Tag: shelter

Scott Pruitt is such a colossal asshole that the lobbyists who were bribing him with nearly-free lodgings evicted him

Scott Pruitt, an asshole, was Donald Trump’s pick to head the EPA.
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Muji is now selling $27,000, 98sqft micro-home “huts”

Muji — the Japanese minimalist design house that’s something of a local equivalent to Ikea, but with clothes, stationery, toiletries and groceries — has finally shipped its long-awaited Mujirushi micro-home, a ¥3,000,000 (USD27,000) “hut” with a slanting roof that can be ordered for delivery and assembly in many Japanese suburbs.

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On the road with America’s post-homed nomads

Housing costs Americans more than at any time in history, and it’s only getting worse as foreclosures open the door to market-cornering by inconceivably vast hedge funds who buy all those “distressed properties” and turn then into bond-coupon factories where the rent ratchets higher and higher, well ahead of inflation, wages, or affordability.
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Local council requires Grenfell survivors to bid against each other for new homes

It’s been more than two months since a deadly blaze in Kensington, London — the richest borough in the UK — killed at least 80 people when the decorative cladding installed to make the building look nicer to rich people in nearby buildings caused the building to go up like a matchstick.
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In NYC, every tenant facing eviction is now entitled to a lawyer

America’s hedge-fund driven eviction epidemic is most keenly felt in New York City, where deep-pocketed corporate landlords use dirty tricks to evict families from rent-controlled apartments, creating an epidemic of homeless working families with children.
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Toronto’s insane real-estate bubble is finally bursting

Toronto’s crazy-insane property prices stayed high even through the 2008 crash and its aftermath, but sales volumes of houses of all types plummeted by 40.4% for July 2017-vs-July 2016, new listings are up by 5% over the same period — and the average selling price has fallen by 19% since April.
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New York property speculators have figured out how to evict everyone

New York’s catastrophic homelessness is about to get much, much worse: the skyrocketing property values (driven by speculators who buy apartments in order to get their money out of corrupt and failing states abroad, leaving them empty with the understanding that they can be cashed out on short notice, thanks to the white-hot market of other money-launderers) have attracted very deep-pocketed, anonymous hedge-funds that are snapping up buildings with rent-stabilized and rent-controlled units, who use a ruthless set of highly refined tactics to kick out all their tenants and then flip the building.
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London fire: just last year, Tory landlord-MPs rejected Labour’s tenant safety law

The death-toll on London’s Grenfell Tower fire continues to mount, it’s worth remembering that there are no “natural disasters,” only human disasters, created by people who weigh different interests in the balance and create policies based on the way the scales come up.
Continue reading “London fire: just last year, Tory landlord-MPs rejected Labour’s tenant safety law”