Tuesday, January 04, 2005

How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm -- When You Can't Even Define Farm?

A new Government Accountability Office report suggests Washington redefine "rural." The Rural Housing Service (formerly the FHA) lets some city slickers get rural housing loans while folks on the other side of town can't get them.

The loans were set up in 1949 to help people in rural areas build homes.

The disparity comes from a shifting definition of what is rural -- and a grandfather clause that lets some places keep the rural definition while suburban sprawl swallows them up. The GAO found nearly 1,300 communities that qualified for rural housing loans, even though they were part of metropolitan areas.

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