News For Reasonable People

After his Chicago car dealership was robbed on Saturday, the owner of the business called on city leaders to do more to address crime. During the incident on Saturday, two men walked into the dealership, Gold Coast Exotic Motor Cars, with one standing guard at the door, and the other using a hammer to break open display cases, ABC 7 reported. Employees said that the men made off with seven luxury...

Americans' inflation fears accelerated again in November, climbing for the 13th consecutive month to a new record high, according to a key Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey published Monday. The median expectation is that the inflation rate will be up 6% one year from now, the highest level for the gauge since its launch in June 2013, according to the New York Federal Reserve's Sur...

The free ride is finally over for a Long Island man who went more than two decades without paying a penny on his mortgage — while courts failed to evict him. Guramrit Hanspal, 52, bought the three-bedroom, 2.5-bath East Meadow home in October 1998 for $290,000, with $58,000 down. He made the first mortgage payment of  $1,602.37, and then never paid again. The house was foreclosed upon in 2000. Ove...

The last 48 hours in Seattle and Olympia will have produced three significant sweeps of long-term, un-sanctioned and patently illegal homeless camps. There's something unspoken about cities like Seattle and Olympia that manage to enable homelessness instead of preventing it: the clean-up costs. With the existing policies, the cost falls to the taxpayers. If a business piled up trash, failed t...

The Senate voted Wednesday to block President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on private employers in the latest blow to his push to flex federal power to boost vaccinations in the U.S. The measure to block the mandate heads to the Democratic-held House. It faces a tougher path to passage in the House, and the Biden administration has threatened a veto if it reaches the president’s desk. Because the m...

It’s official – housing inventory in America is at a crisis level. The number of active listings hit an all-time low during the week ending November 28, according to a Redfin report published on Wednesday. During the four week period ending November 28, the number of active listings was a 23% decrease compared to the same time period in 2020 and a 42% drop compared to 2019. The number of new listi...

Vishal Garg, the CEO of mortgage company Better.com who was recently criticized after he reportedly informed roughly 900 employees of their termination over a Zoom call, has apologized for failing to show them "the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation."  "I want to apologize for the way I handled the layoffs last week," Garg wrote in a letter posted on the company’s w...

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction against a vaccine mandate for federal contractors, ruling that President Joe Biden probably exceeded his authority by imposing the requirement. Judge R. Stan Baker, who's based in Georgia, temporarily blocked implementation of the administration after a lawsuit from numerous states and a trade group argued that letting the mandate take...

The Biden administration is set to crack down on all-cash deals in the housing market, a type of transaction beloved by former President Donald Trump and many Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin.  The effort aims to stamp out money laundering and other illicit activity, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said in a Monday statement. Specifically, the...

A house on North Russet Street in the Piedmont neighborhood sold in late June for top dollar. The three-bedroom, 2,652-square-foot single-family home, with a brick fireplace and detached garage, sold for $661,600. Two months later, the owner put it back on the market. But it hasn’t sold, and the house is still empty. Now neighbors say it is attracting squatters. It was Zillow, a publicly traded on...

Mayor Bill de Blasio sprang a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on all private businesses in New York City on Monday — drawing immediate rebuke from trade groups, New York office workers and some fellow elected officials who said the backbone of the Big Apple was “blindsided” by the stunning move. De Blasio, whose mayoralty ends at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, labeled making vaccines compulsor...

City supervisors in San Francisco unanimously approved an ordinance suspending the city's business tax on cannabis retailers last week. San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who penned the ordinance, said in a statement to the San Francisco Examiner that the suspension is intended to help out legal cannabis retailers who are trying to compete with illegal drug dealers and a spike in thef...

Hundreds of thousands of homeowners could soon lose or sell their homes as Covid-related mortgage bailout programs expire. The federal government, big banks and mortgage servicers started emergency programs when the pandemic hit early last year, shutting down vast swaths of the economy. The bailouts allowed millions of homeowners to miss payments, some for up to 18 months. “We’re in the midst of t...

The owners of a San Francisco restaurant are now apologizing after denying service to three uniformed police officers who were on-duty. Hilda and Jesse initially denied service to the three San Francisco Police Department officers on Friday after they were seated at the restaurant.  According to ABC7 News, one of the owners said that the on-duty police officers' "presence" made staf...

While the latest numbers on the state of jobs in the US showed that the US was still creeping toward recovery, one thing remained consistent: The economy isn't working for millions of workers. Even with the Delta wave easing, the number of jobs added in November was a big miss compared with expectations. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said just 210,000 nonfarm payrolls were added i...

A local business owner says the city is "out of control" and overrun with what he calls "unchecked crime." "I think the word on the street is there are not enough officers out there to be able to do their job," Steele Barber owner Matthew Humphrey told us. "And they’re not prosecuting them. So, most of them think it’s just free reign on the city." Humphrey’s...

This past August, John DiLorenzo, one of Portland’s most prominent attorneys, decided he wanted something done about the homeless encampment on Southwest 12th Avenue and Southwest Taylor Street. The historic apartment building he co-owns, The Gentry, was just across the street. DiLorenzo said his tenants had complained about gunshots and drug deals at the camp all summer long. So had nearby proper...

If Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant is recalled, it won't be without one of the most expensive votes in civic history, or without a street fight. On Wednesday, numerous supporters were dotted across Capitol Hill in pop-up tents printing out ballots for the single-issue election on Dec. 7. It wasn't some sort of secret operation, as the tents all advertised the fact that they were ther...

After at least one formal complaint, the Seattle Department of Transportation has issued a warning—but no penalty—to Fremont Brewing, the company co-owned by city council member-elect Sara Nelson, for obstructing the public right-of-way around its Ballard brewing facility with massive concrete “ecology blocks.” As PubliCola reported last summer, eco blocks—so called because they are a byproduct of...

With in-store customers expected to return in droves for the holiday shopping season, law enforcement agencies are moving to halt a wave of organized "smash-and-grab" crimes at retailers across the US. In Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities, police departments are increasing patrols at retailers targeted by mobs of thieves in brazen raids. In Northern California, district attorne...

Calls for help are sometimes meeting long delays as the city’s 911 system finds itself understaffed and overwhelmed. It is a potentially critical collapse in Seattle's public safety net and it could be months before the problem is solved. Until then, a balancing act is underway to better prioritize emergency calls. For every call taker who fills a chair at Seattle’s Community Safety and Commu...

Charles Woodward is letting go of his past. And volunteers with "We Heart Seattle" are now trying to help him rebuild his future. “Piece by piece he kept saying you can take this,” says Andrea Suarez, the non-profit group’s founder. For the past two weekends, Suarez and her crew removed thousands of pounds of wood and scrap metal from his encampment. Including all the lawn mowers that on...

The proposed recall of City Councilmember Kshama Sawant is based on charges related to particular actions last year, and only voters in her central Seattle district are deciding whether she should be retained. But the Dec. 7 recall election could have sweeping consequences, beyond the allegations on the ballot and beyond District 3, because a case can be made that few figures have influenced the c...

Amid a surge in organized shoplifting, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry has said that the crime wave is “traumatizing” employees and making hiring and keeping staff difficult. The retailer is not the only outlet targeted by criminals. Organized shoplifting has “increased dramatically” over the last two years, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul warned in September. Raoul pointed to shocking figures from...

A Virginia police officer who was fired for sending a donation to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense is asking to have his job back now that the teen has been acquitted of murder charges Norfolk Lieutenant William Kelly was fired in April by city officials for donating $25 to fund the legal fees for Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two people and injured one during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in Au...