“Musk’s claim that the undocumented population in swing states is surging, sourced to unspecified “government data,” appears false: Data from both Homeland Security and Pew Research Center debunks Musk’s claim of a Biden-era surge in undocumented immigrants to swing states. (In a few swing states, undocumented populations have shrunk, whereas in others, they’ve increased slightly or been stagnant.) Migrants aren’t being “put” in those states by anyone, let alone Democrats — that’s not how undocumented migration works. Nor is there any evidence Harris has a viable plan to grant them all citizenship in four years or proof they’d all vote for Democrats forever once given the franchise.
Really, what Musk is doing is taking a hoary old white nationalist trope — the “Great Replacement” mainstreamed by X’s most prominent talk show host, Tucker Carlson — and reiterating it with dubious swing-state demographic data.”
“The program works like this: Registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, or Wisconsin — all swing states that could go for either Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump come Election Day — can sign the petition, which claims to be a “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” until Monday, October 21, which happens to be the voter registration deadline in Pennsylvania.
The petition is being circulated by Musk’s America PAC, which has taken over much of Trump’s ground operation in key swing states. Musk has made Pennsylvania a particular focus of his personal outreach, hosting events there, including one on Sunday where he handed a woman in a Trump-Vance shirt a giant $1 million check.
Though the petition does not require signers to be registered Republicans, the focus on the First and Second Amendments does seem to appeal to potential Trump voters who fear Democrats will take away their gun rights and who subscribe to Musk’s idea of “free speech.” The net effect, then, is that Musk is promising $1 million a day to a program aimed at getting pro-Trump voters registered in swing states.
Because his contest is only open to registered voters, there may be a case for it to be understood as an illegal financial incentive to get people to register to vote, as Public Citizen’s complaint alleges. One issue Musk faces, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, is that what constitutes payment for voting-related activity has been broadly interpreted in the past.
“This could involve anything of value,” Becker said. The law “has been applied to things like Ben & Jerry’s offering everyone who has an ‘I Voted’ sticker an ice cream cone on Election Day. They received a cease-and-desist letter and changed [the promotion to give] everyone a free ice cream cone on Election Day.”
There is some ambiguity in Musk’s promotion, compared to what Ben & Jerry’s offered, however. The uncertainty arises from the fact that Musk’s PAC is asking people to sign a petition for the chance to win $1 million, not explicitly rewarding them for registering to vote.
Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program, told Vox that the issue at hand really comes down to whether entering a specific group of people in a lottery if they sign a petition counts as paying people to register to vote.”
“So far, most solutions to this housing crisis have focused on subsidizing prospective buyers. But what if there were a way to make housing cheaper at every step of the process: cheaper to build, cheaper to buy, and still affordable for the next resident?
In San Bernardino, a sunny California city located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, a first-of-its-kind experiment is underway to test these ideas on a single plot of land. Think of it as an affordable housing policy trifecta: three different strategies to bring down housing costs — all at once.
The first innovation is to streamline manufacturing. About 90 percent of homes are built on the land they rest on, but in San Bernardino, manufacturers assembled a modest house — 1,462 square feet, three bedrooms — in a factory before transporting it to its final destination on Ramona Avenue.
The existence of a new moderately sized single-family house is itself a coup when most new homes far exceed 2,000 square feet. Back in the 1940s, nearly 70 percent of new homes were 1,400 square feet or less. Today, that number hovers around 10 percent because rising land and construction costs — along with arduous permitting regulations and a preference for larger projects from lenders and investors — have made smaller homes nearly impossible to build using traditional production techniques.
In the case of San Bernardino, not only are smaller houses less expensive for residents, but factory manufacturing further lowers the price by allowing developers to complete projects more quickly. Manufactured homes cost 45 percent less per square foot than their “site-built” counterparts, according to Freddie Mac.
The second innovation is an 800-square-foot accessory dwelling unit (ADU) located on the same plot of land, about 20 feet away from the house. The matching cream-colored unit provides two more bedrooms and bathrooms to another family, below market rate. In other words, the ADU increases affordable housing without requiring additional land, making more efficient use of the space.
The third innovation: the land itself is owned by a local affordable housing development group, which is using a community land trust to ensure that both the manufactured house and the ADU remain reasonably priced for generations. The community land trust, in effect, limits how much the homeowners could ever resell the property for when they’re ready to move on.
Dora Davila, a 42-year-old medical lab technician born and raised in San Bernardino, recently moved with her three children to the new manufactured home on Ramona Avenue. Her family had been living in an apartment, and despite months of searching, could find no houses available that were affordable.
“We were looking at mobile home parks but, the thing is, none of them had a yard and I wanted space for my kids,” she said.”
We need to build more housing to keep the cost of housing down. Localities prevent building because they don’t like it for a variety of reasons. The states and the country need to get localities to allow building so there is enough housing for the country. Or else, too many localities refuse to build for the narrow local interest of some of their current residents.