Free Republic

Good video talks about the government being the landlord on those Freddie/Fannie houses.

Based on legislation and case law, the U.S. government's attitude toward increased rights for gun owners has been more favorable in recent years than ever before.In the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual's right to possess a firearm for private use. It was the first Supreme Court case in U.S. history to directly address whether the right to keep and bear arms is a right of individuals in addition to a collective right that applies to state-regulated militias.As a result, additional pleas to increase...

President shifts focus to renting, not owning Using $4.25b to build affordable housing WASHINGTON - The Obama administration, in a major shift on housing policy, is abandoning George W. Bush’s vision of creating an “ownership society’’ and instead plans to pump $4.25 billion of economic stimulus money into creating tens of thousands of federally subsidized rental units in American cities. The idea is to pay for the construction of low-rise rental apartment buildings and town houses, as well as the purchase of foreclosed homes that can be refurbished and rented to low- and moderate-income families at affordable rates. Analysts say...

HIGH POINT -- Residents of a local public housing facility recently had to cease holding religious services there after officials told them the activities ran afoul of federal regulations. Worship services by residents of Elm Towers were in violation of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rules, which forbid "inherently religious activities" for organizations that receive HUD funds, according to the High Point Housing Authority. Elm Towers residents had been gathering for years on Sunday mornings and sometimes Wednesday evenings for Christian worship services led by a local minister in a common room on the first floor of the...

ATLANTA The nation's bulldozer attack on crime and poverty soon will make Atlanta - home of the first public housing development - the first major city to eliminate all of its large housing projects. Cities from Boston to Los Angeles are following its lead. For more than 15 years, housing officials across the country have been razing the projects where about 1.2 million families live and replacing them with a mix of higher-rent and subsidized apartments and homes. Alexandria, La., has taken down at least 247 units. Buffalo, N.Y., has demolished about 1,000 aging homes. Atlanta expects to finish tearing...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   California: NRA Victory in San Francisco Lawsuit!   Thursday, January 29, 2009   PUBLIC HOUSING OFFICIALS DROP ILLEGAL BAN ON FIREARMS POSSESSION IN PUBLIC HOUSING An NRA-led coalition of self-defense civil rights groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) has prevailed in a Second Amendment lawsuit challenging a ban on firearm possession in San Francisco public housing residences. “This success is further vindication of the U.S. Supreme Court's Heller ruling upholding the Second Amendment as protecting a fundamental, individual civil right for all law-abiding...

An NRA-led coalition of self-defense civil rights groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) has prevailed in a Second Amendment lawsuit challenging a ban on firearm possession in San Francisco public housing residences. “This success is further vindication of the U.S. Supreme Court's Heller ruling upholding the Second Amendment as protecting a fundamental, individual civil right for all law-abiding Americans,” said NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox. The San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) and the property management company that oversees San Francisco’s public housing projects have agreed to completely remove a lease provision...

On the far south side of Chicago, separated by more than 20 miles and a vast chasm in wealth from the city's soaring skyline, is a collection of squat brick buildings where Barack Obama says he found his calling. The President-elect has said that he learnt more from the locals when working in the Chicago projects than they learnt from him. Those who remember him say that he made little impact The Altgeld Gardens public housing project reeks of decay, fear and despair. At the only shop serving its 2,000 homes, water pours in from the roof on to sodden...

FReep this Digg! Post as many links exposing ObamaNation on Digg as possible between now and election! FLOOD THE PLACE WITH ARTICLES AND VIDEOS EXPOSING OBAMANATION! It’s all about VOLUME!!! To find Digg links on FR, simply typing "Digg" into FR's keyword search box. To make sure they can be found, type Digg into keyword section of any "FReep this Digg" post. Also remember, if you have time, saturate Digg with conservative articles/videos exposing the ObamaNation! --------- CONFUSED? What do I mean by "Digg to the top"? Click on the article link that leads to Digg. Once there, hit the...

For all the talk of weaving public housing residents into the fabric of the city, the Chicago Housing Authority's ambitious Plan for Transformation includes this inconvenient fact: When the plan is complete, nearly 1 of every 10 of those families will live more than 100 blocks south of the Loop, tucked amid landfills, industrial parks and a sewage treatment plant. Mayor Richard Daley declared eight years ago that Chicago would end "the failed policies of the past." Yet a Tribune investigation found that the city has pumped hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars into housing complexes that preserve the...

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporte

CABRINI-GREEN | Mom watches as gate crushes 3-year-old son At 3 years old, Curtis Cooper thought himself invincible. He'd fashion a towel into a cape, and called himself Super Curtis. But mom Pamela Cooper knew he wasn't invincible. So despite her family ribbing her about being overprotective, she never let the boy play outside without her. Until Friday, when she let her son ride his tricycle outside his Cabrini-Green row home alone, she said. As the 22-year-old mother watched from a window, a gate weighing hundreds of pounds broke from its hinge, fell atop the boy and killed him, Cooper's...

I don’t begrudge Barack Obama the modesty of his accomplishments as a community organizer. Stemming the tide of urban decay in Chicago’s worst neighborhoods in the late 1980s was beyond even the most tireless efforts of one man. “Sisyphean” is the term that keeps coming to mind, but I would note that what Obama actually accomplished – “a successful effort to convince the city of Chicago to locate a jobs placement office on the far South Side and his part in a drive to push the city to clean asbestos out of a housing project in the same area [Altgeld...

<p>The National Rifle Association today filed a lawsuit challenging San Francisco's ban on handguns in public housing, trying to capitalize on the U.S. Supreme Court's historic ruling finding a constitutional right to own guns for self-defense in the home.</p> <p>In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, lawyers for gun rights advocates are asking a federal judge to invalidate San Francisco's handgun law based on the Supreme Court's decision striking down a broader Washington, D.C. law forbidding residents to own handguns.</p>

Need proof that Obama's Hope and Change rhetoric is all symbolism and no substance? Look no farther than this devastating Boston Globe investigation: As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year. But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local,...

Pleasantries have given way to earnest conversations among retired accountants, senior salespeople, company executives and others about what many perceive as the Habitat problem. A chapter of Habitat for Humanity wants to build a 90-home development of modest residences at one of the primary entrances to Greenwood Forest, whose homes range from 2,000 to 5,000 square feet.

GENEVA (AP) — Two human rights experts for the United Nations on Thursday criticized a plan by New Orleans authorities to raze public housing projects, saying it will force the predominantly black residents into homelessness. They charged that demolition would harm thousands of people by denying them a place to live in a city where housing already is scarce since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. The joint statement was not a U.N. finding, but only the individual views of Miloon Kothari, a special investigator on housing matters for the U.N. Human Rights Council, and Gay McDougall, a lawyer who...

If last year’s riots Paris riots were horrific, they weren’t surprising. The banlieue, suburbs like St. Denis, Poissy, and Clichy-sous-Bois, are pockets of concentrated immigrant poverty and faceless, block-style building long regarded as tinderboxes for trouble. Paris has begun building more affordable housing within its borders to reduce social isolation of those outside. Besides offering public-housing tenants an alternative to the banlieue, the move addresses the city’s own growing squatter population, which suffered from a slew of fires in the city’s outer rings at the end of the summer. While approximately eight in 10 lodgings in some peripheral neighborhoods are...

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to demolish four of the city’s biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority...

CHICAGO (AP) - The menacing row of concrete towers where four of Katie Sistrunk's children were shot is almost all gone now, replaced by weeds and fields, mud and memories. The cage-like balconies that looked like prison tiers to Beauty Turner have all but disappeared. The gangs that peddled crack to Krystal McCraney Moore have found new places to haunt. One hollow-eyed lookout still paces at the entrance of the last high-rise, watching for police so he can alert drug dealers who lurk in the graffiti-scarred, darkened stairwells. This is the end of the Robert Taylor Homes, the final days...

On a London street, “social” housing encourages antisocial egotism. An interesting experiment took place on the London street where I have an apartment. A few years ago, the borough council permitted a developer to build six apartment complexes across from my building, on the condition that he reserve three of them for “social”—what Americans would call public—housing. The architecture of the buildings, while deeply undistinguished, is far from the worst of the genre and certainly does not suffer from the gigantism that was once the vogue. The street remains leafy, and edges on a fashionable area. A two-bedroom apartment in...

Rodney Littlebear was a homeless drunk who for 15 years ran up the public tab with trips to jail, homeless shelters and emergency rooms. He now has a brand-new, government-financed apartment where he can drink as much as he wants. It is part of a first-in-the-nation experiment to ease the torment of drug and alcohol addiction while saving taxpayers' money. Last year, King County created a list of 200 "chronic public inebriates" in the Seattle region who had cost the most to round up and care for. Seventy-five were offered permanent homes in a new apartment building known by its...

Lawyers for Baltimore public housing residents are asking a federal judge to order the creation of 3,000 new low-income housing units and an additional 3,750 housing vouchers, mostly in well-off suburban neighborhoods with good schools and access to jobs. The request comes 14 months after the judge found that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development violated fair housing laws by failing to take a regional approach to the desegregation of city public housing. It asks the federal agency to provide tenants with 675 new "housing opportunities a year over the next decade to reduce the effects of decades...

Fort Lauderdale residents making up to $69,720 a year will soon be eligible for housing welfare. City commissioners agreed to pursue a variety of housing measures that would expand subsidy programs to the middle class and would make Fort Lauderdale the first city in Broward County to enact affordability laws. Commissioner Carlton Moore said that the move was necessitated by the declining numbers of poor people in the city. “The economy is growing so fast that the poor are disappearing,” said Moore. “The housing subsidy program would’ve died for lack of eligible participants. We’d have to had laid off hundreds...

"After a wave of inner-city Chicago families moved to Charles City in search of safer surroundings, better schools and faster access to public housing, residents old and new are adjusting to life with one another."This is an excerpt from an article published in a prominent Iowa newspaper today. A small town in northern Iowa has experienced an influx of inner-city Chicago people who have turned up to take advantage of the town's easy and cheap public housing. Go to http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060305/NEWS08/603050340/1001/archive to read article.

by Mark Finkelstein February 28, 2006 Didn't someone get the word to Ray Nagin? Didn't His Honor know he was supposed to use his Mardi Gras appearance on the Today show to bemoan slow progress in the rebuilding of New Orleans and take some helpful shots at the Bush administration for its stinginess in allocating only $91 billion? If Nagin wasn't playing by the Bush-bashing script, Katie Couric was there to fill the gaps and use the opportunity to plump for more government programs and an expansion of perhaps the worst idea ever in welfare - 'public housing.' Katie opened...

Housing projects destroyed by Hurricane Katrina will be rebuilt as mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods, with $1.8 billion planned to begin work in Louisiana and Mississippi, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said Wednesday. "Within the next two weeks, we will begin to see results," he said, without giving details. The $1.8 billion is part of President Bush's request for $17.1 billion for long-term recovery along the Gulf of Mexico. "It will be the first of many" allocations, Jackson told reporters after meeting with four City Council members whose districts include housing projects. He said the type of redevelopment was...

Residents of a Westmont public housing complex for seniors said in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that they were coerced and harassed by management into practicing Christianity and pressured to attend Bible study classes. Five former and current residents of the complex, along with housing advocate Hope Fair Housing, are suing the complex and its property manager, saying they used "coercive, harassing and restrictive rules and regulations to impose their 'Christian' beliefs upon current residents." Hope Fair Housing, based in Wheaton, also alleges the complex only invites low-income Chinese tenants and discriminates against any other potential residents. The defendants in...

Tenants told last October to get jobs or else Starting Friday, the Atlanta Housing Authority will begin evicting tenants who are not working, in school or in a work force training program. The authority, which began notifying residents about the new rule last fall, said it is trying to end concentrated poverty by encouraging public housing tenants to become more self-sufficient. Critics of the new rules, however, fear the plan will create a new generation of homeless people as a result of thousands of evictions. "This is going to mean that you will have so many people on the streets...

Two pizza delivery chains refused to send drivers to a public housing community Thursday afternoon, shocking and angering members of the AIDS/HIV Services Group and the president of the local NAACP. Kathy Baker, ASG’s executive director, said that when Domino’s and Papa John’s were called to deliver to an HIV testing event at Westhaven public housing community, the businesses responded that they don’t deliver to Hardy Drive. “I find it quite inappropriate. Whether it’s intended or not, it results in socioeconomic and racial discrimination,” Baker said. “We order pizzas from them all the time and it never occurred to me...

Over 800 hundred people living at the Jesse Jackson Town Homes in Greenville County may be displaced if a government grant goes through. The question is, "Is it too good to be true?" Civil Rights Activist Jesse Jackson says, "Well until we see where the monies are, it's not true." Tonight Jesse Jackson came to meet with residents not because the Town Homes bear his name. "I'm here because I grew up here .. . here because I have friends here." The neighborhood may look idyllic with children out riding their bicycles but at night resident Dianna Turner says it's...

Public housing plan generates complaints, praise Similar desegregation proposal failed 10 years ago By Foster Klug Associated Press BALTIMORE - A judge's ruling to desegregate public housing by moving its mostly black and poor residents to the suburbs - a plan similarly proposed and rejected a decade ago - seems to be generating the same old resistance, and, surprisingly, some cautious new support. The ruling by Judge Marvin Garbis came Jan. 6 in a 10-year-old civil rights case in which the judge decided Baltimore "should not be viewed as an island reservation for use as a container" for the region's...

Ruling in a 10-year-old civil rights case, a federal judge in Baltimore decided today that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development did not meet its obligations under fair housing laws by the agency's "failure adequately to consider a regional approach to desegregation of public housing." In a victory for public housing residents and the American Civil Liberties Union delivered before a packed courtroom, U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis said it "was, and continues to be unreasonable for the agency not to consider housing programs that include the placement of more than an insubstantial portion" of public housing...

The War In Iraq Cost the United States $152,071,800,292 Instead, we could have insured 91,060,958 children for one year. See the cost in your community: Compare to the cost of: PRE-SCHOOL KIDS' HEALTH PUBLIC EDUCATION COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS PUBLIC HOUSING WORLD HUNGER AIDS EPIDEMIC WORLD IMMUNIZATION

CHICAGO -- At the midpoint of the nation's largest, most watched project to transform public housing, critics say the city has been slow and sloppy in relocating Chicago's most down-and-out residents. The old high-rises are coming down much faster than new low-rise, mixed-income developments are going up, and housing analysts worry that residents are getting lost in the shuffle. < SNIP > The goal is to rid Chicago, which once counted 39,000 public housing units, of most of the high-rise developments and many of the squat, low-rise buildings. These would be replaced with mixed-income communities where some apartments will be...

or Shaleema Malave, a resident of the Lillian Wald Houses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the letter arrived unexpectedly about two weeks ago, and it read like a kind of draft notice.To keep her public housing apartment, the one-page letter from the New York City Housing Authority said, Ms. Malave, a stay-at-home mother of four boys under the age of 18, would have to perform 96 hours of unpaid community service over the next 12 months. Volunteering for the Police Department would do, the letter suggested. So, too, would Habitat for Humanity, or a library, or the Parks...

More help for homeless Once in doubt, support building for new Vista center under construction VISTA – New donations will allow a large, publicly funded homeless center to open with a support services building that had been in jeopardy even though operators called it critical to their effort. Before a groundbreaking in July for the Solutions Family Center, Chris Megison, the executive director of North County Solutions for Change, said rising construction costs had left a $700,000 shortfall that could force builders to forsake the support building. Solutions Family Center  What: Year-round shelter for homeless families in North County.  Facilities:...

Sheriff's deputies on Monday arrested two reputed gang members suspected in a brazen daylight assault on a father as he attempted to take his 13-year-old daughter home from a Christian elementary school. Kyle Stowers, 18, of Lancaster and Renaldo Mixon, 25, of Lennox were arrested early Monday evening on a felony charge of assault with a deadly weapon or force likely to produce great bodily injury related to the Nov. 21 beating. "We expect to have more arrests in the future," said Detective Bill Costleigh of the Lancaster Sheriff's Station. Costleigh is assigned to Operation Safe Streets, one of the...

CLEVELAND (AP) -- The city's public housing agency is trying to resolve a lengthy dispute by accommodating the needs of a 772-pound tenant immobilized by her weight. Carmen Bowen, 44, has been involved in a two-year dispute with the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority over how much work must be done to help her move around her apartment. The agency is about to provide her with a handicapped-accessible apartment with extra space to allow an oversized wheelchair to turn. Bowen lives with her 19-year-old son and a caregiver. Still, Bowen filed a discrimination complaint, saying the agency took too long. Housing...

Legislation will be introduced in Congress today to overhaul federal housing assistance for the poor, disabled and elderly along the lines of the 1996 welfare reforms. The Bush administration is proposing a $13 billion initiative called Housing Assistance for Needy Families (HANF). HANF would replace with state block grants the Section 8 rent vouchers received by nearly 2 million families. Under Section 8: o An eligible renter obtains a voucher from one of 2,500 local housing authorities that contract with the federal government and takes it to any private landlord willing to accept it. o Aid recipients pay no more...

* More Good News About Welfare Reform * Gun Crazy * The Real Reason for New York’s Budget Wreck * Not All Cultures Are Equal * What’s a Cop’s Life Worth?Health-Care Demagoguery Real Public Housing Reform good reading

The dead woman's family congregated Tuesday around her angry and tearful mother where yellow police tape rounded the corner of Rosewood Avenue and Poquito Street. "They killed my baby," Brenda Elendu screamed to anyone who would listen. "They could have shot her in the leg. She was a mental patient. They didn't have to kill that child." Across the intersection and down the block, Austin police told reporters that Elendu's daughter, Sophia King, gave officers no choice but to draw their guns when they saw her wielding a knife as she stood over a person who was on the ground....

When 76-year-old Marion Howard looks out the window of her Bloomsbury Square apartment in Annapolis, she sees the side of a state garage and maintenance building, and a parking lot jammed with cars. But soon, she'll have a new home with a much more scenic view - tree-lined College Creek, where kayaks stream past and crew teams practice - thanks to a highly unusual plan to relocate dozens of public housing residents to the city's prized waterfront. "I think it's wonderful," Howard said of the planned public housing community, which will include brick sidewalks and units with hardwood floors and...

Court OKs Public Housing Drug Ban Tue Mar 26,11:15 AM ET By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that government agencies can use aggressive eviction policies to get rid of drug users in public housing. Justices, without dissent, said they had no problem with a federal law and related policies that allow entire families to be evicted from public housing for drug use by one member. The ruling is a relief for housing leaders, who argued that without such tools drug problems would worsen in public housing. The losers were four elderly California tenants...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that public housing tenants can be evicted for any illegal drug activity by household members or guests, even if they did not know about it. In an opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist ,the high court reinstated the Department of Housing and Urban Development's "One Strike and You're Out" policy, which authorized public housing officials to evict innocent tenants. The justices overturned a U.S. appeals court ruling that barred enforcement of the policy, announced in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, on the grounds Congress never approved of evictions for...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that government agencies can use aggressive eviction policies to get rid of drug users in public housing. Justices, without dissent, said they had no problem with a federal law that allows entire families to be evicted from public housing for the drug use by one member. The ruling is a relief for housing leaders, who argued that without such tools drug problems would worsen in public housing. The losers were four elderly California tenants who received eviction notices. They challenged the zero-tolerance policy for drugs in federally subsidized housing and won in...

WASHINGTON -- Religious charities should be allowed to use the common areas in public housing to offer residents counseling, job training and other services, the government is advising local housing authorities. The Department of Housing and Urban Development developed the policy, to be made public Friday, after receiving reports that some authorities denied religious charities access to meeting rooms, an agency official said. HUD wanted to make the policy clear, as it plans to encourage more religious groups to offer their services on site to public housing residents, said Steven Wagner, deputy director of the agency's office of faith-based initiatives....