Affordable Housing Institute : US

Buried in the typical apartment lease is the resident’s right to ‘quiet enjoyment’ of the premises.  While it doesn’t specifically mean noise (rather, it refers to undisturbed occupancy), as anyone who’s lived in an apartment complex knows, ‘quiet’ is often a precondition to ‘enjoyment.’ 
 

I’m not enjoying your taste in music
 
Noise travels, and it cannot be […]

Do you feel … lucky?
 
Ever get yourself into an oh-no fix?  One of those where, scarce seconds after you’ve slammed the car door shut, hit the delete key or the flush lever, or seen the subway doors shut behind you bearing away your luggage?
 

Not that lever!
 
Multiply that by roughly a thousand and you have the […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we followed the tale of woe offered, by their class-action consumer-protection lawyer Gary Klein, of Lori and Mark Pestana of Westford, MA, who as reported in the Boston Globe are now suing Washington Mutual (WaMu) to prevent the foreclosure of their modest home in Westford, based on their assertion that […]

Using a loan I borrow from you, I buy a house that I now cannot pay for.  I fall into default, and you send me notices of default, but I want to renegotiate. 
 
Are you obligated to negotiate with me?
 

Okay now, bank, let’s negotiate
 
That appears to be the premise behind litigation recently filed by Lori […]

[Continued from the previous Part 2 and Part 1.]
 
The idea is as old as the Roman army, as American as the Homestead Act, and as timely as formalizing slums in the global south via urban homesteading.
 
Now for a little more fun: could you use it to stimulate private colonization of the Moon? 
 

See any […]