Caldara: ‘Affordable’ housing scheme a con job on the poor
Excerpt:
The left hates the poor, who are often minorities. I’ll go even further. The left is cruel to the poor.
Yet, somehow they get people to think they’re helping the poor.
Here’s a great case in point. The Denver Gazette reported the City and County of Denver is building a new condo complex for affordable ownership.
If you make less than $60,000, you MIGHT get to be one of only 130 folks to pay a mere $140,000 for a one-bedroom condo in a desirable, central downtown location. What an absolute steal! The estimated monthly payment would be only around $625, unheard of in Denver! After all the average price for a condo or townhome in Denver is now over $430,000.
To get one of these little gems would be winning the lottery.
Too bad it is a lie. A cruel, sick, and twisted lie to dupe the poor.
A similar “permanently affordable” scam is employed in my hometown of Boulder. It works like this: A developer, if he can even get permission to build housing units, must sell about 25% of them at a substantially reduced price to qualifying “poor” folks.
For those who don’t understand basic economics, that of course means the other 75% are sold well above cost.
The real cruelty happens when the “poor” homeowner tries to sell her property and realizes she only kinda, sorta owns her home.
To keep it “affordable” for the next person she can only sell it for what she paid for it, plus a small increase to cover inflation, improvements, and then maybe a slight profit.
Think of the inhumane dichotomy. The market price for these new condominiums is, let’s say, $200,000 each. And say the “poor” person can buy hers at an affordable $100,000. Well, her “regular” neighbor is going to have to pay more than $200,000 for his — a penalty for his white privilege.
Let’s say, a few years later, the market price for those condo units doubles in value. The regular guy now has $200,000 in equity he can use to start a business, retire, put kids through school or sell it and pocket the money.
The poor person who bought her house for only $100,000 has 50% more equity and can do even more with it than her neighbor, including selling it and pocketing $300,000. Except she can’t.
Her “ownership” is a pitiless lie. If she could sell it, the unit would no longer be “affordable” for the next “poor” lady.
...A recent Jersey City, New Jersey story illustrated the ugliness. An 82-year-old woman bought her government-subsidized affordable home 30 years ago; likely it’s paid off now. As she is getting on in years, the place isn’t working for her, she can no longer walk up the stairs.
She wants to sell her home, take her massive equity and move to Florida to be with her sister. All very reasonable and financially sound.
Only now does she realize most all her equity must go to the city, because she didn’t really own it in the first place — a 30-year rip-off job. Just when she went to cash in her nest egg, she found her balance sheets hundreds of thousands of dollars off. Nest empty. The city will use her cash to con another poor sucker into believing they’re buying a home to build a retirement.
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As I was told when growing up if it sounds too good it probably is.
New York Times Blames Flood in Poorly Designed Chinese Tunnel on Global Warming
Excerpt:
To lefties, Global Warming is their god whose actions explain everything that happens in this world. If there’s a flood in Germany, it was caused by their pet diety who can only be appeased by buying a Tesla and eating organic. If there’s heat deaths in Oregon, it’s time to ban plastic bags and genuflect underneath solar panels. And if a tunnel is flooded in China, you don’t blame shoddy design and construction.
No, you blame the Flying Global Warming Monster.
Flood Deaths in China Show Road Risks From Climate Change - New York Times
The actual story contains very little about global warming, but it’s not a headline if the story doesn’t reinforce a trite political narrative.
You can’t expect Times readers to browse a story about China unless it involves...
1. Trump
2. Global warming
3. Identity politics
...More than 200 cars were caught in a highway tunnel on Tuesday in central China when record-setting rainfall soaked the area. Torrents of water poured in the tunnel’s entrances, nearly filling it to the ceiling.
...Why did they pour in? Global warming, what are you some kind of science denier?
Initially, international attention to transportation safety risks from extreme weather focused on drownings in a subway tunnel that filled with water during the same cloudburst in Zhengzhou, in central China’s Henan Province. But the highway-tunnel flooding deaths highlight the risks that climate change can also pose to motorists, transportation safety experts said this weekend.
Or you know, the risks that terrible designs in a Communist dictatorship notorious for its horrible design failures that have killed countless people over the years with dam disasters, road disasters, and assorted collapses. But we mustn’t blame Communism, when we can instead blame people who don’t recycle.
In 2011, a group of Chinese experts published a technical paper pointing out that the Zhengzhou tunnel, which was still being built, was in a low-lying area where ponds of stagnant water frequently formed in the streets. The tunnel opened in 2012.
So obviously, global warming.
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IMO it is only a matter of time when the 3GD collapses due to fault design by the CCP engineers. But the fascist lefties here will worship their diety of Global warming aka global b.s.