Free Republic

After buying a home in Barrington Hills, Chaoshan Lai and his wife couldn’t unload the 15-year-old townhouse that they’d bought for $935,000 in Central Station, a taxpayer-subsidized development in the South Loop where former Mayor Richard M. Daley lived for years. Lai couldn’t even find anyone to rent the townhouse on South Prairie Avenue — until he got a call in 2013 about a woman who’d gotten a “housing choice voucher,” from the Chicago Housing Authority through a program that had long been called Section 8. Lai says the woman wanted to lease his three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath home, which has...

Courtesy of Point2HomesWhen the average home price in San Francisco went over the $1 million threshold in the first half of 2015, it was pretty obvious for most people that the Bay city secured the top position as the most expensive housing market in the U.S. This is exactly what happened. According to records released at the end of last year, San Francisco is the superstar housing market not only in the U.S., but for the entire North America as well.But what may really surprise some people when looking at the top 15 list of the most expensive housing...

In the market for a home? Mortgage website HSH.com has updated its estimate of how much annual income a household would need to buy a home in major metropolitan areas in the US, according to fourth-quarter 2015 data. Thanks to lower mortgage rates and home prices, homes were more affordable in nearly every metro area measured than they had been in the previous quarter. The National Association of Realtors told HSH.com that it doesn't expect this trend to continue. The site also calculated how it would change the salary needed to buy a home if a buyer were to put...

In London, the number of rented homes has just edged past the number that are owner-occupied, according to a report out this month. For the U.K.’s biggest city, this shift from owning to renting is, it seems, just the beginning. According to another new report, the ratio of renters to homeowners in London is expected to be yet greater by 2025, by which time the proportion of renters will have reached 60%. This shift from ownership to shorter-term rental tenancies, one mirrored by trends in the largest North American cities, is likely to have a number of consequences. Being able...

A cart-full of good news on Tuesday — especially for Home Depot (HD) — showed that the housing sector continued to be one of the strongest parts of the economy to start 2016. Existing-home sales solidly beat expectations in January... **** Existing-home sales rose to a 5.47 million annual pace, just shy of July’s level that was the highest since early 2007,,, **** The 1.82 million existing homes available for sale rose 3.4% on the month but were still down 2.2% from a year earlier. That means there’s just a 4.0-month supply of homes for sale, just above December’s 3.9...

If you're interested in whether rent control makes rent prices go down or not -- and plenty of people think it actually makes them go up -- then stop what you're doing right now and watch this video on San Francisco's real estate war, by my colleague Andrew Stern. The video features a heart-breaking interview with artist David Brenkus, who has lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Walter Street for 34 years. His building has been bought and now he is being evicted so that the new landlord can move in. Brenkus's rent is $735 month for a two-bedroom apartment,...

When a devastating earthquake leveled Haiti in 2010, millions of people donated to the American Red Cross. The charity raised almost half a billion dollars. It was one of its most successful fundraising efforts ever. The American Red Cross vowed to help Haitians rebuild, but after five years the Red Cross' legacy in Haiti is not new roads, or schools, or hundreds of new homes. It's difficult to know where all the money went. NPR and ProPublica went in search of the nearly $500 million and found a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success,...

Remember a few years ago, when the American housing market collapsed as a direct result of government policies that—in the name of racial justice—pressured banks to approve mortgage loans for massive numbers of underqualified nonwhite applicants? Remember how that collapse set in motion the financial crisis that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama repeatedly called “the worst economy since the Great Depression”? And remember how Obama—who had long been a leading proponent of precisely the policies that had triggered the crisis—cast himself as the savior who was going to restore fiscal sanity and untangle the whole big mess? Well, now Savior Obama...

Subprime 2.0: The White House is rolling out a new low-income mortgage program that for the first time lets lenders qualify borrowers by counting income from nonborrowers living in the household. What could go wrong? The HomeReady program is offered through Fannie Mae, which is now controlled by Obama's old Congressional Black Caucus pal Mel Watt. It replaces the bankrupted mortgage giant's notorious old subprime program, MyCommunityMortgage. In case renaming the subprime product fails to fool anybody, the affordable-housing geniuses in the administration have re-termed "subprime," a dirty word since the mortgage bust, "alternative."

The political left has been trying to run other people’s lives for centuries. So we should not be surprised to see the Obama administration now trying to force neighborhoods across America to have the mix of people the government wants them to have. There are not enough poor people living in middle class neighborhoods to suit the political left. Not enough blacks in white neighborhoods. Not enough Hispanics here, not enough Asians there. Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the federal government the power to dictate such things. But places that do not mix and match people the way...

DALLAS - By most accounts, census tract 166.05 is not a particularly desirable place to live. Tucked between two major highways in southwest Dallas, the neighborhood is characterized by clusters of ramshackle, one-story houses, huge swaths of vacant land and big warehouses and storage centers. More than 40 percent of people living in the census tract have incomes below the poverty level, a proportion that more than doubled since 2000, according to U.S. Census data. Crime rates and levels of slum and blight are also high, according to the Dallas-based housing advocacy group the Inclusive Communities Project. Such placement "perpetuates...

Xochitl Collazo won't be spending 2016 in Orange County, her home of three decades. Instead, the longtime Santa Ana resident plans to move in with a friend in central Arizona, driven away by unaffordable rents and high health insurance premiums. "It just doesn't make sense for me to be struggling like that anymore," said Collazo, 36, who could barely afford her $1,000-a-month rent from what she earned managing a Mission Viejo doctor's office. "What am I supposed to do? Have no savings? Have nothing? It literally makes no sense." If forecasters are right, there's little relief in sight for Orange...

Harry_Dent December 30, 2015 We woke up this morning to find oil prices weighing on the market… again… with China suffering the biggest losses. Oil prices have already kept stocks at bay in the best time of the year. Funny how this “Santa Claus” rally that I predicted wouldn’t happen this year, didn’t. The last time was in 2007 and 2008 – the last years the stock market crashed. I’ve been looking at how low oil prices will be the first trigger in the next crisis. Although it helps consumers a bit, low prices kill the $1 trillion QE-driven fracking...

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.

The 10.5% crash in existing home sales is the worst November drop ever. Against expectations of a mere 0.2% drop, this is the largest miss in history asnd tumbles SAAR sales to the weakest since March 2014. The collapse in sales was across all regions, and ironically was accompanied by a rise in median home prices across all regions. Of course there was plenty of blame to go around, from inventory constraints to weather but most of all - paperwork - as new regulations - Know Before You Owe initiative, has meant longer closing times. In other words, wait til...

The political left has been trying to run other people's lives for centuries. So we should not be surprised to see the Obama administration now trying to force neighborhoods across America to have the mix of people the government wants them to have. There are not enough poor people living in middle class neighborhoods to suit the political left. Not enough blacks in white neighborhoods. Not enough Hispanics here, not enough Asians there. Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the federal government the power to dictate such things. But places that do not mix and match people the way...

Danielle Hill has a secret, one she shares with dozens of other residents of Baltimore public housing. It goes like this: They don't live in the city. Instead, they live in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford and Howard counties, in houses purchased by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. Thousands more have moved to the counties with special rent subsidies in a companion program. Hill's family is among nearly 10,000 black women and children who have moved into overwhelmingly white, prosperous suburbs through a court-ordered relocation program designed to combat the intense inner-city segregation and poverty forged by decades of discrimination....

More bad news about the Omnibus spending bill: the Gosar Amendment language has been stripped out. This language would have prevented the Obama administration from implementing its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH), a radical plan to use the power of the national government to create communities of a certain kind, each having what the federal government deems an appropriate mix of economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. Apparently, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan weren’t up to defending the freedom of Americans to decide, through their local governments, how they will live — just as they weren’t up to slapping down...

...Earlier this year, the federal agency - Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced the "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule," (AFFH). This is Barack Obama's most radical assault on American citizens and local governments...

Elvis Summers has made it a full time job to put a roof over the head of some of Los Angeles’ homeless people by building tiny homes for them. He is helping people in need before the holidays so that they can have a home before the temperatures drop. Summers expressed fear that without shelter, people who were living on the streets would die...