Free Republic

In a dangerous deja vu, politicians and lobbyists are pressuring banks to throw open their lending windows for credit-poor people who want to buy homes but may not be able to afford them. Worried about sagging homeownership rates, especially among minorities, the Obama administration seeks to boost homebuying by easing mortgage lending standards — and affordable-housing zealots are egging it on. So are Realtors and brokers hungry for profits. They're all cheering recent moves by Obama regulators to slash down-payment and mortgage insurance requirements for first-time homebuyers at federal agencies that back such mortgages. They also support a plan to...

The North Texas rental market is on fire, with properties springing up, people flocking to the city for corporate relocations and builders working to keep pace with demand. According to an article from WFAA, apartment rent reached an all-time high last year, with rents rising 4.9% in 2014 and the average monthly rent for an apartment in Dallas-Fort Worth surging to $919. "Annual increases above 4% are rare in this market," said Greg Willett, an MPF Research vice president. "Because we're such a construction hot spot, the flow of new product moving through initial lease-up normally holds rent growth below...

In the new June/July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, freelance journalist Jordan Fraade has a piece on something you may not be familiar with yet. Driven by below normal home ownership in the Millennial generation, some communities are coming up with an interesting incentive called “Shared Equity Housing.” Because Millennials began entering the economy right around the time the economy cratered in 2008, they don’t have the savings typical of people their age. This makes finding a down payment on a house one of the most significant barriers to home ownership. All across the country, particularly in its most expensive...

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.” A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.” A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country. The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of...

In “This Is What Happens When A Millennial Tries To Get A Job,” we highlighted 1) high youth unemployment (U-6 at nearly 14%) and 2) the failure of America’s university system to prepare new entrants for the job market, on the way to painting a rather grim picture for America’s newly-minted college graduates. We’ve also been keen to emphasize the fact that the “strong” labor market is anything but, as wage growth is essentially non-existent and upside “surprises” benefit from the now ubiquitous “vanishing worker.” Given this, it’s no surprise that many of America’s best and brightest find themselves serving...

The reason why Zero Hedge has been steadfast over the past 6 years in its accusation that the Fed is making a mockery of, and destroying not only the very fabric of capital markets (something which Citigroup now openly admits almost every week) but the US economy itself (as Goldman most recently hinted last week when it lowered its long-term "potential GDP" growth of the US by 0.5% to 1.75%), is simple: all along we knew we have been right, and all the career economists, Wall Street weathermen-cum-strategists, and "straight to CNBC" book-talking pundits were wrong. Not to mention the...

How many academics does it take to fix America’s criminal justice system? Twenty. That’s how many participated in a National Research Council (NRC) study of U. S. prisons and their effect on inner cities. They study was conducted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). “After decades of stability, U.S. federal and state prison populations escalated steadily between 1973 and 2009, growing from about 200,000 people to 1.5 million,” they found. “The increase was driven by changes in policy that imprisoned people for a wider range of offenses and imposed longer sentences.” “Has this greater reliance on...

Nearly two years after Veo Vessels died, her daughter, 70-year-old Mary Frances Hickman, decided to sell the home her mother had left to her. A sprawling brick house in Oklahoma City’s historic Highland Park neighborhood, it was built in 1924, just a year after Mary’s birth. Decades later, one of Vessels’ great-grandchildren fondly recalls the wood and tile floors, the fish pond, the butler’s quarters, and the multi-car garage where children played house. “It was really, really nice,” says Hickman’s granddaughter, Andrea Martin. That’s part of the reason she’s so surprised her grandmother sold the home in 1993 for a...

Poonam Sandhu rented out the master bedroom of her Watsonville, California home to a couple through Airbnb. Now they refuse to leave or pay rent. Sandhu says she's been forced from her own home by some terrible tenants.

A national fair housing organization has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, charging that Fannie Mae is not properly caring for and marketing foreclosed homes it owns in nonwhite communities. The National Fair Housing Alliance alleges Fannie Mae violated the federal Fair Housing Act in nonwhite, working-class communities in the Chicago area as well as in 33 other metropolitan areas. Nineteen fair housing groups in various cities, including three in the Chicago area, joined the alliance in the complaint against Fannie Mae. "Fannie has more foreclosures in the United States than anybody else," said...

Last Tuesday, President Obama blamed the GOP-controlled Congress for its failure to fund the “massive investment in urban communities” that could “make a difference.” Well, how does $1.8 billion for the 622,000 people of Baltimore sound? Pretty massive – actually, just about $2900 for every man, woman, child, and baby of the entire City of Baltimore. But that’s the total amount of Obama Stimulus money sent to Charm City, according to an analysis by The Free Beacon:

More than one in four U.S. renters have to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities. That's the finding of an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007. Since the end of 2010, rental prices have surged at nearly twice the pace of average hourly wages, according to data from the real estate firm Zillow and the Labor Department.

Eighty-Eight thousand people (so far) have applied for 55 low-rent apartments in a fancy new condominium building on Manhattan's upper west side. The lucky few could get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1100 a month in the West 60's of Manhattan. To get tax breaks, developers of luxury buildings make some units available at below market rent rates, and this is what happened here. But as you can see from the number of applicants, this program will never produce enough low income housing. Rent control is the biggest obstacle to building new affordable housing; that's why nearly...

On Reddit, he’s /u/huckstah, an administrator on /r/vagabond, a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members—many of them identify as “homeless”—who trade skills and stories. On “the road and the rails,” he’s Huck, and even after we speak twice by cellphone, he tells me he’d prefer I don’t print his real name. “People say, ‘Well, you chose to become homeless.’ But that’s wrong,” he says. Huck says he’s been a hobo for upward of 11 years and started hopping trains and hitching rides at 18. “I did not choose to become homeless. If you want to say I chose to become homeless...

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...

With typical gall, Hillary Clinton in her campaign launch lit into "those at the top" for "stacking" the deck against middle-class families when in fact they are buried under the house of cards built by her husband. Earth to Hillary: It wasn't the richest 1% or Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy and created financial wreckage from which working Americans "have fought" to dig themselves out of. No, that path to destruction was set by Bill Clinton and his social housing policies. The evidence is overwhelming that Clinton was the architect of the financial disaster that wiped out trillions...

From CNS News: Speaking at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday about affordable housing, Vice President Joe Biden said home ownership helped him pay for his children’s college education, even if that would not be the case today because of the amount of money he earns.

A Chinese engineering firm that claims it built 10 houses in less than 24 hours last year using a 3D printer has unveiled the world’s tallest “printed” building. The five-story apartment building is on display next to a 1,100-square-foot mansion—also created on a 3D printer—in Suzhou Industrial Park in Jiangsu province. The mansion’s furniture and decorations also were made on a 6.6- by-10-meter tall printer, which uses an "ink" composed of glass fibers, steel, cement, hardening agents, and recycled construction waste to build one layer at a time for builders to assemble. The apartment building took a day to print...

Oregon holds on to its title as “Top Moving Destination” and continues to pull away from the pack, while the Northeast loses residents for the third consecutive year. Those are the key findings from United Van Lines’ 38th Annual National Movers Study, which tracks customers’ migration patterns state-to-state during the course of the past year. The study found that Oregon is the top moving destination of 2014, with 66 percent of moves to and from the state being inbound — that’s a nearly 5 percent increase of inbound moves compared to 2013. Arriving at No. 2 on the list was...