A report from NBC News. "One of the first signs Barb Carter’s move to Florida wasn’t the postcard life she’d envisioned was the armadillo infestation in her home that caused $9,000 in damages. Then came a hurricane, ever present feuding over politics, and an inability to find a doctor to remove a tumor from her liver. After a year in the Sunshine State, Carter packed her car with whatever belongings she could fit and headed back to her home state of Kansas — selling her Florida home at a $40,000 loss and leaving behind the children and grandchildren she’d moved to be closer to."

"Carter, who describes herself as a 'middle of the road' Republican, said she learned to keep her opinions to herself. 'You cannot engage in a conversation there without politics coming up, it is just crazy. We’re retired, we’re supposed to be in our fun time of life,' she said."

"For some Florida newcomers though, politics is the main draw to the state, said John Desautels, who has sold real estate in Florida for decades. While politics never used to be a topic for homebuyers, Desautels said it is now a regular subject his clients bring up. Rather than asking about schools or amenities in a community, prospective buyers are asking him about the political affiliations of a certain neighborhood. One of the first things they say is, ‘I don’t want to be in one of them X or Y political party neighborhoods,’ Desautels said. I spend hours listening to people vent to me about fleeing the communist government of XYZ and they want to come to freedom or whatever.'"

The Union Tribune in California. "When Eric Dargan took over more than a year ago as San Diego's chief operating officer, the city's top nonelected position, he quickly flagged several issues. Crumbling infrastructure. Aging fire facilities. Police recruitment. These would be his priorities, he thought. Then he asked residents about their biggest worries. 'Nine out of 10 people would tell me, 'homelessness,' he said in an interview. 'If that's your number one concern, then that needs to become my number one concern.'"

The Los Angeles Times in California. "One year ago, Los Angeles’ 'mansion tax' took effect. The transfer tax, formally known as Measure ULA, levies a 4% charge on all property sales above $5 million and a 5.5% charge on sales above $10 million, with proceeds funding affordable housing and homelessness initiatives. Critics, including many L.A. real estate professionals, claim the tax has hampered the market — not just luxury home sales, but also multifamily developments and commercial properties, since the tax applies to all property sales above $5 million. In Beverly Hills, single-family sales dropped 24%. In Santa Monica, single-family sales dropped 29%. In Malibu, single-family sales dropped 28%. 'My clients are leaving L.A.,' said Jason Oppenheim, a luxury real estate agent. 'We can’t keep pushing the wealthy out of our city.'"

From Oregon Live. "Washington County’s recent track record of sheltering far more people in need hasn’t spared its large cities from the visible consequences of the state’s housing and addiction crises. The intersection of Southwest 5th Street and Tucker Avenue, near the downtown Beaverton library and the Beaverton Community Center, is a prime example, police say. While the city’s troubles with homelessness and substance use disorder are not nearly to the scale of Portland’s, pressure is mounting to respond quickly in Beaverton, Beaverton Mayor Lacey Beaty said. A visible rise in the suburban homeless population — while still relatively small — and Beaverton’s high rate of homeless youth demand solutions, Beaty said."

"In another small sign of how things have changed, Beaverton’s officers now carry two doses of naloxone, which can be used to reverse an opioid overdose. 'We used to only carry one because heroin only required one,' Bike Sgt. Chester Lamb said. 'Fentanyl often requires more.'"

The Seattle Times in Washington. "Ballard is a bit of an anomaly. Despite being one of the wealthier residential neighborhoods in Seattle, a lot of people are living outside there. That juxtaposition has sparked debate around homelessness that at times feels more intense than anywhere else in the city. Homelessness has increased about 60% across King County over the past decade. Many in Ballard noticed a significant change around the mid- to late-2010s. Lisa Pekar, who for 17 years has managed Haven Salon, a block from Ballard Commons Park, said she saw the first tents appear there around this time. Jean Johnson, owner of Tea Cozy Yarn Shop next to the salon, said that’s when she stopped seeing children and families at the park."

"After the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructed cities to stop clearing encampments to prevent the spread of COVID-19, an encampment formed at the Ballard Commons that ballooned to dozens of tents with 85 people sleeping there at one point. 'To have that happen right in my backyard, in this little quaint Ballard, was very, very upsetting,' said Pekar at Haven Salon, who said she felt unsafe at the time. Pekar used to live in Ballard but has since moved to Magnolia, another wealthy area of Seattle, which she said 'doesn’t have any homeless people.' She and others blame Ballard’s homelessness on programs like St. Luke’s Edible Hope Kitchen. 'Wherever you hand food out for free, that’s where you’re gonna get your homeless people,' Pekar said."

From El Pais. "'Gringo go home,' reads a huge graffiti in Roma, Mexico City’s trendy neighborhood that has become a mecca for short- and long-stay global tourism. 'I wish someone nationalist would come along and introduce these little shits to their fate,' people comment on social media in response to a gringo inviting his compatriots to visit the capital. 'I hate you fucking gringos,' others say succinctly. In the collective imagination, gringos are the cause and reason for the rising cost of housing in Mexico City. And it is thought that expelling them represents an important part of the solution to the problem."

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "After three decades as an emergency physician at Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital, Louis Hugo Francescutti has come to realize that medicine alone is not health care. For years now, he has watched an alarming spike in the number of homeless patients coming through his ER’s doors. Just as troubling, he says, is that of the nearly 9,000 patients with no fixed address who visited Edmonton emergency rooms last year, many of them wound up sent back to the same illness-inducing circumstances that landed them in the ER in the first place – only to see them return again, sicker."

"To break that cycle, last winter, Dr. Francescutti and his colleagues launched a local pilot program that provides transitional housing for patients that would otherwise be discharged from hospital into homelessness. In short, physicians are reckoning with what UHN physician Andrew Boozary calls 'the heart and soul' of medicine, in a country that prides itself on universal health care. 'We can’t really talk about universal health care without housing as a human right.'"

CBC News in Canada. "Timmins and Sudbury have some of the highest rates of opiate use in Ontario, but after this weekend, the cities will no longer have funding for their supervised consumption sites. The Spot in Sudbury and the Safe Health Site Timmins offer spaces with supports and care for people to use toxic drugs safely, but funding for both runs out after March 31. Timmins and Sudbury have an opioid toxicity mortality rate nearly three times the provincial average, according to data from the Office of the Chief Coroner. Kevin Peltier was a client at the Spot, and says he's worried about what could happen if he doesn't have a supervised site to use drugs. 'I just felt safer, you know, knowing that there was, you know, trained medical staff on site,' he said. Staff at the Timmins site told CBC in early March that since opening in 2022, they had managed over 350 overdoses."

DPA International. "Located between meadows and trees, at the outskirts of the northern German town of Bramsche, is a refugee and migrant reception facility. According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), some 329,000 people applied for asylum in Germany last year, more than at any time since 2016. Nisar Ahmad from Pakistan is unhappy about the accommodation. The shower rooms are far away from the rooms and dirty, the food inedible, he complains. Ahmad repeatedly stresses that his wife is pregnant and that the driver who was supposed to pick her up and take her to a doctor's surgery in nearby Osnabrück arrived late. 'Life is very tough,' he says. 'Every day is very tough.'"

"He leads us to the room that his family of five currently calls home. Several beds are placed next to each other on the PVC floor, opposite a cupboard with several missing doors. Ahmad points angrily to discolouration and dirt on the walls. Then he goes to the cupboard to look for a document, his Bachelor of Laws that's been idly sitting around. Ahmad says he expected more from Germany."

From Magyar Nemzet. "New crime statistics for the city of Frankfurt, Germany, reveal shocking figures on foreigners and serious crime, including one particular figure, which shows foreigners are responsible for 100 percent of serious sexual violence crimes and 57.4 percent of all crimes. As for crimes against life, 54 percent of the murders were committed by foreigners, while they were responsible for 64.8 percent of other homicides. Foreigners were also far over-represented when it comes to sex crimes in Frankfurt, with 64.1 per cent of rape cases and 100 per cent of grave sexual violence cases committed by foreign nationals, according to the figures."

"Foreigners were responsible for 64.4 per cent of cases of sexual abuse and 57.1 per cent of cases of abuse of minors. The proportion of persons with a migrant background in robberies is also very high: 65.5 percent of robberies, 75.6 percent of aggravated robberies, 93 percent of car thefts, 87.5 percent of handbag thefts, 93 percent of pickpocketing, 87.5 percent of forced entry, 80 percent of daytime burglaries and 72.9 percent of street thefts were attributed to foreign nationals, but migrants also committed 75 percent of all counterfeiting offences and 62.5 percent of sexual extortion cases."

"Last week, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann stated that foreigners are responsible for a vastly higher share of crime compared to their share of the population. 'We will not accept the increase in crime, even if it is a nationwide trend for which foreigners and immigrants are particularly responsible,' Herrmann said. The crime statistics make it clear that uncontrolled immigration also has a negative impact on the security situation, he added. 'It is particularly important to take those foreigners who pose a threat to public safety out of the country as quickly as possible after serving their sentence. In addition, we finally need a fundamental change of course in asylum policy and, above all, an effective containment of illegal migration,' Hermann stressed."

Eastern Daily Press. "Plans for hundreds of new homes in Norwich are stuck in limbo because City Hall does not consider them a priority for an anti-pollution scheme. Officials have admitted they have been forced to put 67 planning applications on hold because Norwich City Council has not come up with ways to ensure they do not breach tough rules introduced by Natural England. The revelation has angered small-scale builders who have accused the council of ignoring them at the expense of large-scale developments as it tries to ensure all new housing schemes achieve so-called 'nutrient neutrality', whereby their polluting impact is offset by environmental measures."

"Property director Tristan Gordon - who has been waiting for two years for permission to convert offices in St Faith's Lane into three three-bed flats - said: 'I've been going back and forth with the city council's planning department and I'm getting increasingly frustrated. People like me have been left in limbo.' The Norfolk Environmental Credits scheme has itself attracted controversy, after it emerged it had paid a farmer almost £1m not to farm pigs on his land, near Caistor St Edmund. The idea behind the move was that it would offset the polluting impact of new homes, by removing a comparative amount of pollution produced by the pigs, which was flowing into the rivers Yare and Tas."