Free Republic

Housing advocates say easy public access to landlord-tenant complaints hamstrings renter efforts to find new housing, but pulling records from public view also raises concerns. The Strip District woman would feel a lot more confident about apartment hunting if her tenant history was not marked by three recent court complaints filed against her by her current landlord. “Honestly, it makes me feel like a criminal,” she said. The tenant, whose name is being withheld for privacy reasons, faced a health crisis last year and an ongoing disability that slashed her income, even prompting a GoFundMe plea for help with medical...

CHICAGO - Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration reversed itself Friday, announcing migrants will no longer start being evicted Saturday from Chicago’s migrant shelter system. It’s the mayor’s latest about-face in his handling of a 60-day shelter limit policy that has seen months of delays and backlash. However, the administration said they will evict 35 migrants Sunday, and the pace of evictions after that is unclear. During a Friday briefing with City Hall reporters, Johnson’s deputy chief-of-staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas confirmed the change ahead of Saturday’s deadline for the first group of migrants required to leave the shelters. The mayor had told reporters...

Over 90% of Los Angeles tenants were given three days to get out of their homes, but the city is offering more help Tenants in the Hollywood neighborhood were handed the most eviction notices in Los Angeles after protections introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic lapsed earlier this year. Those living in the 90028 ZIP code received 3,585 — the most for any L.A. neighborhood — out of nearly 50,000 notices accounted for, according to new data released by L.A.'s City Controller, Kenneth Mejia on Monday. In August alone, 5,575 notices were filed across the city. Other top neighborhoods affected by...

Legal aid groups in Chicago filed a lawsuit and a complaint with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development on Tuesday against corporate landlords for automatically rejecting prospective tenants with “any prior connection to an eviction case.”

SAN FRANCISCO -- Retiree Pamela Haile has paid property taxes, insurance and other bills on a house she lets out in Oakland, but for more than three years her tenants have paid no rent thanks to one of the longest-lasting eviction bans in the country. The eviction moratorium in the San Francisco Bay Area city expires next month and Haile can't wait. The 69-year-old estimates she is owed more than $60,000 in back rent, money she doubts she will ever see. Moreover, the tenants have trashed her house and it will cost tens of thousands of dollars to make it...

A handful of California cities are still enforcing laws that protect tenants from eviction or rent increases, extending pandemic-era policies that most of the country wound down more than a year ago. The San Francisco board of supervisors voted in March to maintain a local eviction ban for unpaid rent until at least the summer. In Oakland and Berkeley, similar laws will also run into the summer months. The city of Los Angeles, meanwhile, extended a prohibition on evicting tenants for having unauthorized pets or occupants in their apartments. It also renewed a rent freeze on rent-controlled apartments until next...

Albany must include “good-cause eviction” once it finally passes the stalled state budget, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive electeds said at a Wednesday rally in Astoria, Queens. “Fighting to pass good-cause eviction is essential,” the Democratic congresswoman, who represents a swath of the Bronx and Queens, told a crowd in Athens Square. “We have to push Gov. Hochul to make sure that she includes this in the budget.” The good-cause evictions bill, first introduced in 2019, would bolster protections for tenants in non-rent regulated apartments by barring landlords from kicking them out without “good cause,” such as failure to...

This is bad, real bad! I don’t want to see that in my country! Swiss citizens are now facing forced evictions to house Ukrainian refugees. Just one step further and officials in Switzerland will start requisitioning private property and possessions for Ukrainian refugees. This has already started in Germany… In the latest news, the municipality of Seegräben in Canton Zürich is throwing out a long-term tenant out of his apartment because they are unable to find apartments to accommodate asylum seekers from Ukraine. I think this is just the beginning… Fight for your rights… Swiss tenant has to leave apartment...

Irate customers complained about soaring energy costs at a recent meeting of the Colorado Public Utility Commission. Gov. Jared Polis responded, directing state agencies to do something — to fix a problem he caused. “The Governor has directed the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which regulates state utilities, and the Colorado Energy Office (CEO) to implement several immediate actions to alleviate the natural gas energy burden on Coloradans,” states a Feb. 6 press release from the governor’s office. “I am laying out ways state entities and utilities can take action to help save people money on their energy costs, to identify...

The investment giant Blackstone has increased its eviction filings in the South and the West. One of the country's biggest landlords, Blackstone provided aid to tenants for much of the pandemic. The investment firm Blackstone has filed hundreds of eviction cases against its tenants in Georgia and Florida, the Financial Times reported on Monday. Data compiled by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks private-equity investment in housing and other sectors, shows that Blackstone's eviction filings significantly increased since July. In Florida, Blackstone has filed 382 evictions since July. It's filed another 311 cases in Georgia....

Jada Riley thought she had beaten homelessness. The 26-year-old New Orleans resident was finally making a steady income cleaning houses during the pandemic to afford a $700-a-month, one-bedroom apartment. But she lost nearly all her clients after Hurricane Ida hit last year. Then she was fired from a grocery store job in February after taking time off to help a relative. Two months behind on rent, she made the difficult decision last month to leave her apartment rather than risk an eviction judgment on her record. Now, she's living in her car with her 6-year-old son, sometimes spending nights at...

A new mural in the city of Georgetown, Texas, is generating controversy for its support of LGBTQ ideology. Members of one church who spoke out against public subsidies for sexual politics at a city council meeting believe their subsequent eviction from the Georgetown Palace Theatre was retaliation for their speech. The mural is part of a jointly sponsored initiative between the Georgetown Independent School District (GISD), Georgetown City Council, and the Georgetown Arts and Culture Board to display the work of one student artist a year. Under the agreement, GISD sponsors materials up to $500, and the city is responsible...

BOSTON (AP) — Eviction rates in Massachusetts were about twice as high in communities of color compared to predominantly white neighborhoods during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, a report by a housing group said. The report, released on Tuesday from Homes for All Massachusetts, stated that after the state’s eviction moratorium expired in October 2020, 55% of eviction filings occurred in locations where most of the residents were people of color. But only 42% of the state’s renters live in those neighborhoods. According to the report, the pandemic could potentially worsen the long-term economic and racial disparities...

Krystal Guerra’s Miami apartment has a tiny kitchen, cracked tiles, warped cabinets, no dishwasher and hardly any storage space. But Guerra was fine with the apartment’s shortcomings. It was all part of being a 32-year-old graduate student in South Florida, she reasoned, and she was happy to live there for a few more years as she finished her marketing degree. That was until a new owner bought the property and told her he was raising the rent from $1,550 to $1,950, a 26% increase that Guerra said meant her rent would account for the majority of her take-home pay from...

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against a federal freeze on evictions, dealing a blow to the Biden administration’s effort to shield cash-strapped tenants from the coronavirus pandemic. In a 6-3 ruling that broke along familiar ideological lines, the court lifted the stay on a federal judge’s order which found the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium unlawful.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Well, this really backfired: according to sources, the new and totally constitutional eviction moratorium handed down by President Joe Biden means that Capitol rioters are able to camp out in Nancy Pelosi's office indefinitely. Not good! Pelosi asked them to leave, but she was powerless to do so, as the eviction moratorium had taken effect. Sad! "Shoo, peasant! Shoo!" she said, waving her arms and trying to get the man sitting at her desk to leave. "It's 3 p.m. -- ice cream-eating time for Auntie Pelosi!" Womp womp! At publishing time, Pelosi had asked for the attorney general to...

The Supreme Court on Thursday night lifted New York’s pandemic-related ban on residential evictions, siding with a group of landlords who said their rights were being violated. The short emergency order was opposed by the court’s three liberal justices, who noted the moratorium was scheduled to expire at the end of the month. “We must balance against the landlords’ hardship the hardship to New York tenants who have relied on [the law’s] protections and will now be forced to face eviction proceedings earlier than expected,” wrote Justice Stephen G. Breyer. He said ending the moratorium early “may lead to unnecessary...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A landlord argued with his live-in tenants over unpaid rent before opening fire with a handgun in a small house near downtown Las Vegas early Tuesday, killing two women and wounding a man who survived nine gunshots, police said. The shooting suspect, Arnoldo Lozano-Sanchez, 78, surrendered after a one-hour standoff with police who arrived about 12:30 a.m. to find one woman dead outside the pink one-story home and the wounded man coming out the door, said police Lt. Ray Spencer. Police SWAT officers found the second woman dead inside the house, Spencer said. https://www.yahoo.com/news/vegas-police-2-fatally-shot-143626031.html

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday suggested the Biden administration had engaged in “gamesmanship” by renewing a freeze on evictions despite an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling. During a 30-minute hearing, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich questioned why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed an eviction moratorium last week after officials had publicly expressed doubts about the administration’s legal authority to do so.... ...One central issue in Monday’s hearing was which of two higher court rulings — one from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and another from the Supreme Court — should guide Friedrich’s decision,...

The president knows what he ordered the CDC to do is illegal. He did it anyway to appease the left wing of his party.An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If...