Free Republic

We have written about how “regionalism” and its handmaiden “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) are, in effect, an attempt by the left to dictate the way Americans will live. Now, we see that they also entail an attempt to tell elected officials what they must say. This has become apparent from efforts to muzzle Westchester Country Executive Rob Astorino. Westchester County, New York is ground zero in the left’s push for its vision of regionalism. Under Democratic leadership, the County entered into a settlement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The County agreed to build 750 “affordable housing...

Rotterdam studio Kraaijvanger has designed a modular kitchen and bathroom unit that can be inserted into an empty building to turn it into a residence (+ slideshow). Called the Hub, the boxy 15-square-metre unit is designed by Kraaijvanger to be installed into almost any type of building, from disused office blocks to warehouses, as long as the structure has electricity and water connections. Each module contains a kitchen, bathroom and toilet, as well as facilities including heating, a sound system and a Wi-Fi connection – providing residents with almost everything they need to live comfortably. It is also possible to...

Palo Alto officials are considering providing subsidized housing for people earning up to $250,000, as rent and home prices soar in the Silicon Valley city. The plan is a among a series of proposals being mulled by the Palo Alto City Council to provide affordable housing to those considered middle class in the area - families making between $150,000 to $250,000 annually. The median household income in the U.S. in 2014 was about $52,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics. The proposals include building about 2,000 new units that would be made available for those earning less than $250,000, as...

Various companies and startups around the world are already exploring 3D printing construction solutions, usually involving a concrete 3D printer. The idea is that this can not only greatly speed up customized production, but will also significantly reduce construction costs. But the founder of Brazilian startup Urban3D Anielle Guedes looks far beyond costs or customized, artistic housing. She has been dreaming about a completely different purpose: to use efficient 3D printing construction to combat the world's growing slum problems. For whatever way you're looking at the situation, there's certainly a growing slum problem. Thanks to economic realities and a population...

The next housing crisis is here. And this time the crisis is all about one thing: supply. Following the mid-aughts housing bubble that saw homeowners across the country get themselves upside down in homes and mortgages they couldn't ever afford to repay — a crisis that was as much about too much supply as it was about too much bad financing — the market has gone the complete other direction. First-time home buyers are crowded out, with Trulia's chief economist Ralph McLaughlin writing Monday that the number of starter homes on the market has declined 43.6% in the last four...

"For rent: Downtown apartment, 2 bedrooms. Includes organic garden space, hot tub, great backyard. You can bring your dogs if they have references as good as yours. If voting for Donald Trump, do not call." This ad appeared in The Nickel, a free paper in Grand Junction — and even before the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel published an article about it on Saturday, landlord Mark Holmes received push-back from fans of Donald Trump by way of ugly voicemail messages. And that's not to mention the comments that have appeared in posts about the ad that have appeared on conservative websites, some of...

According to a new study released by online loan marketplace LendingTree, more young people are pursuing home ownership. "The under-35 crowd had been, for some years, hesitant to enter the housing market, but we're seeing that start to shift," said Doug Lebda, CEO of LendingTree, in a press release. "The data all points to the fact that millennials are increasingly eager to own rather than rent, and even the incredibly high real estate prices in some markets don't necessarily deter them." Case in point: Boston, one of the priciest cities to buy a home, topped LendingTree's ranking, which was created...

The CHA pays him $3,911 a month in federal funds to lease his townhouse to the woman and three others in her household, including a child under the age of 6, records show. It also has been a good deal for Lai’s tenant. She pays no rent because, CHA officials say, she has no income. The CHA declined to identify her or other voucher clients, though it released the names of landlords. Public housing doesn’t conjure images of a near-$1 million home. But the CHA foots most or all of the bill for Lai’s tenant and others to live in...

According to personal finance site SmartAsset, fewer than 35% of adults under age 35 own a home. But owning a home doesn't have to be a far-off dream, even if you're still in your 20s or early 30s. In a recent report, SmartAsset determined the best cities in the US for first-time homebuyers by looking at data on the affordability, mortgage availability, and stability of the housing market in every city with a population over 300,000. For millennials in search of their first home, Oklahoma and Texas are going to be the best buys — five of the top ten...

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...