taylor, lead for trust and safety at TurboTenant, a free online property management platform, is also seeing an uptick, telling FOX Business that nearly 75% of apartment owners across the nation reported a...

New York’s new mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has announced plans for a state-run luxury rehabilitation compound for homeless and addicted veterans — turning the relics of capitalist greed into centers of recovery, work, and collective renewal. The project, known as the Veterans’ Rebirth Compound, would combine housing, physical training, and political education to help veterans rebuild their lives through discipline, purpose, and solidarity. Empty hotels and abandoned corporate properties are being considered for conversion.

Why do New York City voters want to repeat this disaster from the 1960s and 1970s? https://reason.org/commentary/rent-control-laws-nearly-destroyed-parts-of-new-york-city-they-could-do-the-same-to-california/

This is my two cents, and the information arrived after some interesting texts with my little brother, Crusader.Some of it, now that last night's results are in, needs to be attended to immediately, as he said.Trump really needs to focus on what can be done for the economy... He needs to light a fire under congresscritters to ratchet down on outsourcing and h1bs; the job market is not getting better and grocery prices aren’t getting better eitherSome grocery prices are better, sure - those damn eggs, for one thing. But the hamburger you feed a family with is still through...

We will never get the cost of housing down until we go back to the levels of per capita construction that we had in the 1960s and 1970s. Current zoning laws make that impossible.

With a 1.4% vacancy rate, the city is in desperate need of housing, and fast. A special panel known as the Charter Revision Commission, established by Mayor Eric Adams, believes they have some solutions to the problem. What You Need To Know Housing-related proposals will appear as questions two through five on the November ballot. Voters will see them when they flip over their ballots Question two would create two new shortened processes for affordable housing: one for publicly financed projects and another for a newly created list of the 12 community districts with the least development Question three would...

Obviously both are important and require a massive shift away from the status-quo, but if you had to pick one, which is more critical for the well-being of America?I'd personally think immigration reform is slightly more important, but understand if that's not as critical to some others.

Rents for single-family residential homes rose just 1.4% in August compared with the year before, according to analytics and data firm Cotality, down from a 2.3% annual gain in July. That’s also much less than the 3% average gain seen last year and is the smallest increase in 15 years. Rent growth weakened across all price points, continuing a trend that has persisted in the second half of this year. Rents had been strengthening in the first half of this year. There were, however, strong variations regionally. Chicago saw the highest annual rent growth at 4.7% in August, followed by...

Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes NEW: Section 8 payments to be PAUSED due to Democrats keeping the government shutdown Landlord has just received a letter from the Housing Authority saying after mid November, payments will be paused “October is funded, partial of November is funded. After that, if the shutdown continues, we will not be getting paid our rent”

Where I work in Austin, I deal with a LOT of Hispanic customers, primarily Mexicans. They have been telling me for some time that there is almost no construction work available. Today, two in a very short space of time said they have no work. Furthermore lemons, avocados, poblano peppers or other produce into the U.S. due to tariffs and are unloading tons of it on the side of rural highways for the locals to pick up for free. We are about to see major economic problems as the Trump Administration attempts to fix YEARS of problems caused by Godless...

The changes follow a class action lawsuit challenging the longstanding fee structure of the entire U.S. real estate system. An important sea change has taken place in the United States' $136 trillion real estate market. It stands to impact nearly everyone buying or selling a home. And it’s due to a game-changing lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors. Consumers face new rules designed for their benefit. But the overhauled system and the fallout are still being figured out. Jared Breit helped spark the real estate revolution. He joined a class action lawsuit challenging the longstanding fee structure of...

A favorite subject of mine over the years has been the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. NYCHA operates hundreds of buildings housing some 500,000 people, in some 170,000 +/- apartments, mostly built from the 1950s to the 1970s. Organized on a pure socialist model of public ownership with heavily subsidized rents, NYCHA has followed the trajectory of all socialist schemes ever attempted, having gone from an excited beginning into a long, slow death spiral that has now been ongoing for at least two decades. When NYCHA was building the buildings, everyone seems to have assumed that bricks and...

Chicago news outlets have published and aired seemingly endless images and videos from inside the South Shore apartment building raided by federal immigration agents this week. You’ve undoubtedly seen them: doors hanging open, apartments torn apart, and hallways left in disarray after the feds left. What the outlets haven’t shared is what the building looked like before the raid. The pre-raid videos, posted by Wayne Head, who identifies himself as a former maintenance person at the building, reveal apartment doors splintered and hanging open, deadbolts ripped out. Security camera lenses were covered with thick coats of spray paint to keep...

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That applies not only to Newtonian physics but also to markets, even in things like housing. Doral, Florida, is a suburb of Miami, peopled heavily with Venezuelan immigrants. Some of them are citizens, some are in the country legally, and some are not in the country legally. According to a piece in Monday's Wall Street Journal, some of these people are leaving Doral, in no small part due to President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration, resulting in a spike in Doral's rental housing vacancy rate. That's a good thing. Here's...

BREAKING: New NYC mayoral polls without Adams show that Cuomo is beating out Sliwa by 12-13%.It’s time for Sliwa to do the right thing and drop out. pic.twitter.com/YN6U24MtmQ— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) September 29, 2025

Sales of newly built homes rose a much larger-than-expected 20.5% in August compared with July to the highest level since January 2022, according to the U.S. Census. It is also the largest one-month gain since August 2022. Sales were 15.4% higher than August 2024. This count is based on people out shopping in August and signing deals, when the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage was higher than it is today. That rate started August at 6.63%, according to Mortgage News Daily, and didn’t really move much during the month. The sharp decline in rates began in September, when...

Those of us fortunate enough to live anywhere but New York City may take comfort from reading the news about what is arguably NYC’s biggest campaign issue in 2025 -- the lack of affordable housing in the nation’s biggest city. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we may say, shaking our heads in flyover country, where apartment rents and home prices may also be too high, but where there is at least some kind of availability. But NYC’s problem is only local in part; many of the inputs are nationwide issues, which a new mayor, regardless of...

President Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated his attacks on Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., asserting that the governor was nearing completion on a plan to build low-income housing in an LA suburb ravaged by wildfires. "Shockingly, I have just learned, that Gavin Newscum, the Governor of California, is in final stages of approval to build Low Income Housing in Pacific Palisades," he posted on Truth Social. "How unfair is that to the people that have suffered so much! Newscum allowed their houses to burn by not accepting Hundreds of Millions of Gallons of Water from the Pacific Northwest, and now, the...

A once-crumbling factory in Seneca Falls just won one of New York’s top preservation honors — after being saved from the wrecking ball and transformed into a home for dozens of families and veterans. Huntington Apartments has received a 2025 Excellence in Historic Preservation Award from the Preservation League of New York State, the organization announced Monday. The building at 201 Fall Street was originally home to the National Yeast Company in the late 1800s. By the 2010s, it was deteriorating fast. A gas station proposal nearly sealed its fate — until local advocates stepped in. The Seneca Falls Historical...

“Passive income.” That’s the sales pitch for rentals. Tenants cover the mortgage, you collect the rent, the property appreciates, and you’re off sipping margaritas. Sounds dreamy… until Saturday morning shows up with a broken appliance. Ask me how I know. Here’s the reality from my own ledger: one of my rental properties in the Finger Lakes, NY area is locked at $2,200/month. That’s the ceiling. Meanwhile the expense list has no ceiling. In the last year alone I replaced the gas range, microwave and dishwasher. That’s just a tiny sample of a seemingly never-ending list of surprise expenses. “Passive” income?...