Free Republic

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — On Wednesday, a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrated the completion of a new housing development for sustainable homes in Rochester. Governor Hochul announced the completion of the $49 million mixed-use affordable housing development, Edna Craven Estates, which creates 164 sustainable homes and a new community center in Northeast Rochester, consisting of seven separate buildings along Clifford and Joseph Avenues. The newly constructed Edna Craven Estates features ground-floor commercial space and a new community center.

Not in my HUGE back yard! 156-unit low-income housing project sparks outrage in billionaire's playground Nantucket - where Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and former Secretary of State John Kerry spend their summers Plans to build an affordable housing project on Nantucket, Surfside Crossing, were first submitted in April 2018, and have been hotly contested ever since Developers want to create 156 homes on a 13.5-acre site, with 70 percent designated for people who live on the island year-round They said 15 of the homes and 24 of the condos would be sold for between $261,000 and $373,000, but locals say...

The Build Back Better Act, or the Democrats’ social and environmental spending bill, includes financial incentives for state and local entities to change zoning laws, specifically those that would replace single-family homes with multi-unit properties to provide more “affordable housing.” Those financial incentives would come in the form of tax-payer-funded grants and tax credits. On page 815 of the 2,468-page, $1.75 trillion bill, it reads: The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall establish a competitive grant program for— (1) planning grants to develop and evaluate housing policy plans and substantially improve housing strategies; (2) streamlining regulatory requirements and shorten...

CHICAGO (WLS) -- Chicago's Community Development Commission approved in a meeting Tuesday an additional $600 million in tax revenue to go toward redeveloping Cabrini-Green. The Near North TIF has been controversial since it was created in 1997 by former Mayor Richard M. Daley. The proposed extension is likely to renew the debate over TIFs. Proponents have said they are tools to spur economic development in blighted areas. Those against them say they are a "slush fund." Mayor Lori Lightfoot's plan to finish the project now goes to the full City Council for what city officials hope is final approval in...

SACRAMENTO — California will open vacant state land to emergency shelters for homeless people under an executive order that Gov. Gavin Newsom intends to sign Wednesday. The order, which Newsom announced ahead of his annual budget plan due this week, would also create a fund to pay rent and build affordable housing for homeless people. The governor will propose to start the fund with $750 million in taxpayer money, which the Legislature would have to approve. With the homeless population surging by double-digit percentages in many cities across the state, and California coming under fire from President Trump for its...

Cook County Assessor (and Democratic Central Committee Chairman) Joe Berrios just cost the taxpayers $529,000 – the settlements we’ll be paying to 11 county workers he fired so he could replace them with family members and political cronies. Berrios said he didn’t know the firings were impermissible because “I thought they were all at-will employees.” Considering that political hirings and firings have been illegal for 40 years, Berrios should have known better. Most likely, he doesn’t care. When questioned about his hiring practices, Berrios claims he’s not subject to county ethics rules that prohibit nepotism. Then he asks why his...

Nearly two years after Veo Vessels died, her daughter, 70-year-old Mary Frances Hickman, decided to sell the home her mother had left to her. A sprawling brick house in Oklahoma City’s historic Highland Park neighborhood, it was built in 1924, just a year after Mary’s birth. Decades later, one of Vessels’ great-grandchildren fondly recalls the wood and tile floors, the fish pond, the butler’s quarters, and the multi-car garage where children played house. “It was really, really nice,” says Hickman’s granddaughter, Andrea Martin. That’s part of the reason she’s so surprised her grandmother sold the home in 1993 for a...

If adopted, ideas being considered by a Seattle housing committee would be devastating to the city’s appeal, KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson said. Get rid of single-family zoning in Seattle. That’s the big message in a draft report being worked on by Mayor Ed Murray’s housing committee, obtained by The Seattle Times. According to a draft letter, the city needs to move away from the idea that all families can live in their own home on a piece of land, the Times reports. “Today, as Seattle expands rapidly and experiences massive economic and population growth, we are held back by policies...

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...

Today, HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. A front-page article pre-emptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post. The final rule is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013. AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood—imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening...

Remember when Barney Frank insisted in 2003 that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not in a crisis,” and “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing?”As chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, former Rep. Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, helped defeat Bush administration proposals to rein in the two federal loan giants. The housing market crashed in 2008 on thousands of bad subprime home loans, triggering the Great Recession, from which this nation still has not recovered.Well, it’s time to roll the dice again. According to the 5-4 majority opinion at...

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...

The Supreme Court saved a law Thursday aimed at preventing housing discrimination, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a scathing dissent calling out his liberal colleagues for their "audacity." In a 5-4 decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court's majority found that the Fair Housing Act (FHA) prevents housing practices that unfairly impact minorities even if those practices are not intentionally discriminatory. Many cases brought under the FHA involve so-called disparate-impact claims, so a ruling against fair-housing advocates would have seriously hobbled the law. Thomas — the court's only African-American justice — wrote a separate dissent questioning the notion that the government...

The Supreme Court handed a major victory to the Obama administration and civil rights groups on Thursday when it upheld a key tool used for more than four decades to fight housing discrimination. The justices ruled 5-4 that federal housing laws prohibit seemingly neutral practices that harm minorities, even without proof of intentional discrimination. The case involved an appeal from Texas officials accused of violating the Fair Housing Act by awarding federal tax credits in a way that kept low-income housing out of white neighborhoods. Justice Anthony Kennedy, often a swing vote, joined the court’s four liberal members in upholding...

An African-American millionaire can buy a home in any expensive suburb. Color is no longer a barrier. Despite this progress, President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing expensive towns of racism, simply because most minorities can’t afford to live there. Westchester County has struggled under a federal monitor since 2009 to compel the county to build multi-unit affordable housing in the county’s most expensive areas. Hillary Clinton claims to be a warrior against inequality. But her adopted hometown of Chappaqua is battling HUD’s demands — and that means it’s fighting the man believed to top Hillary’s veep...

The heavy federal hand in the housing market has been a disaster. Despite spending more than $13,000 for every household, Washington has record low homeownership to show for it, even among the middle class. In fact, a just-released report by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies not only finds more middle-class families renting but many also struggling to make rent, as homeownership rates plunge lower than ever. This is as shocking as it is depressing. It used to be that the middle class owned homes. Now it's increasingly feeling "the strain of rising rents," the reports says, as foreclosures and...

Politically correct propaganda has invaded our collective conscious with terms that somehow make what was once thought of as abnormal now seem normal. Along with this new jargon comes a new rationale that is irrational to many who persist in living in the real world. Unfortunately, often the realists have remained silent – indifferent to or intimidated by the name-calling of those claiming to be tolerant. And so the topsy-turvy world that once was America has now become a land where free speech is only afforded to those with loud voices who have a national platform and embrace liberal ideologies....

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...

An African-American millionaire can buy a home in any expensive suburb. Color is no longer a barrier. Despite this progress, President Obama's Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing expensive towns of racism, simply because most minorities can't afford to live there. Westchester County, N.Y., has struggled since 2009 under a plan by a federal monitor to compel the county to comply with HUD's demands for multiunit affordable housing in expensive areas. Hillary Clinton claims to be a warrior against inequality. But her adopted hometown of Chappaqua, an upscale Westchester village that one resident describes as "a little piece...