Free Republic

While 86 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 see owning a house as more affordable than renting —and 68 percent view their first house as a "stepping stone" to a dream home — just one in five think they can make a down payment, according to a new report released Wednesday by Bank of America. (The bank, it should be noted, made an unusually low $960 million in consumer mortgage banking income last year.) Millennials, the generation that last year, for the first time in the modern era, became more likely to live with their parents...

LOS ANGELES - A Los Angeles man says he’s found a solution to the city’s housing crisis in the most unlikeliest of places. T.K. Devine wants to help solve L.A.’s homeless problem with portable toilets. “Folks who are living it rough and living on the streets and are trying to make a better life for themselves, they need consistency,” Devine told CBS Los Angeles. “They need a good night’s rest.” The 35-year-old founder of Porta-Home is converting portable toilets into portable homes out of a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, including one built for himself....The system rests on a trailer that...

Building a house completely by hand can be both time-consuming and expensive. A number of home-builders have chosen to automate part of the construction process (i.e. by printing the home's parts) instead. A new Ukrainian homebuilding startup called Passivdom uses a 3D-printing robot that can print parts for tiny houses. The machine can print the walls, roof, and floor of Passivdom's 380-square-foot model in about eight hours. The windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical systems are then added by a human worker. When complete, the homes are completely autonomous and mobile, meaning they don't need to connect to external electrical and...

Larry Elder reads from a 2006 article in The American Spectator entitled, "Race to the Top" (http://tinyurl.com/gn88j7m). In the article we find out some interesting sides to the new Senate Minority Leader. And I am sure this info will become much more public now that the words of Sen. Schumer (D-NY) are in the troposphere.

New York has a problem: buying an apartment here is way too expensive. Mayor de Blasio has grouchily ambled along with a solution: make apartments even more expensive. That makes no sense. But it’s the principle of the mayor’s proposed “mansion tax.” Last week, de Blasio went up to Albany to push his idea: forcing home buyers to pay a “paltry” 2.5 percent tax on the value of purchases above $2 million. The tax would raise $336 million a year. That would be enough to subsidize 25,000 poorer elderly folks’ rent by a little more than $1,000 a month, as...

With housing affordability a huge concern for many Sydney residents, one organisation is offering low- to middle-income earners the opportunity to live more cheaply in smaller spaces. Evolve Housing's initiative has already seen single people and couples making the switch to one-bedroom, one-bathroom places that are close to work but do not hurt the hip pocket. But can people actually live in a tiny apartment? The ABC took a tour inside one to see what it would be like.

CINCINNATI - U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, will highlight in downtown Cincinnati this morning key infrastruture projects, such as the Brent Spence Bridge, as he outlines a framework to rebuild and repair the country’s infrastructure which will create millions of construction jobs. The northern Ohio Senator will be joined by Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority President and CEO Laura Brunner, and OKI Regional Council of Governments Deputy Executive DirectorRobert Koehler. President Donald Trump previously promised $1 trillion of investment in American infrastructure during his campaign. Brown joined Senate colleagues to release a roadmap for making...

Ben Carson is now officially confirmed as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, following the Senate vote Thursday morning. The approval locks in one of the few remaining cabinet members left to be approved. The Senate floor voted the day before on the motion to invoke cloture on the nomination of Carson, passing the vote 62-37. The significant majority vote gave Carson a likely green light to be confirmed on Thursday. Despite a controversial start to his nomination, it turned out to be all bark and no bite as his hearing went fairly smooth. The former neurosurgeon...

One unresolved issue from the financial crisis is the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two firms that stand behind much of America’s housing market. Fannie and Freddie purchase mortgages, bundle them into securities and sell them on to investors with a guarantee. When America’s housing market collapsed a decade ago, the government had to bail them out. Its treatment of the firms since then has created a titanic legal struggle. Shareholders have cried foul. On February 21st, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling in the government’s favour. At issue is the Obama administration’s decision in 2012...

NEW ORLEANS — At 75, Deacon John Moore considers himself one of the lucky ones: The scion of three generations of music-making Creoles, he’s been able to sustain himself with his guitar, raise a family, buy a house. Most other musicians here, he says, aren’t so fortunate. He’s tooling around the streets of Treme — one of the nation’s oldest black neighborhoods and the birthplace of jazz — in his ancient Volvo, pointing out all the gentrified houses, the ones with the jacked up rents. Everybody wants to live here now, he said. New Orleans is enjoying a renaissance 12...

My former employer is trying to make me pay for repair to labor housing. I was REQUIRED to live on the job site and be on call. When one is required to live in labor housing, it does NOT count as income, either federally or in state law. There also was no lease/tenancy agreement which would suggest it was a landlord tenant arrangement. There was no payment for the home in anyway. My understanding is as the house is essentially part of the work place, labor is not required to pay for rehabing the place(paint, new carpet, flooring, etc.) or...

Programs like Joseph Project, the Miss Mary Project create real sustainable success that can blossom into prosperity and change lives. If HUD will use their vast communications network to support those community efforts, we will shrink poverty Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has expanded its mandate to enforce these laws by labeling everything that is not equal, from the educational experience and housing, to the relative wealth of your residential zip code, as discriminatory.

Tipped off to the students’ plans for the Women’s March by Campus Reform, administrators including Chief of Police Jay Gruber emailed the campus to say they aren’t allowed to “sublease or rent” their campus residences for the inauguration on platforms such as Airbnb.

During his confirmation hearing Thursday, Ben Carson repeatedly refused to guarantee that money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development would not go to benefit President-elect Donald Trump or his family. “Among the billions of dollars that you will be handing out in grants and loans, can you just assure us that not one dollar will go to benefit either the president-elect or his family?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked. “I can assure you that the things that I do are driven by a sense of morals and values,” Carson responded. “And therefore I will absolutely not play favorites...

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. …