PrairiePundit

 Fox News: DEI is the real cause of America’s housing crisis Why doesn’t Hermes just produce more bags and then everyone can have a Birkin? That’s basically the argument of people pressing President Donald Trump to declare a housing emergency. The fact is there’s plenty of housing, just not in the most desirable neighborhoods. Population growth is slowing, deportations are increasing and new home construction already outpaces family creation. The shortage is a myth created by activists so they can force residential living patterns to conform to DEI dogma. A simple calculation proves it. The Census Bureau collects annual data on both the number of households and the available housing stock. The latest data shows 131.3 million households and 146.5 million housing units, an excess supply of over 15 million units. ... Several years ago, I moved out of Houston and built a home in the country, and it was the second home on the road.  Since then, several other houses have been built ...

  American Action News: The head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said Thursday that he is reversing a policy that requires domestic violence shelters and other facilities to accept men in women’s spaces. HUD Secretary Scott Turner, whom the Senate confirmed Wednesday, announced the change during a press briefing in Washington, D.C. as one of many ways he is terminating “far-left agenda items” in the agency. The Obama administration adopted the “gender identity” policy that bans “discrimination” against “transgender persons” in federally-funded housing. Turner said scrapping the rule would “protect the ladies that are entering any HUD-funded facilities” such as abuse shelters and “get government out of the way of what the Lord established” regarding gender. His decision complies with President Donald Trump’s executive order restoring “biological truth” to federal agencies by recognizing male and female as the only two sexes, the secretary told the press. ....

 NY Post: ‘Shady’ $7B Biden climate slush fund recipient facilitated NY low-income housing sale that hiked rents, forced out residents: tenants A New York woman who was due to get nearly $7 billion from a Biden administration climate slush fund once forced through the sale of a low-income housing complex in Westchester County, resulting in rents spiking up to 80% and making the cost unaffordable for many, tenants say. Sadie McKeown — a Democratic donor appointed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the boards of the state Housing Financing Agency and Energy Research and Development Authority in 2021 — was ticketed to receive $6.79 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for her nonprofit during former President Joe Biden’s final months in office. As president of the nonprofit, the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), McKeown then propped up a coalition of groups called Climate United to steer their cut of the EPA’s $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund into build...

 Fox News: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) eliminated federal regulations created during the Obama administration, which Secretary Scott Turner accused of putting "extreme and restrictive demands" on local housing developers. President Donald Trump rescinded the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, created under former President Barack Obama, during his first administration. Trump said at the time in a speech about cutting red tape in the federal government that the rule serves to "eliminate single-family zoning to destroy the value of houses" at the benefit of "far-left Washington bureaucrats." Then-President Joe Biden later worked to reinstate the rule but ultimately pulled back due to fear it could make him politically vulnerable as he sought reelection, according to Politico. On Wednesday, HUD initiated its own rulemaking to squash the Obama-era AFFH rule, which mandated that localities commission extensive ana...

  American Action News: President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says he will make American housing affordable again by making it “easier to build” without state intrusion. HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s conservative agenda for the cabinet-level agency involves taking a critical look at the regulatory regime that former President Joe Biden expanded. Turner now has the task of working to reverse housing costs that hit record highs under Biden and largely blamed him for causing them in an interview days before the Senate confirmed him on Wednesday in a 55-44 vote. Turner was sworn in on Wednesday. “It is our desire that we can build as many homes as possible — quality living spaces of all kinds for the American people,” Turner told the Daily Caller News Foundation, mentioning “millions” as his goal. A spokesperson for Turner said he “is the person we need to reform failed federal housing policies, cut red tape, and find innovative sol...

@TheKevinDalton In March of 2023 Gavin Newsom promised to deliver 1200 tiny homes at a cost of 625,000 taxpayer dollars apiece. To date, not a single tiny home has been delivered. By comparison, the Amish just built 12 tiny homes in less than 48 hours at a cost of $25,000 apiece. Newsom should have hired the Amish.  They know how to get things done and do so in a timely manner.  I find it remarkable that tiny homes cost $625,000 in California.  No wonder that state is losing population.  I suspect that the Amish houses' cost is just materials and does not include labor but I also doubt that the labor cost on tiny homes is $600,000 even in California.

 American Action News: Matt Gorman, a former aide to Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, warned during a Friday CNN appearance that sellers will add the down payment assistance proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris to the price of homes. Harris proposed giving first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 in down payment assistance during a Friday speech laying out proposals regarding the economy. Gorman, who worked on Scott’s 2024 presidential campaign, said that Harris was trying to moderate from positions she held during the 2020 election, but that the housing proposal was “far left.” ... “But look, when it comes to the 25K, I mean, you just added $25,000 to every price, on every home price in the country because if you’re giving that away, essentially for free, people will add it into the price,” Gorman told “CNN News Central” co-host Boris Sanchez. “Obviously price controls have come under criticism from the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, whom this channel’s talked to...

 American Action News: The Biden administration announced on Monday new measures that could exacerbate housing shortages in the U.S., experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen released new measures Monday that aim to increase the housing supply by expanding financing opportunities through continued subsidization in an effort to bring down costs. The U.S. continues to run a housing deficit year-over-year, driving up costs, with the latest measures adding to the list of market interventions in the housing sector under Biden that have ultimately exacerbated the problem through inflationary spending, crowding out of private investment and the encouragement of risky lending, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF. There was a shortage of around 4 to 7 million homes as of November 2023, according to an estimate from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In a separate estimate from Zillow, the shortage grew by 200,000 from 2021 to 2022. “Based on prices, i...

 American Update: A major real estate company released a survey on Friday which found that renters and homeowners are significantly reducing their quality of life to afford housing under President Joe Biden. Nearly one in five homeowners and renters reported skipping meals to afford housing in Biden’s economy, according to a new survey conducted by Redfin. The median asking rental price increased from less than $1,700 when Biden took office in January 2021 to nearly $2,000 as of February, according to Redfin’s data. Americans made other sacrifices to stay in their homes, with 20.7% reporting working more hours, 20.6% saying they have sold their belongings, more than one in six having dipped into retirement savings and 15.6% reporting that they’re putting off medical care to afford housing payments. As of February, the median household earned $30,000 less than it would need to afford the median home in the United States, according to Redfin. When Biden took office in 2021, the me...

Biden's reckless spending is primarily the cause. It created inflation which also drove up the interest rates as well as the cost of housing.

 Gateway Pundit: Lawmakers in Florida are finally addressing the problem of squatting, one of the most egregious property rights violations going on in America today. This month, both chambers of the state Legislature unanimously passed a bill allowing law enforcement to immediately remove squatters without waiting weeks or months for a case to move through the courts, according to WJXT-TV . If signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the measure would go into effect on July 1. The move comes as a relief to Florida property owner Patti Peeples, who dealt with squatters last year. “It gives me a real feeling of positive hope that we still have the ability to discuss challenges in our society and work with our legislatures in a bipartisan way,” she told WJXT. Peeples shared her story during a state Senate Criminal Justice Committee hearing in February. “Imagine for a moment that you leave from your day of serving the citizens of Florida as a senator and you return to your home,” she said, acco...

 American Update: President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2025 includes over $250 billion in funding to boost housing supply as housing unaffordability continues to plague Americans. The $258 billion proposal would be used to build or preserve over two million housing units, catering to lower- and middle-income households, according to the White House. Home prices climbed by 7% year-over-year in December, up from 6.3% in November, as constraints on supply, sustained inflation and high interest rates burden both suppliers and consumers. The proposal includes $20 billion in mandatory funding for the Innovation Fund for Housing Expansion, which aims to provide subsidies for the construction of multifamily rental homes as well as remove barriers to housing development, according to the White House. The budget calls for another $7.5 billion in mandatory funding to be given to rental assistance project contracts for “the development of new climate-resilient affordable ho...

 Yahoo News: A collapse in the housing and utilities system has struck half of the regions in Russia. Source: The Moscow Times Municipal emergencies have affected at least 43 regions, leaving hundreds of thousands of Russian residents without heating, water, electricity and gas. The largest incident occurred in Podolsk near Moscow, where 20,000 people were left without heating in -30°C temperatures. Even nearly two weeks after the incident, the local authorities have not been able to fully restore the heat supply. In Novosibirsk, an emergency left 14,000 people in 237 buildings without heating, and in Lipetsk, 10,000 people in 282 buildings were affected. Significant emergencies have also been reported in Saratov, where heating was turned off in over 650 buildings and 100 social facilities, including schools and hospitals; Volgograd, where tens of thousands of people were left without heating; and Nakhodka, where 6,000 people faced the same issue. Yet despite critical wear and tear...

 Rick Moran: Another crisis that Joe Biden has been pretending doesn't exist is the homelessness crisis. The number of "unhoused people," to use the new-fangled term for homeless people so we don't hurt their feelings or something, has increased 12% just in the last year. Numbers rose across "all household types, the Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a new  report ," reported  by Axios. About 650,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January, according to the report. That figure represents "the highest number of people reported as experiencing homelessness on a single night since reporting began in 2007," the report says. Other findings from the report: Black people made up 13% of the U.S. population in 2023, but they made up 21% of the U.S. population living in poverty, 37% of all people experiencing homelessness and 50% of homeless people in families with children. Asian and Asian American people had the large...

 John Nolte: The average monthly mortgage payment in Joe Biden’s America has soared to $3,322, per analysis from the Wall Street Journal. That $3,322 is nearly double the average monthly mortgage payment when His Fraudulency assumed office. When former President Trump left office, the average monthly mortgage payment was $1,787. ... Even the pre-Biden monthly payment is about 10 times what my first mortgage payment was.  The current mortgage payment is nearly $40,000 a year which is out of reach for many Americans. 

Reuters: Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market. China's property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing. Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed. As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show. That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres. ... It looks like a failure of the market research by the builders and the lender wh...

 Breitbart: CNN: As Rent Inflation Remains Sticky, Rising Mortgages Fueling ‘Worst Affordability Crisis’ in Housing in 40 Years The big difference 40 years ago is that home prices were not nearly as high, to begin with, so the increased mortgage payments were not the deal killer that they are now.  I was fortunate enough to make some good investments in real estate and now own my home with no mortgage payment.  It is like getting a tax-free raise in pay.  See, also: Real Estate Agents Say: Buy Property in These 5 States To Be Rich in 5 Years Texas is at the top of the list. 

 Fox Business: Mortgage rates reach highest level in over 20 years The average rate for the benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage is at 7.09% ... "The economy continues to do better than expected, and the 10-year Treasury yield has moved up, causing mortgage rates to climb," said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. "Demand has been impacted by affordability headwinds, but low inventory remains the root cause of stalling home sales." A recent report from Realtor.com showed that the number of available homes on the market in June was down more than 47% from the typical amount before the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. The Federal Reserve's aggressive interest-rate hike campaign sent mortgage rates soaring last year, and sellers who locked in a low mortgage rate before the pandemic have been reluctant to sell and jump into a higher rate on a new property, leaving few options for buyers. High inflation has driven the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark...

 Fox News: Frustration builds as officials in Philadelphia refuse to enforce anti-squatter laws across the city Homeowners across the United States are fighting drawn-out and costly legal battles to remove squatters. In Philadelphia , it can cost upwards of $3,500 to even begin the court process to remove squatters from a residence plus $1,600 to actually move the suspects out and store their belongings for a month, Megan Spangler of Anchor Realty NE told Fox News. "We're dealing with almost a year to get these people out," Spangler said. "It is a very lengthy process. It's a very expensive one, too." Lapidus said he thought the city was heading in the right direction several years ago when the council passed an ordinance speeding up the process for removing alleged squatters from residential property and imposing a fine of up to $300 per day that the trespassing continues, plus jail time. It also authorized police to investigate squatting accusations and...

 Moneywise: ... Between 2019 and 2020, the number of New Yorkers earning between $150,000 and $750,000 fell by nearly 6%, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. ... Moreover, the number of real high earners — those making over $750,000 — dropped by nearly 10% during the same period. Some speculate that the wealthy elites are leaving New York because of the state’s high tax rates. While it’s hard to say exactly why people move, the loss of high earners can impact the city’s income tax revenue. For perspective, the 41,000 filers in the city’s top 1% pay more than 40% of all its income taxes. The 450,000 filers in the top 10% pay about two-thirds of all income taxes. In other words, the remaining 90% of taxpayers contribute about one-third of the city’s income tax revenue. In its most recent report, financial technology company SmartAsset found that in 2020, New York had a net outflow of almost 20,000 high-earning households — defined as households earning over $200...