Free Republic

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...

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...

...Earlier this year, the federal agency - Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced the "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule," (AFFH). This is Barack Obama's most radical assault on American citizens and local governments...

Coinciding with the mass release of federal inmates, the Obama administration is spending $1.7 million on a “re-entry program” to ease the transition from prison and ordering public housing facilities not to reject tenants with criminal records.The goal is to reduce barriers to public housing, employment and educational opportunities by promoting rehabilitation and reintegration for the formerly incarcerated, the feds explain in an announcement. A key component of the program is a joint venture between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to help public housing residents expunge or seal their criminal records....

It's sad watching most Republican candidates promise to make cuts in federal spending without ever actually telling us where the cuts would occur... All that changed last night, however, when Ted Cruz called for the elimination of the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Commerce, and Education, as well as the IRS. The liberal media will be focusing on the fact that he mentioned eliminating Commerce twice. I prefer to focus on the merits of what he has announced. The Department of Energy. We have a Department of Energy that generates no energy. Instead, the DOE distributes nearly...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The Department of Housing and Urban Development provided a $9.4 million loan guarantee to renovate an apartment complex here eight months after the owner convinced the county to value the complex at just $3.8 million, a Watchdog.org investigation found. The loan for Apollo Village Apartments defaulted and the property was foreclosed on in 2012 with HUD losing as much as $4.5 million on the deal, public trustee records show. Pete Sepp, president of the National Union of Taxpayers, said these government programs put a substantial amount of taxpayer money at risk and should be eliminated. ......

Every cloud may not have a silver lining, but Westchester County has just found a big one in a legal ruling that will cost it $5 million in federal funds. The case turns on the Housing & Urban Development Department’s effort at social engineering to end what it claims is rampant housing discrimination in Westchester. The cloud: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals said that, to get HUD’s money, West­­chester must play by HUD’s rules in complying with a 2009 agreement to build affordable housing in upscale communities. The silver lining: The judges also said, “There has been no finding,...

If your town is taking HUD housing dollars, diversity, in the form of third world refugees, is on the way Posted by Ann Corcoran on September 6, 2015 I’m old enough to remember the time when Rep. Mo Udall wanted the federal government to control all land use decisions (zoning) in America (yes, he really did!) and the Left has been angling for that power for all the decades since. Udall’s mission, of course, was to protect the environment from developers (as one of its goals), Obama has another mission—to fundamentally change America by changing the people and will actually...

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing may be an attempt to create balanced living patterns. Rather than remove discrimination, AFFH leverages it to codify oppression Local rule died in America on July 8, 2015. With it passes the rights of rural and suburban communities to decide their own futures. The trigger was the final 377-page ruling from HUD called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing[ia] that attempts to remove discrimination and achieve balanced and integrated living patterns. As one blogger beams, “What could possibly be wrong with helping low-income families to move into better neighborhoods?” In this case, everything. AFFH is reminiscent of the...

Reflections on the release of the HUD watchdog's report on wasteful public housing assistance... The watchdog for the Department of Housing and Urban Development released a report. Some 25,000 families, only about 3% of the system, depending on how you look at it, receive federal housing assistance despite having earnings well above the income limits required to qualify for such subsidies. Major publications on both sides of the argument – such as the Daily Caller on the right and the Washington Post on the left – immediately seized on the issue and rightly blasted it. How dare the government provide...

Tens of thousands of people who earn too much to qualify for the U.S. government’s taxpayer-subsidized public housing live in the facilities nationwide and the federal agency that runs the program has no intention of evicting the violators. That’s because “there are positive social benefits from having families with varying income levels residing in the same property,” according to the Obama administration official that runs the program.Some beneficiaries earn tens of thousands of dollars a year more than the threshold allowed to qualify for the cheap housing and, in at least one case, a millionaire pays a mere $300 a...

A family of four in New York City makes $497,911 a year but pays $1,574 a month to live in public housing in a three-bedroom apartment subsidized by taxpayers. In Los Angeles, a family of five that’s lived in public housing since 1974 made $204,784 last year but paid $1,091 for a four-bedroom apartment. And a tenant with assets worth $1.6 million — including stocks, real estate and retirement accounts — last year paid $300 for a one-bedroom apartment in public housing in Oxford, Neb. In a new report, the watchdog for the Department of Housing and Urban Development describes...

The Democrat-Media Complex have just told us what they fear the most as an issue in the 2016 election: President Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” suburbia (as explained today by Jeannie DeAngelis). This is an issue that literally hits voters where they live, by using the denial of federal funding to override local control and force communities to provide low-income housing distributed to approved minority groups. Investor’s Business Daily reports that all three broadcast networks ignored the story that affects their viewers more directly than almost any other issue. The Big Three news networks all punted on covering one of...

And, lo and behold, it will be coming very soon to your neighborhood, in the form of a fair housing rule promulgated by Obama. This rule, known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH), has been shrouded in secrecy. Obama, the ultimate leftist, continues with his false utopian dreams. Repeatedly, Obama openly supports the notion that wealthy people have no right to their wealth. And, furthermore, it is the principled right of poor people – or the government serving their so-called interests – to rob the affluent of their hard-earned wealth. In traditional Obama fashion, the AFFH will actually...

The Supreme Court issued an important ruling last month when it reminded state and local governments that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 bars them from spending federal housing money in a manner that perpetuates racial segregation. Last week, the Obama administration took an even more important step — one that has already changed the decades-long discussion about how to combat residential segregation. It rewrote the rules under the provision of the act that requires state and local governments to “affirmatively further” housing goals by making real efforts to cope with the cumulative results of the discrimination that confined black...

The Obama administration unveiled new rules Wednesday to rid the country of racially segregated neighborhoods by directing cities and towns to set goals for reducing segregation, and then regularly report their progress to the feds. Communities nationwide will be given a series of questions designed to help them figure out whether racial bias is causing segregated neighborhoods, racial or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, unequal access to opportunity or disproportionate housing needs in their jurisdiction. They will be required to set goals related to that data and publicly report on their progress every three to five years. The Department of...

The federal government doesn’t want you to choose where to live, it wants to be able to decide that for you too, and they’re implementing that plan with new rules to order that by race. Because that’s how we defeat racism, we organize people by race.From the Washington Post: …on Wednesday, the Obama administration will announce long-awaited rules designed to repair the law’s unfulfilled promise and promote the kind of racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded deeply segregated cities like Chicago and Baltimore. The new rules, a top demand of civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over...

The Obama administration on Wednesday will announce new rules requiring cities to look for racial bias in housing practices in order to promote racially integrated neighborhoods, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. The rules would further the work of the landmark 1968 Fair Housing Act, which made it illegal to refuse to sell or rent a home to a person based on race, religion, gender or national origin. The Post said cities and towns now would be required to look for patterns of racial bias in local housing, report the results every three to five years and set goals on...

A government study says housing vouchers may be the best way to reduce homelessness in the United States. A Department of Housing and Urban Development study released Tuesday examined homeless families in emergency shelters in 12 U.S. cities. After 18 months, the families that were offered a housing voucher were less likely to re-enter homelessness or experience housing instability. …

A while back we discussed a proposed plan which Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was preparing to roll out. The goal was apparently to use public funds to impose a bit more “diversity” on neighborhoods by improving lower income neighborhood properties while mandating more low cost, public housing in wealthier areas. The response around here was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic, but hey… this is just one small corner of the interwebs, right? Perhaps the rest of the nation sees this as a wonderful opportunity and an idea whose time has come round at last. Let’s check in with...