City Sells $1 Homes | Mortgage Fraud | Investors Spur Gentrification

City Program Sells Homes in Gary, Indiana for $1

1. A chance to own a home for $1 in city on the ropes. Officials say that a third of the houses in Gary are unoccupied, hollowed dwellings spread across a city that, like other former industrial powerhouses, has lost more than half its population in the last half-century. While some of those homes will be demolished, Gary is exploring a more affordable way to lift its haggard tax base and reduce the excess of empty structures: sell them for $1. [New York Times – 08/14/13]
2. Report: Half of all homes are being purchased with cash. More than half of all homes sold last year and so far in 2013 have been financed without a mortgage, according to an analysis by economists at Goldman Sachs Group. [Wall Street Journal – 08/15/13]
3. 10 architects make cut in post-Sandy competition. Some of the biggest names in world architecture are lining up for the chance to help design systems to protect portions of the Northeast from the next superstorm. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has just announced 10 finalists fora competition to create a regional storm protection system to help areas hit hard by the storm defend themselves from future hurricanes and rising sea levels. [Crains New York – 08/09/13]
4. Your mortgage documents are fake! A newly unsealed lawsuit, which banks settled in 2012 for $95 million, actually offers a different reason, providing a key answer to one of the persistent riddles of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The lawsuit states that banks resorted to fake documents because they could not legally establish true ownership of the loans when trying to foreclose. [Salon – 08/12/13]
5. The Passive House: Sealed for freshness. On paper, at least, the Ritchies’ home sounds too good to be true: an environmentally responsible house without traditional heating and air-conditioning systems that will be an airy 70 to 74 degrees on the coldest day of winter and the hottest day of summer, but use only a fraction of the energy consumed by a typical house [New York Times – 08/14/13]
6. Report: Upstate pols weild heavy influence on city housing policies. Republican state senators are the top recipients of campaign contributions from New York City’s real estate industry, but over 70 percent of the politicians receiving these funds are not from the city,reported the non-profit advocacy group Common Cause New York. [WNYC – 08/14/13]
7. Bloomberg signs bill to aid disaster planning. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed nine bills on Monday intended to close large holes in disaster planning that were exposed afterHurricane Sandy, which left vulnerable residents without help or adrift in shelters for days. [New York Times – 08/13/13]
8. The many, many jobs that won’t earn you enough to live in your city. Fair-market rent for the average two-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco metropolitan area will run youabout $1,795 a month (that’s for the metro area, not the city proper; the latter number is evenmore absurd). That makes San Francisco the second most expensive rental metro in the country, behind Honolulu. And the number has two major implications: Increasingly, only certain occupations can afford to live in the region. Meanwhile, all kinds of workers any city needs - bank tellers, parking lot attendants, fire fighters - cannot. [Atlantic Cities – 08/15/13]
9. Companies spruce up neighborhoods, putting gentrification in overdrive. The gentrification of low- and middle-income urban neighborhoods is nothing new. But economists and scholars say the current process is moving faster than in the past, which can be unsettling to people who lost their homes or who are being displaced by fast-rising rental rates and home prices. “It can take generations for neighborhoods to change, but investors have the potential to accelerate the process, especially because they may have the cash on hand to purchase lots of homes at once, even in tight credit markets,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, co-director of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. [Wall Street Journal – 08/13/13]
10. Lhota backs affordable housing plan. A coalition of affordable-housing groups that is pushing an $8 billion plan to build or preserve 150,000 low-cost units in New York City has found some unlikely allies: Republican mayoral candidates. Leading Democratic mayoral candidates have put out ambitious affordable housing plans, but Republican candidates have provided much less detail thus far about their visions for housing low- and middle-income New Yorkers. [Wall Street Journal – 08/13/13]