Free Republic

Hemet - The gated community in Hemet doesn't seem like the best place for Eddie and Maria Lopez to raise their family anymore. Vandals knocked out the streetlight in front of the Lopezes' five-bedroom home and then took advantage of the darkness to try to steal a van. Cars are parked four deep in the driveway next door, where a handful of men rent rooms. And up and down their block of handsome single-family homes are padlocked doors, orange "no trespassing signs" and broken front windows. It wasn't what the Lopezes pictured when they agreed to pay $440,000 for their...

<p>A 12-year-old boy and 16-year-old boy were in critical condition tonight after they were wounded in a drive-by shooting as they walked to a 7-Eleven store, police said.</p> <p>The shootings also left a 14-year-old girl injured with a graze wound but her condition did not appear life-threatening, said Schaumburg police Sgt. John Nebl.</p>

Sharon Jasper has spent 57 of her 58 years dedicated to one cause and one cause only, and has nothing to show for her dedicated servitude... She has lived in Section 8 housing all but 1 of her 58 years. It was a legacy passed down from her parents who moved into Section 8 housing in 1949 when she was six months old.. She has passed the legacy down to her children, but fears they may have to get jobs to pay for the utilities and deposits. She laments about her one year hiatus from the comfort of her Section...

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration, in a major shift on housing policy, is abandoning George W. Bush’s vision of creating an “ownership society’’ and instead plans to pump $4.25 billion of economic stimulus money into creating tens of thousands of federally subsidized rental units in American cities. The idea is to pay for the construction of low-rise rental apartment buildings and town houses, as well as the purchase of foreclosed homes that can be refurbished and rented to low- and moderate-income families at affordable rates.

Gun rights advocates scored a victory Thursday as the House Financial Services Committee adopted an amendment to allow guns in public housing projects. The amendment, by Tom Price , R‑Ga., would bar any housing authority from restricting legal ownership of guns. It was adopted, 38-31, as the committee continued its markup of a housing bill (HR 3045) that the panel is expected to approve next week. “Seniors and other individuals have the right to protect themselves,” said Joe Baca of California, one of 13 Democrats who voted for the amendment. “Those guns would be registered, and those individuals have a...

Obama is already showing mental and emotional fatigue - won't last another term with this weak display of performance. There is no doubt he wouldn't last another term of the presidential spotlight. The democrats will have pay a high price for his lack of 'savvy skills' thus the demise of the party.

The financial meltdown has produced a vast patchwork of foreclosed and abandoned single-family homes across America, accelerating the decades-long migration of our nation's poor from cities to the suburban fringe. In 2005, as rising property values reduced affordable-housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods, suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time. The trend will continue. By 2025, predicts planning expert Arthur C. Nelson, America will face a market surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income residents deeper into suburbia where decay and social and geographic isolation will...

It pays when someone else pays.I initially thought President Obama was going to turn a blind eye and neglect the housing crisis in his porktabulous $787 billion spending bill in favor of doorknobs, STD awareness, hybrid cars and abandoned mine sites. It looks like I couldn't be more wrong ... and it took an article I read at the Indy Mind blog to bring it to my attention. (Thanks a million, Arkady).Nothing apparently gets by President Obama - that is, except the truth, American values and the need to keep terrorists caged. Housing, as it turns out, is a huge...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   California: NRA Victory in San Francisco Lawsuit!   Thursday, January 29, 2009   PUBLIC HOUSING OFFICIALS DROP ILLEGAL BAN ON FIREARMS POSSESSION IN PUBLIC HOUSING An NRA-led coalition of self-defense civil rights groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) has prevailed in a Second Amendment lawsuit challenging a ban on firearm possession in San Francisco public housing residences. “This success is further vindication of the U.S. Supreme Court's Heller ruling upholding the Second Amendment as protecting a fundamental, individual civil right for all law-abiding...

I like most Mexican people, just as I like most Americans. I don’t have prejudice against them, they are God’s children, just like me. So let’s get that out of the way. What I do hate, is illegal activity. I don’t like it when people ignore our laws, and sneak into our country. Yes, yes, we are a country of immigrants, I get that, I love that, I respect that, and encourage that. But, we are not a country of illegal immigrants. Law and order should be followed in all things. What I hate more than illegal immigration, is when...

What part of illegal alien is so difficult to understand? Apparently, there are those who are either too confused, too unwilling or too incapable of understanding the meaning of those simple words. Instead, they'd rather emotionalize any debate on illegal immigration with cries of racism, discrimination and an alleged lack of compassion for our fellow human beings. They choose this course rather than honestly dealing with the established fact we are a nation of laws - laws intended and necessary to preserve civility and order for our common good. I, for one, refuse to be intimidated or influenced by such...

Riverside and San Bernardino counties added more Latino residents between 2000 and 2007 than all but three other U.S. counties, a new analysis of U.S. Census data found. The report, by the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center, also found that most Latino population growth is now from new births. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was mostly from immigration. That means no matter what happens to the immigration rate, the Latino population of Riverside and San Bernardino counties will continue to grow steadily, reaching a majority within several years, experts say. Riverside County's Hispanic population surged 60 percent between...

A Story County district court judge granted a temporary injunction this week barring the city from complying with a Freedom of Information Act request for the addresses of people participating in Ames' city-run Section 8 subsidized housing program. The writ, authored by Judge Michael Moon and filed Monday, indicates that it appears the information sought by Ames resident Joe Monahan is protected under Iowa law and cannot be released, pending a full hearing into this matter on the legality of the request. No hearing date has yet been set. Monahan said he hadn't received the ruling, yet, but said he...

For all the talk of weaving public housing residents into the fabric of the city, the Chicago Housing Authority's ambitious Plan for Transformation includes this inconvenient fact: When the plan is complete, nearly 1 of every 10 of those families will live more than 100 blocks south of the Loop, tucked amid landfills, industrial parks and a sewage treatment plant. Mayor Richard Daley declared eight years ago that Chicago would end "the failed policies of the past." Yet a Tribune investigation found that the city has pumped hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars into housing complexes that preserve the...

This was not the first thing I wanted to hear this morning, yet perhaps I don't understand the context of President Bush's speech nor his intentions back then. What I heard this morning reminded me of President Johnson's Great Society programs. Again, and hopefully I have misunderstood the background on this. The following is my partial transcription of audio clips aired 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. on 790 KABC Talk Radio September 30, 2008. I also found the text of President Bush's 2002 speech and I posted it following my partial transcript of the audio segments. President Bush's 2002...

Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs. Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents....

Hey girls, want to get skanky? Well, sashay down to your local abuse shelter and get buzzed! No, you don't have to be a real victim of domestic violence. All you need is a convincing story. Last year Hollie Cephas of Monticello, Ark. arrived on the doorstep of the Options shelter to recount her tale of woe: Her husband had beaten her to the point of having two miscarriages, he hid her insulin, and once he even called her a "fat pig." The intake worker at Options had been taught to "always believe the victim," so of course she was...

Even million-dollar housing vouchers bring crime to the suburbs. ___ What if Section 8 housing voucher recipients were given $15 million vouchers, good for use in Malibu or Beverly Hills? The only question would be whether it would take a full five seconds for elite support for this federal housing program—which provides welfare families with a monthly rental check to move from ghettos to more stable working-class neighborhoods—to evaporate. The gorgeous sea-and-mountain community of Topanga Canyon, just south of Malibu, may have gotten a little taste of what such an experiment in serious social engineering might look like. In 2000,...

As a retired college professor I may live in a bubble of comfort, but I realize full well that millions of Americans live in poverty and hopelessness. It is truly unfortunate that every scheme advanced by liberals over the years aimed at helping people out of poverty has failed so miserably. AFDC Welfare has created millions of fatherless children to their detriment and to the great detriment of society as a whole. AFDC should be converted into a temporary emergency program for new recipients. In my last column I discussed the total failure of the Section 8 Housing program, and...

We could write columns for the rest of our lives just enumerating the failures of programs inspired by liberals and liberal philosophy – the Great Society, the destruction of families by Welfare, affirmative action, the destruction of our public education system, forced busing, shutdown of drilling for oil and stopping the building of more nuclear plants, dealing with Islamic terrorists in the criminal justice system, etc., etc. Today I want to focus on liberal programs in the area of housing.