“permitting research on a backup emergency plan to cool should be an urgent priority. We are bequeathing to our descendants a world in which the climate is changing in what may be very deleterious ways. Surely banning research that would supply people later in this century with information about the risks and benefits various geoengineering tools would be wrong. As two geoengineering research proponents asked, “Is it justified for us to deprive future generations of tools that may lessen the pain we have inflicted? They may or may not use these tools, but surely those decisions are theirs to make.””
“Rental prices in some of the country’s largest cities are falling—some by almost 45 percent, according to new data from Five Star Cash Offer, a real estate investment firm that operates as a direct cash homebuyer. The dataset, which includes the top 65 metropolitan areas in the United States, reveals that cities that have recently enacted pro-housing policies have experienced the most significant year-over-year decline in rental prices nationwide.”
“The Out of Reach report similarly says that “more than half of all wage earners cannot afford a modest one-bedroom rental home at Fair Market Rent while working full-time. At least 60% cannot afford a modest two-bedroom rental home while working full-time.”
Yet the vast majority of those wage earners are not currently homeless. Clearly they’re meeting their housing needs somehow, despite not earning a so-called housing wage. Most likely, they too are making some tradeoffs between unit price, location, quality, and size.
The fact is that individuals and families are always going to have to make those tradeoffs at any price and wage level.
Lowering housing costs through deregulation—so that more housing, and more types of housing, can be built in more places—would certainly lessen the tradeoffs between housing costs and other desirable features.
Yet by ignoring that people do (and always will) make tradeoffs when finding housing, the Out of Reach report downplays what land-use deregulation can accomplish.
While calling it an essential part of an overall affordability strategy, the report says that “zoning reform alone cannot solve the affordable housing crisis, particularly for the lowest-income renters.”
That’s probably true if the goal is having every minimum wage worker spending no more than 30 percent of his income to live by himself in a midpriced, two-bedroom unit while working no more than 40 hours a week.
It’s probably not true if the goal is to give that minimum wage earner more housing options, so that he and his partner can afford to live in a larger unit, or he individually can rent a room closer to work or school.
Free markets give people what they want at a price they’re willing to pay. What they might be willing to pay for might be something different than what the Out of Reach report imagines they should have.”
“State contracts for Florida’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp were removed from a public database and replaced with far less detailed documents after media outlets began writing about them…
The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM), which is overseeing the state’s new immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, says the contracts contained “proprietary information.”…
open government advocates and state Democratic lawmakers say that removing details of the contracts flies in the face of Florida’s promises to provide transparency in public spending, especially given the massive expenditures of taxpayer money involved. The most recent reporting on the ballooning costs of the Everglades detention camp puts it at $250 million and growing.”
“The Trump administration has awarded a Virginia-based defense contractor a $1.26 billion contract to build a 5,000-bed immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, reports Bloomberg. The newest—and biggest—facility will be located at the 1 million-acre Fort Bliss Army base, equipped with tents for detention infrastructure and an airport to serve as a deportation hub.”
“”Overwhelmingly, it turns out that the men with the most relationship options (wealthier, higher-social-status men) marry women similar in age to them and with high educational attainment,” writes demographer Lyman Stone in an article published this week for the Institute for Family Studies. “Relationships with large age gaps are more common for low-income men than for high-income men.”
Stone found that, contrary to stereotypes that proliferate online, the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that his wife has a graduate degree and the less likely it is that there is a considerable age gap between them. Further, high-earning men were mostly married to high-earning women. The average wife of a top 1 percent–earning man also earned over $100,000.
“The simplest explanation for these trends,” Stone wrote, “is that high-earning men who have more romantic options prefer to marry women who are more like a peer. When men have power to influence their mate options, they tend to use that power to find a peer-age woman for companionship and partnership in life.”
…
yet there’s a coterie of tweets—and online personalities—devoted to insisting that high-achieving men find high-achieving women repulsive and instead choose to marry from America’s veritable cornucopia of smokin’ hot Applebee’s waitresses.”
“Trump’s team is putting “maximum pressure on everywhere where redistricting is an option and it could provide a good return on investment,” according to a person familiar with the team’s thinking and granted anonymity to describe it.
…
a handful of Democratic-leaning states — including California — handed mapmaking power to independent commissions instead of leaving it in the hands of the state legislatures. States where Democrats retain the power to gerrymander, like Illinois and Maryland, have very little room to draw more advantageous maps than their current ones.”
“Republican Gov. Mike Braun remained noncommittal about a mid-decade redistricting push following his meeting with Vice President JD Vance in Indiana on Thursday.
“We covered a wide array of topics. We listened,” Braun told reporters in response to a question about whether an agreement was reached.
…
Vance’s visit to the state comes amid a push from President Donald Trump’s team to redraw maps “everywhere where redistricting is an option.” A plan in Texas is already well underway, where Republican lawmakers drew a new map that could net Republicans as many as five Republican-leaning seats, and Democrats in the Lone Star state fled in a last-ditch effort to stop the map from passing.”