Word: homesteads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...warm Friday afternoon in June, about 50,000 boxes of toothpaste got their last squeeze inside an industrial trash compactor in Homestead, Fla. They were yanked from the shelves of discount stores and bathroom cabinets after a nationwide recall warned that the toothpaste contained a chemical, diethylene glycol, that could lead to kidney failure. Francisco Botta, who distributed the toothpaste for his family's wholesale business in Miami, stocked his warehouse bathroom with the stuff. "I used it every day," he says. "I told everybody to stop...
Some of Florida's recent fixes have only exacerbated the frustration. In the 1990s the state adopted a "homestead" provision that eventually caps a homeowner's property tax increases at 3% a year. But when the house is sold, the cap no longer applies - creating absurd situations in which neighbors with similar homes pay wildly disparate property taxes. As a result, "there is now absolute consensus that local property taxes are out of control," says Republican state Senator Mike Haridopolos, co-chairman of the Joint Select Committee on Property Tax Reform and Relief...
When Sergio Martinez, 41, bought his 5-bedroom Miami house three years ago for $405,000, the taxes were only $2,800. But before he became eligible for the homestead cap last year, they'd jumped to $7,400. His house is now valued at more than $900,00 - and if he were to sell it, the new owner would be staring at an annual tax bill of almost $20,000. "That's a big reason I'd have trouble finding a buyer for this house, and why I'd have trouble buying a new one here myself," says Martinez...
...life, Hoberman said. The Hollywood producers during the Cold War were growing aware that their movies provided a social function, Hoberman said. Action and war films during the early 1940s had catered to an excited, militant public. In the 1950s, that action was replaced by the tranquility of the homestead amid fears of nuclear war. Only a miracle, such as the voice of God in “The Next Voice You Hear,” could quell those fears, Hoberman said. Hollywood also found itself on the defensive from a religious revival that was fueled by those same fears...
...Springvale homestead, an hour's drive from Halls Creek, was the home of legendary cattleman and bush poet Tom Quilty. Until the 1886 gold rush, the station was one of this region's few inhabited places. Historian Geoffrey Blainey described men with gold lust traveling the final 1,000 km from Katherine. "The manager of Spring Vale reported that 'great numbers of men from Queensland have passed by, some of them very undesirable characters, who prefer picking their own beef and horse-flesh,'" he writes in The Rush That Never Ended. "They faked the brands on their stolen horses with...