Envy Apartment

Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston has 182 lots." />EXPAND The Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston has 182 lots. Stephen Paulsen Elizabeth Perez loves her trailer park . But if she's ever forced to move, at least she has a back-up plan. A chatty 45-year-old with a wide smile, Perez has lived at and managed the Trinity Duval Mobile Home Park in southeast Houston since 2008. Used mobile homes here typically sell for $12,000 to $38,000, depending on their size and condition, she says. She remembers one woman buying a home for just $2,000, using her IRS refund. The Duval Mobile Home Park first opened in the 1950s. It was purchased last year by Trinity Community Group , a trailer park management company — and Perez worried about the future of the park. “I kept thinking, ‘Shoot, they're going to want to tear it down,’” Perez said. “I was kind of scared.” The company promised it would keep the park operational , according to Perez. Still, Perez accepts...

Flagship Inn, Petersburg Two Sundays ago the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a disturbing special report on poverty and housing insecurity along the Jefferson Davis Highway in Chesterfield County. Hundreds of people live in shabby motels, paying $200 or more per week to live in conditions almost as deplorable as Richmond’s public housing projects . These hotels, the housing equivalent of pawn shops and payday lenders, serve the poor and the desperate who have nowhere else to turn. It is depressing to think that people live this way. People pay huge sums — $200 per week translates into more than $800 per month, enough to rent a nice, two- room apartment in a decent neighborhood — to dwell amidst deplorable conditions . Many hotel rooms have roaches, bedbugs and other insect infestations. The article cites leaking sewage , mold, mice droppings, and inoperable door locks . Conditions sound similar to those of the public housing projects — without the same level of crime. The plight of ...

Last week, we sponsored the 11th annual Points Summer Book Club , a community discussion of Matthew Desmond's piercing Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City . We debated the causes of eviction, the effect on children, how to view landlords' role, and what this discussion means for a city like Dallas. The book club also included an event with the author, in a partnership with Southern Methodist University 's SMU Reads program . On Thursday, Desmond spoke to a crowd of more than 900 people, laying out his research and his experience with evictions' damaging effect on people's safety, family, jobs and mental health. "When you add all that up, we have to conclude that eviction -- which used to be rare in this country, which used to draw crowds — it's not just a condition of poverty, it's also a cause of it. And it's making it worse. It's leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation — which means that we can't fix poverty in A...

Share this story They live in luxury apartments costing $6 000 a month, wear designer labels , drink champagne worth $500 per bottle, cruise around Johannesburg in chauffeur-driven limousines, and African Independent can exclusively reveal that their combined pocket money exceeds $40 000 every month. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe ’s sons, Robert Jnr (24) and Bellarmine Chatunga (20), are living in the lap of luxury. Impeccable sources said each boy receives more than $20 000 in pocket money every month, in addition to the rentals and living expenses which are footed in Zimbabwe. Interestingly, Mugabe revealed in 2015 that the government paid him a monthly salary of $12 000. H is wife Grace said Mugabe is the poorest president in the world.  The Mugabe family ’s only known private business, a dairy located 35 kilometres north of Harare, is a perennial loss-maker. Chatunga posted a video on YouTube last week showing him smoking expensive cigars and sipping on pricey champagne...

September 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm news By Kevin Plummer Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. One Sunday evening in 1959, after a screening of the Toronto Film Society , architect Gerald Robinson and engineer/builder Irwin Burns chatted over coffee. The two shared a common viewpoint that the city’s urban core was in decline. The same was happening in cities across Canada as municipal governments were more interested in improving traffic and encouraging sprawl rather than revitalizing their downtown districts. The very next day, Burns heard from real estate developer Murray Webber that a lot with Bloor Street West frontage was going to become available for a hundred-year lease from Victoria University. “There,” Burns told Robinson , as he recalled in the Globe and Mail of October 18, 1963, “is the place to demonstra...