Free Republic

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...

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.