These are some of the stories we’ve been following this week.
- The Los Angeles Unified School District is turning excess or underutilized land into affordable housing for low-income district employees.
- Property values in Detroit are on the rise, thanks to the city’s work to demolish blighted buildings that are near single-family homes. We’ve written about the problems posed by blight before.
- Private equity firm TPG Capital, which manages $75 billion in assets and recently bought commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, has raised more than $2 billion of capital for its first multi-investor real estate fund.
- Cook County, Illinois sued HSBC, alleging that several of the British bank’s affiliates directed black and Hispanic borrowers into subprime loans they couldn’t afford. A federal judge in Chicago has ruled that the predatory lending lawsuit against HSBC will go forward.
- Irving Fryar, a pastor and former NFL star, has been sentenced to 5 years in prison for his role in a $1.2 million case of mortgage loan fraud.
- Congress’s help may be needed to clean up property titles in Colorado where homes and yards extend into the railbanked easement of the Roaring Fork Valley railroad system.
- Ozone rules for plant emissions are about to get tougher, thanks to a new court-mandated rule from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). However, critics on both sides seem unhappy with the new limit of 70 parts per billion.
Monitoring the Animas River after the Gold King Mine spill
- The Gold King Mine could become a Superfund site, but some are opposed to the idea because of potential effects on tourism in the area. As we wrote about previously, acid mine drainage released from the mine during maintenance contaminated the Animas River with heavy metals.
- Wyoming is being sued for a law that makes it illegal for citizens to photograph or otherwise collect evidence of contaminated streams and rivers and report that information to state and federal authorities without specific permission from the property owner to collect that data.
- Federal regulators have given GE the OK to dismantle a PCB cleanup plant on the upper Hudson River. About 310,000 pounds of PCBs have been removed from the river sediment at the Superfund site.
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