FML Listings posts incredulous commentary about outrageously overpriced real estate listings in Toronto. Look at the run-down bungalows -- in
North York! -- listed for a million dollars and despair. Canada's
housing bubble, on full display. Via
Maclean's.
posted by mcwetboy
on Jan 30, 2012 -
73 comments
"Completed in 1954, the 33 11-story buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development was built as an attempt to address the housing crisis the poor faced in St Louis, Missouri. Only twenty years later, at 3pm on the 16th of March, 1972, the buildings were leveled, declared unfit for habitation because of unsafe and unsanitary conditions, coupled with rampant crime. The story of Pruitt-Igoe is a tragic urban fable, a complicated and loaded story of ambition, hubris and failure." (src)
"The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" is a documentary directed by Chad Freidrichs that dives into the complex history of the
famed housing project (YouTube or Vimeo trailer). RustWire has
an interesting interview with the documentary's creator. More information from
Architizer,
Homo Ludens, and
Magical Urbanism. Be sure to check out the collection of pictures from the area and from the documentary in the creators'
Flickr stream.
[via Archinect and Mefi Projects] [more inside]
posted by spiderskull
on Feb 28, 2011 -
29 comments
Earlier this week, Toxie, NPR's cutest toxic asset
died. One of the mortgages bundled into this asset was an investment property in Bradenton, Florida, which, like many Florida homes, has never been occupied or served as anything other than a financial instrument. Boston.com's Big Picture recently took
a look from above at the effects that this (and previous) housing bubbles have had on the development of Florida's cities and landscapes. How do you design a city that nobody plans to live in? (
Previously)
posted by schmod
on Oct 1, 2010 -
82 comments
Before they foreclose on your house why don't you get back at the bastards by
stripping the place. There are
consequences. "Lawyers who represent people facing foreclosure advise them that whatever's nailed down generally stays with the house."
posted by Xurando
on Sep 12, 2010 -
138 comments
When he was 32, his life seemed hopeless. He was bankrupt and without a job. He was grief stricken over the death of his first child and he had a wife and a newborn to support. Drinking heavily, he contemplated suicide. Instead, he decided decided that his life was not his to throw away: it belonged to the universe. Buckminster Fuller embarked on "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." If the architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller were still alive, he would be 115 years old today. Though he died in 1983, his legacy grows on through
recordings of his ideas and
the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 12, 2010 -
32 comments
Mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae
announces policy changes designed to encourage borrowers to "work with their servicers and pursue alternatives to foreclosure"...and threatens borrowers with new penalties for strategic default.
[more inside]
posted by 2bucksplus
on Jul 1, 2010 -
44 comments
Betting Against the American Dream. In 2005, just as Wall Street started to get cold feet about the housing market, the
Magnetar hedge fund helped create a new wave of billion-dollar mortgage-backed securities, pushed bankers to include riskier sub-prime mortgages, and then shorted the securities, making millions when the bubble finally burst. Traders on both sides of the deals pocketed enormous fees even if their banks went under when the securities failed.
Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica,
This American Life, and NPR's
Planet Money track down some of the big winners in the housing/financial crisis. No time to read or listen? It seemed so much like a scheme from
The Producers, they even recorded
a show tune to explain it all. (
Previously,
2,
3)
posted by straight
on Apr 15, 2010 -
30 comments
ACORN, the low-income community grassroots organisation, is
set to close by April 1st, citing "a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded, right-wing attacks that are unprecedented since the McCarthy era". Meanwhile the New York Times has issued a
correction on the stories which led to the 87-3 vote to remove ACORN's Federal funding (
previously), admiting that "while footage shot away from the offices shows one activist, James O'Keefe, in a flamboyant pimp costume, there is no indication that he was wearing the costume while talking to the Acorn workers."
posted by Artw
on Mar 22, 2010 -
87 comments
The Donald Sterling Rule "Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling lives by his own rules. And the only one that matters, apparently, is this:
all bad deeds go unpunished. Over the last six years, nearly two dozen L.A. residents have sued Sterling for engaging in racist housing practices and Jim Crow-style bigotry. In a 2003 deposition, the 76-year-old real estate mogul admitted to paying a former employee to have sex with him in an elevator. Three years ago, the U.S. government charged him with "willful" mistreatment of African-American and Latino tenants, and earlier this month, he agreed to pay the Dept. of Justice nearly $3 million to settle a federal racial-discrimination housing lawsuit, the largest award ever for a case of its kind." So why, asks California's
Tenants Together,
has the NBA said nothing about Sterling's less than sterling behavior?
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Nov 27, 2009 -
27 comments
There are still some
smart people left on Wall St. Hedge fund manager, John Paulson, made a cool $15B for his fund as the housing market imploded. His cut? $3-4B. Not too shabby for a year's worth of work.
[more inside]
posted by blahblah
on Sep 26, 2008 -
45 comments
Disclosing victim status could mean being denied that housing is even available. Women strong enough to flee their homes and their abusive situations were more likely to be denied housing outright, something that did not happen to people not disclosing.
posted by jacobw
on Apr 24, 2008 -
29 comments
Will States Respond to the Foreclosure Crisis? Their headline is that 1 in 33 homeowners are projected to face foreclosure in the next two years. But I found the stat that neighboring homes will lose $356 billion in value a rather staggering number to swallow for those not facing the threat of foreclosure.
posted by jacobw
on Apr 17, 2008 -
65 comments
The sub-prime mortgage crisis is giving way in some places to crime ridden McMansion ghettos, perhaps the beginning of a
larger long term trend in demographics: "many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 29, 2008 -
81 comments
