Free Republic

The Obama administration will announce plans Wednesday to seek investors' ideas for turning thousands of foreclosed properties owned by government-backed entities into rental homes, according to administration officials. The move is intended to put a floor under declining home prices by creating a way to deal with hundreds of thousands of potential foreclosures in coming years. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sold a record 100,000 homes during the second quarter. Together with the Federal Housing Administration, the entities owned about 250,000 homes at the end of June, or around half of all unsold, repossessed properties. Another 830,000 homes...

FAIRFAX, Va. -- Resort-style swimming pools with fountains and heated spas, billiards rooms, granite counter tops, ceramic tile, indoor basketball courts, stainless steel appliances -- many Fairfax County taxpayers cannot afford such luxuries. But they are paying for these amenities for use by low-income residents who live in subsidized housing in affluent neighborhoods. "They're a part of our rental program where we subsidize the rents for the individuals in the units, and we end up having to pick up the condo fees," supervisor Pat Herrity told 630 WMAL News. Herrity does not advocate putting low-income residents in "ghetto-style" housing but...

It used to be that, to live in Chatham, you practically had to know someone. As a mother with no husband — despite having a 9-to-5 — my chances of finding a landlord who’d rent me an apartment in one of Chatham’s immaculate three-flats were slim. The landlords there could afford to be picky. Few of them would rent to you just because you told them you were a mom desperate to move to a neighborhood where you didn’t have to worry about gangs and guns. That’s another thing that’s different about Chatham these days. Looking for the new Chatham,...

CHARLOTTE — It was clear that Liza Jackson’s luck had changed when she drove her pearl-white Dodge sedan, the one with the huge pink plastic eyelashes over the headlights, into Pinebrook, an eight-year-old subdivision where residents tend to notice cars with huge pink eyelashes. “There goes the neighborhood,” one homeowner said when she heard that her potential new neighbor had a federal housing voucher known as a Section 8.

In the Spring of 1968 at the Bing Nursery School in Palo Alto California, America came to an end. Within its walls, the elites learned just how cheaply our souls could be had: All it cost was a couple of minutes and one marshmallow per soul on average.

SAN DIEGO – The parents were hard-working owners of a towing business. Their 17-year-old daughter was excited about this weekend's prom and preparing for college. Their 9-year-old girl played with children in the neighborhood. All four were found dead in a backyard swimming pool and a bathtub in what police are calling a murder-suicide, stunning neighbors and friends who said they saw no signs of trouble. Police said one of the four family members committed suicide but declined to say which one. The San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office was expected to rule on the causes of death as early...

Green Township is being singled out because federal investigators believe the housing authority blocked new public housing there for at least the past two years. More public housing for the poor is likely headed to Green Township and some other communities as part of a deal to resolve a discrimination complaint against Cincinnati's housing authority.

Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children: Panel to Examine New Report with Latest Data– Tue Mar 29, 7:50 am ET WASHINGTON, March 29, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new Center for Immigration Studies report finds that, 13 years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes – not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs...

More than a third of California's African American public high school students dropped out before graduation day, a startling number and one that's on the rise, according to 2009 data released Tuesday. The 37 percent African American dropout rate, up three percentage points from the prior year, was far above that of any other ethnic subgroup. Hispanic students had the second highest rate at 27 percent. Locally, San Francisco cautiously celebrated a 9 percent overall dropout rate, a stark contrast to Oakland's 40 percent, numbers still under review for accuracy. The statewide statistics highlight a pervasive achievement gap in test...

David Cameron today defended the Government's plans to limit housing benefit, saying it was not fair for working people to see their taxes used to fund homes 'they couldn't even dream of'. The Prime Minister dismissed reports there could be a climbdown over the proposals, telling Labour leader Ed Miliband: 'We are going forward with all the proposals we put in the spending review and in the Budget'.

WASHINGTON — The American suburb is no longer a refuge from poverty in cities. A pair of analyses by the nonprofit Brookings Institution paints a bleak economic picture for the 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade and in coming years, and finds that suburbs now are home to one-third of the nation's poor, and rising. The study of census data finds that since 2000, the number of poor people in the suburbs jumped by 37.4 percent to 13.7 million. The growth rate of suburban poverty is more than double that of cities and higher than the national rate...

At least 120 municipalities spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit, a Times analysis of state data shows. Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units. ___ TITLE BURIES LEAD ___ Second of two parts — Cities across California have skirted or ignored laws requiring them to build affordable homes and in the process mismanaged hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, a Times investigation has found. At least 120 municipalities — nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies — spent a combined...

The Washington Times lead editorial today is about the Justice Department enabling voter fraud — just in time for the November elections. This is due to the Department’s refusal to enforce the part of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls — people who have died or moved away, and felons who have not yet had their voting rights restored. The longer such names remain on a registration list, the greater the chances that a fraudulent vote will be cast in their names. I reported in 2009 that...

Georgia investigators started arresting about 80 people around the state Wednesday for allegedly lying their way into federally funded Section 8 housing. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan said 63 people were arrested by Wednesday evening and more will follow in coming weeks. The announcement of further arrests was intended as a threat toward Section 8 cheaters across the state. Keenan invited those who have erred on their Section 8 forms to come forward, since they could receive leniency. Those found cheating would have to leave the housing and pay back what they owe, but they might not face...

Some things need to be said about the mob that showed up to glom some applications for Section 8 welfare housing in East Point this week, and I’m your guy — the (ahem) author of The New York Times best-seller “Somebody’s Gotta Say It.” My experience with these Section 8 “clients” goes back to the mid-1970s when I had a law office at the First National Bank building in Decatur. It was my misfortune to occupy an office down the hall from the Decatur Housing Authority. Being a quick learner, I figured out I needed to be somewhere else on...

East Point residents began lining up to turn in Section 8 housing applications before daybreak Thursday, a day after a crowd of 30,000 mobbed a shopping center to pick up the forms. This time, less than a dozen people were in line. [Goes on to describe yesterday's chaos in the heat]

... The program, known as Section 8, has for decades put families in functional but basic homes and apartments, sometimes in less-than-desirable communities. But overbuilding during the housing boom has left so many homes available that landlords, desperate for renters, are wooing Section 8 recipients, whose government subsidies, delivered electronically, guarantee the landlord gets paid. As a result, Section 8 recipients suddenly have a housing smorgasbord. Plenty of average housing stock remains in many places, but in certain markets, there are also more upscale selections. On the website GoSection8.com, landlords nationwide tout boom-era showpieces—replete with "great rooms," backyard swimming pools...

Saying she did not wish to burden the taxpayers any longer, a circuit judge this morning released Angel Adams, the homeless mother of 12 dependent children who was jailed last week after refusing

At the beginning of the decade, a plague of chaos erupted in working class neighborhoods across America. In once relatively peaceful areas, epidemics of murder, rape and robbery broke out. Police faced a grim situation. The mayhem once contained to isolated sections of the city had jumped the breaks. A firestorm had erupted destroying neighborhoods and ripping apart families. Horrifying though it may be, crime is mundane in one respect: It tends to occur in predictable patterns. These patterns signify that the thin veneer of civilization is holding. Without the thin veneer of civilization, man would tear himself to shreds....

Imagine if a plague was intentionally set loose in your neighborhood: A plague of social disintegration leading to the widespread rape of women, sack of property and a skyrocketing homicide rate. During the 1990's, this is exactly what happened. As part of a grand experiment, the working class were injected with a dose of poverty and chaos ensued: Neighborhoods were ruined, lives were destroyed and families were ripped apart. This experiment continues to this day