Quotes About Housing

Housing, not buying, should be a right - and available and affordable for all. Right to buy is devastating our housing system, just as rail privatisation has devastated our transport infrastructure.

When we talk about a city's cost of living, we don't mean food, transportation, or clothing, which cost about the same everywhere. We mean housing.

Disabled people need more invested in their education, housing, job training, transportation, assistive technology, and independent-living facilities. Governments earn back this investment - and more - by making people with disabilities economically productive citizens.

Historic inequality continues to cast a long shadow on more than just law enforcement. It affects everything from housing to employment to transportation.

To one extent, if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

To some extent, if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—"Storming Tarragona." Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. "D. Boon didn't think our dads got a fair shake," Watt says, "and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.

financially. He gets so far upside down on his mortgage he's

Yes, I said 1962 levels. I know it's hard to believe, but think back to the fifties, when American workers could own a house, raise a family, and send the kids to college, all on a single paycheck. Now both parents work and most people still can't afford a house.

The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," says Zelman. "But the problem wasn't just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.

Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles—or major deflations—on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default.

The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned.

2005 there would be $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Half a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage–backed bonds in a single year.

Greg Lippmann was now blasting Vinny and Danny with all sorts of negative information about the housing market, and, for the first time, Vinny and Danny began to hide the information from Eisman. "We were worried he'd come out of his office and shout, 'Do a trillion!'" said Danny. In

you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month.

Racism is especially useful when channeling the economic fears and anger of Whites away from employers and toward out-groups who are seen as competitors for scarce jobs, education, and housing.

Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state—if there is the political will and a mobilization of popular class power.

No single housing finance institution should be too big to fail.

I'm a Black man who was raised by a single mother in a housing project. That story doesn't usually end in Congress.

I've found all of my apartments on Craigslist. I've got good Craigslist luck. I just sit on my couch and really focus on it, and I've gotten really lucky that way.

Why can't we, with a more intelligent policy, actually have houses that are affordable, built at higher densities than they are at the moment and built on brownfield sites.

Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would destabilize the greatest economy in the world.

I love living in Brooklyn. Originally I moved there because I could enjoy a bigger space for less money than I would ever get in Manhattan.

Why do we need long-term fixed-rate mortgages in a world where the work force of the future is going to change jobs and move every three to five years?