Free Republic

We already knew the rent was too damn high, even before we published a report this February showing not only that the median for a one bedroom apartment in the city had jumped to $3,460, but that even formerly cheaper neighborhoods were now among the pricey. Apparently though, they weren’t high enough. According to Zillow, the new median rent in San Francisco is $4,225 a month. Zillow’s data compose the “Zillow Rental Index” (ZRI). This index shows rents up 16% year-over-year (YOY) this April, and take into account all types of rentals in San Francisco proper, from single family homes...

The poorest Americans, who can’t afford to buy property, are increasingly priced out of rentals. There were only 28 adequate and available to rent homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters in 2013, down from 37 in 2000, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that focuses on social and economic policy. “This gap between supply and demand leaves 72% of the country’s poorest families burdened by the high cost of housing,” it found. Extremely low-income renters are households with incomes at or below 30% of the median income in that region. Not one county in the...

Struggling to live in America's $1M city: Photographer captures lives of ordinary San Francisco residents who have been forced to live in cars, trailers, garages and tents following the tech boom Photographer Wenxin Zhang moved to San Francisco in 2011 Discovered a group of people online that had been forced to find alternative means of accommodation 'I visited them alone with mutual trust,' she said The subsequent photo essay is called Goodnight Stories A recent report said that a family needs about $200,000 a year to live comfortably in San Francisco, so long as their children go to public school....

San Francisco -- Rebuilding San Francisco after a major earthquake would change its human face, hastening gentrification and driving out poor and elderly residents, experts and city officials warn. Experts say there's a 62 percent chance a quake with a magnitude of 6.7 or higher will hit the San Francisco Bay area within several decades — or tomorrow. Thousands of homes would be rendered uninhabitable, displacing up to 300,000 residents, almost half the city's population, according to some projections. A major issue would be creating replacement housing for the poor in one of the nation's most expensive markets. About 16,000...

Author, founder of Salon.com, and Bernal Heights resident David Talbot recently made a speech at Stanford which was then published in 48HillsOnline.com decrying “Stanford douchebags”, gentrification, and Mayor Ed Lee. Talbot’s strong words for Stanford students have struck a chord up north in San Francisco, and his speech is rapidly going viral.

If you’re out on the left coast and heading out for some tasty Chipotle goodness tonight, be prepared to dig a little deeper when you pay the check. Prices are going up and it’s not just because of the cost of beef. (From the Chicago Tribune) In its weekly survey of 10 Chipotle markets, Chicago-based William Blair found that Chipotle raised prices in half of the markets that the investment firm surveyed — San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Orlando. In most markets, the price increases occurred due to the rising cost of beef.The city by the bay, however,...

For over a decade, architecture students at Rural Studio, Auburn University's design-build program in a tiny town in West Alabama, have worked on a nearly impossible problem. How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want—while also providing a living wage for the local construction team that builds it? In January, after years of building prototypes, the team finished their first pilot project in the real world. Partnering with a commercial developer outside Atlanta, in a tiny community called Serenbe, they built two one-bedroom houses, with materials that cost...

The Obama administration has started its push to expand low-income housing into “higher opportunity areas.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development last week announced a “landmark” settlement agreement with Baltimore County that will serve as a catalyst to “promote housing mobility” and “address residential segregation.” The goal is to move low- and very-low-income people out of the city and into the suburbs. …

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters. A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment. It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The...

NOVATO (CBS SF) — After George Lucas ran into a buzzsaw of opposition from his wealthy Marin County neighbors when he tried to expand his Skywalker Ranch studio, the filmmaker might be getting some payback with plans for one of the largest affordable housing projects in the Bay Area.

A plan for a luxury skyscraper with a so-called “poor door” is changing to extend more of a welcome to residents of its cluster of affordable apartments, officials and the developers said Friday. The retooled plan for 1 West End Ave. still involves separate entrances, but all residents will now have access to such building amenities as a courtyard and river-view roof deck, and the affordable segment’s lobby will be stylishly appointed and set facing a park. […] … (S)ome residents and officials see the divisions as discriminatory, and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has said it aims to bar...

Naomi Phillips, 85, sat in the shade outside Village Crossroads II watching the community’s formal dedication May 19. She moved to the new Catholic Charities affordable senior housing community in March after living most of her adult life in Latrobe Homes, subsidized city housing in East Baltimore. Village Crossroads, she said, is “real nice” and reminds her of her childhood home in North Carolina. “I love it because I was born in the country,” she said. “There’s nice country air and peace and quiet.” The 180-unit community includes two buildings, Village Crossroads I and II, near the intersection of Belair...

"It's important to introduce children to diversity so they grow up knowing these people are just like us, no different."The project would allow Chappaqua, where 91 percent of the residents are white, to contribute to a desegregation settlement Westchester County reached in 2009 that is being overseen by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development...The county is required to aggressively market those apartments to nonwhites.

Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope. Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a “bubble,” of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever more esoteric financial instruments,...

The Democrat Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.

"Star Wars" creator George Lucas could, indeed, make good on his idea of building affordable housing right next door to the high-income NIMBYs who blocked his plans for a production studio near his Lucas Valley ranch complex. His Marin County neighbors and conservationists have dismissed Lucas' musings as sour grapes, and say low-income housing could never be built in such a remote and environmentally sensitive location.But those in the know disagree.There's a feeling on the Board of Supervisors, which has final say over the project, that it fits into the county's desire for more low-income housing - and by the...

... Entitled, "Highlights of HUD Accomplishments 1997-1999," the document chronicles the "accomplishments under the leadership of Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who took office in January 1997." View Full Image Associated Press Andrew Cuomo .HUD's Web visitors learn that in 1999 "Secretary Cuomo established new Affordable Housing Goals requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—two government sponsored enterprises involved in housing finance—to buy $2.4 trillion in mortgages in the next 10 years. This will mean new affordable housing for about 28.1 million low- and moderate-income families. The historic action raised the required percentage of mortgage loans for low- and moderate-income families that the...

The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

In June we got peek at Obama’s plans to destroy America’s white middle class suburbs. Now we have new evidence Obama is using race to turn America into the socialist gulag in his dreams for America. The first plan unveiled the idea of the federal government demolishing large sections of Flint Michigan and Detroit and relocating their residents to middle class suburbs. Today comes another plan to flood traditional Republican suburbs with exactly the people these middle class Americans moved away from. No place to run The Department of Housing and Urban Development has been changed into the Department of...

After virtually every disaster created by Beltway politicians you can hear the sound of feet scurrying for cover in Washington, see fingers pointing in every direction away from Washington, and watch all sorts of scapegoats hauled up before Congressional committees to be denounced on television for the disasters created by members of the committee who are lecturing them. The word repeated endlessly in these political charades is "deregulation." The idea is that it was a lack of government supervision which allowed "greed" in the private sector to lead the nation into crises that only our Beltway saviors can solve. What...