REMEMBER, THIS WEALTH INEQUITY WAS PLANNED AND IMPLEMENTED BY REAGAN WITH CLINTON AS THE MAJOR PLAYER IN THE TRANSITION. WITHOUT A POLITICIAN POSING AS A DEMOCRAT, THIS BREAKDOWN OF THE NEW DEAL/WAR ON POVERTY WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED. EACH TIME, CLINTON AND OBAMA LIED TO GET INTO OFFICE!!! NOW, IT IS BEING FUNDED BY THE MONEY STOLEN THROUGH CORPORATE FRAUD.
IF YOU DO NOT FIGHT NOW TO CHANGE THE DYNAMICS....IT WILL GET CONSIDERABLY WORSE!!!
Turning the dynamic of urban city life from that of neglected inner city poverty to affluent Manhattan luxury takes decades of planning and a complete disregard of Rule of Law. Baltimore is ground zero for Wall Street investment as they take the money defrauded from American citizens and purchase and/or are given blighted real estate that is envisioned to grow in worth by 10,000%. To get there the working class had to watch as their futures and savings went from prepared to bankrupt as the city defunded their neighborhoods to get them to blighted. If the subprime loan fraud didn't get them then property tax leans collected prematurely or fake water bills that had the city claiming people's houses did. This is a predatory, cruel, and often illegal takeover of people's property. Houses are being given to churches who hold them until funds are found to develop them in the way the development plan calls. You wouldn't want the wrong people buying into these future communities!!!!! THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE NEANDERTHAL GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION SOCIETY-BUILDING. MAN WITH BIGGEST CLUB GETS MUCH WOMEN AND PRIVATE CAVE. LET'S NOT BE RULED BY IDIOTS!!!!
We have gathered evidence of Baltimore City deliberately taking people's homes for failure to pay taxes well before the stated deadline of June 30 for example. Senior citizens are targeted by the city who wants these housed as part of a development tract in city east and central. The city is spending tens of thousands of taxpayer money for a property where a citizen is deceased and then gives it to developers who then build and sell for considerable profit. Whether Greater Homewood or East Baltimore Development......this is Johns Hopkins deciding who the winners and losers will be in this development. We are watching as taxpayer money is used to rehab public mansions so they can be sold to the rich in the city......these are cherished parks belonging to the public. I ONCE HEARD A NATIVE BALTIMOREAN SAY THAT THE NAMESAKE FOUNDER JOHNS HOPKINS IS ROLLING IN HIS GRAVE TO SEE WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO HIS UNIVERSITY. WALL STREET GREED AND IMMORALITY.
When the city isn't trying to roll the homeless, the elderly, or the sick out of the city it is creating a workforce based on immigrant labor that can be exploited to the lowest price. At the Board of Estimates meeting the Minority Contractor lawyer covering the 25% minority work requirement in bid awards caused one board member to hang his head in shame at the outright bid rigging that happens in Baltimore City Hall. It is so embarrassing to citizens and it is life and death for the black contractors openly discriminated against and a minority requirement that barely reaches 10%. The minorities awarded these bids....Hispanics and Asian contractors both of which then hire undocumented workers and green card workers all getting below minimum wage. It is spectacular in its greed.
As I showed with the Sustainability piece that gives all kinds of tax credits to businesses all of this contract award comes with its own set of tax breaks and as you see below when corporations aren't paying property taxes and new residents are getting discounted property taxes and the rich have their tax breaks and property taxes ring-fenced to their neighborhoods......THERE IS NO MONEY FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. HENCE THE WALL STREET CONNECTION IN BUILDING AND THE BUSINESS CONNECTION IN FUNDING SCHOOLS. STARVE THE PUBLIC SECTOR TO PRIVATIZE IT.
Raise your hand if this is the vision you have for your child's future? That's right.....almost no one. IT TAKES AN AUTOCRATIC KLEPTOCRACY!!
Take a look at what these Third Way corporate democrats working for corporate profits and wealth inequity are doing to the people for whom they are supposed to serve.
VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!
RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN NEXT ELECTIONS!!!!
Let's be clear, at every level of government it is the middle/lower class who is being taken to the cleaners while tens of trillions are being swept into the pockets of corporations and the rich.
Fiscal Collapse: US Congress to Make Sequester Cuts Permanent By Andre Damon Global Research, March 19, 2013
Hundreds of thousands face unpaid furloughs As the US government prepares to furlough hundreds of thousands of federal employees next month, Congress is moving to make permanent the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade mandated by the sequester process that was triggered at the beginning of March.
The Democratic-controlled Senate is expected this week to approve a so-called “continuing resolution” that will fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year on September 30. A version of the bill has already been passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both the House and Senate versions include the $85 billion in cuts for fiscal year 2013 mandated by the sequester.
On top of these cuts, both versions of the bill include provisions to freeze federal pay through the end of this year, reversing an earlier executive order to end the current pay freeze and give federal employees a 0.5 percent raise.
With the sequester cuts secured for rest of the fiscal year, the two parties will intensify their discussions on next year’s federal budget and plans to impose unprecedented attacks on the most basic social programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
Congressional Democrats have made clear they have no intention of using the threat of a government shutdown, which would result from failure to pass a continuing resolution, in order to reverse the sequester cuts.
Since the exact form of the across-the-board sequester cuts are still being worked out, it is not clear precisely how many workers will face payless furloughs, but preliminary figures indicate that over one million employees could be affected. Many workers could lose more than 20 percent of their annual salary.
The spending bill passed by the House contains provisions giving the military much greater flexibility in distributing the burden of the spending cuts, meaning there will be little discernible impact on military capacity. The burden of the cuts will be born overwhelmingly by civilian employees of the military.
Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the Navy’s top uniformed officer, said earlier this month that compared to the original sequester provisions, the changes implemented in the bill are “almost night and day.” The admiral said that as a result of the bill, for instance, the Navy could proceed with the building of two new carriers whose construction it had previously threatened to halt.
“A huge portion of these cuts will come directly out of the pay of federal workers,” said Jackie Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees in a telephone interview Monday. “The Department of Defense has chosen to protect its contractors and make its civilian employees pay for the cuts,” she continued, adding that “the DOD spends over $200 billion per year on service contracts: none of these have been cut, and nothing is coming out of uniformed services.”
Then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last month that the “vast majority” of the Defense Department’s 800,000 civilian employees would take 22 furlough days per fiscal year, resulting in pay cuts of 20 percent.
Employees affected by the defense department furloughs include workers at military hospitals and schools, employees at depots and arsenals and the sprawling defense department logistics system, as well as maintenance and repair staff.
Many thousands of non-military federal employees will also face unpaid furloughs. While most of the furlough days will be staggered throughout the year, 9,212 meat safety inspectors will all be furloughed on the same days, meaning no meat safety inspections will take place on 11 days of the year, Simon said.
The furloughs of federal employees come in addition to severe cuts in social services as a result of the sequester. The nearly 4 million long-term unemployed who receive federal unemployment benefits will see an 11 percent cut in their benefits, or about $130 per month.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported earlier this month that the “WIC nutrition program for low-income pregnant women, infants, and young children will have to turn away an estimated 600,000 to 775,000 women and children, including very young children, by the end of this fiscal year.”
Additionally, 100,000 low-income families will lose vouchers for housing assistance as a result of the sequester cuts, and tens of thousands of education workers will face layoffs.
Throughout the entire “debate” over the budget and federal deficit, the issues of unemployment, poverty and falling wages have gone virtually unmentioned. The joint goal of the Obama administration and congressional Republicans and Democrats is to manufacture an atmosphere of crisis, in which an immense assault on social services and workers’ living standards can be carried out.
The next crisis date will occur in August, when the federal debt ceiling will be reached. This will be utilized along prearranged lines to push through cuts and structural changes that will mark the beginning of the end of the basic social reforms enacted in the 1930s and 1960s.
Obama is resolutely pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits and hundreds of billions of further cuts in Medicare, as well as the introduction of means-testing, which will begin the transformation of the medical insurance program for seniors from a universal program to a poverty program, a major step toward its destruction.
The White House is seeking to spin this historic attack as a boon to the “middle class” and a “fair” and “balanced” approach to the deficit by linking it to token tax increases on the rich. Any such increases, however, would be more than made up for by a “reform” of the tax code that slashes corporate taxes and shifts the tax burden further from the wealthy to the working class.
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WE ALL KNOW HOW MUCH THE MIDDLE/LOWER CLASS HAS LOST ALREADY. ON AMERICAN PUBLIC RADIO, MARKETPLACE HAS A HABIT OF LAUGHING AT THE MISFORTUNES OF LABOR AS THEY ARE PUSHED DEEPER INTO POVERTY. THIS IS 'PUBLIC' MEDIA. BELOW YOU WILL SEE A FEW OF THE PERKS GIVEN TO THE WEALTHY IN MARYLAND JUST THIS WEEK!
ARE YOU READY FOR A REVOLUTION??????
IT IS EASY TO PETITION TO REFERENDUM NO MATTER THE CHANGES MADE IN ANNAPOLIS......
RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!!
BELOW YOU SEE ACROSS THE NATION THE URBAN DEVELOPMENT ADDED TO THE PEOPLE'S IMPOVERISHMENT HAS PUSHED MOST PEOPLE INTO RENTAL SITUATIONS THAT ARE GEARING UP FOR LANDLORD ABUSE. LAWS ARE BEING CHANGED AND RENT CONTROL ENDED SO THESE LANDLORD DEVELOPERS CAN EXPLOIT THE HECK OUT OF YOU AND ME!!!!
Baltimore City Council's latest resolution:
Tax Credits - High-Performance Market-Rate Rental Housing
FOR the purpose of providing a property tax credit for certain newly constructed or converted high-performance market-rate rental housing projects; imposing certain limitations, conditions, and qualifications; providing for the administration of the credit; defining certain terms; setting a date for termination of the program; and generally relating to property tax credits.
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REMEMBER, THE DEVELOPERS ARE USUALLY AN EXTENSION OF THE WALL STREET INVESTMENT FIRMS THAT CREATED THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD AND GOT AWAY WITH TRILLIONS. THEY ARE NOW BEING ALLOWED BY YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TO MOVE OUT MOST AVERAGE MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE BECAUSE --------THEY CHOOSE TO!
THANKS TO YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRAT WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW AND NO POLITICAL SUPPORT.
I want to say that 10 years ago I rented a two bedroom 2,000 sq ft apartment in Seattle overlooking the Puget Sound and views of Mt Rainier for $1,000. These prices below in a mid-level city are extreme.
Apartment rentals are hot property in downtown Grand Rapids — to say the lease
By Rod Kackley Sam Cummings
One thing that downtown Grand Rapids has going for it: old buildings, many of them empty. Another thing: Demand from people who want to rent an apartment downtown — young people, in particular — has spilled onto waiting lists.
In response, developers are renovating downtown buildings as quickly as City Hall will allow, putting as few as four rental units in some buildings, 30-40 in others and more than 100 in a few.
Developer Sam Cummings, the principal and managing partner of CWD Real Estate Investment, is a believer in rental development in downtown Grand Rapids.
"There is room to run with apartments," he said. "Rents are doing quite well and occupancy, for all intents, is 100 percent."
The only vacancies that CWD Real Estate has in The Gallery Apartments are one-month turnovers, when a lease runs its course and a new tenant needs to be selected. Cummings said rents there are in the market-rate range for downtown Grand Rapids -- from $950 a month for a studio to $2,500 for a three-bedroom apartment.
Clay Powell, director of the Rental Property Owners Association in Grand Rapids, thinks the number of people renting downtown will continue to climb for the next three to five years because of stricter mortgage lending requirements.
Developers such as Cummings have the luxury of selecting tenants because demand for apartments downtown is outstripping supply. People just out of college, working their first job, are standing beside their empty-nesting parents in line for apartments that are being built wherever there's an empty space, he said.
What's the attraction? Downtown Grand Rapids is filled with craft beer brew pubs, coffee shops, scores of restaurants, the Grand Rapids Art Museum and Grand Rapids Public Museum — right across the street from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.
Every winter, city officials turn Rosa Parks Circle, across from the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, into an ice skating rink. In summer, it's used for free public concerts on weekends and evenings and is filled with tables and chairs for weekday lunch hours.
The ArtPrize festival takes over downtown for a couple of weeks every autumn, while the annual Festival of the Arts fills downtown the first weekend of June with art, music and food.
Besides market-rate units, there are also income-restricted apartments — called "workforce housing," designed for people making $25,000 to $35,000 a year. These units are attractive to recent college graduates and service sector employees who work downtown.
Eric Pratt, a Grand Rapids city planner, said the developer decides whether rentals will be market rate, income-restricted or rent-subsidized. It depends on which tax credits or incentives, if any, he or she wants to take advantage of.
The Grand Rapids Downtown Development Authority has 3,164 rental units on its Downtown Housing Inventory. The phrase "market rate" is typed beside 566. An additional 881 units are listed as income-restricted. The rest are Grand Valley State University student housing and owner-occupied condos.
Derek Coppess believes as strongly as Sam Cummings in market-rate development. The 616 Development founder and managing director had plans for 65 rental units in 2011 in several buildings. Now he has 150 and plans to construct 350 more units in downtown buildings.
More than 550 prospective tenants are on a waiting list for 616 Development properties. Sixty-five percent are women ages 25-34.
"They make decent money and just want to live downtown," Coppess said. "They are price first, location second, square footage and size third."
616 Development rents a one-bedroom, 600- to 700-square-foot apartment for $1,000 to $1,200 a month. A two-bedroom, 850- to 1,000-square-foot unit rents for $1,400 to $1,600 a month.
"Every time a new project begins, the units get swallowed up before the project is done," Coppess said. "That shows me we are not dealing with a fad. We are dealing with a lack of supply."
Market-rate and income-restricted developments are only two segments of the downtown Grand Rapids rental market. Steadfast Properties, owner of the McKay Tower, is going after the other end of the spectrum, with luxury apartments on the 15th floor.
Chaundra Kerks, operations director at the McKay Tower, said the first of three apartments — an 850-square-foot, fully furnished studio — was rented four weeks after it was listed for $2,000 a month. Steadfast Properties plans to have the two other apartments, both two-bedroom units priced at $4,000 to $5,000 a month, ready for tenants this summer.
Depending on how quickly those units go, Kerks said, Steadfast Properties might turn the 14th floor into luxury apartments.
Although he said real estate in downtown Grand Rapids is coming back, Cummings doesn’t see much potential to build and sell condominiums — a real estate bubble downtown that burst about five years ago with the onset of the Great Recession.
However, real estate agent Ashley Dietch, who specializes in downtown Grand Rapids condominiums for the Steve Volker Group of Keller-Williams Realty, is not giving up on the for-sale market. She said only 40-50 condo units are for sale out of the 1,000 that have been built in downtown Grand Rapids.
Dietch has seen prices as high as $600,000, she said, with the average between $175,000 and $200,000.
Coppess is convinced the migration of renters is going to drive downtown development.
"If we jam as many people as possible into market-rate housing, these people have disposable income. They are going to spend it at bars and restaurants. That is what grocery stores follow. That is what retail follows."
Grand Rapids' city planning director, Suzanne Schulz, agrees, to a point.
"The growth is driving interest in retail and office development," she said. "The good news is the more people there are downtown, the more attractive it is for retailers."
Loeks Theaters Inc., for one, has been studying the idea of building a movie theater in downtown Grand Rapids for close to a year.
However, Schulz said, it doesn't look as if downtown is going to get a supermarket yet. "We really need to have a higher number of people with the incomes that can support a supermarket," she said.
Downtown Grand Rapids mass transit is another story. DDA Director Kristopher Larson said planners of urban mass transit tend to guide property developers, because people who prefer an urban environment tend to cluster around transit stops.
He said the perfect example of that is Washington, D.C., a city that has grown around the Metropolitan Transit Authority since it opened in 1968.
Grand Rapids officials hope that happens with the Silver Line, a bus rapid transit system that should start running from the southern suburbs up the main street of downtown Grand Rapids — Division Avenue — by the end of 2014.
"That is the ideal scenario, to have the transportation system guide your land-use planning," Larson said. "Because it is not an overnight thing, it can take as long as 30 years to build around that transportation infrastructure."
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Here is the City of Baltimore and its residents today. These people have been taxed up the yingyang to pay for this development that plans to leave all of them in the dust. You can see by Maryland's median income that they are looking to create the same in Baltimore.
Where do the working class go? I was told they need to head to rural landscapes where they are already practicing slave labor. SOUND FAMILIAR?
Do you realize how many people in Baltimore will be pushed out over just a few decades if these powers are left to their devices?
HOW DO THE WORKING-CLASS/ POOR MOVE AROUND OUTSIDE AN URBAN SETTING? THEY DON'T.
Sep 20, 2012, 11:19am EDT
Maryland median household income No. 1 in U.S.; Baltimore below average
Maryland's median household income is the highest in the U.S.
New Media Editor- Baltimore Business Journal
Maryland’s median household income was the highest in the nation last year, but Baltimore City’s number remains well below average.
The median household income in Baltimore was 23 percent less than the national average in 2011, according data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
That same report showed the Maryland’s median household income of $70,004 was the highest in the country.
The 2011 American Community Survey said the median income in Baltimore last year was $38,731, compared with the national figure of $50,502.
The survey also found that 13.5 percent of people in Baltimore did not have health insurance coverage, compared with 15.1 percent nationally.
Other Baltimore data:
Mississippi had the lowest household income at $36,919.
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WE NEED TO KNOW THAT THE INTENT IS TO EMPTY THE CITIES OF POOR AND WORKING CLASS AND SEND THEM TO THE COUNTRYSIDE......JUST AS BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. THE DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT WE HAVE EXTREMELY WEALTHY PEOPLE WHO ARE LOOKING TOWARDS PLUTOCRACY IN AN AMERICAN THAT WAS CREATED AS A REVOLUTIONARY END TO JUST THAT WEALTH INEQUITY. IT IS NOT AMERICA.......
OUR MONEY, OUR PUBLIC ASSETS, OUR FUTURES, AND CHILDREN'S FUTURES WERE QUITE LITERALLY STOLEN BY A SMALL GROUP OF MANIACS.
WE NEED OUTRAGE AND WE NEED ACTION ......WE CAN TURN THIS AROUND!!!!
BELOW YOU SEE HOW THE POOR ARE BEING PUSHED DEEPER INTO RURAL AREAS AND THE WORKING/MIDDLE CLASS IS MOVING TO THE SUBURBS. THE CITIES ARE BEING BUILT FOR THE AFFLUENT WITH THE MONEY STOLEN THROUGH MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD AND OUR PENSIONS, RETIREMENTS, AND HEALTH CARE.
PATCHWORK NATION -- November 7, 2011 at 4:41 PM EDT
Poverty's Changing Profile in the U.S. By: Dante Chinni
Fresh produce is viewed at the Central Park United Methodist Church weekly food pantry on Oct.19, 2011 in Reading, Pennsylvania. The church feeds thousands of needy Reading residents monthly and relies on donations and volunteers to keep its increasingly popular programs operating. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
The hard economic times of the last few years have been felt widely, but not uniformly. As we have often noted on Patchwork Nation, American communities that relied heavily on specific slices of the economy -- housing, manufacturing -- were particularly hard hit.
A new report from The Brookings Institution, The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s, sheds light on what those differences mean in America's largest metro areas. And when you examine the numbers from that report using Patchwork Nation's 12 county types, some common themes emerge in how life is changing in urbanized and rural America.
First, while the cores of the nation's big city areas still have many troubles, they are lessening somewhat in relative terms. Poverty grew more in suburban counties than in the dense heart of those urban centers.
Second, it appears that more distant suburbs and many rural areas saw much steeper jumps in poverty. As Patchwork Nation has often noted, those farther-flung exurban locales have been particularly hard hit in the housing crunch.
Should these trends continue, they would change our understanding of what poverty looks like in the United States and how it plays out at the community level. It might also lead Washington to reconsider how aid is divvied up and passed out.
'Better' is a Relative Word
To be clear, the nation's most densely populated counties, the places Patchwork Nation calls the Industrial Metropolis, still hold most of the nation's poor. More than 8.3 million people who live in those places fall into that income range, according to the Brookings numbers. But even over the hard times of the last decade, those numbers did not rise dramatically. In 2000, about 7.9 million lived in poverty in the Metros -- that's equals an increase of about 400,000 since then.
Now look at what's happened elsewhere. The number living in poverty increased by some one million in the wealthy Monied Burbs. It increased by a startling 1.7 million in the largely exurban Boom Town counties that grew so dramatically in the last decade before the housing troubles began.
Some of Patchwork Nation's 12 county types hold more people than others, so raw numbers don't tell the whole story. The chart below shows the poverty rate for each for the types as well as the increase in the number of people living in poverty from 2000 and for the five-year average of 2005-2009.
Community Type Percentage Poverty Rate 2000 Percentage Poverty Rate '05-'09 Change in Number in Poverty Monied 'Burbs 8% 9.01% 1,050,167 Minority Central 20.24% 20.79% 49,051 Evangelical Epicenters 14.6% 16.77% 380,015 Tractor Country 12.71% 12.66% -10,399 Campus and Careers 10.39% 12.14% 276,091 Immigration Nation 16.79% 17.14% 455,688 Industrial Metropolis 15.48% 15.85% 377,563 Boom Towns 11.03% 12.45% 1,777,658 Service Center 12.08% 13.99% 586,886 Empty Nests 9.38% 11.49% 331,036 Military Bastions 11.98% 13.38% 175,242 Mormon Outposts 9.58% 10.15% 35,946
The map below shows those what the poverty increase by percentage looks like on a national scale. Look closely and you can see those trends play out in big metro areas. For instance, look at places like Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis and you'll note those counties saw smaller increases in poverty than their neighboring suburban counties. Out east, Washington, Baltimore and the middle of the New York City's densest boroughs saw some of the biggest drops in poverty.
Temporary or Something Bigger?
The real question is what do these numbers represent? Remember the latest data comes form a five-year average that includes the collapse of the housing market. That helps explain the high numbers in the Boom Town counties are here. It could be that one or two or five years from now these numbers look different. Statistics, like any other measure, offer only a snapshot of a moment.
But as we have noted in other posts, any turnaround in the housing market is likely still some time off. These poverty rates are not just "blips" for these communities, they are at least medium-term problems tied into the collapse of construction.
And what of the other spikes here. The aging Emptying Nests saw a jump of 330,000 in poverty over this period -- a two percentage-point increase in the poverty rate. The small town Service Worker Centers saw almost a two percentage-point jump, some 586,000 more people in poverty.
Those places rely heavily on small manufacturing and/or spending from visitors coming from the bigger metro areas to keep them afloat. And neither of those things looks to pick up anytime soon.
These numbers may just represent a picture of a moment in time, but if the next snapshot looks similar, it will raise serious questions. For decades the dominant image of poverty in America has been one of gritty urban landscapes -- of Detroits and Clevelands and Philadelphias. That image may be growing more complicated.
If poverty continues to grow in these non-urban locations the programs needed to serve the poor in them may have to change. Issues like transportation, education and housing for the needy may have to re-imagined. Some problems that we think of as problems of poverty are actually problems of urban poverty. The racial and economic breakdowns of suburban, exurban and rural America are necessarily different.
The great recession was clearly the main driver of the current economic sluggishness. Poverty spiked with the downturn than began at the end of 2007. But the pattern shown here combined with what we now about how different communities are hurting suggests there is much more than a recession at work.
The changing jobs environment combined with growing exurban and rural poverty may be redefining not just who winners and losers are in the new economy, but where they live and what they need.
IF YOU DO NOT FIGHT NOW TO CHANGE THE DYNAMICS....IT WILL GET CONSIDERABLY WORSE!!!
Turning the dynamic of urban city life from that of neglected inner city poverty to affluent Manhattan luxury takes decades of planning and a complete disregard of Rule of Law. Baltimore is ground zero for Wall Street investment as they take the money defrauded from American citizens and purchase and/or are given blighted real estate that is envisioned to grow in worth by 10,000%. To get there the working class had to watch as their futures and savings went from prepared to bankrupt as the city defunded their neighborhoods to get them to blighted. If the subprime loan fraud didn't get them then property tax leans collected prematurely or fake water bills that had the city claiming people's houses did. This is a predatory, cruel, and often illegal takeover of people's property. Houses are being given to churches who hold them until funds are found to develop them in the way the development plan calls. You wouldn't want the wrong people buying into these future communities!!!!! THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE NEANDERTHAL GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION SOCIETY-BUILDING. MAN WITH BIGGEST CLUB GETS MUCH WOMEN AND PRIVATE CAVE. LET'S NOT BE RULED BY IDIOTS!!!!
We have gathered evidence of Baltimore City deliberately taking people's homes for failure to pay taxes well before the stated deadline of June 30 for example. Senior citizens are targeted by the city who wants these housed as part of a development tract in city east and central. The city is spending tens of thousands of taxpayer money for a property where a citizen is deceased and then gives it to developers who then build and sell for considerable profit. Whether Greater Homewood or East Baltimore Development......this is Johns Hopkins deciding who the winners and losers will be in this development. We are watching as taxpayer money is used to rehab public mansions so they can be sold to the rich in the city......these are cherished parks belonging to the public. I ONCE HEARD A NATIVE BALTIMOREAN SAY THAT THE NAMESAKE FOUNDER JOHNS HOPKINS IS ROLLING IN HIS GRAVE TO SEE WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO HIS UNIVERSITY. WALL STREET GREED AND IMMORALITY.
When the city isn't trying to roll the homeless, the elderly, or the sick out of the city it is creating a workforce based on immigrant labor that can be exploited to the lowest price. At the Board of Estimates meeting the Minority Contractor lawyer covering the 25% minority work requirement in bid awards caused one board member to hang his head in shame at the outright bid rigging that happens in Baltimore City Hall. It is so embarrassing to citizens and it is life and death for the black contractors openly discriminated against and a minority requirement that barely reaches 10%. The minorities awarded these bids....Hispanics and Asian contractors both of which then hire undocumented workers and green card workers all getting below minimum wage. It is spectacular in its greed.
As I showed with the Sustainability piece that gives all kinds of tax credits to businesses all of this contract award comes with its own set of tax breaks and as you see below when corporations aren't paying property taxes and new residents are getting discounted property taxes and the rich have their tax breaks and property taxes ring-fenced to their neighborhoods......THERE IS NO MONEY FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. HENCE THE WALL STREET CONNECTION IN BUILDING AND THE BUSINESS CONNECTION IN FUNDING SCHOOLS. STARVE THE PUBLIC SECTOR TO PRIVATIZE IT.
Raise your hand if this is the vision you have for your child's future? That's right.....almost no one. IT TAKES AN AUTOCRATIC KLEPTOCRACY!!
Take a look at what these Third Way corporate democrats working for corporate profits and wealth inequity are doing to the people for whom they are supposed to serve.
VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!
RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN NEXT ELECTIONS!!!!
Let's be clear, at every level of government it is the middle/lower class who is being taken to the cleaners while tens of trillions are being swept into the pockets of corporations and the rich.
Fiscal Collapse: US Congress to Make Sequester Cuts Permanent By Andre Damon Global Research, March 19, 2013
Hundreds of thousands face unpaid furloughs As the US government prepares to furlough hundreds of thousands of federal employees next month, Congress is moving to make permanent the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade mandated by the sequester process that was triggered at the beginning of March.
The Democratic-controlled Senate is expected this week to approve a so-called “continuing resolution” that will fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year on September 30. A version of the bill has already been passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both the House and Senate versions include the $85 billion in cuts for fiscal year 2013 mandated by the sequester.
On top of these cuts, both versions of the bill include provisions to freeze federal pay through the end of this year, reversing an earlier executive order to end the current pay freeze and give federal employees a 0.5 percent raise.
With the sequester cuts secured for rest of the fiscal year, the two parties will intensify their discussions on next year’s federal budget and plans to impose unprecedented attacks on the most basic social programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
Congressional Democrats have made clear they have no intention of using the threat of a government shutdown, which would result from failure to pass a continuing resolution, in order to reverse the sequester cuts.
Since the exact form of the across-the-board sequester cuts are still being worked out, it is not clear precisely how many workers will face payless furloughs, but preliminary figures indicate that over one million employees could be affected. Many workers could lose more than 20 percent of their annual salary.
The spending bill passed by the House contains provisions giving the military much greater flexibility in distributing the burden of the spending cuts, meaning there will be little discernible impact on military capacity. The burden of the cuts will be born overwhelmingly by civilian employees of the military.
Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the Navy’s top uniformed officer, said earlier this month that compared to the original sequester provisions, the changes implemented in the bill are “almost night and day.” The admiral said that as a result of the bill, for instance, the Navy could proceed with the building of two new carriers whose construction it had previously threatened to halt.
“A huge portion of these cuts will come directly out of the pay of federal workers,” said Jackie Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees in a telephone interview Monday. “The Department of Defense has chosen to protect its contractors and make its civilian employees pay for the cuts,” she continued, adding that “the DOD spends over $200 billion per year on service contracts: none of these have been cut, and nothing is coming out of uniformed services.”
Then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last month that the “vast majority” of the Defense Department’s 800,000 civilian employees would take 22 furlough days per fiscal year, resulting in pay cuts of 20 percent.
Employees affected by the defense department furloughs include workers at military hospitals and schools, employees at depots and arsenals and the sprawling defense department logistics system, as well as maintenance and repair staff.
Many thousands of non-military federal employees will also face unpaid furloughs. While most of the furlough days will be staggered throughout the year, 9,212 meat safety inspectors will all be furloughed on the same days, meaning no meat safety inspections will take place on 11 days of the year, Simon said.
The furloughs of federal employees come in addition to severe cuts in social services as a result of the sequester. The nearly 4 million long-term unemployed who receive federal unemployment benefits will see an 11 percent cut in their benefits, or about $130 per month.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported earlier this month that the “WIC nutrition program for low-income pregnant women, infants, and young children will have to turn away an estimated 600,000 to 775,000 women and children, including very young children, by the end of this fiscal year.”
Additionally, 100,000 low-income families will lose vouchers for housing assistance as a result of the sequester cuts, and tens of thousands of education workers will face layoffs.
Throughout the entire “debate” over the budget and federal deficit, the issues of unemployment, poverty and falling wages have gone virtually unmentioned. The joint goal of the Obama administration and congressional Republicans and Democrats is to manufacture an atmosphere of crisis, in which an immense assault on social services and workers’ living standards can be carried out.
The next crisis date will occur in August, when the federal debt ceiling will be reached. This will be utilized along prearranged lines to push through cuts and structural changes that will mark the beginning of the end of the basic social reforms enacted in the 1930s and 1960s.
Obama is resolutely pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits and hundreds of billions of further cuts in Medicare, as well as the introduction of means-testing, which will begin the transformation of the medical insurance program for seniors from a universal program to a poverty program, a major step toward its destruction.
The White House is seeking to spin this historic attack as a boon to the “middle class” and a “fair” and “balanced” approach to the deficit by linking it to token tax increases on the rich. Any such increases, however, would be more than made up for by a “reform” of the tax code that slashes corporate taxes and shifts the tax burden further from the wealthy to the working class.
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WE ALL KNOW HOW MUCH THE MIDDLE/LOWER CLASS HAS LOST ALREADY. ON AMERICAN PUBLIC RADIO, MARKETPLACE HAS A HABIT OF LAUGHING AT THE MISFORTUNES OF LABOR AS THEY ARE PUSHED DEEPER INTO POVERTY. THIS IS 'PUBLIC' MEDIA. BELOW YOU WILL SEE A FEW OF THE PERKS GIVEN TO THE WEALTHY IN MARYLAND JUST THIS WEEK!
ARE YOU READY FOR A REVOLUTION??????
IT IS EASY TO PETITION TO REFERENDUM NO MATTER THE CHANGES MADE IN ANNAPOLIS......
RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!!
BELOW YOU SEE ACROSS THE NATION THE URBAN DEVELOPMENT ADDED TO THE PEOPLE'S IMPOVERISHMENT HAS PUSHED MOST PEOPLE INTO RENTAL SITUATIONS THAT ARE GEARING UP FOR LANDLORD ABUSE. LAWS ARE BEING CHANGED AND RENT CONTROL ENDED SO THESE LANDLORD DEVELOPERS CAN EXPLOIT THE HECK OUT OF YOU AND ME!!!!
Baltimore City Council's latest resolution:
Tax Credits - High-Performance Market-Rate Rental Housing
FOR the purpose of providing a property tax credit for certain newly constructed or converted high-performance market-rate rental housing projects; imposing certain limitations, conditions, and qualifications; providing for the administration of the credit; defining certain terms; setting a date for termination of the program; and generally relating to property tax credits.
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REMEMBER, THE DEVELOPERS ARE USUALLY AN EXTENSION OF THE WALL STREET INVESTMENT FIRMS THAT CREATED THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD AND GOT AWAY WITH TRILLIONS. THEY ARE NOW BEING ALLOWED BY YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TO MOVE OUT MOST AVERAGE MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE BECAUSE --------THEY CHOOSE TO!
THANKS TO YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRAT WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW AND NO POLITICAL SUPPORT.
I want to say that 10 years ago I rented a two bedroom 2,000 sq ft apartment in Seattle overlooking the Puget Sound and views of Mt Rainier for $1,000. These prices below in a mid-level city are extreme.
Apartment rentals are hot property in downtown Grand Rapids — to say the lease
By Rod Kackley Sam Cummings
One thing that downtown Grand Rapids has going for it: old buildings, many of them empty. Another thing: Demand from people who want to rent an apartment downtown — young people, in particular — has spilled onto waiting lists.
In response, developers are renovating downtown buildings as quickly as City Hall will allow, putting as few as four rental units in some buildings, 30-40 in others and more than 100 in a few.
Developer Sam Cummings, the principal and managing partner of CWD Real Estate Investment, is a believer in rental development in downtown Grand Rapids.
"There is room to run with apartments," he said. "Rents are doing quite well and occupancy, for all intents, is 100 percent."
The only vacancies that CWD Real Estate has in The Gallery Apartments are one-month turnovers, when a lease runs its course and a new tenant needs to be selected. Cummings said rents there are in the market-rate range for downtown Grand Rapids -- from $950 a month for a studio to $2,500 for a three-bedroom apartment.
Clay Powell, director of the Rental Property Owners Association in Grand Rapids, thinks the number of people renting downtown will continue to climb for the next three to five years because of stricter mortgage lending requirements.
Developers such as Cummings have the luxury of selecting tenants because demand for apartments downtown is outstripping supply. People just out of college, working their first job, are standing beside their empty-nesting parents in line for apartments that are being built wherever there's an empty space, he said.
What's the attraction? Downtown Grand Rapids is filled with craft beer brew pubs, coffee shops, scores of restaurants, the Grand Rapids Art Museum and Grand Rapids Public Museum — right across the street from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.
Every winter, city officials turn Rosa Parks Circle, across from the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, into an ice skating rink. In summer, it's used for free public concerts on weekends and evenings and is filled with tables and chairs for weekday lunch hours.
The ArtPrize festival takes over downtown for a couple of weeks every autumn, while the annual Festival of the Arts fills downtown the first weekend of June with art, music and food.
Besides market-rate units, there are also income-restricted apartments — called "workforce housing," designed for people making $25,000 to $35,000 a year. These units are attractive to recent college graduates and service sector employees who work downtown.
Eric Pratt, a Grand Rapids city planner, said the developer decides whether rentals will be market rate, income-restricted or rent-subsidized. It depends on which tax credits or incentives, if any, he or she wants to take advantage of.
The Grand Rapids Downtown Development Authority has 3,164 rental units on its Downtown Housing Inventory. The phrase "market rate" is typed beside 566. An additional 881 units are listed as income-restricted. The rest are Grand Valley State University student housing and owner-occupied condos.
Derek Coppess believes as strongly as Sam Cummings in market-rate development. The 616 Development founder and managing director had plans for 65 rental units in 2011 in several buildings. Now he has 150 and plans to construct 350 more units in downtown buildings.
More than 550 prospective tenants are on a waiting list for 616 Development properties. Sixty-five percent are women ages 25-34.
"They make decent money and just want to live downtown," Coppess said. "They are price first, location second, square footage and size third."
616 Development rents a one-bedroom, 600- to 700-square-foot apartment for $1,000 to $1,200 a month. A two-bedroom, 850- to 1,000-square-foot unit rents for $1,400 to $1,600 a month.
"Every time a new project begins, the units get swallowed up before the project is done," Coppess said. "That shows me we are not dealing with a fad. We are dealing with a lack of supply."
Market-rate and income-restricted developments are only two segments of the downtown Grand Rapids rental market. Steadfast Properties, owner of the McKay Tower, is going after the other end of the spectrum, with luxury apartments on the 15th floor.
Chaundra Kerks, operations director at the McKay Tower, said the first of three apartments — an 850-square-foot, fully furnished studio — was rented four weeks after it was listed for $2,000 a month. Steadfast Properties plans to have the two other apartments, both two-bedroom units priced at $4,000 to $5,000 a month, ready for tenants this summer.
Depending on how quickly those units go, Kerks said, Steadfast Properties might turn the 14th floor into luxury apartments.
Although he said real estate in downtown Grand Rapids is coming back, Cummings doesn’t see much potential to build and sell condominiums — a real estate bubble downtown that burst about five years ago with the onset of the Great Recession.
However, real estate agent Ashley Dietch, who specializes in downtown Grand Rapids condominiums for the Steve Volker Group of Keller-Williams Realty, is not giving up on the for-sale market. She said only 40-50 condo units are for sale out of the 1,000 that have been built in downtown Grand Rapids.
Dietch has seen prices as high as $600,000, she said, with the average between $175,000 and $200,000.
Coppess is convinced the migration of renters is going to drive downtown development.
"If we jam as many people as possible into market-rate housing, these people have disposable income. They are going to spend it at bars and restaurants. That is what grocery stores follow. That is what retail follows."
Grand Rapids' city planning director, Suzanne Schulz, agrees, to a point.
"The growth is driving interest in retail and office development," she said. "The good news is the more people there are downtown, the more attractive it is for retailers."
Loeks Theaters Inc., for one, has been studying the idea of building a movie theater in downtown Grand Rapids for close to a year.
However, Schulz said, it doesn't look as if downtown is going to get a supermarket yet. "We really need to have a higher number of people with the incomes that can support a supermarket," she said.
Downtown Grand Rapids mass transit is another story. DDA Director Kristopher Larson said planners of urban mass transit tend to guide property developers, because people who prefer an urban environment tend to cluster around transit stops.
He said the perfect example of that is Washington, D.C., a city that has grown around the Metropolitan Transit Authority since it opened in 1968.
Grand Rapids officials hope that happens with the Silver Line, a bus rapid transit system that should start running from the southern suburbs up the main street of downtown Grand Rapids — Division Avenue — by the end of 2014.
"That is the ideal scenario, to have the transportation system guide your land-use planning," Larson said. "Because it is not an overnight thing, it can take as long as 30 years to build around that transportation infrastructure."
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Here is the City of Baltimore and its residents today. These people have been taxed up the yingyang to pay for this development that plans to leave all of them in the dust. You can see by Maryland's median income that they are looking to create the same in Baltimore.
Where do the working class go? I was told they need to head to rural landscapes where they are already practicing slave labor. SOUND FAMILIAR?
Do you realize how many people in Baltimore will be pushed out over just a few decades if these powers are left to their devices?
HOW DO THE WORKING-CLASS/ POOR MOVE AROUND OUTSIDE AN URBAN SETTING? THEY DON'T.
Sep 20, 2012, 11:19am EDT
Maryland median household income No. 1 in U.S.; Baltimore below average
Maryland's median household income is the highest in the U.S.
New Media Editor- Baltimore Business Journal
Maryland’s median household income was the highest in the nation last year, but Baltimore City’s number remains well below average.
The median household income in Baltimore was 23 percent less than the national average in 2011, according data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
That same report showed the Maryland’s median household income of $70,004 was the highest in the country.
The 2011 American Community Survey said the median income in Baltimore last year was $38,731, compared with the national figure of $50,502.
The survey also found that 13.5 percent of people in Baltimore did not have health insurance coverage, compared with 15.1 percent nationally.
Other Baltimore data:
- In 2011, 46.1 percent of the preschool age population was enrolled in school, compared with 47.4 percent nationally.
- Among Baltimore’s 25-and-older population, 80.5 percent completed high school or more, compared with 85.9 percent nationally.
- 27.5 percent of the 25-and-older population had a bachelor’s degree or higher, just lower than the 28.5 percent nationally.
- Median value for an owner-occupied home was $154,400, compared with $173,600 nationally.
- In 2011, the median gross rent (rent plus utilities) was $880, compared with $871 nationally.
- Some 7.4 percent of people in Baltimore were foreign-born, compared with 13 percent across the U.S.
Mississippi had the lowest household income at $36,919.
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WE NEED TO KNOW THAT THE INTENT IS TO EMPTY THE CITIES OF POOR AND WORKING CLASS AND SEND THEM TO THE COUNTRYSIDE......JUST AS BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. THE DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT WE HAVE EXTREMELY WEALTHY PEOPLE WHO ARE LOOKING TOWARDS PLUTOCRACY IN AN AMERICAN THAT WAS CREATED AS A REVOLUTIONARY END TO JUST THAT WEALTH INEQUITY. IT IS NOT AMERICA.......
OUR MONEY, OUR PUBLIC ASSETS, OUR FUTURES, AND CHILDREN'S FUTURES WERE QUITE LITERALLY STOLEN BY A SMALL GROUP OF MANIACS.
WE NEED OUTRAGE AND WE NEED ACTION ......WE CAN TURN THIS AROUND!!!!
BELOW YOU SEE HOW THE POOR ARE BEING PUSHED DEEPER INTO RURAL AREAS AND THE WORKING/MIDDLE CLASS IS MOVING TO THE SUBURBS. THE CITIES ARE BEING BUILT FOR THE AFFLUENT WITH THE MONEY STOLEN THROUGH MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD AND OUR PENSIONS, RETIREMENTS, AND HEALTH CARE.
PATCHWORK NATION -- November 7, 2011 at 4:41 PM EDT
Poverty's Changing Profile in the U.S. By: Dante Chinni
Fresh produce is viewed at the Central Park United Methodist Church weekly food pantry on Oct.19, 2011 in Reading, Pennsylvania. The church feeds thousands of needy Reading residents monthly and relies on donations and volunteers to keep its increasingly popular programs operating. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
The hard economic times of the last few years have been felt widely, but not uniformly. As we have often noted on Patchwork Nation, American communities that relied heavily on specific slices of the economy -- housing, manufacturing -- were particularly hard hit.
A new report from The Brookings Institution, The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s, sheds light on what those differences mean in America's largest metro areas. And when you examine the numbers from that report using Patchwork Nation's 12 county types, some common themes emerge in how life is changing in urbanized and rural America.
First, while the cores of the nation's big city areas still have many troubles, they are lessening somewhat in relative terms. Poverty grew more in suburban counties than in the dense heart of those urban centers.
Second, it appears that more distant suburbs and many rural areas saw much steeper jumps in poverty. As Patchwork Nation has often noted, those farther-flung exurban locales have been particularly hard hit in the housing crunch.
Should these trends continue, they would change our understanding of what poverty looks like in the United States and how it plays out at the community level. It might also lead Washington to reconsider how aid is divvied up and passed out.
'Better' is a Relative Word
To be clear, the nation's most densely populated counties, the places Patchwork Nation calls the Industrial Metropolis, still hold most of the nation's poor. More than 8.3 million people who live in those places fall into that income range, according to the Brookings numbers. But even over the hard times of the last decade, those numbers did not rise dramatically. In 2000, about 7.9 million lived in poverty in the Metros -- that's equals an increase of about 400,000 since then.
Now look at what's happened elsewhere. The number living in poverty increased by some one million in the wealthy Monied Burbs. It increased by a startling 1.7 million in the largely exurban Boom Town counties that grew so dramatically in the last decade before the housing troubles began.
Some of Patchwork Nation's 12 county types hold more people than others, so raw numbers don't tell the whole story. The chart below shows the poverty rate for each for the types as well as the increase in the number of people living in poverty from 2000 and for the five-year average of 2005-2009.
Community Type Percentage Poverty Rate 2000 Percentage Poverty Rate '05-'09 Change in Number in Poverty Monied 'Burbs 8% 9.01% 1,050,167 Minority Central 20.24% 20.79% 49,051 Evangelical Epicenters 14.6% 16.77% 380,015 Tractor Country 12.71% 12.66% -10,399 Campus and Careers 10.39% 12.14% 276,091 Immigration Nation 16.79% 17.14% 455,688 Industrial Metropolis 15.48% 15.85% 377,563 Boom Towns 11.03% 12.45% 1,777,658 Service Center 12.08% 13.99% 586,886 Empty Nests 9.38% 11.49% 331,036 Military Bastions 11.98% 13.38% 175,242 Mormon Outposts 9.58% 10.15% 35,946
The map below shows those what the poverty increase by percentage looks like on a national scale. Look closely and you can see those trends play out in big metro areas. For instance, look at places like Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis and you'll note those counties saw smaller increases in poverty than their neighboring suburban counties. Out east, Washington, Baltimore and the middle of the New York City's densest boroughs saw some of the biggest drops in poverty.
Temporary or Something Bigger?
The real question is what do these numbers represent? Remember the latest data comes form a five-year average that includes the collapse of the housing market. That helps explain the high numbers in the Boom Town counties are here. It could be that one or two or five years from now these numbers look different. Statistics, like any other measure, offer only a snapshot of a moment.
But as we have noted in other posts, any turnaround in the housing market is likely still some time off. These poverty rates are not just "blips" for these communities, they are at least medium-term problems tied into the collapse of construction.
And what of the other spikes here. The aging Emptying Nests saw a jump of 330,000 in poverty over this period -- a two percentage-point increase in the poverty rate. The small town Service Worker Centers saw almost a two percentage-point jump, some 586,000 more people in poverty.
Those places rely heavily on small manufacturing and/or spending from visitors coming from the bigger metro areas to keep them afloat. And neither of those things looks to pick up anytime soon.
These numbers may just represent a picture of a moment in time, but if the next snapshot looks similar, it will raise serious questions. For decades the dominant image of poverty in America has been one of gritty urban landscapes -- of Detroits and Clevelands and Philadelphias. That image may be growing more complicated.
If poverty continues to grow in these non-urban locations the programs needed to serve the poor in them may have to change. Issues like transportation, education and housing for the needy may have to re-imagined. Some problems that we think of as problems of poverty are actually problems of urban poverty. The racial and economic breakdowns of suburban, exurban and rural America are necessarily different.
The great recession was clearly the main driver of the current economic sluggishness. Poverty spiked with the downturn than began at the end of 2007. But the pattern shown here combined with what we now about how different communities are hurting suggests there is much more than a recession at work.
The changing jobs environment combined with growing exurban and rural poverty may be redefining not just who winners and losers are in the new economy, but where they live and what they need.
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