| | | Looks like these honkies learned the system:
Public Radio´s Incomplete Report on Aspen´s Taxpayer-Subsidized Housing
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| | Taxpayer-subsidized Colorado Public Radio likes taxpayer subsidies. I know from personal experience that they even like Aspen’s taxpayer-subsidized housing program, where residents making as much as $186,000 receive million-dollar houses for dimes on the dollar. Here’s the background. One of Colorado Public Radio’s reporters contacted me a few weeks ago, saying he’d seen my columns on the problem-plagued program. He wanted to talk more and asked to have a telephone conversation. I agreed, and we did. In our short conversation, I mentioned some of the problems. |
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The $186,000 income cutoff for the program conveniently includes every city employee, top to bottom. And indeed, lots of city employees live there. A few years ago, four out of the five city council members lived there — including the mayor.
Fraud is rampant. Residents often rent out their subsidized units at market rates for holidays — they can realize a five-figure windfall for Christmas week alone — and sometimes even beyond that. Many retirees have undisclosed nest eggs far over the maximum allowed. (Although tax returns are required to verify income, no proof is required to verify assets; there are no audits.)
Although the program was supposed to encourage “diversity” in Aspen, virtually none of the residents are racial minorities even though a large percentage of the service workers in Aspen are Hispanic. Instead, the winners of the lottery that picks new residents are typically white, upper-middle-class city bureaucrats and other insiders who know how to game the system.
In one recent example, the city allowed a city employee to bypass the lottery on the grounds of a medical hardship. The “hardship” was that the person’s wife gets migraine headaches.
Original Article |
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