Envy Apartment

The Oasis Terraces housing complex in Singapore and the original cast of “Rent” How to tell if one has made it in America? See if they own a home. For decades, homeownership has been one of the cornerstones of the American dream, and the U.S. housing market was the envy of the world. But that’s changed. The federal mortgage subsidy complex , which turned (white) America into a nation of homeowners in the postwar decades and helped build the world’s largest middle class , is no longer doing what it’s supposed to. Faced with stagnating wages and ballooning property prices , fewer Americans can afford to buy their own homes. The mortgage interest deduction and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are turning into regressive subsidies, channeling taxpayer money to rich homeowners and driving up housing costs while a growing group of middle-income renters must fend for themselves. Rent-stabilization laws have become weaker over time. And New York is dealing with a crumbling public housing infrast...

Rents in the Vallejo area, while the lowest in the Bay Area, are rising faster than in most other places, even as the number of renters increase, driving some people out of the area, a new study found. A firm called Apartment List conducted the study to try and get a handle on the challenges renters face , spokeswoman Sydney Bennet said. “In the Vallejo metro, the number of renter households has increased by 30 percent since 2005,” she said. “However, there was insufficient data and research into the challenges renters face . To address this, Apartment List set up its data science program in 2014.” That research leverages proprietary rental unit and survey data, she said. “We also invest significant resources into gathering and analyzing Census and other publicly available data,” she said. The resulting study found that the Vallejo area’s 5 percent year-over- year rent increases , leads the national and state averages. The median monthly rent for a two-bedroom unit in Vallejo t...

Last year, the Miami- Dade County Commission shot down a plan that would have forced local developers to include some affordable apartments in every new project. Commissioner Javier Souto claimed the idea was "social engineering," one of the most profoundly stupid things said in South Florida politics this decade. According to the study, almost two-thirds of Miami's poor are stuck spending more than half of their income on rent or living in roach-infested hellholes. "These households are defined as very low-income renters who do not receive government housing assistance and who paid more than one-half of their income for rent, lived in severely inadequate conditions , or both," HUD's researchers write. "High rents in proportion to renter incomes remain dominant among households with worst-case needs, leaving these renters with substantial, unmet need for affordable housing." Larger cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, techn...

A nonprofit in Missoula is set to purchase 160 units of apartments next to the Clark Fork River in Missoula in order to preserve them as affordable housing . Homeword is currently in the process of buying the Creekside Apartments on East Broadway, which are currently owned by an out-of-state company. The apartments are currently available to people earning $27,720 or less annually, which is 60 percent or less of the area median income of $46,200 per person. However, the affordable restriction was set to expire in 2026, at which point the property would most likely have been converted into market rate rentals due to its desirable location. This would have made them "prime" for rent increases that would likely have caused the majority of residents to have to seek a place to live at lower rates elsewhere in an already competitive rental market , according to Homeword executive director Andrea Davis . “We know that rentals are in high demand here and there’s a significant ne...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...