Then, You Could Charge Whatever You Wanted, And Somebody Would Buy It Within A Day

A report from the Alachua Chronicle in Florida. “Affordable housing is the latest in a long line of government schemes to control not just the less fortunate, but the affluent as well. How? Simple. When government takes from one people-group to give to another, it controls both — because, in the end, government is force. Recently, the Gainesville City Commission posted about their new affordable housing project with Bright Community Trust. This 12-home project is really a trap for would-be ‘homeowners.’ Politicians get to boast about all their good deeds to help the less fortunate, but they are actually harming them. See the 2008 housing bubble. The fall-out of the 2008 housing bubble demonstrated that giving people homes they cannot afford forms a straight line to bankruptcy and credit ruination. But as long as the politicians get their photo ops, they really don’t care, do they? They compound the effects further when the Commission takes land out of supply through land conservation and trust schemes — schemes that often give the land donor lifetime use of the property without paying any more property taxes. This drives up the cost of available land through basic economic principles: when supply goes down, prices go up. How rich of those do-good politicians!”

“Like the war on poverty and the war on drugs, the war on housing will produce the same endless loop, generation after generation. The government is not truly trying to solve the problem; they are trying to perpetuate it by artificially creating an endless need for themselves in the eyes of uninformed voters who are never told the whole story. Said another way, the scientists are creating the housing disease and the cure in the same lab. Willfully.”

The Nevada Current. “A national increase in the inventory of homes for sale is most pronounced in Las Vegas, where the number of listings without offers is up 77% over last year, according to a report that asserts retirees are fleeing the valley as homes flood the market. Washington, D.C. has the second largest spike in inventory (+63.6%) followed by Raleigh, N.C. (+56.4%), says the report from the National Association of Realtors. Nationwide, the number of homes for sale is up 28.9%. Las Vegas Realtors reported last week that at the end of June, 6,992 single-family homes for sale had no offers, a 70% increase from a year ago. The 2,564 condos and townhomes without offers in Southern Nevada account for an 87.6% jump over 2024.”

“The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that for the week ending April 11, 2025, the share of borrowers applying for ARMs rose to its highest level since November 2023. ‘It’s been some time since we had this many homes on the market,’ says Jeff Crampton, a Las Vegas Realtor. ‘Normally, if a listing is priced too high, you’re not getting showings for it. I’ve had 13 showings for one house, and I’ve had 19 showings for another house, but just one offer between them.’ Price reductions last week in Southern Nevada were up 95% over last year, says real estate agent Diane Varney. ‘We appreciated too quickly during Covid. We’re in a correction. We needed one.'”

“Prices, however, remain at record levels. Varney says that’s because the Multiple Listing Service no longer reports seller concessions, resulting in skewed data on sale prices. ‘If you sell a house for $750,000 and there was a $25,000 to $50,000 concession for repairs, rate buy down, closing costs – anything like that – it’s not going to show up in the sale price at the end of the day.’ Those who are attempting to sell in the current market are likely facing a life-altering event, such as marriage, divorce, or the addition of a child, according to Crampton and Varney. ‘It’s not ‘I may want to sell.’ It’s not ‘if I can get my price I’ll sell, otherwise, I’m going to stay here.’ Those players are out of the game,’ Varney says of non-motivated sellers.”

The Fort Worth Report in Texas. “Unlike a year ago, homebuyers in Fort Worth might spot a few additions to ‘For Sale’ signs in front of homes that say ‘price reduced’ or ‘new price.’ Paul Epperley, Greater Fort Worth Association of Realtors president has noticed a few of those signs too, but he doesn’t want buyers to get the impression that things have shifted too much. But some of the more competitive prices on homes is a sign things have changed since a year or so ago, he said. ‘Then, you could charge whatever you wanted, and somebody would buy it within a day, because that’s just the way things were going,’ he said. As head of the local Realtors’ association, Epperley says this market shift is proving to be a ‘teaching moment’ for many of the younger Realtors out there.”

“‘A lot of our Realtors haven’t lived through a buyer’s market,’ he said. ‘It’s been a seller’s market so long that they’re not really prepared. They haven’t fine tuned that tool yet to get a seller to price the house a little bit more competitively. That’s something some of them just haven’t seen before.’ Epperley noted that a year ago, Realtors were advising clients to wait and see what interest rates would do. ‘We told clients then to ‘marry the house, date the rate,’ meaning to negotiate a new rate when rates fall,’ he said. ‘Well, now it’s ‘marry the house, marry the rate’ because rates aren’t falling. That’s where we are now.'”

The Kenora Miner and News in Canada. “Let’s stop pretending the homelessness crisis will be solved by building more units or handing out more contracts. The problem is no longer just about housing. And many of those living in Winnipeg’s growing encampments don’t actually want a permanent home — at least not under the conditions the average taxpayer might expect. That’s the hard truth politicians won’t say out loud. The City of Winnipeg just awarded a contract to Main Street Project under its “Your Way Home” homeless strategy — despite growing concern that the organization openly downplays basic law enforcement. According to multiple sources, including Marion Willis from St. Boniface Street Links, MSP representatives told officials in a recent closed-door meeting that crimes like shoplifting should be dismissed as ‘survival crimes.’ Not handled by police. Not tracked. Not prosecuted. Just excused. This is what we’re funding now.”

“We’ve funded outreach. We’ve expanded shelters. We’ve built housing. But results matter, and the numbers are going the wrong way. If a strategy produces more chaos, more addiction, more deaths, and more destruction of neighbourhoods, it’s time to rethink the entire approach. Because here’s what no one in government will say: Some homeless individuals do not want housing — at least not the kind with rules. They don’t want curfews, sobriety requirements, shared spaces, or expectations. They prefer freedom on their own terms, even if it means living in squalor, trespassing on private land, and committing crimes to get by. That’s not a housing issue. That’s a public safety issue.”

From El Pais. “Her house is so small that one short stride from the front door is enough to land you at the next home — identical to hers, but in a different color. Peeking through the frame of that door is Alejandra Gálvez, 45, with her iron cane: foul-mouthed, cheerful, and generous — a force of nature. Alejandra crossed half the country before ending up in Huehuetoca, in the densely populated State of Mexico. For 10 years, she’s been living in a house she occupied after renting another one where the landlady would walk in whenever she pleased, without warning. ‘I’d see the house, and no one ever came, and one day I said: ‘Screw it, I’m moving in. The rogue way,’ she laughs.”

“People like Alejandra who are occupying homes that technically belong to Mexico’s national worker housing fund institute Infonavit, after going unpaid for years. There are at least 842,000 such properties across the country in irregular situations. All the agency knows is that the original mortgage was never paid off. In reality, behind that dramatic figure lies an even larger one: Mexico’s national statistics agency INEGI estimates that there are more than six million unoccupied homes throughout the country, regardless of whether they were financed by Infonavit or the reasons that led their owners to leave them empty. That amounts to roughly 20% of all the homes built in Mexico.”

“In Mexico, this separation occurred mainly between the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Large construction companies built thousands of homes on cheap land far from jobs, public services, and transportation — perfect ground for organized crime, which has taken control of many of these areas. In the residential development where Joaquín Santiago lives, in Zumpango there are no shortage of unanswered questions. ‘They told us there would be jobs, what kind of jobs?’ ‘If you have money, you go to the hospital, and if not?’ ‘There were going to be lots of children’s areas, bike paths, a pool… Where are they?’ Joaquín, 35, arrived with his mother at the Santa Isabel campus after stumbling across the advertisements displayed by large construction companies in Ecatepec. ‘I decided on Homex because it offered us many advantages, but none of them came true,’ he says. It was 2013 when he secured his loan through Infonavit, and 2020 when he lost hope that the construction company would ever finish the work. Now, the inhabited houses — like his — stand in the same row as those that have become little more than garbage dumps. Alongside them are all the homes the company left unfinished: uniform concrete shells filled with nothing but air. The infamous husks.”

One Roof in New Zealand. “Building inspectors are warning of a new leaky home scandal coming down the pipeline. Jeff Fahrensohn pulls at some tape on a building site somewhere in Auckland. ‘Yeah,’ says Auckland Council’s chief building inspector. ‘It’s been put there to hide things that are not right with the framing. That’s just blatant concealment.’ Fahrensohn posts the video to LinkedIn – there are other videos, too – and reports this building project has a hump in the floor, as well as low-quality welding and other non-compliant work. In another post, he says a Licensed Building Practitioner (LBP) has left the owner with an expensive job to remediate, and in another, ‘this qualified builder’s cladding is coming off.'”

“In a suburb near the central city, an apartment block built about 13 years ago is biting the owners financially and emotionally. Life for owners in the apartment block has been tears, sleepless nights, report after report, lawyers and the blame game. One couple told OneRoof their complex is not ‘leaky’ but structurally unsound. The couple OneRoof spoke to blamed the builder, contractors and council, saying the builder walked away. ‘They start a company to do the development, they do it, sell it off, take the money out, wind the company up, and there’s no way that owners can have recourse because the company that did the development no longer exists.'”

“The couple said that owners at the complex had lost life-changing amounts of money; and some have suffered depression and illness from the constant stress and feelings of helplessness. ‘They’ve spent all their savings on it. Sold cars, sold assets, spent all their inheritances and stuff. Just scraping around for every last dollar they have to put into it.’ The couple said a court case had not gone ahead and that a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) limited what the owners could say. The last three years saw another building flurry, and John Gray, who owned a leaky house and who co-set up advocacy organisation Hobanz in 2007, says Auckland Council’s inspection fail rate is disturbing. One case he has been involved in was a new house that failed 22 inspections, yet people were looking at buying it. When asked how this is happening, Gray replied: ‘Because these builders continue to get away with it.'”