A New York City real estate developer is under fire for a condominium building plan that would see two separate entrances for residents: one for the low-income tenants, and another for the well-to-dos residing in the tower's luxury pads.

They could do so under the town’s “nuisance property” ordinance, a law intended to protect neighborhoods from seriously disruptive households. Officials can invoke the measure and pressure landlords to act if the police have been called to a rental home three times within four months.

So she faced a fearful dilemma, Ms. Briggs recalled, when her volatile boyfriend showed up last summer, fresh out of a jail stint for their previous fight, and demanded to move in.

“I had no choice but to let him stay,” said Ms. Briggs, 34, a certified nursing assistant, even though, she said in an interview, she worried about the safety of her 3-year-old daughter as well as her own.
“If I called the police to get him out of my house, I’d get evicted,” she said. “If I physically tried to remove him, somebody would call 911 and I’d be evicted.”

From Inman: Two women in Houston posing as a real estate agent and a home buyer conned sellers into leaving their homes for showings so the duo could rob their houses, according to police. One of the schemers was being held in police custody Tuesday, and the other was still at large. 

In one incident, the owners of a listed home were notified by their real estate agency that a buyer wanted to see their house right away, police said. The owners left the home immediately without putting their jewelry away, and when they returned, the jewelry was gone. The real estate agency told police that the woman posing as an agent used a real estate license and number. However, she did not have a super key so the home owners had to let her and the buyer inside.

Imagine rents going up three, four, even seven times in a single year! This was the case for many Mission and San Francisco residents in 1978, the year before the Board of Supervisors approved rent control. Documentary film maker Charles Bolton and the production company Optic Nerve, now Ideas In Motion, caught the angst in “Pushed Out For Profit.” The film aired on KQED on Sept. 6, 1978.

According to a new Redfin study, 3 of the 5 most expensive cities for new parents are in the Bay Area. Expenses analyzed include housing, utilities (energy costs), childcare, healthcare, and retail items needed for babies. And by Redfin’s calculations, San Jose is the most expensive in the country, followed by Santa Cruz, CA. San Francisco takes 4th place.

“San Francisco is the best city for childfree living,” says Karen Foster, author of No Way Baby! Exploring, Understanding and Defending the Decision NOT to Have Children. “As the frontrunner in alternative lifestyles, you have to do a lot more than not have kids to be considered odd in San Francisco. I lived there from age nineteen to thirty-two and was never once asked when I was getting married and/or having babies. It’s a place where the childfree may roam free.”

Mark Silver, managing director of Villages Group, said they made the decision to market their planned community to the LGBT community as “an experiment” because “the real estate market in France is so bad right now” and they “didn’t have any takers.” So naturally, they decided to change focus and market to the only people over 50 with a disposable income: the gays, of course!

Since changing their strategy on on Monday, Silver said they’ve received “thousands of emails every hour” and he’s “never seen anything like it” during his 40 years in business.