Free Republic

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...

At 9:30 p.m. the other night, I was presented with a tragic lesson regarding one of our country's pig-headed policy errors, devised ever so quietly by President Barack Obama in league with progressives all over the country. Most Americans are unaware of this policy -- they never voted for it; they never debated it. The progressives are just imposing it on us through stealth. This is the Democrats' latest advance in democratic process. The other night, I had retired early after a long day of writing when suddenly my wife shook me. She asked me with some urgency if I'd...

President Barack Obama’s administration showed Tuesday that he wants to pressure landlords to ignore the criminal records of would-be renters. One inevitable result is that many law-abiding renters — including many African-Americans — will be forced to unknowingly live alongside felons they wish to avoid. According to Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the “disparate impact” theory of racism says landlords are racists if they have a color-blind practice of excluding all felons from their buildings. That color-bind practice is racist, say progressives, because it has a greater impact on African-Americans than on whites. It has a greater...

Obama's threat to the nation's housing providers Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation’s landlords. Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration’s novel interpretation of housing law.

Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation's landlords. Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration's novel interpretation of housing law. “The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” Obama's far-left Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julian Castro, told the annual meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week.  This is...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: One more thing about Obama. I had this at the bottom of The Stack today, but since Obama has gone and intruded on this program and the intended plan today -- and I'm not gonna give this guy much more leeway here, but he's out there asserting a bunch of garbage, and I had to nuke it. You may not have heard this. I just want to read this story as it's published in The Daily Caller: "The Obama administration released a warning Monday telling the nation's landlords that it may be discriminatory for them to refuse...

The Obama administration released a warning Monday telling the nation’s landlords that it may be discriminatory for them to refuse to rent to those with criminal records. The Fair Housing Act doesn’t include criminals as a protected class, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says refusing to rent based on a criminal record is a form of racial discrimination, due to racial imbalances in the U.S. justice system. For instance, while blacks are about 12 percent of the U.S. population, they are about 36 percent of the prison population. Hispanics are also overrepresented behind bars, though to...

The tiny house movement has taken America by storm, in part because our economy is in the toilet. People are striving to reduce their expenses by embracing minimalism. They’re breaking free from the corporate grind because, as I’ve always advised, they are learning to live with less and radically reducing their expenses.But, these days in America, you are sharply admonished when you try to live your life outside of the strictures of the 9-5 world. Is it any surprise that the government is now taking steps to limit our ability to drastically reduce our expenses? They always seem to...

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...