Free Republic

California Democrats have long advocated for the construction of multi-family housing under the guise of "affordable housing" and increasing the state's housing supply—often at the expense of single-family residences. Now, leveraging the recent Eaton and Palisades fires, they appear to be using these disasters as justification to displace families from their single-family homes in order to further their agenda for dense housing development. Gov. Newsom (D-CA) said: “Los Angeles has taken significant steps to rebuild after January’s fires, but the devastation is significant and there remains a long road ahead. Thousands of families – from Pacific Palisades to Altadena to...

A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate change. Currently, 56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area live in single-family homes. That number would drop to 48 percent by 2030, under a high-density development blueprint called Plan Bay Area, recently enacted by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Plan Bay Area has already drawn several legal challenges, and...

As the discussion intensifies in Washington DC about the future of housing finance, the forgotten player in the government guarantee debate is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s presence in the multifamily housing market. President Obama suggested recently that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be wound down while preserving the 30 year fixed-rate mortgage for borrowers, but didn’t mention the government’s role in multifamily housing. So now Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s regulator, FHFA, is seeking guidance on potentially shrinking their multifamily exposure. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is seeking public input on strategies for reducing Fannie Mae and Freddie...