Photo: Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock The city’s top housing official announced on Wednesday that she will be leaving her job by July. Gothamist reports that Jessica Katz, who serves as the chief housing officer in Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, was first appointed to the newly created role in January 2022, just weeks after the mayor was sworn in. It’s not yet clear who will replace Katz or if the role itself will be phased out, per Gothamist. Katz’s decision comes as the city is grappling with a critical housing shortage and an accompanying intense homelessness crisis. On Wednesday, City Hall asked the courts to suspend the city’s decades-old right-to-shelter law , citing an increase in asylum seekers transported from southern states, which has added to the already immense number of people in the shelter system. Adams has made addressing the city’s housing scarcity one of his top issues, pledging to build 500,000 new homes over the next decade. That plan, … [Read more...] about City’s Top Housing Official to Resign This Summer
3 family house plans
White House Official: Biden’s Migration Is an Economic Strategy
A senior official in the White House says President Joe Biden’s immigration policy is intended to fill new jobs in government spending programs, high-tech firms, and a growing economy. “We are creating new jobs this year as we’re breaking ground on key infrastructure projects under the President’s bipartisan infrastructure law , the CHIPS and Science Act , [and] new green jobs as we implement the Inflation Reduction Act ,” said Katie Tobin, the senior director for transborder security on the National Security Council, adding : As our economy grows, we need workers that we just don’t have enough of. So it is in our interest to bring people in and to stay competitive globally. “In closing,” Tobin said on May 15, “the Biden-Harris administration appreciates both the moral responsibility and the strategic opportunity that migration presents — it’s at the heart of our domestic and our foreign policy agendas.” Tobin’s stealth policy of government-accelerated economic … [Read more...] about White House Official: Biden’s Migration Is an Economic Strategy
White House and G.O.P. Strike Debt Limit Deal to Avert Default
President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Saturday reached an agreement in principle to lift the debt limit for two years while cutting and capping some government spending over the same period, a breakthrough after a marathon set of crisis talks that has brought the nation within days of its first default in history. Congressional passage of the plan before June 5, when the Treasury is projected to exhaust its ability to pay its obligations, is not assured, particularly in the House, which plans to consider it on Wednesday. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the chamber, and right-wing lawmakers who had demanded significantly larger budget cuts in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit were already in revolt. But the compromise, which would effectively freeze federal spending that had been on track to grow, had the blessing of both the Democratic president and the Republican speaker, raising hopes that it could break the fiscal stalemate that has gripped Washington and … [Read more...] about White House and G.O.P. Strike Debt Limit Deal to Avert Default
How Housing’s New Players Spiraled Into Banks’ Old Mistakes
When the housing crisis sent the American economy to the brink of disaster in 2008, millions of people lost their homes. The banking system had failed homeowners and their families. New investors soon swept in — mainly private equity firms — promising to do better. But some of these new investors are repeating the mistakes that banks committed throughout the housing crisis, an investigation by The New York Times has found. They are quickly foreclosing on homeowners. They are losing families’ mortgage paperwork, much as the banks did. And many of these practices were enabled by the federal government, which sold tens of thousands of discounted mortgages to private equity investors, while making few demands on how they treated struggling homeowners. The rising importance of private equity in the housing market is one of the most consequential transformations of the post-crisis American financial landscape. A home, after all, is the single largest investment most families will … [Read more...] about How Housing’s New Players Spiraled Into Banks’ Old Mistakes
The Newest High-End Amenity: Houses That Come With Horses
Plenty of luxury housing developments are built around glamorous perks: a manicured 18-hole golf course, a private beach club, even an exclusive on-site restaurant crowned with Michelin stars. Tucked in the coastal jungle of Western Mexico comes yet another hyper-luxurious real estate offering, this one banking on a novel perk: a pony named Karen. Karen and 48 of her equine colleagues make up the centerpiece of Mandarina, a billion-dollar residential resort gamble currently being carved into a cliffside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Riviera Nayarit, Mexico. Its Mexico-based developer is betting that the palatial, celebrity-architect-designed stables erected at its heart — where the skills of two polo pros and their herd of athletic beasts are available to all residents — will help put this luxury outpost rising from the jungle on the It-people map. “With the ultraluxury market, this could be their fifth, six, seventh, 10th home — and it is touches that make the difference,” said … [Read more...] about The Newest High-End Amenity: Houses That Come With Horses
Historian Plans Book From Chats With Clinton
The conversations between President Bill Clinton and the historian Taylor Branch were long and late, sometimes stretching until 2 a.m. For eight years, at Mr. Clinton’s urging, they met in a second-floor office in the family quarters of the White House, Mr. Branch scribbling notes and a tape recorder running. Those sessions, nearly 80 in all, are the fodder for a new book by Mr. Branch, tentatively titled “Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes,” that Simon & Schuster plans to publish in late 2008, the publisher said yesterday. Mr. Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “America in the King Years, 1954-1968,” a trilogy on the life and times of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said he intended to write about what he called an extraordinary and unprecedented series of sessions that began as an oral history project when Mr. Clinton was still the president-elect. They are also the product of a friendship between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Branch that dates back nearly 40 … [Read more...] about Historian Plans Book From Chats With Clinton