HUD: You Are Getting Scammed By NYCHA. Time To Pay Attention!

October 08, 2025 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

A favorite subject of mine over the years has been the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. NYCHA operates hundreds of buildings housing some 500,000 people, in some 170,000 +/- apartments, mostly built from the 1950s to the 1970s. Organized on a pure socialist model of public ownership with heavily subsidized rents, NYCHA has followed the trajectory of all socialist schemes ever attempted, having gone from an excited beginning into a long, slow death spiral that has now been ongoing for at least two decades.

When NYCHA was building the buildings, everyone seems to have assumed that bricks and mortar just last forever; so nobody bothered to consider that at some point the capital investment would need to be renewed, or to plan for how that would be done. By the 2010s, the buildings were turning 40, 50 and even 60 years old. In 2015 NYCHA announced that it had suddenly discovered a need for some $17 billion to fund urgently-needed repairs. Thereafter, the amounts claimed to be needed for such repairs escalated rapidly: by 2021 it was $32 billion; and by 2023 a new “audit” found the “need” to be $78 billion — about $460,000 per unit. And this is for “low income” housing. (For comparison, according to the most recent data from FRED, the median price of a single family house in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2025 was about $410,000.)

So what’s the plan now? In recent weeks, news reports have revealed that renovation projects are now moving forward on substantial numbers of NYCHA buildings (although a small percentage of the total). Costs, to the extent announced, are in the range of well over $400,000, and up to about $600,000, per unit. And where is the money going to come from? You will not be surprised to learn that they are being as opaque as possible about that. However, it is clear that the main plan is to scam the money out of the federal taxpayers.

HUD: It is time for you to get on top of this situation and shut it down.

Here is a smattering of reports on NYCHA renovation projects that I have come across in the past couple of weeks:

• Something called the NYCHA Journal had a piece on September 25 with the headline “NYCHA & Partners Close on Financing for $433M PACT Project to Renovate 5 Brooklyn Developments.”The piece states that the $433 million will cover “nearly 2,000 residents” in “14 residential buildings.” Since NYCHA buildings average about 3 residents per unit, this plan involves about 700 units, which means that the renovation cost per unit is in the range of $600,000 per unit.
• On October 3, the New York YIMBY website reported that a NYCHA project in East Harlem called the Gaylord White Houses had secured some $272.6 million in financing to renovate four buildings with 523 residential units. That would come to some $521,000 per unit. Again, the financing was said to come via this PACT program.
• On October 4, YIMBY reported that a “$93M Renovation Project [had been] Approved For Bronx River Addition In Soundview, The Bronx.” “The project will include repairs across 226 apartments in two buildings. . . .” $93 million divided by 226 units comes to about $412,000 per unit.
• An October 6 piece, again at New York YIMBY, reported that the NYC Public Housing Preservation Trust is seeking “requests for proposals” to renovate two NYCHA buildings in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The two buildings are said to contain “more than 400 residents” in 209 units. No price is yet available for this prospective renovation.

So what exactly is the plan to pay back these very large new loans?

As background, the average rent on a NYCHA apartment (2024 data) is $588 per month, or just over $7000 per year. Moreover, rents are limited to 30% of resident income, and the average income (same link) is said to be about $25,000 — so NYCHA has almost no ability to raise rents. The $588/month current rent covers only about a third of operating costs, with almost all of the rest provided by federal subsidies totaling in the range of $2.5 billion per year.

But the new loans are going to more than double the operating shortfall. Assuming that the borrowing entity can get a 6% interest rate (likely better than you could get today), and a renovation cost per unit of $400,000 (very optimistic), that means $24,000 annually of added interest cost per unit, or $2000 per month. Tenant rent stays at $588 per month, so taxpayer subsidy must then go from about $1500 per month to more like $3500 per month. If extended to all NYCHA apartments and paid for by the federal taxpayers, the extra $2000 per month per unit would take annual federal subsidies to NYCHA from about $2.5 billion to more like $6.5 billion. (For comparison, the total of rents collected from all NYCHA tenants is around $1 billion per year.)

The renovations are being financed under something called the PACT program (Permanent Affordability Commitment Together). The NYCHA Journal piece linked above has this to say about the PACT program:

The PACT program transitions developments from traditional Section 9 assistance to Project-Based Section 8 and unlocks funding for resident-selected PACT partners to complete comprehensive repairs and to oversee daily property management of the campus.

New York City has a web page further describing the PACT program. From that page:

Through PACT, developments will be included in the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) and convert to a more stable, federally-funded program called Project-Based Section 8. This allows NYCHA to unlock funding to complete comprehensive repairs, while also ensuring homes remain permanently affordable and residents have the same basic rights as they possess in the public housing program. . . . Why do we need PACT? NYCHA needs more than $78 billion to fully restore and renovate all of its buildings, but the federal government has provided only a fraction of the funding needed for these improvements.

They are “unlocking” federal funding by going from “traditional Section 9 assistance” to “project-based Section 8" funding. “Section 9” means a multi-billion dollar annual subsidy payable directly from HUD to NYCHA. “Section 8” means that each tenant gets a subsidy in the form of a housing voucher covering the difference between his rent (30% of income) and a rental amount sufficient to cover all the new costs. This will then be “more stable” — with that term apparently meaning no more need to rely on tenants who may or may not pay rent when due, when you can now just get a big regular handout from Uncle Sugar’s infinite pile of money. The federal taxpayer will go from paying around two-thirds of the cost of operating these buildings, to more like five-sixths. And by the way, these buildings don’t pay property tax!

So, HUD, if you just let this happen, you will get scammed for an additional $4 billion a year or so, while NYCHA will remain as a sore tooth in New York City for potentially generations to come. You have an opportunity to shut it down now, through the device of not awarding unlimited Section 8 subsidies to this left-wing graft factory. With that step, you can force NYCHA into a long overdue fundamental restructuring, which otherwise will never occur. Time to pay attention!

 

The Latest News On New York's Socialist-Model Public Housing Provider, NYCHA

July 15, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

There’s always something new to report on New York’s housing follies. The accepted housing paradigm here in blue-model New York is that elite public policy geniuses with access to infinite taxpayer funds will create housing solutions to provide perfect housing fairness and justice to all. Somehow, they keep falling short.

Nowhere is this more evident that with the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. NYCHA is the ultimate socialist-model low income housing provider, by far the largest such housing authority in the country. It owns and manages about 180,000 apartments in what are known as The Projects, home to something in the range of 400,000-500,000 people, or about 5-6% of New York City’s population. (In most other American cities, HUD-supported projects house about 1-2% of the population.) For decades, as housing authorities in places like Chicago and St. Louis were forced to dynamite many of their failed low-income projects, NYCHA was held up as the great success story of the genre. But was the apparent success real, or was NYCHA just more artful than its compatriots in covering up its failures?

I last reported on NYCHA in a post in May that covered a new Report out from the Citizens Budget Commission. The CBC Report had one piece after another of disastrous financial news about NYCHA. During Covid, many NYCHA tenants just stopped paying rent, and when essentially nobody got evicted, many more followed suit. By February 2023, NYCHA was down to collecting only about 63% of (already deeply subsidized) rents on a monthly basis. Rent collections for 2022 were estimated to cover barely 25% of operating costs, with nothing for needed capital upgrades, let alone other things that normal citizens have to pay for, like property taxes.

NYCHA’s gigantic hole of needed capital improvements started to come to public attention in 2015, when Bill de Blasio was the Mayor. The City issued a big Report titled “Next Generation NYCHA,” supposedly outlining the strategy to take NYCHA forward for the next several decades. You only had to get to page 5 to find out that NYCHA was facing a looming financial crisis:

[T]he promise of NYCHA as decent, affordable housing is under serious threat as the Authority confronts the worst financial crisis in its history. Billions in underfunding by all levels of government, outdated and inefficient management models, and rapidly deteriorating buildings have severely weakened NYCHA as an organization and diminished the quality of its life of residents. Today, tenants shoulder the burden of nearly $17 billion in unmet capital needs across the Authority’s aging building stock, living with leaky roofs, mold, unreliable heating systems, broken elevators, and a host of other problems at any given time.

$17 billion in “unmet capital needs” for about 180,000 apartments is almost $100,000 per apartment — an enormous sum for apartments that rent for an average of only about $600 per month.

But the $17 billion was only the start. In February 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported on a City Council hearing where NYCHA officials testified that the amount of unmet capital needs had then reached $25 billion. And then things really got going:

• Just a few months later, the figure had jumped to $32 billion. From the Gothamist, July 3, 2018: “A new capital assessment report from the City shows that the authority [NYCHA] requires $32 billion in repairs and replacements over the next five years.”
• By January 2020, the figure had become $40 billion. From The Real Deal, January 14, 2020: “Two years ago, the New York City Housing Authority said it needed $32 billion to repair its housing stock. That estimate has soared to $40 billion.”
• On December 30, 2021, NYCHA issued another new “Capital Plan,” now giving a range for its capital needs of $42.7 to 68.6 billion: “The capital needs are projected to grow anywhere from $42.7 billion to $68.6 billion over the next ten years depending on the estimated rate of deterioration. Of NYCHA’s 2,351 residential buildings, 77% are more than 40 years old.”

Which brings us to the New York Times on July 12, 2023, headline “Almost $80 Billion Needed for Repairs to New York City’s Public Housing.” Excerpt:

New York City’s public housing agency now needs more than $78 billion to repair or renovate aging kitchens, leaky pipes, faulty elevators and other problems over the next 20 years, officials revealed on Wednesday. . . . The new estimate . . . underscores the staggering challenge facing city officials and the New York City Housing Authority, which runs the system of more than 2,100 buildings.

$78 billion for NYCHA is a truly staggering sum — well over $400,000 per apartment, which is more than the median price of a single family home in the U.S. This is a hole so deep that it can probably never be dug out of. The answer of our elected leadership seems to be to go forward with business as usual, as if nothing were wrong. On July 6 Mayor Adams held a news conference appointing new leadership for NYCHA (the prior leadership having accomplished nothing other than putting out larger and larger numbers for capital needs). Key quote:

"We have been clear since day one that NYCHA residents deserve the same quality of life as every New Yorker, and this administration has embraced the responsibility and the opportunity to deliver that," said Mayor Adams.

OK, but is there any real plan to get out of this mess? I have repeatedly proposed that the best answer would be to give the projects to the residents, free of charge and without debt, with the proviso that property taxes start to kick in after a few years of grace period. Likely, most residents put in this position would quickly figure out that their best option would be to sell the buildings to the highest bidder, take the money, and move somewhere else that is cheaper. Many residents of the best-located projects could become millionaires in this process, and the City would get a large new source of revenue from the prospective property taxes on long-exempt land. Of course, this option is not under consideration as far as I can tell.

In late June we got an idea of where the City may be going, when NYCHA announced a plan to demolish and re-build two large public housing complexes in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A post about the plan appeared on June 26 on a website called New York YIMBY (“yes in my back yard”). The two projects in question are called Robert Fulton Houses and Chelsea-Elliott Houses. Here is a picture of Chelsea-Elliott from the YIMBY post:

Lovely. According to YIMBY, NYCHA has partnered with two private developers, Related Companies and Essence, for the redevelopment. The number of apartments on the sites will be vastly increased, with most of the new apartments market-rate, but a large percentage of income-restricted units, for which the existing tenants will be given priority.

The YIMBY post does not contain financial details of the deal done with Related and Essence. Likely, they are getting a lengthy real estate tax abatement to compensate them for the large number of income-restricted units they will be providing. If they think they can make money on this, then I say I wish them the best. However, this type of deal can only work at a handful of NYCHA sites located in the best neighborhoods, of which Chelsea is one today. The number of units in Fulton and Chelsea-Elliott houses is about 2000, or barely more than 1% of the NYCHA inventory. The remaining 99% of the NYCHA units have no solution in sight at the moment.

Climate cartels plan to cancel single family homes, private cars

By Larry Bell |March 6th, 2023|Economy, Energy|105 Comments @ CFACT

Allysia Finley, a regular Wall Street Journal contributor, posted an article a couple weeks ago titled “The Climate Crusaders Are Coming for Electric Cars Too,” a prophesy consistent with a concerning social control trend I have witnessed as well.

It’s not that “green” lobbies have the necessary public support to succeed in consigning most of us to trade freedoms we take for granted for their enchanted “progressive” visions of ant farm utopia — at least not yet — but don’t count them out just yet either.

Ms. Finley referred to a report issued by the University of California, Davis and “a network of academics and policy experts” called the “Climate and Community Project” which concludes that meeting the left’s net-zero climate goals to save the planet may require a few economic and social life-shifting changes we might not have realized come with the deal.

Like, for example, “densifying low-density suburbs while allowing more people to live in high-density urban spaces” which will simultaneously make public transit more useful and efficient.

This, in turn, will reduce “car dependency,” which can essentially be compelled by reducing “financial subsidies for private vehicles,” such as on-street and free parking and imposing charges on pickup trucks and SUVs (including electric ones.)

According to their assessment, the auto sector’s “current dominant strategy,” which involves replacing gasoline-powered vehicles with EVs won’t be nearly enough without decreasing car ownership and use.

Besides, who really needs them anyway when we there will be all those favored new electric trolleys and natural gas-banning shoe box efficiency apartments?

Except for maybe some of us wondering where all that electricity will come from.

PJM Interconnection, one of the nation’s largest grid operators, forecasts that as power demands continue to increase, the current government policy push for unreliable and inadequate renewable energy sources is putting power supplies across 13 eastern states in its 65 million customer territory in jeopardy of “energy imbalance” (shortages and blackouts).

This circumstance is worsening as coal and natural gas plants retire largely due to policy-driven steep costs of compliance with Biden administration EPA regulations including a proposed “good neighbor rule” that is expected to be finalized this month that will force about 10,500 MW of fossil fuel generation to shut down.

Add to this, environmental, social and governance (ESG) pressures that are killing coal investments, with Illinois and New Jersey climate policies projected to cause a major 8,900 MW loss.

On top of supply shortages, consider that our aging power grids have limited capacity to handle rapidly transitioning power demands and dependence for transportation (public and EV), home conditioning (heat and cooling), cellphones and computing, and electrified lifestyles in general.

According to data compiled by The Wall Street Journal, there were fewer than two dozen major U.S. power disruptions in 2,000, compared with more than 180 in 2020.

Regarding those other worrisome trends I previously mentioned, the Biden administration has proposed that the Department of Housing and Urban Development reinstate an Obama-era “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) rule that essentially allows the federal government to preempt local land use and single family zoning policies.

AFFH had given rise to numerous legal challenges — not disputing recognized legitimate merits of prohibiting housing discrimination based upon race, religion, national origin, sex, (and as amended) handicap and family status — but rather for extending overreach of federal government control of independent local governance on a truly draconian scale.

As a condition for receiving federal assistance, AFFH gave HUD a weapon of power to force any community that received federal taxpayer funds to meet racial distribution quotas.

AFFH also contravened a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the Fair Housing Act “is not an instrument to force housing authorities to reorder priorities” or to “decree a particular vision of urban development.”

Nevertheless, prohibited or not, New York State’s Westchester County experienced a costly illustrative saga following a lawsuit alleging that its suburban village of Tuckahoe was out of compliance with HUD’s social engineering “vision.”

Westchester’s basic zoning policies were determined to be racially “exclusionary” based upon development restrictions such as building height and area density.

Single-family homes on quarter-acre lots were deemed potentially “discriminatory” —  supposedly because minority members might not be able to afford them.

HUD may have been referring here to exclusionary Westchester County homes like the $1.7 million 11-room colonial in Chappaqua purchased in 1999 by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Speaking of New York, in her Jan. 5, 2022, State of State address, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul included a plan to eliminate single family zoning laws plus mandate that municipalities allow a minimum of one accessory dwelling unit on owner-occupied lots in residential zones.

In short, apartments would be encouraged, and local governments would not have the power to stop them.

So finally, what does this really have anything to do with climate “equity”?

Well, according to a Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute report, once-redlined neighborhoods in 108 cities experienced up to 10 deg. Fahrenheit higher daily temperatures than others due to fewer parks, and trees, and proximity to industrial areas which use more electricity.

Presumably, these neighborhoods have a preponderance of populations with the most difficulty covering existing household and living expenses directly driven by the green war on economical fossil energy.

Now somebody please explain how cramming more people together and adding more electrical demands along with perilous reliability will make their lives — anyone’s lives — better?

This article originally appeared at Newsmax

Author: Larry Bell - CFACT Advisor Larry Bell heads the graduate program in space architecture at the University of Houston. He founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. He is also the author of "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax."

Biden’s Latest Whack at the Suburbs Will Change Your Neighborhood for the Worse

By Howard Husock February 23, 2023

The goal of “fair housing” would seem to be quite straightforward. As spelled out in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — and found in realtors’ offices across the country — it precludes “discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of dwellings … based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), familial status, and disability.” In other words, those who can afford to rent or buy should not be precluded from doing so for reasons having nothing to do with the ability to pay.

But for the Biden administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, fair housing is more — much more. In proposed regulations that would touch any jurisdiction that accepts any sort of HUD funding, fair housing must mean a plan to “promote equity in their communities, decrease segregation, and increase access to opportunity and community assets for people of color and other underserved communities.”

Translated that means that the route to upward mobility for disadvantaged minorities lies through their relocation to more affluent communities, where they will no longer be “underserved.”

The details as to how this should be done run more than 200 pages. Those required to comply will include more than 1,200 cities and counties receiving HUD funding. All will be required to develop “equity plans.”

The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released proposed guidelines that would radicalize the department’s mission.

Such equity could mean anything from building low-income housing to redrawing school district lines for racial or socio-economic integration, all as assessed by the HUD bureaucracy.

Both those concerned about the best routes to upward mobility for the poor and those concerned about administrative state overreach have reasons to be dubious. ...........To Read More....

 

The Left's Latest Battleground Is Your Neighborhood

March 1, 2021 By Linda R. Killian 

The progressives running the Biden administration are planning a two-pronged strategy to attack traditional suburban families where they live — in their homes and schools.  The Biden campaign platform, largely written by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, called for initiatives for equity in housing and education.  Going forward, these will translate into actions by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to assert its policy to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH) and for the Department of Education to impose Critical Race Theory (CRT) to attack both real and intellectual property.  The strategy got underway with the new president's executive order on equity that calls for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."

Their primary weapon is the concept of disparate impact, a conveniently squishy theory that there needs to be no factual finding of discriminatory zoning or racism in schools to conclude that a community is racist.  All disparate impact requires is for a bureaucrat to declare an imbalance of race or income among the residents of a local community or in its school's Advanced Placement courses.

To understand the seriousness of the assault, it is necessary to understand the philosophical origins of the left's positions on private property and the class struggle.  The first tenet of Marxism is the abolition of private real property.  The second is the class struggle between the oppressed proletariat and the oppressing bourgeoisie...........To Read More....

HUD-Nominee Marcia Fudge: Treating Everyone the Same 'Is Not Always Fair'

By Susan Jones | January 29, 2021

"What is the difference between racial equity and racial equality?" Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Rep. Marcia Fudge, the woman nominated to lead President Biden's Department of Housing and Urban Development.  "From my own perspective," Fudge responded, "the difference is that one just means that you treat everybody the same. Sometimes the same is not equitable," she explained:.........To Read More...

My Take - Mary Rose Oakar was a big promoter of comparable worth, where the federal government would decide how much people should make based on gender, not on what they did.  

As an example they didn't like the idea men who worked on dangerous jobs made more than a secretary, so they would in turn decide what the "comparable worth" was to society and determine how much women would be paid in comparison.  

How do you make that kind of comparison?  What are the rules.  What are the parameters?  Who makes those rules and decisions?  Clearly an open ended system for abuse and political persecution, of which something leftists are always guilty, and are demonstrating it now.

Even the Democrats thought this was a "loonytoon idea".  Not any longer though,  because this is the same kind of irrational tyrannical government overreach as was comparable worth, with all the same potential abuses, only now they're openly demanding the imposition of censorship, economic tyranny, and big government abuse.  

Another Biden consequence.    

This happens if Trump fails to rein in HUD

By John Anthony

If you want to know what will happen to your hometown if Trump allows the Department of Housing and Urban Development to continue its devastating control of local rule, look at Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania. It is the latest community to surrender to HUD’s aggressive tactics.

Much of the chaos we see in America today is designed to stop President Trump from dismantling the federal system of rampant waste, dishonesty, and bullying. The largest “swamp” he must drain, is the embedded federal bureaucracy.

In theory, at least, we can “fire” politicians every 2, 4, and 6 years. But federal agency employees can linger for decades, beneath the radar, issuing guidance documents on little understood regulations that are now devastating our communities and property rights.

That is why the administration must work closely with Congress to pass the House and Senate bills, titled, the  “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017”.   Once signed by the President, the new law will outlaw HUD’s worst offenders, its “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) regulation.

AFFH uses legal actions against communities that accept popular HUD grants, to force them into a bizarre, centrally managed program of regionalism and forced socio-economic integration. AFFH use of litigation threats is becoming a widespread enforcement tool for the agency.....Read More Here........

The Not So Cold War of Urban Renewal and Social Engineering

by Kathleen Marquardt

Tom (DeWeese) has been telling you all the latest with AFFH, HUD, DOT, and the rest of the swamp. That is, the recent part of the swamp that is our federal government. But the swamp is far deeper, far murkier, and far more sinister in its aims than most people are willing to believe. And it is being promoted by the Pope, Mark Zuckerberg, the UN, and the world’s elite.

I am trying to keep this somewhat short, but there is so much background that needs to be exposed to the light of day. If you can’t read it all, scan it; things will pop out and you will be surprised at the evil in our swamp. I was always told that before air conditioning, foreign governments paid their US embassy staff hazardous duty pay above their regular salaries for working in DC because it was built on a swamp. Now I wonder if there was a second reason, a second swamp to be negotiated.

Communitarians suggest a series of measures that would significantly enhance public safety and public health, without endangering basic individual rights and constitutional protections. Often these modifications entail no mare than limited reinterpretations of legal traditions – for instance, of what constitutes reasonable search and seizure, which, of course, the Constitution allows. Such reinterpretations have been taking place continuously over the past two hundred years.

There are those who openly admit that the courts, especially the US Supreme Court, treat the Constitution as a living document that may be modified to respond to the changing times and changes in our moral values. Others argue that the Constitution is to be treated as a sacred text that is unalterable. The latter group of legal scholars does its adjusting of the Constitution by interpreting what they see as the Founding Fathers’ intent. In either case, we are not irrevocably bound by what was written two hundred years ago. Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community – the Reinvention of American Society.

“Our changing moral values” and “we are not irrevocably bound by what was written two hundred years ago.” Unless one believes in moral relativity, morality is not readily mutable. But in order to move from individual rights and freedom to socialism/communitarianism, communism and, as Mary Parker Follett says, the ‘state (UN) ‘. . .must be a coordinating agency. It must appear as the great moral leader. Its supreme function is moral ordering,” and individuals be damned.

Urban Renewal

Jo Hindman wrote the following in1966; the only difference today is that there is no international cold war.

Much is written about the international cold war, but little about the incognito warfare on United States soil which public officials and their accomplices are waging to wrest private property from landowners.

The strategy is to make property ownership so unbearable by harassment through building inspections, remodeling orders, fines and jailings, that owners give up in despair and sell to land developers at cut-rate prices. Punitive municipal codes are the weapons in the warfare.

Hindman also wrote, “Planning assistance subsidized by Federal money leads small cities and counties into direct obedience under a regional master plan. Land use rights are literally stolen from landowners when zoning is applied to land.”

Now you might think, so what, there is no cold war and Trump says he is going to rid our country of anything that is evil. Hold on to your hats and your tongues. I want to show you some things from our not too distant history. Our government has been corrupted for many decades; we are not going to get rid of the rot and poison with 500 executive orders. This was written 32 years before the Rio Accord gave us Agenda 21. It is from the Constitution of the American Institute of Planners, the forerunner of the American Planning Association. ...........Read More Here

Comprehensive plan is a one-size-fits-all

Sep. 27, 2013 | by Linda Wagner Bishop

Sandusky County’s Comprehensive Plan sounds like it is straight out of the United Nations Agenda 21 master plan for every community in the U.S. ... as well as the world. When we accept grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, Housing and Urban Development and other sources, this is your taxpayer money used against you. We are then held to government mandates and additional layers of un-elected bureaucrats. Sandusky County needs to solve its own set of problems rather than look to Washington and its boilerplate one-size-fits-all solutions. The federal government is $17 trillion dollars in debt, so grants are no longer the solution. No matter how you slice or shuffle the money, it will be an extra tax for the already burdened taxpayer.....In Ohio, Greene and Pickaway County commissioners have said no to their communities’ sustainable, comprehensive, smart growth plans.

I would urge Sandusky County commissioners, township trustees and other elected entities to please read the plan before giving it the stamp of approval. The plan — more than 300 pages — is extremely comprehensive and includes controlling every aspect of your life and property in Sandusky County. When you hear comprehensive, think “deprivation of property rights.” Other terms to watch for are smart growth, growth management and sustainability....To Read More.....

Mortgage relief didn't help many keep their homes, critics say

By E. Scott Reckard Sep. 25, 2013 

When five giant mortgage firms signed a landmark $25-billion mortgage settlement last year, officials hailed debt forgiveness as the primary strategy to preserve home ownership.  The banks hoped to avoid further enforcement action over widespread foreclosure abuses; federal regulators and state attorneys general aimed to prevent even more foreclosures.

“This isn’t just about punishing banks for their irresponsible behavior,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said. “It’s also about requiring them … to help homeowners stay in their homes.”

Advocates for borrowers took such comments to mean that the banks would prioritize debt write-downs on first mortgages, which banks resisted before the settlement. Now, with nearly all the promised relief handed out, it is clear that the banks had other ideas.…..To Read More…..