Posted on 03/14/2016 9:19:28 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
After buying a home in Barrington Hills, Chaoshan Lai and his wife couldn’t unload the 15-year-old townhouse that they’d bought for $935,000 in Central Station, a taxpayer-subsidized development in the South Loop where former Mayor Richard M. Daley lived for years.
Lai couldn’t even find anyone to rent the townhouse on South Prairie Avenue — until he got a call in 2013 about a woman who’d gotten a “housing choice voucher,” from the Chicago Housing Authority through a program that had long been called Section 8.
Lai says the woman wanted to lease his three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath home, which has a library and is within walking distance of Soldier Field and the lakefront.
“I said, ‘You probably cannot afford the rent,’ ” Lai recalls. “But they said they have a special program in the ‘opportunity area’ that pays much better. I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ ”
It ended up being a good deal for Lai. Since June 1, 2013, he’s collected more than $100,000 from the CHA, which administers public housing in Chicago for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The CHA pays him $3,911 a month in federal funds to lease his townhouse to the woman and three others in her household, including a child under the age of 6, records show.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicago.suntimes.com ...
$400 million plus a year just in Chicago. Six million people in Chicago. Sounds like $2 billion a year nationwide plus admin costs, so that’s another $2 billion.
The landlord won’t be laughing when he sees the condition of his property when his section eight tenant moves out. 100 k won’t pay for the damage.
Typical socialist program.
MISSION CREEP
“Public Housing” was originally sold to the public as a program to provide basic temporary housing to people temporarily down on their luck.
The assumption was that they soon would find work, regain their independance and move out of public housing.
Now we have fourth or fifth generational family dynasties of professional moochers who have never lived in a home that wasn’t paid for by taxpayers.
And they get indignant if they aren’t provided accommodations equal to those of homeowners who pay their own way.
Like all other government programs - the more you provide for free, the larger the constituency will grow.
Kiss property values in the area goodbye. They did this in Pittsburgh in an area but not to this extreme. The state maintained the house for the moocher. They KNEW it wouldn’t be maintained and the project would get bad press.
I don’t think Trump will like this program. He can’t get in there soon enough for me.
Four grand a month...
L
I read part of the article...amazing - simply amazing.
Based on the attitudes of the people in that article, that city is doomed to Detroit’s fate.
If you live in Chicago, sell everything and leave; a locust swarm of entitlled feral humans and their Dhimmicrat enablers has descended on your city. It is doomed.
Yes, I remember. The Sanders Consent Decree.
Yet another consequence of our Federal Reserve and massive debt supporting the nanny-state.
Read through every such article, from Germany’s intake of 1 million illiterate Muslims to free tampons for NY City school girls, and you will see the root of it all - our corrupted, centrally-planned monetary system.
If Lai had good luck with this program, Section 8 going by a different name, he is very lucky. A house in my neighborhood was rented out under Section 8. The people renting it totally trashed the house inside, leaving it as a shell. All the floors were destroyed, the walls smashed in, the appliances stolen. And Section 8 made it close to impossible for the landlord to get rid of them, claiming all the while that the tenants were fine. It took over 2 years to get rid of them. Meanwhile, the landlord was left with tens of thousands of dollars of repairs. The rent money during that entire time did not come close to paying for all the damages.
I don’t know. The converted kitchen cabinets could still be used to raise chickens and pigs. Other rooms could be rented hourly as drug flop houses or for “sex for sale/rent” entrepreneurs. One could also extort the neighbors to chip in to fix the place up.
Why work? Vote Democrat!
There are thousands of these stories from both landlords who thought they’d get easy money and those who were coerced; they almost all end the way yours do. Trying to get rid of the leeches was an absolute nightmare and sometimes they got really desperate. I read of at least one landlord was suspected of arson when his Sec-8 apartment burned to the ground after months of appeals failed...unfortunately one of the roaches’ illegitimate babies died in the fire so it’s also a homicide case. :(
The ONLY landlord I ever heard of who got off good in the end had an arrangement where almost only retirement-aged people were moved in, and since they were too old/decrepit to do much damage he made out sweet. The residents were almost to the last person bilking local/state/federal governments for a ton of different benefits, but that’s another story.
Basically, the government is in charge of your apartment. They will dictate what the rent is (good luck increasing it). Also, a tenant can damage an apartment while they are living there and the landlord will be forced to fix and pay for it. the tenant has no motivation to take care of the apartment.
Also, the units are inspected often by the housing authority and, once again, you have to immediately fix any damages that the tenant might have done.
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