Free Republic

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