Florida Looks at New Ideas for Battling Hurricanes

Hurricane season is two months old and not a single named storm has popped onto the radar. If that makes people complacent, it only makes weather watchers worry even more about what is to come. Officials and insurers are concerned about the ramifications of a “Big One,” and Florida, the most ravaged of states, is looking at several novel approaches to riding out the storms — or even preventing them altogether

Share

Florida’s Property Taxes Go Wacky in Housing Slump

In Palm Beach County, Fla., buyers who find fire-sale bargains at foreclosed home auctions — picking up, say, $400,000 houses for $100,000 or less — are also realizing they’re required in many cases to pay the same property taxes, as if the homes were still valued at $400,000. In Miami-Dade County to the south, where one in four homeowners are 30 days or more behind in their mortgage payments, residents are bracing for what Mayor Carlos Alvarez says could be an imminent property tax hike to fill an almost $400 million budget hole — a move that veteran Miami realtors like Alex Shay insist would set recovery back.

Share

Banking Jobs Holding Up Better than Most in Recession

Staffers in the industry at the heart of the nation’s economic woes have been hurt less in the downturn than the rest of the country has. Jobs in the banking and insurance industries have fallen just 5% since the start of the recession. That’s half a percentage point less than the 5.4% overall drop in nongovernment employment over the same time period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Share

NYPD police officer killed by cop

A police officer was shot to death by another officer as he was chasing a man he saw breaking into his car in New York’s East Harlem neighborhood , authorities said. New York Police Department Officer Omar Edwards, 25, was shot twice about 10:30 p.m. Thursday just blocks from the precinct where he had finished his shift

Share

Will The Housing Bubble Burst in 2007?

Sin ce early 2000, economists have been sounding the housing bubble alarm with increasing urgency. And while many markets around the country have seen prices drop in the last year, the dire, across-the-board correction that many predicted has yet to materialize

Share

The Outlook For Stocks Is Decidedly…Mixed

‘Mixed’ is a word that pops up often in financial research reports these days. The measures that give us hints about which way the economy and markets are headed‹everything from the number of people out of work to how difficult it is for companies to fund themselves are pointing in every which direction. As a new Bank of America-Merrill Lynch report puts it: ‘The [stock market] indicators are fairly evenly divided between positive and negative readings.’ That’s not too helpful.

Share

Out of India: First the $2,000 Nano Car, Now the $7,800 Nano Home

India’s giant Tata conglomerate, whose subsidiary Tata Motors just successfully launched the $2,000 Nano, the world’s cheapest car, is ready for an encore: ultra-cheap homes. Tata Housing Development, the real estate arm of the giant Tata group, is poised to start building apartment-style homes priced from $7,800 to $13,400 in a township being planned at Bhoisar, an industrial suburb located 31 miles north of Mumbai. Like the Nano, which was designed to bring some middle-class comforts to the masses, the homes are geared for the hundreds of millions of Indians making less than $5,000 a year who are unable to afford decent dwellings

Share