Free Republic

Modeling has shown that more than 60,000 homeless people could become ill with the coronavirus in California over the next eight weeks, badly straining the healthcare system, the state governor said on Wednesday.

California State Sen. Scott Wiener introduced legislation to increase affordable housing by easing zoning restrictions. Under Senate Bill 899, nonprofit hospitals and faith institutions like churches, synagogues and mosques, would be able to build up to 150 affordable housing units on their excess property, regardless of local zoning prohibits that type of housing. "Churches and other religious and charitable institutions often have land to spare, and they should be able to use that land to build affordable housing and thus further their mission. SB899 ensures that affordable housing can be built and removes local zoning and approval obstacles in order...

In recent years, discussion about homelessness has been circumscribed around a set of premises acceptable to progressive opinion. The homeless were thrown onto the streets, we’re told, because of rising rents, heartless landlords, and a lack of economic opportunity. Activists, journalists, and political leaders have perpetuated this line of reasoning and, following it to its conclusion, have proposed investing billions in subsidized housing to solve homelessness. But new data are undermining this narrative. As residents of West Coast cities witness the disorder associated with homeless encampments, they have found it harder to accept the progressive consensus—especially in the context of...

... You might have noticed California is enduring housing and homeless crises. The market solution to housing shortages is simple: Government should reduce regulations, slow-growth restrictions, rent controls and fees that limit supply and drive up prices. Let builders build. Homelessness is a more complicated problem because homeless people often have addiction and mental-health issues, but more housing would help. I can't say exactly how it will work, just as I can't say exactly how a molly bolt gets from the foundry in India to Home Depot in Sacramento. But I can tell you what won't work—namely the policies our...

Mortgage rates in the United States have fallen to the lowest level ever on the heels of concerns stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage dropped to 3.29% during the week ending March 5, a major decrease of 16 basis points from the previous week, Freddie Mac FMCC, -2.40% reported Thursday. Previously, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage hit an all-time low back in November 2012 in the wake of the recession, when the average rate fell to 3.31%.

The Democratic presidential candidate's plan includes six "Biden principles for housing": affordability, stability, safety and health, accessibility, energy efficiency and resilience, and closeness to good schools and jobs. . . . The plan would be paid for by raising taxes on corporations and large financial institutions, including a specific fee on "certain liabilities of firms with over $50 billion in assets."

Governor Gavin Newsom is pleading with his Legislature to fix California’s government-created housing shortage. As usual, Democrats are responding with a jack-hammer against business that will cause more problems. Berkeley state Senator Nancy Skinner last week introduced legislation that would let local governments fine developers that leave homes unoccupied for at least 90 days. Local governments would also be allowed to use eminent domain to acquire vacant properties and then rent them or sell them to a nonprofit. The bill targets so-called house flippers who buy and fix up homes—usually in foreclosure—and then resell them for a profit. But it...

Mark Zuckerberg Funds a Plan to Turn California Into a Silicon Valley Ghetto Facebook’s founder comes after California’s middle class. Thu Feb 20, 2020 Daniel Greenfield 52 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Why do people live in California? The weather is nice and so are the property taxes. Unlike a lot of blue states where property taxes make home ownership all but impossible for working class and even middle class families, California has the 16th lowest property taxes in the country....

California's wildfires are getting deadlier and more destructive each year. Naturally then, state politicians want to make it easier to get insurance in fire-prone areas. On Tuesday, Assemblymembers Lorena Gonzalez (D–San Diego) and Monique Limon (D–Santa Barbara) introduced Assembly Bill (A.B.) 2367. Their "Renew California" bill would require that insurance companies write new policies or indefinitely renew current ones for existing homes provided they meet yet-to-be-determined state standards for fire-hardening. Roughly one million homes in wildfire-affected areas are already covered by a one-year moratorium on non-renewals issued by the state's elected insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, in December 2019. Lara has...

Progressives in the state Legislature aren’t done damaging the city’s housing market — indeed, they’re now aiming to slam the entire state. They’re looking to impose universal rent control — subjecting every Empire State apartment to rules that say that rent hikes are “unreasonable” if they exceed 3 percent, or one-and-a-half times the inflation rate. The “Good Cause Eviction” bill would prohibit landlords from evicting tenants in nearly every market-rate apartment without first showing “good cause.” Tenants could fight evictions if they say they can’t pay such an “unreasonable” rent. Right now, roughly a million apartments in the city, all...

Seattle’s City Council on Monday voted to ban some residential evictions during winter months in a 7-0 vote after narrowing the scope of the originally proposed measure. The final, passed version of the bill cut the months covered by the measure from five to three months and limited it to low- and moderate-income tenants, as well as an exemption for landlords with four or fewer housing units, the Seattle Times reported. “This is huge and I think we should be proud of our movement,” said Councilmember Kshama Sawant (D), who sponsored the legislation, although she expressed disappointment with the amendments....

A national survey conducted by Loandepot finds 77 percent of Millennial and Gen Z-ers are expecting financial assistance from their parents to purchase their first home. The most common expectations included help with a down payment (38 percent), co-signing the mortgage (31 percent) and helping with closing costs (24 percent). Of those expecting down payment assistance, the majority of respondents were looking for less than $10,000. Alarmingly, 18 percent of parents responding to the survey who indicated they would help their children also said they were putting their retirement on hold to do so. Parents whose children were still living...

He’s locked up on murder charges — but still has a rent-regulated apartment. A deadbeat tenant who allegedly killed a man in his Bronx apartment beat an eviction proceeding while in jail on Rikers Island thanks to a controversial new state rent law, The Post has learned. Charles Votaw’s landlord first slapped him with a 10-day notice demanding more than $7,000 in unpaid rent on June 6 last year, the first step to boot him from his federally subsidized Section 8 apartment in Fordham Heights. But on June 14, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, February 6, 2020 CRA/LA agreed to pay $3.1 million to resolve allegations that its predecessor violated the False Claims Act by knowingly failing to comply with federal accessibility laws when it financed and assisted in the development of affordable housing in the City of Los Angeles supported by federal funds, the Department of Justice announced.  CRA/LA is the successor of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, a local redevelopment agency that financed and assisted in the development of multifamily affordable housing using local tax...

My wife and I are considering selling our existing home and building a new home. Our approach is to sell the house, rent a furnished house/apartment (we have a yellow lab) while the house is being built. We don't want to worry about having two houses. My question is, what did you do to minimize the amount of moving? Store furniture in PODs? Store semi-trailer? What tips do you have? What would you do differently? Anyone sell & build at the same time? Did you use a realtor who'd purchase your house if it didn't sell after XX numbers of...

Los Angeles politicians will make housing affordable, by force if necessary. On Friday, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a motion that asks city staff to draft plans for using eminent domain to seize Hillside Villa Apartments, a 124-unit, privately-owned development in the city's Chinatown neighborhood to avoid rent increases at the property. The property is currently under an affordability covenant that requires its owner to rent out a number of its units at below-market rates. That covenant is set to expire soon, meaning rents on some 59 units will increase to market rates—which means rent hikes of up to $1,000...

Democrats complain about the cost of everything, from health care to prescription drugs to fuel prices (when a Republican is president) to groceries to college tuition, never understanding, or simply not caring, that it’s their policies that drive up prices. So they of course think there’s nothing wrong with their ideas that will accelerate increases in housing costs. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who still has a chance to be the Democrats’ nominee, said a few weeks back that because scientists are scaring her about the climate, “by 2028, no new buildings, no new houses� would be built “without a zero-carbon...

The Trump administration’s new homelessness czar is proposing a wholesale shift in the country’s philosophy for aiding the unhoused, potentially upending existing approaches as big cities and states struggle with the deepening problem. Robert Marbut, the head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the top federal body on the issue, blames the rise in homelessness in large part on a policy called “Housing First,” which was conceived in the 1990s in New York City and soon became best practice but whose definition has since become contested. It aims to get people a reliable home before focusing on services such...

Affordable-housing shortages are an abiding challenge for cities around the nation. But often policies meant to alleviate the problem aggravate it instead. That’s certainly the case in Seattle, where the City Council imposed a pair of ordinances aimed at restricting property owners’ right to choose their tenants. These misguided laws, recently upheld by the Washington Supreme Court, attempt to solve problems caused by the housing shortage by destroying property rights. Property owners in other cities should take note: Such reforms have a tendency to spread once they take root. The two ordinances in question strip landlords of the right to...

“Landlords cannot be allowed to raise rents to whatever they want, whenever they want,” Senator Bernie Sanders boomed on Twitter in November. “We need…a national rent control standard.” Now, his presidential campaign advocates one: under Sanders’ housing proposals, all landlords nationwide would only be able to increase rents annually by one and a half times the rate of inflation or 3 percent, whichever is higher. Assuming the current CPI for Urban Consumers is the inflation measure used, that would mean a rent increase cap today of just 3.4 percent. Given the likely unconstitutionality of a truly national rent control law,...