Free Republic

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...

A bill filed in advance of the next legislative session would make gold and silver legal tender again in the state of South Carolina. State Representative Stewart O. Jones submitted legislation that would restore gold and silver to their status as legal tender in his state. In an op-ed written in October, Representative Jones set out the sound economic principles that support his proposed statute: To understand the full extent of the debt and the destruction of the dollar, it’s essential to realize that paper money has a history of being printed as bills of credit to finance runaway government....

COLUMBIA, S.C. (Nov. 22, 2019) – A bill prefiled in the South Carolina House would make gold and silver coins legal tender in the state. Passage of this bill would take a step toward creating currency competition in South Carolina and undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money. Rep. Stewart Jones filed House Bill 4678 (H.4678) on Nov. 20. Under the proposed law, “gold and silver coins minted foreign or domestic shall be legal tender in the State of South Carolina under the laws of this State. No person or other entity may compel another person or other entity to...

California landlords would no longer be allowed to reject prospective tenants solely because they hold federal Section 8 housing vouchers under a bill passed by the state Legislature on Wednesday. 300,000 Californians who receive the vouchers. The program provides the largest direct federal subsidy for low-income tenants. “Why do we continue to criminalize and penalize and have bias against people who are poor?”

Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around? Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Furious tenants of a public housing project in the Bronx were pleading for help Monday, saying their buildings are overrun with rats — and they’re not kidding. They have the video to prove it. But we should warn you, the pictures are not for the squeamish. “I’m traumatized,” tenant Veronica Martinez told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer. You’d be traumatized, too, if you had the same kitchen as Martinez. Rats. An entire family of rats, some as big as cats, have taken over, hopping in the sink, into pots and pans. It’s absolutely gut wrenching. “I should never...

Trump administration officials announced Saturday that immigrants who legally use public benefits like food assistance and Section 8 housing vouchers could be denied green cards under new rules aimed at keeping out people the administration deems a drain on the country.

Recently, a sailor on the cruiser Shiloh started to behave erratically. He claimed he had the ability to shoot fireballs from his hands and that he had traveled into outer space. Despite his obvious insanity, no action was taken. The sailor, named Peter Mims, then hid aboard his ship, and no one was able to find him for a week. Peter Mims was a troubled sailor who wanted out of the Navy. He had financial problems, his marriage had fallen apart[,] and his chain of command was riding him about qualifications. He'd sought mental health counseling, but was not treated...

Cairo, Ill., has a population of fewer than 3,000 people. A plan to demolish two public housing developments would force many residents to leave and cut the school enrollment in half. ___ The authorities announced last month that the cost of fixing the developments was out of reach, and that replacing them altogether would cost almost 10 times as much. For hundreds of residents, the decision may mean not only leaving these crumbling buildings, but also moving from Cairo altogether. “For sure they needed to fix this place up a long time ago,” said Nena Ellis, 38, a mother of...

Ald. Arena's Section 8 development means more crime, lower property values in Jefferson Park, says expert Crime Glenn Minnis James Bovard warns residents of Jefferson Park that they need look no further than the opposite side of the city to see what a proposed low-income, subsidized housing complex could mean for their neighborhood. The plan, backed by 45th Ward Alderman John Arena, would nearly double the amount of subsidized housing in the neighborhood. “It could be the Chatham aftermath all over again,” Bovard, a noted libertarian author and lecturer, told the Chicago City Wire. Chatham is a South Side neighborhood...

The mobile home park has been around as a real estate sector for over half a century. However, it has remained in complete obscurity except for a few lucky investors and such heavyweights as Sam Zell. But 2017 is the year in which mobile home parks will finally be identified for the wonderful business models that they are, as well as the prime solution to the affordable housing crisis in America. And this attention is coming from a number of sources. The U.S. government After being ignored by the Federal Government for the past 50 years, that period of silence...

Verde Point is a self-described "luxury apartment" complex with a rooftop pool and "personal wine storage" that is currently accepting public housing assistance recipients who will live there practically for free, courtesy of the taxpayers — at least until they become gainfully employed and their incomes rise. That's when the pool parties and wine tastings end and they will have to downgrade to a more middle-class abode. The Gramercy is another luxury apartment, also in Arlington, Va., where holders of the federal vouchers formerly known as Section 8 can live, taking advantage of its "massage room and sauna" and "clubroom...

WASHINGTON — A proposed amendment aimed at defunding a controversial Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulation related to Section 8 Housing was tabled in the upper chamber Thursday. Utah Sen. Mike Lee proposed an amendment to the Senate Transportation and HUD appropriations bill that would have defunded a regulation stopping the implementation of the HUD regulation known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy. The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real-estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs. Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods. It’s all part of...

Is the Obama administration, or at least some officials in it, hostile toward whites? This is certainly an awkward, publicly unspeakable question -- and answering it is exceptionally difficult. Not easy to discern the motives of countless Washington bureaucrats.  Nevertheless, recent events outside of Baltimore, MD suggest that enmity toward whites does afflict some Obama administrators and our proof, though short of the smoking gun standard, is probably as good as it gets.  In a nutshell, thanks to Washington’s money and political pressure, thousands of poor blacks will now be re-located from Baltimore’s slums to upgraded housing in the surrounding,...

Welcome to the world of “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH), Obama’s transformative new regulation. How will AFFH work? The city of Dubuque gives us one of our best and most frightening previews yet. An account of Dubuque as a forerunner of a post-AFFH world comes to us courtesy of a stunning report by Deborah Thornton, a policy analyst for Iowa’s Public Interest Institute. The report tells the story of how Dubuque was pressured to cede large swathes of its governing authority to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has forced the city to direct its limited low-income “Section...

DALLAS - By most accounts, census tract 166.05 is not a particularly desirable place to live. Tucked between two major highways in southwest Dallas, the neighborhood is characterized by clusters of ramshackle, one-story houses, huge swaths of vacant land and big warehouses and storage centers. More than 40 percent of people living in the census tract have incomes below the poverty level, a proportion that more than doubled since 2000, according to U.S. Census data. Crime rates and levels of slum and blight are also high, according to the Dallas-based housing advocacy group the Inclusive Communities Project. Such placement "perpetuates...

The new owners of a 21-unit, low-rent apartment complex in Healdsburg are evicting all the mostly Latino tenants with plans to fix it up and in some cases more than double the rents, prompting a community outcry as well as highlighting the challenge of providing affordable housing in a hot real estate market. “This town is built on the backs of those people, and those people who trusted me for 30 years to teach their children,” said Judy Sanderson, a retired teacher and self-described “privileged white woman” who said it feels like the new owners are “targeting Hispanic families.” Laura...

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...

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.” A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.