Many Sellers Are Afraid To Continue To Wait, And They’re Afraid They May Be Exposed To Even More Egregious Market Conditions

‘In Otara, houses in 2014 were selling for $400,000, rising to over $1m during the Covid boom but now Otara had fallen to a $600,000/$700,000 suburb. The price crash had knocked people’s belief prices would continue to rise’

Is that a lot Tom?

This photo from the link captioned ‘An Auckland auction in 2016 draws the crowds.’

https://s.oneroof.co.nz/image/c7/22/c722fb2a1669d80891fff4cdb1cd3a55.jpg

There were times when New Zealand prices were going up tens of thousands of pesos every month.

‘Pavletich was behind the Demographia surveys, which have run since 2005, comparing housing affordability in different countries, and has been outspoken about how unaffordable New Zealand prices have been. Auckland’s housing affordability sits around eight times the average income but Pavletich says Sydney’s number is 13.8 and Melbourne and Adelaide are around 10’

Lending is what’s behind all housing bubbles. This is another installment of a UHS site pushing the idea that ‘phew, I’m glad all that craziness is over!’ This Alexander guy is apparently one of the biggest ‘To the Moon Alice!’ characters on this sh$thole island. When the cheerleaders are on the bus, the game is over.

Tenants at St. Pete complex warned water may be shut off over unpaid bills

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Residents at a St. Petersburg apartment complex say they’re frustrated and confused after receiving a notice from the city warning them that water service may be shut off in less than three weeks

“I was super frustrated,” said Morgan resident Ashleigh Slaybaugh, who first contacted FOX 13 News over the weekend. “Why are our utilities getting cut off for something we’re already paying for?”

Slaybaugh says she and her husband have lived at The Morgan for a year and a half. She says they pay over $1,900 a month for a two-bedroom unit, and assumed utility costs were included in their rent.

“I want to know where my money’s going,” she said. “Is it being used for something else? Is it being pocketed? Because we were told all of that is part of our rent. So where is my money going if you’re not paying what needs to be paid?”

Lurin Real Estate Holdings, which owns The Morgan and other Florida properties, appears to be under financial strain. In May, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported that the company is currently facing a $400 million foreclosure involving 12 apartment complexes across the state, including others in Tampa and the Panhandle.

The Morgan is one of dozens of properties Lurin has acquired in recent years, as part of a strategy to reposition and redevelop aging workforce housing. But residents like Slaybaugh say those promises aren’t lining up with reality. FOX 13 News has made multiple attempts to contact Lurin Real Estate Holdings via email. As of publication, the company has not responded.

https://www.fox13news.com/news/where-is-our-money-going-tenants-st-pete-complex-warned-water-may-be-shut-off-over-unpaid-bills

Why Lelo Juarez Chose Self-Deportation

When I spoke with Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known as “Lelo,” while he was imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, he had to be very careful about what he said. Calls to detainees are monitored. “My freedom of speech here is very limited,” he warned me. Lelo had been held there since his detention in March, and I interviewed him in July.

Two weeks after our conversation Lelo agreed to “voluntary departure”—the term used by immigration authorities for self-deportation. In early August, by telephone from Santa Cruz Yucucani, his hometown in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, he was able to describe the conditions in this enormous immigrant detention center, which today holds more than 1,500 people awaiting deportation.

“It’s a really terrible place,” Lelo told me. He said bad food was probably the worst problem: The Geo Group, a private corporation that runs the detention center, is supposed to provide three meals a day, but often the last meal would come at one or two in the morning. “The rice was hard, like it never touched hot water, and the beans were never cooked all the way,” Lelo said. “That was the main food they gave us. Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night. One time everybody turned in their trays and we wouldn’t take the food.”

The Tacoma immigrant detention center is run by the Geo Group, founded as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation. “Geo does this on purpose to make it hard for folks, while maximizing their profit by not having more employees,” Lelo said. Bad conditions serve to coerce people detained at the Northwest Detention Center into self-deportation.

“They are trying all they can to get folks out of the country,” Lelo said, “whether through deportation or asking folks to self deport.” Inside the Tacoma detention center, ICE agents took another tactic. “They went to my unit three times, saying that if people gave up their right to fight their case and self-deported, they’d send them $1,000 after sixty days. People got really mad because a lot have lived here for many years. We have families and we’re part of the community. What is $1,000 compared to twenty years of your life?”

Nevertheless, the constant pressure took its toll on his family, and eventually on Lelo himself. In early March his family decided to return to their hometown, Santa Cruz Yucucani. At that point, Lelo had not yet been detained. Later, as he languished inside, he described their reasons.

“It was a hard decision because my parents had lived in Washington for eighteen years,” he explained. “My siblings were born in the United States. They were going to school there. All their friends are there. But as we saw ICE begin to round up more and more folks, we did not want to put my family through the trauma of separation. So we decided they would leave, which they did on March 16 from Santa Maria, [California, a town from which many people leave to go back to Mexico] on the bus. It’s hard to describe the feeling. We always had this plan for my siblings to go to school and have a better life, more opportunity than my parents had. It was like we had to start all over again.”

ICE later said he had been detained because of an earlier deportation order, but Lelo called the charge a pretext. “Before my detention, I had no idea that there was a removal order for me from 2017, under the first Trump Administration. If they’d really wanted to remove me, they could have, but they didn’t. They waited until Trump was President again to go after me. I was never given the opportunity to respond or fully defend myself. There was never any due process.”

Lelo was targeted because of his history as a farmworker organizer. But it was his public criticism of the H-2A contract labor program that earned Lelo the greatest hostility among growers. That program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico for a season’s work, after which they must return. Workers are very vulnerable, and can be fired and blacklisted for organizing, or simply for failing to meet production quotas. Almost one-third of farmworkers in Washington state have now been replaced by contractors using the H-2A program.

In the end, however, months in detention took their toll. In mid-July Lelo decided to leave the country voluntarily. He and many others faced the same situation, worn down by the impact of dehumanizing conditions and hopelessness for any solution to their cases. “It’s very hard to bring legal cases from within this place,” he explained during our conversation while he was still in Tacoma. “There are many people here and they’re all losing [their cases] and getting deported. Two people even won their cases, and they’re going to be deported anyway. A lot of people here have legal status. They have good jobs. They’ve been paying taxes for many years. But at the end of their last hearing, they get removed from the country anyway.”

In that sense, Lelo’s case was no different. “Winning from within just doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Even if I went through all the legal steps and had a decision in my favor, there is no guarantee I will be released after that. Signing the voluntary departure is the only option I have.”

At the end of the ordeal, however, Lelo found himself in Santa Cruz Yucucani, an Indigenous Mixtec community that he only remembered as a child, but which still remembered him. “I went to town a couple of days ago and people recognized me and invited me to eat,” he told me. “I’ve had a lot of really good food here. There are other families in Santa Cruz that have come back as well, and folks are excited that we’re back.”

“I haven’t stopped feeling part of an immigrant community that’s trying to defend itself. As a farmworker it’s heartbreaking to see pictures of the military chasing us in the fields. We’ve never been able to legalize, and now we have to leave. It’s not right. People have to pay attention to what’s happening and speak up. Don’t look the other way.”

In the meantime, though, Lelo simply has to live. “Tomorrow I’m going to the banana field. It’s going to be the first time in eighteen years,” he says.

https://progressive.org/latest/why-lelo-juarez-chose-self-deportation-bacon-20250811/

You’ll get used to wiping yer a$$ with banana leaves in the outhouse Lelo.

Factories are losing immigrant workers, stressing those who remain

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Jaelin Carpenter was stressed. Four people on her team of 26 at GE Appliances had learned that their immigration status had changed.

Under former President Biden, they’d been allowed to stay and work in the U.S. for two years, protected by a program set up to help people fleeing humanitarian crises back home. But the Trump administration abruptly canceled that program, revoking their legal status and their authorization to work. Carpenter fielded call after call from her panicked co-workers.

“They were calling me asking me if they’re on the run. ‘Does this mean I’m getting deported today?'” she recalls them asking.

As a team leader on a washing machine line and a union shop steward for IUE-CWA Local 83761, Carpenter was used to fielding all kinds of questions at work. But she wasn’t prepared for this. Her co-workers were desperate for answers. Carpenter had none. That tore her down, she says.

Carpenter says the four team members were doing some of the most difficult tasks on the line, installing the hoses on the washers as well as affixing the platforms that hold the motors. “These are people who are on critical jobs,” she says. And suddenly, they were gone.

In recent months, immigrants working in manufacturing, food production and other industries have lost their jobs due to President Trump’s immigration policies — not as a result of immigration raids, but because Trump ended Biden-era programs that had provided them temporary permission to remain in the U.S. and get jobs.

Those affected include more than a half-million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who had been granted humanitarian parole for two years through a program known as CHNV — an acronym for the countries it covered. The changes also affect close to 1 million immigrants who were allowed into the U.S. after securing appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border via a U.S. government app.

Those programs were part of Biden’s efforts to create a safe, orderly process at the border for those fleeing war, violence or political unrest. The Trump administration says they achieved the opposite.

“Programs like CHNV were abused to admit hundreds of thousands of poorly vetted illegal aliens. It was exploited by bad actors, undercut American workers, and encouraged more illegal immigration,” wrote White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement.

Trump’s cancellation of those programs has been challenged in court, delaying his efforts to get people to leave immediately. Also facing legal challenges is Trump’s cancellation of temporary protected status for people from a number of countries. Those protections, in some cases granted decades ago, were aimed at providing temporary relief for people escaping unsafe conditions due to war or environmental disasters. The Trump administration argues that those conditions have long passed, despite ongoing violence and instability in some places.

Even with the legal battles still unfolding, the reversal in immigration policies has left employers with holes to fill as they’ve scrambled to remove from their payrolls those no longer authorized to work or even stay in the U.S.

“This is a new area for us. We’ve certainly consulted with other people just to understand — what does this mean? How are we supposed to do this?” says Julie Wood, head of corporate communications for GE Appliances. To date, Wood says the company has seen 148 employees lose their eligibility to work.

Wood says the departures have not caused a major disruption at the plant, which employs some 5,000 production workers across five buildings. The company always keeps replacement workers on hand to fill in for absences, and Wood says they’ve added to that pool during the current uncertainty.

Tom Torres, a mechanic for Kraft Heinz in Holland, Mich., Torres says immigrants have long played key roles at the plant, which is best known for making pickles. Born in Michigan to Mexican farmworkers and raised in Texas, Torres grew up making the annual summer migration from Texas to Michigan to pick berries and other crops. He sees in his immigrant co-workers the same work ethic he saw in his parents.

Under Trump, some of Torres’ co-workers are now gone, stripped of their authorization to work.

Kraft Heinz says six employees have been affected by Trump’s immigration policies. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents about 270 employees at the plant in Holland, believes it’s more.

Torres, who serves as the local union president, says he’s sat in on more than a dozen human resources meetings where employees have been told they’re no longer eligible to work. He’s watched people in the company struggle to deliver the message.

“Just tears in their eyes,” he says, adding that it’s been difficult for him, too. “It’s killing me, because I’m watching them walk out. I know these people because I work with them every day.”

Even as companies like Kraft Heinz and GE Appliances maintain they are adequately staffed for now, there are growing concerns across the broader business community that Trump’s immigration policies could create problems in the not-too-distant future.

Greater Louisville Inc., the regional chamber of commerce, has long advocated for more immigration, not less.

“In today’s exceptionally tight labor market, decreased legal immigration has contributed to stifling our economy,” the chamber states in its 2025 Federal Agenda. “American businesses are experiencing significant workforce shortages despite investments in expanding domestic pipelines.”

Shelby Somervell, senior vice president of government affairs for Greater Louisville Inc., was part of a delegation that traveled to Washington, D.C., this summer to lobby for an expansion of legal immigration, among other issues.

“The workforce participation rate in Kentucky is lower,” Somervell says. “Any way that we can fill those jobs legally is what we want to do.”

Michel Ange Lucas, who builds refrigerators for GE Appliances, says the current Feb. 3 expiration date for TPS for Haitians will leave big gaps at the plant, given how many Haitians work there.

“From Building 1 to Building 5, it’s a lot of us,” says Lucas, who is of Haitian descent but is not a TPS holder. He thinks for people who had the government’s permission to stay and work in the U.S., what’s happening now is unfair.

“The people is not illegal,” Lucas says. “Politics made them illegal. But they was never illegal.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5496335/trump-immigration-workers-parole-tps

Unionized factory jobs: the work Americans won’t do!

‘Under Trump, some of Torres’ co-workers are now gone, stripped of their authorization to work’

More of this please!