Wedding Planner to Run Chumph Federal Housing Programs

Lawn Jockey of the week and future Orange Jumpsuit wearer…Lynne Patton

She claims a Yale Degree, and never attended the school and a Law Degree she was never awarded.

Yet another full time Chumph incompetent, unqualified, criminal and liar, this time selected solely on the basis of her race.

Trump chooses inexperienced woman who planned his son Eric’s wedding to run N.Y. federal housing programs

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding.

Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

Patton was appointed Wednesday to head up the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Region II, which includes New York and New Jersey, where she’ll oversee distribution of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Patton’s tight relationship with the Trump clan dates back to 2009, when she began serving as the family’s “event planner.”

“Responsible for organizing, executing and assisting with upscale events and celebrity golf tournaments,” her LinkedIn profile says. “Handle celebrity talent acquisition for various marketing projects, philanthropic events and golf tournaments.”

From 2011 through January, she also helped run the Eric Trump Foundation, a charity that’s now under investigation by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

She also claims on her LinkedIn page to have obtained a juris doctorate degree in 2000 from Quinnipiac University School of Law in Connecticut. Next to the J.D. notation is written (N/A) without explanation.

On Thursday school registrar Jim Benson said Patton attended for two semesters but did not graduate.

She also listed Yale University but HUD officials couldn’t explain why that was there. Patton, who begins her Region II job July 5, did not return calls seeking comment.

As head of the biggest HUD regional office in the U.S., Patton will oversee distribution of billions in cash to public housing authorities — including NYCHA — as well as tens of thousands of rental vouchers and block grants that fund housing inspections and senior citizen programs.

Patton is one of the handful of African Americans within Trump’s inner circle and a passionate Trump promoter. Last year she made a video entitled “I’m proof Donald Trump isn’t a bigot.”

Trump first placed her as a White House liaison at HUD in February. While there, she’s fired off multiple flamethrowing tweets for him and his family…

Patton has also had to defend her role as former vice president at Eric Trump’s foundation. Forbes last week reported the charity steered money to the Trump empire by holding events at Trump golf courses while she was there. She said nothing untoward happened at the charity.

Note – She is now under investigation by the FBI for fraud at that charity.

 

 

Uncle Ben Carson Get’s Blasted by 6th Graders

Even the 6th Graders have figured out Uncle Ben is a fool.

 

Airbnb’s Problem With Racist Hosts

This one has been getting a lot of air lately, as there has become increasing awareness of some racist Airbnb Hosts rejecting minority tenants based on their race/ethnicity.

While it is legal for the owner of a private residence to reject rental of their residence to whomever the choose, what is happening through Airbnb, may have different legal implications, in that the transaction crosses state lines, and as such may be subject to Federal Law, The following case might be a banner case with which to test the legal limits of the law relative to discrimination.

‘I hate n*ggers so I’m going to cancel’: NC Airbnb host rejects and harasses black businesswoman

Airbnb host in North Carolina reportedly canceled on an investment banker after learning she was black and then attacked her with racial and sexist slurs.

In screen shots of a heated conversation sent to Bossip, Airbnb host Todd Warner accepts the reservation of an investment banker that needed temporary housing in Charlotte, and then hours later cited her race as the reason for canceling.

Shani C. Taylor, who identified herself as a friend of the woman, posted some of the conversation on Twitter.

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Shani C. Taylor ‎@shanictaylor

My friend and classmate here at Kellogg had a hateful and racist encounter with an @Airbnb host.

7:25 PM – 31 May 2016 · Evanston, IL, United States

• 2,0702,070 Retweets

• 752752 likes

This was only one of several really awful remarks made by the host, Todd Warner. pic.twitter.com/F0mLHWZW2v

— Shani C. Taylor (@shanictaylor) May 31, 2016

“I hate n*ggers so I’m going to cancel you,” Warner wrote. “This is the south darline. Find another place to rest your n*gger head.”

He added that he “wanted to f*ck” the woman’s “white friend.”

After threatening to report Warner to Airbnb, the woman explained that she was an investment banker with an MBA.

“So watch out,” she warned. “I might just buy the apartment/house next to you, and watch you squirm, you piece of shit.”

Warner fired back that he had retired with $22 million at the age of 44 because he was “not N*GGER like with my spending.”

“Have 80 babies that you can’t afford,” he wrote.

Airbnb responded on Tuesday, saying that the company had contacted the host.

In recent months, Airbnb has come under fire for not screening out racists hosts.

Last year, the company defended itself after a Harvard study found that renters whose names sounded African-American were more likely to be rejected by Airbnb hosts.

“Airbnb is one of the most open, trusted, diverse, transparent communities in the world,” a spokesperson insisted to Bloomberg at the time. “We respond quickly to any concerns raised by hosts or guests, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination on our platform.”

 

DOJ Outs Donald Trump’s Housing Discrimination

Shouldn’t be a big surprise…And Trump continued racist housing discrimination for years.

DOJ: Trump’s Early Businesses Blocked Blacks

A 1973 suit against Trump and the Trump Organization claimed that superintendents at Trump properties would mark African-American applications with a ‘C’ for ‘Colored’ and other racial codes.

When an African-American showed up to rent an apartment owned by a young real-estate scion named Donald Trump and his family, the building superintendent did what he claimed he’d been told to do. He allegedly attached a separate sheet of paper to the application, marked with the letter “C.”

“C” for “Colored.”

According to the Department of Justice, that was the crude code that ensured the rental would be denied.

Details of this secret system, as well as other practices that the Trump organization allegedly used to exclude black residents from its buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, and Norfolk, Virginia in the 1970s, were recorded in a lawsuit brought by the DOJ against Trump and his father, Fred, in 1973 for alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act.

The Trumps responded to the Department of Justice with characteristic combativeness. They counter-sued the federal government for $100 million, while the family’s infamous lawyer—the Joe McCarthy aide turned mafia counsel Roy Cohn—attacked a prosecutor for being a “hot-tempered white female” while slamming the investigation as “Gestapo-like.” Extensive court documents, unearthed by The Daily Beast, provide a window not only into alleged discriminatory practices at the heart of Trump’s early real estate empire, but also into the family’s attack mode, which echoes Trump’s current slash-and-burn campaign for the White House.

A Secret Racist Code

The lawsuit—which Trump Management settled in 1975 with a consent decree, and which they noted at the time did not constitute an admission of wrongdoing—detailed numerous instances of a racial code that Trump-owned buildings allegedly used to indicate if an applicant was black or otherwise “undesirable.”

A super who worked for the Trumps, Thomas Miranda, allegedly told the DOJ that Trump Management staffers had instructed him to “attach a separate sheet of paper to every application submitted by a prospective ‘colored’ renter.”

“Miranda was to write a ‘C’ in order to indicate to management that the prospective renter was ‘colored,’” the DOJ noted in court documents.

Elyse Goldweber, an attorney on the case, claimed Miranda had been reluctant to talk to her and have his name disclosed because “he was afraid that the Trumps would have him ‘knocked off.’” Miranda was also allegedly afraid to reveal to the Trumps that he was Puerto Rican and instead told them he was South American because he thought they “did not want Puerto Ricans living or working in the building,” according to Goldweber’s documentation.

In another instance, Goldweber said, Miranda told another tenant that Trump’s central office did not want him to rent to an Indian man—and that they only agreed to rent to the individual after they found out he had United Nations connections and that a rejection “might cause an unnecessary confrontation.”

He was personally ordered to rent only to “Jews and executives” and to discourage blacks from renting.

Miranda later denied in sworn testimony that he’d said such things to the DOJ. He testified that he went to talk to the Trumps after prosecutors paid him a visit and told “Mr. Trump,” who was a “busy man,” that he wanted no part in the case.

But according to other court documents from the suit, Thomas Miranda was not the only staffer who claimed to know of a secret racial code.

According to the DOJ, a former super at Trump’s Highlander complex claimed that he would also attach a coded piece of paper to let the “central office” know that an applicant was black. He added that a number of supers in Queens used a “phony lease” to enable them to refuse apartments to people of color. The super’s assistant backed up his story about the code and said she was told, “Trump Management tries not to rent to black persons.”…More on Trump’s Discrimination Here…

 

The Housing Bust and the Destruction of Black Wealth

The 2005 Housing bust destroyed more black wealth than any event in American HIstory since slavery.

 

Black Americans Would Have Been Better Off Renting Than Buying

The first several years of the 21st century were relatively good ones for the housing market—at least on the surface. Homeownership climbed to around 70 percent, and all that demand meant lots of new construction and increasing home equity for existing owners. If someone was lucky enough to buy and sell before the market went bust, or if their home wasn’t in an area with catastrophic value loss, they probably increased their net worth just by keeping a roof overhead. Unless they were black.

“Becoming a homeowner was not a fruitful asset accumulation strategy for low- and moderate-income black families in the 2000 decade, in either the short- or medium-term,” write Sandra J. Newman and C. Scott Holupka, authors of a new study from Johns Hopkins University.

To come to that conclusion they looked at data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a representative survey of 5,000 American families. They find that white Americans with low net worth who bought during the boom years made out much better than black Americans who had the same timing and similar financial circumstances. Black families who bought in 2005 lost almost $20,000 of net worth by 2007, according to the paper. By 2011 those losses were more like $30,000. White homeowners didn’t have quite the same problem. Those who purchased in 2007 saw their net worth grow by $18,000 in two years, and then those gains eroded, leaving them with an increase of $13,000 by 2011. All told, the black families lost, on average, 43 percent of their wealth.

That news is perhaps to be expected given the inequities that exists in the housing market, including the quality of financing people have access to and the prospects of the neighborhoods they are buying into. The researchers note that neighborhood location, predatory loan practices, and how long families were able to hold on to homes all likely played a role in how white and black families fared during the early aughts.

Newman and Holupka also investigated how black families would have fared if they had chosen to rent instead of buy. In order to do that, they took a look at the net worth (that is all assets minus all liabilities) for families that did have a mortgage and families who didn’t. Generally, net worth for renters increases marginally each year—as workers get raises, or families pay down debt. For first-time homebuyers, those increases can be much faster, thanks to both the acquisition of a large asset and home value appreciation. But they found that in general black families would have been better off if they hadn’t bought homes at all.

According to the data white families who rented would have ultimately gained $6,600 between 2005 and 2011—less than they earned as homeowners, but still a nice gain. But for black families the choice to rent instead of buy could have moved them from negative to positive net worth. In two years, between 2005 and 2007, wealth would have increased to $1,300, and it would have hit $2,700 by 2011.

Those gains, to be certain, aren’t astronomical, but they are also certainly more promising than the tens of thousands in disproportionate losses that black homeowners experienced and are still trying to overcome. For black homeowners, there were never enough financial gains to offset the massive losses they sustained. But sadly, renting may not be much of a solution. In most places, rent just keeps on rising, which means fewer options for families already struggling to build wealth.

 

Maintaining Systemic Poverty Through Credit

One of the ways young black folks who do all the right things are held back is by a system of predatory credit based on race. In America it is virtually impossible to generate Generational Wealth without credit as the principal vehicle for the middle class gathering that wealth has been their homes.

Back when I was a youngster making very good money in my first professional job, as well as bankable money in several side enterprises. I wound up at 22 years old with about $6k in savings  – which was a fairly tidy sum in the early 70’s for a guy just starting out. Now, my parents, despite being homeowners, never taught me about how to buy a house – but I recognized, with the advice of friends what a tremendous investment it could be. I owned an old ’75 Mustang I had bought used, and which ran pretty well. A fairly fancy new car at that point was about $3500 – and in terms of Pony cars that was one with a few upgrades in terms of horses. Working a side job as a DJ in the emerging Disco scene, I noticed the previously run down portion of town (Georgetown for those who know DC) was undergoing a transformation as hip white adults began to buy up the old Townhouses. Prices on the main drag were far beyond my reach – but 3 blocks off, there were a group of unrestored – dilapidated townhouses, which had been cut up into rentals.

The owner held the entire block. Most of the residents were black, which for white investors presented a problem in terms of doing anything less than taking out the whole block. Asked the owner if he would consider selling a smaller portion of the property. He agreed on a block of 3 houses for $21,000 or two for $17,000. I had $6k, and anyway you look at it that is nearly a 30% down payment on the block of 3. I would have to decide what to do with them – and decided, being handy with tools, I could renovate them and sell them while living in one.

Could not get a loan. Really didn’t matter that I made $12k a year in my “day job”, 30% or better down… Nyet!

Very few banks loaned to black folks in those days…And the few that did didn’t loan money to us 22 year old tech upstarts, because they had no comprehension that I would double my income in less than 2 years. No way to raise the money before he sold those houses as a block to a developed… They sell for about $2 million per house now.

Seems that things haven’t really changed. Meanwhile US Home ownership has dropped to its lowest level since 1967.

Getting a Home Loan Is Expensive—Especially for Black Women

A recent study in the Journal of Real Estate and Finance Economics finds that black home loan borrowers are charged higher interest rates than their white counterparts—and that black women pay the highest rates of all.

The three finance professors who authored the study analyzed the mortgages and demographic characteristics of more than 3,500 households during the height of the housing boom—2001, 2004, and 2007—using the Federal Reserve’s triennialSurvey of Consumer Finances. They found that on average, black borrowers were charged between 0.29 and 0.31 percentage points more in interest than whites, even after controlling for their debt and credit history.

The racial disparity was most pronounced for subprime borrowers who couldn’t qualify for low-interest mortgages (the left side of the chart above), with black borrowers paying interest rates that were at least 0.4 percentage points higher than whites in the same group.

Within this group paying the highest interest rates, black women paid the highest rates of all, at an average rate of 7.9 percent. But a statistically significant disparity persisted even among those who paid lower interest rates (the right side of the chart), the study notes. In this group, black borrowers paid interest rates between 0.1 percent and 0.4 percentage points higher than their white counterparts.

Over at Quartz, Melvin Backman explains how these disparities translate into dollars: According to Freddie Mac’s mortgage cost calculator, a $200,000, 30-year mortgage would cost a black man about $3,000 more than a white man over the course of the loan. A black woman getting the same loan would pay nearly $9,000 more than a white woman.

The study adds to a body of research showing that black mortgage applicants aremore likely to be denied credit than white applicants, and are more likely to be charged higher interest rates than whites. It also appears to confirm the racial disparities identified in lawsuits against several of America’s top mortgage lenders, including Wells Fargo and Bank of America’s Countrywide, which faced hefty payouts in a slew of discrimination lawsuits following the housing-market crash. The lawsuitshad even prompted the Obama administration to set up a new unit in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division to deal with the caseload.

But the new study also suggests more granular disparities between black and white borrowers. Among black borrowers, for example, younger homeowners without a college education paid some of the highest interest rates. And among those paying higher interest rates, black women, who already face stiff obstacles to economic mobility, were likely to be charged interest rate premiums two to three times that of what black men were charged. While they do not speculate about the causes of these racial and gender gaps between borrowers, the authors conclude, “it is the more financially vulnerable black women who suffer the most.”

Another Dream Deferred…

 

 

Fear of a Black President…Obama and Statistics Collection Exposing Racism

Did you know the US Government is building a “Secret Race Database”?

And that President Obama plans to use it to tear down the foundations of white privilege, and ravage the very roots of Dixie?

Enjoy!

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.

All of the above charts were from reports done by various research institutes, including Brookings, Pew, and Manhattan, as well as educationals studies by Universities such as Stanford. Hate to be the first one to tell this conservative racist clown…

But the data is already there.

 

Where is the Black Community?

I grew up in an all-black suburban community defined by segregation. Our community was essentially an Island in an otherwise all white sea defined by housing restrictions and covenants.

Living in the suburbs in those days meant having ties to other black communities which existed in sometimes disparate areas defined by post Civil War realities. Your barber or hairdresser might be in another community. The segregated black schools drew from communities which could be 20 or 30 miles from each other leading to long bus rides, and by High School – the students coming from a geographic region, instead of a “community”. Social activities such as house parties could be 30 or more miles away.

Tying this together were the remnants of the 40’s era segregation. Many of the communities, if large enough – had a baseball team. Sunday evenings were filled with crack of a bat as communities met on local fields to root for their respective local teams.

So the “black community”, at least in the suburban sense that I grew up with was always a “virtual” entity.

The stock in trade of black conservatives is to discuss shortcomings of the “black community”. The problem with that line of “thinking” is that the black community in the pre-60’s sense – has ceased to exist. The remnants of those communities, where they exist at all –  largely exist today as urban pockets. The black diaspora has not only changed the nature and makeup of the pre-desegregation black community – it has changed the racial dynamic of previously white communities. The urban pocket community is no more a representation of the black community than $5 million houses in an upscale Jersey community are representative of the “white community” as a whole in the US. Quite simply America has changed – and like any major social change the impact is complex.

John McWhorter discusses the impact of desegregation in this article. I find it amusing when people who never experienced segregation talk about how wonderful it was…

Segregation Is Down. Great News, Right?

When Newt Gingrich says that housing project people don’t work, our job is to show that they do. When he says that Obama is the “food stamp” president, our job is to show that most food stamp recipients are white. When Ron Paul writes that we’re about to start rioting again, we are to make sure that everybody knows we’re not.

In other words, although this isn’t the lesson usually taken from these recent episodes, it would appear that we are getting more comfortable admitting that progress happens for us. Real progress, even if racism still exists, as it always will. And not just symbolic progress, such as having a black president. When we get angry at whites depicting us as poster children, we are saying that being black is less of a problem in 2012, even if it occasionally still is one.

Well, now there’s more good news. We need to trumpet it to the skies as eagerly as we do the news that not so many of us use food stamps. It’s about segregation: This new report by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor shows that black Americans are living under less of it than at any time since William Howard Taft was president.

As Glaeser and Vigdor, writing for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, show, “As of 2010, the separation of African-Americans from individuals of other races has stood at its lowest level in nearly a century. Fifty years ago, nearly half the black population lived in what might be termed a ‘ghetto’ neighborhood, with an African-American share above 80 percent. Today, that proportion has fallen to 20 percent.”

Indeed, I used to work for the Manhattan Institute and am proud of it. But I am hardly the only one who will be writing about this report this week, and I would be shouting it to the heavens even if I used to work for Burger King. This is important news.

So often we are told that despite the civil rights revolution, black America’s big problem is segregation. Black people live together too much, we are told. And when everybody is black and poor, then we have to understand that the neighborhood must fall to pieces. Not enough middle-class role models, we are told. About twice a year the New York Times runs a story on segregation that pings around the country madly for weeks, in which assorted people are quoted spinning variations on “We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.”

Here, then, is a story about the way we’ve come. From 1970 to 2010, segregation declined for black people in all 85 of the nation’s largest metro areas. From just 2000 to 2010, segregation declined in 522 out of 658 housing markets. By 2010, out of 72,531 census tracts, only 424 had no black people in them. And as recently as 2000, that number had been 902. In 1960, there were 4,700 all-white neighborhoods in America. Today there are 170. We’re everywhere! (More)

 

America Joins the 3rd World

This looks like something I’ve seen in Haiti…

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Atlanta Is Being Hammered Economically, posted with vodpod

30,000 queue for housing assistance in Atlanta

Some 30,000 people lined up outside a local shopping centre in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday in the hope of receiving public housing assistance. The authorities were unprepared for the throng, which was unruly at times. Amid sweltering conditions, 62 people were hurt and 20 needed hospital care. Only 455 rent assistance vouchers and 200 public housing spaces were on offer – while 13,000 applications were taken.

Some had lined up since Sunday for the possibility of discounted rent.

It was the first time in eight years that the housing authority in East Point, a municipality in south-west Atlanta, had accepted applications for public housing and rent subsidies, known as Section 8 vouchers. Authorities estimate it will be six months before any vacancies become available for the small number of successful applicants. Most of the 16 other local housing authorities in Atlanta have closed their waiting lists. But Section 8 vouchers are portable, so people flocked from across the city for a chance to receive housing aid.

Atlanta is an economically polarized city: it has the fastest growing number of millionaires in the US but also has the third-highest proportion of people living below 50% of the poverty line.

“People are desperate. They are really willing to do whatever it takes to get into housing,” James Fraser, a public housing expert at Vanderbilt University, told the BBC.

Welcome to America after 30 years of conservatism. One of the favorite stitch’s of a black conservative buckdancer from Atlanta is to berate the City of Detroit. The line goes that Liberalism and Unions killed manufacturing in the North, as companies sought lower wage