There were foreclosures and now house owners are being forced out of their house, the place they called home for decades.
Associated Press (via Yahoo News) reports that the action is not only limited real estate investors but also city's housing authority. They are flipping houses for profit. What they do is move aging tenants out of their houses and then renovate the house and sell them to wealthy buyers.
Renovations do not come cheap, it can go as high as $300,000 but once it is completed, the profit is more than worth it because the property can be sold as high as $900,000. This doesn't work all the time however since some of the houses remain sitting empty for years, after tenants have gone.
Some elderly tenants and their children who were affected have asked to be given an opportunity to purchase the homes but they were turned down.
The plan is to use the profits to be had by the housing authority to "renovate existing subsidized rental units and build new ones," the report continues. Most of the work hasn't begun yet, however and the money is yet to go to any construction. Perhaps it is because sales are slow-moving and haphazard.
Associated Press describes "the home tobe known in public-housing circles as "scattered sites" - single-family properties around Washington that are rented to public-housing tenants. Many are in desirable neighborhoods, including Capitol Hill and Shaw, where median home prices have more than doubled in the past 15 years to $500,000-plus."
About 300 scattered sites had been undert he District of Columbia Housing Authorithy, which it has been slowly selling them off since the 1990s.
Some of the tenants have lived in the houses for a very, very long time. A couple, aged 81 and 82, respectively, was forced out of their home and some of their belongings were thrown away.
To date, of the 26 homes, 14 have been sold while others have been listed for sale and the other three taken off the market.
The question is, where do the tenants who have been forced out of their homes go?
