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The number of New Yorkers applying for emergency grants to stay in their homes is skyrocketing — as the number of people staying in homeless shelters reached an all-time high last weekend, records show. There were 82,306 applications for one-time emergency grants to prevent evictions in fiscal 2016, up 26 percent from 65,138 requests the previous year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report. The city’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. Without the aid — which comes from city funds and was approved in roughly two-thirds of the cases — even more families would likely have entered...

A French immigrant family that voluntarily moved to Great Britain is now complaining about their housing conditions, saying the five-bedroom home they were offered courtesy of the British taxpayer is too small because it “doesn’t even have a dining room.” The Daily Mail reports the Sube family moved from France to Britain in 2012 so the father, 33-year-old Arnold Mballe, could study mental health nursing at the University of Bedfordshire. His wife, Jeanne, is reportedly a stay-at-home mother who, like her husband, is not employed. The couple has eight children. After having been housed by the Luton Borough Council first...

It was the boldest California housing policy proposal in years: Allow any residential project that complies with local zoning and sets aside as few as five percent of its units as affordable to be built “as of right,” removing review from local municipalities. The idea was to fast-track approvals and reduce the cost of building as the state struggles with a crushing housing crisis. But after three months of debate and widespread opposition, the proposal by Gov. Jerry Brown, meant to boost the state’s housing production in the face of record-high housing prices, appears to be dead. … Dozens of...

SIERRA VISTA — City and Cochise County officials and the owner of several properties in the Fry Townsite have agreed upon the basis of a deal which would ultimately result in the clearing away of dozens of dilapidated mobile homes and junk vehicles from the county enclave. The final details of the deal are still being fine-tuned and will have to be accepted by a federal bankruptcy court, but after months of negotiations between property owner Lane Balmer and Mary Jacobs, assistant city manager of Sierra Vista, as well as Britt Hanson, chief civil deputy attorney for the Cochise County...

Housing prices in Michigan have recovered from the Great Recession. The price of the average home sale in Michigan in the first six months of 2016 was $147,323. This is the highest since 2006, and approaching record levels. Other state housing value indicators are up as well. The federal Housing Finance Authority’s house price index says that Michigan’s values increased 33.6 percent from the first quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2016. That’s the seventh-highest increase among the states. The growth of housing values is a good thing for homeowners and landlords. But it also is driving a...

In hopes of promoting the narrative of a US housing recovery, one recurring thesis has been that as Millennials get older and start families, they will eventually leave their parents' basement and buy a house or shift from renting to owning. So far the facts have refused to corroborate this, and according to the latest "Housing Vacancies and Homeownership" report released on Thursday, the dream of owning a home just became even more distant. The reason: after staging a feeble rebound in late 2015, the US homeownership rate just tumbled from 63.5% to 62.9%, tied for the lowest print going...

After rising just over a decade ago to its highest level ever, the nation's home ownership rate fell to match its all-time low and could drop even further in the months to come. In the second quarter of this year, the rate fell to 62.9 percent, not seasonally adjusted, which is the same as it was in 1965, when the U.S. Census started tracking the metric. During the epic housing boom in the mid-2000s, the rate soared as high as 69.2 percent. That was when politicians touted the so-called "ownership society."

Ambitious expansion plans by small and medium towns across China have lead to the creation of more than 3,500 “new areas” for residential and economic use raising fears many are destined to become ghost towns. The combined projected population of these new areas is an “impossible” 3.4 billion people – 2.5 times the current number of people in the country, experts say. The world’s population today stands at 7.3 billion, according to the US Census Bureau.

FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, states have quickly adopted most building safety features blessed by the Washington-based nonprofit that recommends minimum codes for the nation. But that’s not what happened after the International Code Council decided in 2008 that every new American home should have fire sprinklers. Fire Fight Far outside DC, there’s a campaign finance fight taking place over fire safety. And it’s putting families at risk. Instead, a review by ProPublica shows, U.S. homebuilders and realtors unleashed an unprecedented campaign to fend off the change, which they argued would not improve safety enough to justify the added cost....

Pending home sales dove 3.7%, well below the Bloomberg Econoday consensus estimate of -1%, and even below the bottom estimate of -2.4% The bad details continue, as last month’s huge rise of 5.1% was lowered to 3.9%. “Highlights Existing home sales have been trending higher but today’s pending home sales index, which tracks contract signings, may be pointing to slowing for the early part of the summer. The index fell a steep 3.7 percent in the May report to nearly reverse a downward revised 3.9 percent jump in April. Year-on-year, the pending sales index is down 0.2 percent which hints...

If freedom holds any value, we must educate our neighbors to the link between property and human rights, and the dangers of a government that can peel off either on a whim President Obama is successfully executing the most dangerous seizure of individual choice in our history because Americans are growing blind to the bond between property rights and human rights. While farm owners surrender their land development rights to governments, federal agencies relocate affordable housing next to million dollar homes, and declare entire neighborhoods discriminatory.

Angelo Mozilo can finally get on with his life. This month the Justice Department told Mr. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest subprime mortgage lender, that he was no longer under investigation in connection with civil mortgage fraud. The government’s criminal inquiry into Mr. Mozilo’s role in the financial crisis was dropped previously, so he is now in the clear. At least that’s the view from Washington. On Main Street, where the pain of Countrywide’s reckless lending and abusive foreclosure practices still throbs, it’s safe to say that Mr. Mozilo is still identified as...

During the 12 months ending June 30, the number of people leaving California for another state exceeded by 61,100 the number who moved here from elsewhere in the U.S., according to state Finance Department statistics. The so-called "net outward migration" was the largest since 2011, when 63,300 more people fled California than entered. "The main factors are housing costs in many parts of the state, including coastal regions of California such as the Bay Area," said Dan Hamilton, director of economics with the Economic Forecasting Center at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. "California has seen negative outward migration to...

The Portland City Council voted Wednesday to move forward with a plan to foreclose on so-called "zombie homes" for the first time in 50 years as the city grapples with a swelling population and skyrocketing home costs that are locking new homeowners out of the market. Commissioners and the mayor voted 4-0 in favor of the plan, with one member absent. The vote targets five of the city's worst abandoned properties, the first part of a long-term plan to free up housing in an overheated market while clearing out squatters who have plagued developing neighborhoods outside the city's hip core...

Nearly one-third of survey respondents said they’d had to scramble to cover a mortgage or rent payment in the past few years __ A vast majority of respondents – 81% - said housing affordability is a problem, and one-third said they or someone they know has been evicted, foreclosed on, or lost their housing in the past five years. Over half the respondents, 53%, said they’d had to make sacrifices over the past three years to be able to pay their mortgage or rent. Yet most respondents believe the housing problem is solvable, and want policymakers to address it. Nearly...

Remembering the Forsaken Written by Francis Slobodnik    Tuesday, 12 January 2010 18:51   A Review of the book The Forsaken, An American Tragedy In Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis     In times of social and political turmoil, it is not uncommon for men to grasp for what appear to be easy solutions. Oftentimes, these impulsive decisions can have disastrous consequences. There is nothing meritorious about change in and of itself. The virtuous person prayerfully reasons through the options before making decisions. Men with little virtue grab desperately for anything that, on the surface, appears will improve their...

Showboating is something we expect from Donald Trump, but his father Fred was no shrinking violet himself. He even used a real boat to advertise his goods — a 65-foot cabin cruiser bearing hoardings with TRUMP HOMES spelled in ten-foot-tall letters. Trump’s houses were cozy, well made, and — more than anything — affordable even to working-class families. He reduced construction costs by using the same economies of scale that made the Model T automobile so inexpensive. Known in the industry as “the Henry Ford of housing,” he applied techniques of mass production to home construction a full decade before...

County Executive for Westchester County NY, Rob Astorino If information is power, Rob Astorino has enough to shatter the administration’s media halo and send HUD officials slithering behind their stacks of regulations. Astorino is the County Executive for Westchester County, NY, an upscale community north of NYC that is home to Andrew Cuomo, George Soros, Hillary and Bill Clinton to name a few. In the name of fair housing, HUD is now implementing the most abusive, property-rights-grabbing, local-rule-neutering regulation since our Founders cast off monarchical handouts for natural rights

On highway 99 north of Seattle past Denny Way and the space needle is what was once an abandoned hotel that was later taken over by homeless people and made into a community living center and halfway home for the homeless. It is run by the homeless and formerly homeless and is a shining beacon of what personal responsibility, initiative and Christian love can accomplish. Aloha was originally started by SHARE with help from Catholic charities and the archdiocese of Seattle in 1990. At the time, SHARE was in its infancy when share was made up of sturdy yet responsible...

Depending on how much credence you give to "whisper listings," there are between 27 and 50 $100,000,000+ houses on the market; last year, only two houses in that bracket sold worldwide. The glut of super-duper-ultra-luxury houses on the market worries economy-watchers, who view the oversupply as a bellwether for a housing crash -- the last glut (which wasn't nearly as pronounced as the current one) was in 2007/8.

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Stephen Moore. We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It's a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and all the greatest investment gurus over the years. Ready? Buy low, sell high. It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, and it helps account for his amazing business success. But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it's a crime. Campaigning in California last week she wailed that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the...

Vote Description This vote was a procedural vote to kill an amendment offered by Senator Lee that would have defunded implementation of a Department of Housing and Urban Development rule that basically federalizes zoning laws and encourages the forced economic diversification of neighborhoods. Rhetorically speaking this rule is a war on the suburbs as it uses the power of federal government to centrally plan out neighborhoods. The rule is a massive power grab by progressive bureaucrats to allow them to conduct large scale social experiments with real neighborhoods by forcing the collection of data that will be used to evaluate...

Gov. Jerry Brown’s solution to California’s affordable housing crisis is to build, build, build, and not let local politics get in the way. Earlier this month, the governor introduced a bill under which proposed urban housing developments that meet local zoning requirements and reserve some portion of their units for low-income residents would be exempted from any additional environmental or local government review. The governor’s theory is that neighborhood opponents and other parochial interests have consistently blocked or downsized badly needed development projects, leading to a housing crisis in which California's major cities are increasingly unaffordable for most of its...

Four Latino families filed papers to sue their Virginia landlord Monday after he threatened eviction due to illegal family members living on the premises. The civil rights lawsuit filed by families living in Waples Mobile Home Park in Fairfax County, Va., claims it is discriminatory to require a social security number for residency. The landlords at the mobile home park are requiring residents to provide either a social security card, passport or valid visa with documentation to renew their leases, reports The Washington Post. The lawyers representing the families, from the Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC) and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart...

When she’s not looking out for the little guy being taken advantageof by predatory lenders, Elizabeth Warren is making high-interest, short-term loans to family members and flipping homes for a profit. That’sthe revelation in a story published today by the Boston Herald,which identifies nine instances when Warren made a quick profit eitherbuying and reselling homes or loaning money to family members to fliphomes in the late 90s. For instance, in 1993 Warren purchased a foreclosed home in OklahomaCity for $61,000. She resold the home 18 months later for $95,000. In several more cases, Warren provided loans so that her brother...

They’re coming for your home. Right now. I suggest you save it. I can guide you, but you must do exactly as I say. Except, this isn’t The Matrix. You’re no actor, like Keanu Reeves, playing a distraught programmer-hacker named “Neo.” Nor am I an actor, like Laurence Fishburne, playing your guide “Morpheus.” This is real life, baby. Your home or apartment—and the neighborhood in which you live—is under siege. “Agents”—sans black glasses and black business suits—who work for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have written a new regulation called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) that...

The use of technology to better assess a potential borrower's risk profile and score borrowers who previously could not be scored-or were scored inaccurately-is one of the most exciting elements of marketplace lending. That is, of course, unless you are the U.S. Treasury Department, which according to its recently released report on marketplace lending worries that technology will make loan underwriting too good. That isn't a typo; the Treasury is worried that better underwriting may be "unfair" because it can disadvantage borrowers who are currently mischaracterized as low risk by making them pay higher (that is to say, correct) rates....

The Lee Amendment to defund President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation failed in the Senate yesterday because not enough Republicans backed it. The Amendment was tabled by a vote of 60-37. Jeremy Carl aptly describes this vote as a defeat for conservatism, community control, and common sense. It is a victory, as Carl says, for turning the federal government into a National Zoning board, forcing high density housing on unwilling cities and towns, and letting bureaucrats decide the racial, ethnic and income balance of local communities.

Housing: Seemingly everyone applauds the recent surge in home prices as a positive sign for the economy. But, in fact, it isn’t. If anything, it’s a sign the federal government still hasn’t learned its lesson about excessive regulation. While prices for homes have surged in recent years, they’ve done so thanks mainly to federal regulations put in place after the financial crisis. Low interest rates engineered by the Fed to stimulate the economy have fueled a surge in demand, driving prices up sharply. And federal regulations continue to require mortgage lenders to make risky home loans based on race and...

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show with guest host Mark Steyn at 2:30PM EST to discuss the imminent Senate vote on an amendment by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), S.3897, to the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) appropriations bill that will prohibit implementation of the HUD regulation “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) that conditions $3 billion of yearly community development block grants on 1,200 recipient cities and counties rezoning neighborhoods along income and racial guidelines.

<p>Property prices in Auckland have increased by nearly 80% in five years, leaving some families unable to buy or rent ___ Hundreds of families in Auckland are living in cars, garages and even a shipping container as a housing crisis fuelled by rising property prices forces low-income workers out of private rental accommodation.</p>

There's a bidding war for government action on Canada's soaring housing market, but as fingers point to foreign buyers as a reason for escalating prices, governments at all three levels are not yet motivated to cool the market down. Young Canadians complain home ownership is increasingly beyond their reach. Governments fear rules to put a lid on stratospheric prices — expected to show another strong increase in today's real estate data for April — could have an an economic impact far beyond the first-time buyer market. The difficulty governments face is that while Canadian manufacturing and exports fall, while oil...

The odds of landing an affordable apartment through the city’s Housing Connect website have gotten so long, they’re now at about 1,000 to 1, officials said Wednesday. Housing Commissioner Vicki Been testified at a City Council budget hearing that 2,628 affordable apartments have become available online so far this year — drawing 2.54 million applications. -snip The number of applications represents a dramatic increase from fiscal 2013, when some 364,000 applications were submitted for just over 2,300 units.

ANZ Banking Group and Westpac Banking Corp have discovered they have each approved "hundreds" of home loans backed by fraudulent Chinese income documents, which were allegedly manufactured with the help of dodgy mortgage brokers.

Councils across the UK are set to consider banning people who already own homes from buying holiday cottages after a historic vote yesterday. More than 80 per cent of voters in St Ives, Cornwall, backed proposals that will mean new housing developments will only get planning permission if homes there are reserved for full-time residents. And now councils in the Lake District, Derbyshire Dales, north Devon and the Isle of Wight are all looking at schemes to prevent outsiders buying holiday homes. But ministers are poised to oppose the ban, saying it could be regarded as unfair and discriminatory. Tory...

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy. The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real-estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs. Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods. It’s all part of...

Saudi Arabia's government has authorized the housing ministry to seek the assistance of Britain, France and China in building hundreds of thousands of homes to ease a shortage of affordable housing in the kingdom. The housing minister and his deputy were given the power to sign memorandums of understanding with those countries, the official Saudi Press Agency reported on Monday. It gave no details of what the agreements might contain, but in March the ministry signed memorandums with South Korea and a Saudi-South Korean consortium to develop 100,000 housing units in northern Riyadh over 10 years. The consortium includes Daewoo...

More than 850 families have transitioned out of public housing in Delaware since the state began limiting the length of time residents are eligible to receive housing subsidies, and hundreds more have become homeowners. “Before we started Moving to Work, we had people who were on their third or fourth generation of the same family who were at the same site,” Rebecca Kauffman, social service senior administrator at the Delaware Housing Authority’s Moving to Work program, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. -------------------------------- The contrast with the rest of the federal public housing program is vivid. The average resident currently...

Given that “redneck” and “hillbilly” remain the last acceptable stereotypes among polite society, it isn’t surprising that the stereotypical urban home of poor, recently rural whites remains an object of scorn. The mere mention of a trailer park conjures images of criminals in wifebeaters, moldy mattresses thrown awry, and Confederate flags. As with most social phenomena, there is a much more interesting reality behind this crass cliché. Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements...

Those expecting a strong Spring start to housing (and you know who you are), were miles off their forecast. Both starts and permits were down steep percentages, both below the bottom ranges of economists’ estimates. The Bloomberg Econoday consensus estimate for housing starts was 1.167 million homes SAAR (seasonally adjusted annualized) in a range of 1.120 million to 1.195 million. The Bloomberg Econoday consensus estimate for housing permits was 1.200 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annualized) in a range of 1.175 million to 1.231 million. Permits came in at 1.086 million. Starts came in at 1.089 million. Fundamental Strength Inquiring minds...

The Miami real estate slowdown is becoming a meltdown — with the most expensive areas getting hit hardest. The number of sales and prices in posh Miami Beach — home to many of the city's most expensive and highest-profile properties — fell during the first quarter, according to a new report. Meanwhile, inventory soared by roughly a third compared with the prior-year quarter. The report, released Thursday by Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers & Consultants, found the average sale price in Miami Beach and the nearby Barrier Islands fell 7.5 percent year over year to $905,252. The...

We’ve seen 3D-printed houses before, but most make use of prefabricated chunks. This hurricane and tornado resistant hotel suite in the Philippines was printed in one shot. Sound familiar? This is the work of [Andrey Rudenko], who started by building a concrete 3D printer in his garage 2 years ago, moved on to 3D printing his kids a concrete castle in his backyard later that year and now appears to have a full-blown company offering commercial 3D printed houses. Way to go [Andrey]! The building was designed in Sketchup no less, and the printer makes use of Pronterface for the...

By every calculation, Julian Castro would be the ideal running mate for Hillary Clinton should she avoid criminal prosecution and gain the Democratic nomination. He is young, Hispanic, a former mayor of San Antonio, smack dab in the great red state of Texas, and the current Secretary of HUD in the Obama administration. He would serve as a counterweight to Ted Cruz, should he become the Republican nominee, and would appeal to Hispanics, a fast growing demographic that both parties are wooing. However, a number of liberal progressive groups are moving to block Castro as unacceptable for a Democratic national...

The National Housing Trust Fund will give housing assistance to the very poorest households in the nation ___ The federal government debuted a program on Monday to provide housing for the very poorest residents in America. The National Housing Trust Fund is a new affordable-housing program, one that creates permanently affordable housing for extremely low-income households. Julián Castro, Secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced that $174 million in allocations for the National Housing Trust Fund would be available soon. He and other officials from HUD, along with other housing policy officials, broke down the details...

For over a decade, architecture students at Rural Studio, Auburn University's design-build program in a tiny town in West Alabama, have worked on a nearly impossible problem. How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want—while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it? In January, after years of building prototypes, the team finished their first pilot project in the real world. Partnering with a commercial developer outside Atlanta, in a tiny community called Serenbe, they built two one-bedroom houses, with materials that cost...

The cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area is insanely high.The housing crisis has caused all kinds of problems, but some people are getting creative to survive it.From wooden pods to trailer trucks, check out all the crazy things people are doing to survive the area's ridiculous housing prices. According to real-estate marketplace Zumper, San Francisco is the most expensive rental market in the US, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment going for $3,590. This housing flyer will give you a better idea of how crazy rental prices are. Take Brandon, a 23-year-old Google engineer who...

You're a private landlord, renting apartments in a building you bought with your savings from years of hard work and modest living. You take pride in maintaining your property, keeping it clean, comfortable, and attractive. You charge a fair rent and treat your tenants with courtesy and respect. Your tenants, in turn, appreciate the care you put into the building. And they trust you to screen prospective tenants wisely, accepting only residents who won't jeopardize the building's safe and neighborly character. That's why you only consider applications from individuals who are employed or in school, whose credit scores are strong,...

The Obama administration is doing its best to give the nation another mortgage meltdown. As Paul Sperry recently noted in The Post, Team Obama has pushed mortgage lenders to offer home loans to folks with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market collapse. Wasn’t the last one bad enough? Credit scores of approved borrowers, for example, have been trending down, even as their debt levels have grown. The Federal Housing Administration and government-sponsored “independent” lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been demanding lower credit standards — just as the feds did starting under President Bill Clinton, in pursuit...

The U.S. Department of Housing has just determined that refusing to rent to a convicted felon may be a violation of the Fair Housing Act, and National Public Radio seems to approve. Felons are not a protected class (yet) under the Fair Housing Act, but since the American justice system disproportionately affects persons of color, it's racist to deny felons housing. Note that HUD says may violate the act. That means, all you have to do as a landlord is ignore HUD and then battle it out in court. Feeling lucky? Roll the dice: 40% of the federal judiciary has...