Free Republic

Rising housing costs in Colorado are making it hard for teachers to stay in the area, so officials are moving in to help. As Colorado’s housing costs skyrocket, a growing number of school districts, local leaders, and lawmakers are taking steps to make housing more affordable for teachers and staff. For years, resort communities like Aspen, Colorado, and a rural district in the state’s Eastern Plains have leased housing to employees at below-market rates. More recently, subsidized housing for educators has cropped up in pricey urban areas such as San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore. But lately, Colorado districts big and...

Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller says President-elect Donald Trump is showing Americans how to live large and love it. "We used to be more into modest living," the Yale professor told CNBC, speaking about the years after the financial crisis. "Now people are thinking, '[that] doesn't work.' You know? You have to live big-league and you're on your way," Shiller said. Shiller said the excitement is visible at Trump rallies and in the stock market. Shiller's comments add to budding sentiment that America's new billionaire-in-chief — with his gold-plated penthouse, private jumbo jet and multiple mansions — could shift U.S....

Last year we noted, via the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, that rents in San Francisco and surrounding areas had grown so out of control that even Ivy Leaguers, like 31 year old Luke Iseman of The Wharton School, were having a hard time making ends meet. After growing tired of renting a run down, tiny apartment for $4,200 per month, Iseman decided to take a novel approach to housing. So he rented out a warehouse space and filled it with 11 steel shipping containers that he now rents out as makeshift apartments for $1,000 per month. We learn more from Bloomberg:...

Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. The ultimate goal [] is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts...

EXCLUSIVE: FIFTY percent of asylum seekers surveyed about the quality of housing they have been provided, which is paid for by the taxpayer, have branded it as "completely inadequate", it has emerged. Refugees housed across Birmingham and the West Midlands were quizzed about the standard of accommodation they were provided and a further 17 per cent described it as just "mediocre". The properties were provided by G4S, one of three companies hired by the Home Office to provide asylum seeker accommodation up and down the country. Just 11 percent of people asked said the housing was excellent, eight percent described...

New figures from Statistics Denmark show that home prices increased by nearly two percent in July, the latest month for which numbers are available. The national average for single-family houses roses by 1.6 percent, while apartment prices increased by 1.4 percent over the month before. The jump is even greater, at 2.2 and 2.3 percent respectively, when the period of May to July is compared with February to April. …

Wow! MN Housing Board to Pay Monthly Rent for Migrants Traveling Back to East Africa Jim Hoft Oct 1st, 2016 1:02 pm 188 Comments somali muslims minnesota Somali Muslims at a town hall event in Minnesota. The Minneapolis Housing Authority passed legislation this week that will allow migrants to skip their monthly rent in Minnesota when they travel back home to East Africa. The move was sought by local East African immigrants. Immigrants traveling for 30 to 90 days could apply for a hardship which will reduce their rent to $75 a month while they are gone. The Star Tribune...

A new report out shows rent prices are falling in several Bay Area cities. The trend for rent prices has been up for such a long time but in San Francisco, rent came down by 6 percent last month. Abodo, an apartment search website, released a new study showing where the biggest increases and decreases were in rents for one bedroom apartments across the country. >>>Click here to see the report. Rent in San Francisco between August to September went from around $3,950 a month to around $3,700. In San Jose, the news was better. It ranked number two in...

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The number of New Yorkers applying for emergency grants to stay in their homes is skyrocketing — as the number of people staying in homeless shelters reached an all-time high last weekend, records show. There were 82,306 applications for one-time emergency grants to prevent evictions in fiscal 2016, up 26 percent from 65,138 requests the previous year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report. The city’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. Without the aid — which comes from city funds and was approved in roughly two-thirds of the cases — even more families would likely have entered...

A French immigrant family that voluntarily moved to Great Britain is now complaining about their housing conditions, saying the five-bedroom home they were offered courtesy of the British taxpayer is too small because it “doesn’t even have a dining room.” The Daily Mail reports the Sube family moved from France to Britain in 2012 so the father, 33-year-old Arnold Mballe, could study mental health nursing at the University of Bedfordshire. His wife, Jeanne, is reportedly a stay-at-home mother who, like her husband, is not employed. The couple has eight children. After having been housed by the Luton Borough Council first...

It was the boldest California housing policy proposal in years: Allow any residential project that complies with local zoning and sets aside as few as five percent of its units as affordable to be built “as of right,” removing review from local municipalities. The idea was to fast-track approvals and reduce the cost of building as the state struggles with a crushing housing crisis. But after three months of debate and widespread opposition, the proposal by Gov. Jerry Brown, meant to boost the state’s housing production in the face of record-high housing prices, appears to be dead. … Dozens of...

SIERRA VISTA — City and Cochise County officials and the owner of several properties in the Fry Townsite have agreed upon the basis of a deal which would ultimately result in the clearing away of dozens of dilapidated mobile homes and junk vehicles from the county enclave. The final details of the deal are still being fine-tuned and will have to be accepted by a federal bankruptcy court, but after months of negotiations between property owner Lane Balmer and Mary Jacobs, assistant city manager of Sierra Vista, as well as Britt Hanson, chief civil deputy attorney for the Cochise County...

Housing prices in Michigan have recovered from the Great Recession. The price of the average home sale in Michigan in the first six months of 2016 was $147,323. This is the highest since 2006, and approaching record levels. Other state housing value indicators are up as well. The federal Housing Finance Authority’s house price index says that Michigan’s values increased 33.6 percent from the first quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2016. That’s the seventh-highest increase among the states. The growth of housing values is a good thing for homeowners and landlords. But it also is driving a...

In hopes of promoting the narrative of a US housing recovery, one recurring thesis has been that as Millennials get older and start families, they will eventually leave their parents' basement and buy a house or shift from renting to owning. So far the facts have refused to corroborate this, and according to the latest "Housing Vacancies and Homeownership" report released on Thursday, the dream of owning a home just became even more distant. The reason: after staging a feeble rebound in late 2015, the US homeownership rate just tumbled from 63.5% to 62.9%, tied for the lowest print going...

After rising just over a decade ago to its highest level ever, the nation's home ownership rate fell to match its all-time low and could drop even further in the months to come. In the second quarter of this year, the rate fell to 62.9 percent, not seasonally adjusted, which is the same as it was in 1965, when the U.S. Census started tracking the metric. During the epic housing boom in the mid-2000s, the rate soared as high as 69.2 percent. That was when politicians touted the so-called "ownership society."

Ambitious expansion plans by small and medium towns across China have lead to the creation of more than 3,500 “new areas” for residential and economic use raising fears many are destined to become ghost towns. The combined projected population of these new areas is an “impossible” 3.4 billion people – 2.5 times the current number of people in the country, experts say. The world’s population today stands at 7.3 billion, according to the US Census Bureau.

FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, states have quickly adopted most building safety features blessed by the Washington-based nonprofit that recommends minimum codes for the nation. But that’s not what happened after the International Code Council decided in 2008 that every new American home should have fire sprinklers. Fire Fight Far outside DC, there’s a campaign finance fight taking place over fire safety. And it’s putting families at risk. Instead, a review by ProPublica shows, U.S. homebuilders and realtors unleashed an unprecedented campaign to fend off the change, which they argued would not improve safety enough to justify the added cost....

Pending home sales dove 3.7%, well below the Bloomberg Econoday consensus estimate of -1%, and even below the bottom estimate of -2.4% The bad details continue, as last month’s huge rise of 5.1% was lowered to 3.9%. “Highlights Existing home sales have been trending higher but today’s pending home sales index, which tracks contract signings, may be pointing to slowing for the early part of the summer. The index fell a steep 3.7 percent in the May report to nearly reverse a downward revised 3.9 percent jump in April. Year-on-year, the pending sales index is down 0.2 percent which hints...

If freedom holds any value, we must educate our neighbors to the link between property and human rights, and the dangers of a government that can peel off either on a whim President Obama is successfully executing the most dangerous seizure of individual choice in our history because Americans are growing blind to the bond between property rights and human rights. While farm owners surrender their land development rights to governments, federal agencies relocate affordable housing next to million dollar homes, and declare entire neighborhoods discriminatory.