Tag: HUD

Obama’s last act is to force suburbs to be less white and less wealthy

Guest Post by Paul Sperry

Obama’s last act is to force suburbs to be less white and less wealthy

President Barack Obama and Housing Secretary Julian Castro

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy.

The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs.

Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods.

It’s all part of a grand scheme to forcibly desegregate inner cities and integrate the outer suburbs.

Anticipating NIMBY resistance, Castro last month threatened to sue suburban landlords for discrimination if they refuse even Section 8 tenants with criminal records. And last year, he implemented a powerful new regulation — “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” — that pressures all suburban counties taking federal grant money to change local zoning laws to build more low-income housing (landlords of such properties are required to accept Section 8 vouchers).

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Here’s How Gov’t Housing Vouchers End Up Causing More Poverty

Via The Daily Caller

Federal officials spend more tax dollars on Section 8 housing vouchers than they do on cash welfare, and the program often perpetuates poverty rather than alleviating it, according to an urban housing expert.

“Its incentives are completely skewed,” Howard Husock, vice president for policy research and director of the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“You’ve ‘hit the lottery’ and you’re set for life,” said Husock, referring to those who receive housing assistance for decades, a lifetime or even generations, while others wait for years on a waiting list. “Not only do you hit the lottery and you can sit back and have a housing unit for life, but remember, your deal is you pay 30 percent of your income in rent, but what it means is for every additional dollar you earn, you pay an addition 30 cents in rent,” he said.

Voucher recipients pay 30 percent of their income in rent no matter how much they earn, which stifles motivation to earn more, Husock said. Federal housing assistance, unlike the five-year cap imposed on welfare benefits in 1995, has no time limit. Husock, author of, “America’s Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of America’s Housing Policy,” calls it “welfare unreformed.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development paid $18 billion in vouchers, not including associated costs, in fiscal year 2014, versus the $16.5 billion the Department of Health and Human Services spent on cash welfare the same year.

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FEEL GOOD STORY OF THE DAY: A family in public housing makes $498,000 a year

This doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of thousands of people in Section 8 housing who are “earning” money under the table and not reporting it to the IRS. Then there are the additional “tenants” who pay to live there, which is also not reported. This article is only the tip of the iceberg.

Via Washington Post

A public housing project in Brooklyn. (Reuters/Lucas Jackson/File)

A family of four in New York City makes $497,911 a year but pays $1,574 a month to live in public housing in a three-bedroom apartment subsidized by taxpayers.

In Los Angeles, a family of five that’s lived in public housing since 1974 made $204,784 last year but paid $1,091 for a four-bedroom apartment. And a tenant with assets worth $1.6 million — including stocks, real estate and retirement accounts — last year paid $300 for a one-bedroom apartment in public housing in Oxford, Neb.

In a new report, the watchdog for the Department of Housing and Urban Development describes these and more than 25,000 other “over income” families earning more than the maximum income for government-subsidized housing as an “egregious” abuse of the system. While the family in New York with an annual income of almost $500,000 raked in $790,500 in rental income on its real estate holdings in recent years, more than 300,000 families that really qualify for public housing lingered on waiting lists, auditors found.

(HUD Office of Inspector General)

Continue reading “FEEL GOOD STORY OF THE DAY: A family in public housing makes $498,000 a year”

Affirmatively Destroying America’s Neighborhoods In The War On Suburbia

Submitted by Bob Livingston via PersonalLiberty.com,

Few of us understand patient gradualism. We live and have our being within a few years and mostly in an unconscious automated state of mind.

But people in power are long-term planners. They absolutely understand human nature and how to channel it to the evolution and refinement of the authoritarian state.

Authoritarianism is based on long-term planning. Authoritarianism is a philosophy of collectivism. Some call it democracy. Some call it communism. Some call it fascism. Some call it National Socialism. But whatever you call it, it is all collectivism or authoritarianism; and in its ultimate form it is globalism.

The goal is perfect docility and perfect harmony with authoritarianism (economic, social and spiritual). Until the people accept collectivism under some pretext, they are not docile and completely subdued. Once they do, rebellion and confrontation are impossible. This is the ultimate goal of the globalists, and the American system is nearing this state.

As I told you last week in “Why is the war on the Confederacy still going on today?,” the dismantling of the middle class has become the appointed, full-time task of the largest government alphabet soup agencies and Wall Street on behalf of globalism. The purpose behind this is that if those big middle-class producers and consumers can be decimated once and for all, then they can join the ranks of low-wage workers and more readily accept government largess and, thereby, become “hooked” on collectivism.

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Not the Onion: Obama Wants to “Diversify” America’s Wealthy Neighborhoods

Section 8 coming to your neighborhood, whether you like it or not. I wonder if Obama will diversify the Hamptons or the NYC penthouse community.

Guest Post by Leah Barkoukis via Townhall

Heading into the last quarter of Obama’s presidency we heard time and time again that these two years would be the most dangerous for the Republic. His disdain for working with Congress, contempt for the Constitution, and propensity to act unilaterally would only be magnified in the remaining days of his term—after all, he’d go big because he’s going home.

Now that he’s made everything from health care to immigration precipitously worse, next up on the list is an experiment in social engineering.

The Onion The Hill reports:

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.”

A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.

“HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”

Continue reading “Not the Onion: Obama Wants to “Diversify” America’s Wealthy Neighborhoods”

AFFIRMATIVELY FURTHERING FAIR HOUSING

Government mandated racial diversity coming to your neighborhood courtesy of your Savior in Chief using your tax dollars to ease the plight of former slaves by providing them housing they can’t afford, but you can. You too can now live next to Section 8 neighbors like Admin in Wildwood. Obama is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s got two years left and he will use executive orders to implement his left wing agenda while appeasing the Republicans with more war. Wait until the nasty parts of Obamacare kick in during 2015.

Guest Post by Anthony Sanders

 

Free To Choose? Obama Administration Likely To Impose “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” Regulation After Midterm Elections

The midterm elections are on Tuesday, November 4th. After the elections, the Obama Administration is expected to operationalize the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” regulation in December.

What is the proposed “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” regulation?

According to the New York Post,

After a delay, the administration’s final “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” regulation is now expected to be announced in December. Originally scheduled for finalization in October, the new Housing and Urban Development Department rules will force all cities and suburbs to accept subsidized housing in the name of racial diversity, superceding all local zoning ordinances.

The Orwellian-sounding regulation would force some 1,200 municipalities to redraw zoning maps to racially diversify suburban neighborhoods.

Under the scheme, HUD plans to map every US neighborhood by race and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances. Areas deemed overly segregated will be forced to change their zoning laws to allow construction of subsidized and other affordable housing to bring more low-income minorities into “white suburbs.” HUD’s maps will be used to select affordable housing sites.

It’s part of the administration’s ambitious agenda to eliminate “racial segregation,” ZIP code by ZIP code, block by block, through the systematic dismantling of allegedly “exclusionary” building ordinances. In effect, federal bureaucrats will have the power to rezone your neighborhood.

Some cities are already complaining about the new regulation.

Here is how it will work. HUD and it’s agents will create racial maps and then “encourage” affordable housing construction in non-integrated neighborhoods.

hudracemap

The cost if a municipality doesn’t comply? Loss of HUD block grant funding. Or worse.

School busing was a previous attempt at “equality” of education, but that venture failed badly and was abandoned. So now HUD wants to bus people to your neighborhood … permanently.

Selective Enforcement

Of course, the HUD maps of racial divergence will not be applied equally. Does anyone believe that Democrat Nancy Pelosi will allow affordable housing projects in her swank San Francisco neighborhood? Will billionaires in the San Francisco Bay Area from Google, Apple, etc., allow affordable housing projects in Portola Valley, Los Altos Hills, etc? Will wealthy horse owners in Northern Virginia allow affordable housing projects plopped in the middle of their farms? Not likely.

This is massive Federal overreach and negates “voting with your feet.” That is, if you choose to move away from bad schools, crime, etc., the Federal government will negate your freedom of choice and plop the same problems in your new neighborhood.

And I doubt if President Obama will allow an affordable housing project next to whatever swank golf course he decides to move to after he leaves office.

No, the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” Regulation is another attack on the middle class.

This new regulation comes from HUD, the same people that brought us “The National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream” under President Bill Clinton that turned out to be a nightmare for millions of American households.

Here is Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman discussing freedom of choice versus government control of markets.