Free Republic

Obama's threat to the nation's housing providers Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation’s landlords. Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration’s novel interpretation of housing law.

Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation's landlords. Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration's novel interpretation of housing law. “The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” Obama's far-left Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julian Castro, told the annual meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week.  This is...

What a surprise!The left is posting Rent-a-Mob ads on Craigslist. Rent-a-Mob supplier to MoveOn.org, and other Soros-related Disturbances– Via Investment Watch: The group is hiring for ‘Canvass Directors’ and ‘Assistant Canvass Directors.’ If you call the number they are willing to hire you on the spot.One reader sent this: I checked this out — It’s real. They wanted to hire me on the spot when I called them up. Unbelievable! The group is linked to the ACLU and Democrat Party.

In London, the number of rented homes has just edged past the number that are owner-occupied, according to a report out this month. For the U.K.’s biggest city, this shift from owning to renting is, it seems, just the beginning. According to another new report, the ratio of renters to homeowners in London is expected to be yet greater by 2025, by which time the proportion of renters will have reached 60%. This shift from ownership to shorter-term rental tenancies, one mirrored by trends in the largest North American cities, is likely to have a number of consequences. Being able...

OWNING your own house is as much the Australian dream as the American dream, and it's one that feels increasingly out of reach for many. But when one user on Quora pondered whether it was ultimately better to rent or own your own home, blogger and investor James Altucher penned this highly controversial response: I am sick of me writing about this. Do you ever get sick of yourself? I am sick of me. But every day I see more propaganda about the American Dream of owning the home. I see codewords a $15 trillion dollar industry uses to hypnotise...

I recently joined up with ClassicFlix, because they seem to have thousands of movies Netflix doesn't. Here's the problem: The mail service here deteriorated badly about six months ago. I was watching a movie from Netflix) each Friday (with friends), returning the movie immediately, and nearly always getting the next movie by Tuesday. Suddenly, the movies were taking longer in transit, so I wasn't getting the next movie by Friday. Netflix handled the problem by sending the next movie in my queue before the previous movie had returned to them. If I had two movies "at home" they did not...

When 23-year-old Brandon S. headed from Massachusetts to the Bay Area in mid-May to start work as a software engineer at Google, he opted out of settling into an overpriced San Francisco apartment. Instead, he moved into a 128-square-foot truck. The idea started to formulate while Brandon — who asked to withhold his last name and photo to maintain his privacy on campus — was interning at Google last summer and living in the cheapest corporate housing offered: two bedrooms and four people for about $65 a night (roughly $2,000 a month), he told Business Insider. "I realized I was...

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of “affordable housing” as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters. A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment. It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your paycheck. The whole...

Just when it looked like Brooklyn rents couldn’t possibly go any higher, they jumped again. The median rent for a Brooklyn apartment rose by a whopping 10.8% year-over-year in August, to $3,112 a month, according to a new report by residential brokerage Douglas Elliman. The gain marks the first time since records began that median rents topped $3,000 a month. “It’s the third record high in three months,” said real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller, who prepared the report, “and we’re going to continue over the coming year to see prices hit record levels.” Rents rose dramatically for every unit type...

In most areas of the country, homeownership costs more than renting. Many economists with calculators claim the opposite, but the calculations and conclusions are often highly misleading. As is often the case, the devil is in the details. We recently reviewed one highly publicized calculation that owning was cheaper than renting in almost all markets. That calculation had a number of outdated assumptions, including: Outdated assumption #1: Buyers put down 20%. In reality, own versus rent is a first-time buyer decision, and the vast majority of first-time buyers today make down payments of 10% or less. Outdated assumption #2: Buyers...

New evidence surfaced last week showing that life is getting worse for America’s renters, two news reports said. The Associated Press and Wall Street Journal did a mash-up of two economic reports demonstrating that monthly rents are rising faster than incomes. The online real estate site Zillow.com reported that rents increased 4.3 percent in June from a year earlier in the nation as a whole (and 3 percent in Orange County). That’s double June’s average hourly wage increase of 2 percent reflected in government data, the news outlets reported. “Rents are insanely unaffordable on a historical basis in the United...

In urban centers around the country, rental prices are soaring. Cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City routinely report double-digit increases that make it nearly impossible for residents to make ends meet. But it’s not just dwellers of those metropolitan areas who are having a hard time paying the rent. According to a report out this week from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, more than half of renters in America are considered to be financially burdened by their rent, meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their income just on where they live. High...

The poorest Americans, who can’t afford to buy property, are increasingly priced out of rentals. There were only 28 adequate and available to rent homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters in 2013, down from 37 in 2000, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that focuses on social and economic policy. “This gap between supply and demand leaves 72% of the country’s poorest families burdened by the high cost of housing,” it found. Extremely low-income renters are households with incomes at or below 30% of the median income in that region. Not one county in the...

The North Texas rental market is on fire, with properties springing up, people flocking to the city for corporate relocations and builders working to keep pace with demand. According to an article from WFAA, apartment rent reached an all-time high last year, with rents rising 4.9% in 2014 and the average monthly rent for an apartment in Dallas-Fort Worth surging to $919. "Annual increases above 4% are rare in this market," said Greg Willett, an MPF Research vice president. "Because we're such a construction hot spot, the flow of new product moving through initial lease-up normally holds rent growth below...

You won't find this on any local news, but what is happening is a crime on a massive scale. Here's the story. My friend works at a section 8 apartment complex, which means that the taxpayers pay most of the rent there. Last week he sent me this picture of a late model Jaguar parked at his complex. His caption of the picture was "Section 8, rent always late". I asked him how much was their rent. "It just went up, to $80." A MONTH?!! "A month." This means that taxpayers are providing the Jag owner over $1,000 a month...

I was purusing the local rentals on a certain craigslist when I came across an ad which listed using electronic cigarettes.. among the exclusions for perspective tenants. No Smokers...No Vaping whats next? No Plaids...light Stripe Usage. Free Range Cotton Wearers given prefernce

More than one in four U.S. renters have to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities. That's the finding of an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007. Since the end of 2010, rental prices have surged at nearly twice the pace of average hourly wages, according to data from the real estate firm Zillow and the Labor Department.

Living with roommates is practically a rite of passage in New York City. It often begins with far too many people sharing too little space and ends with a move into an apartment of one’s own, or with that special someone. But with rents reaching new highs, single 20-somethings are not the only ones looking for someone with whom to share the rent. Couples are living with roommates even after they’ve tied the knot.

A new report from Zillow shows that rents across the U.S. are increasing, and not just in the expected regions of New York City, San Francisco and Boston. Overall, rents increased 3.3% year-over-year as of January. But many cities outpaced that, including Kansas City, which saw rent grow more than double the national average, jumping 8.5% year-over-year. St. Louis saw rent increase by 4.5% over the same period. Rents in Detroit grew by 5.0% and rents in Cleveland grew by 4.2%. Nationwide, rental appreciation is still below its peak - 6.3% hit in September 2012 after the housing bust. According...

When you buy a home, a lot of the money you spend isn't going toward your home equity. The cost of homeownership includes the money you spend on fees, taxes, and interest. These costs do not increase the value of your home nor do they reduce the principal on your mortgage. We did some analysis on the cost of homeownership versus the cost of renting. Rental costs are offset by the interest you make on the cash you did not have to put toward a down payment. Homeownership costs are offset by the tax deduction you get on your mortgage...