Evelyn Reynolds

Community banks are big commercial real-estate lenders. But they say their loans are to sturdy local businesses, not those facing vacant office space.Small banks are feeling misunderstood.They see themselves as integral to neighborhoods across the country: backers of local dry cleaners, dentists and sandwich shops. Investors worry that those banks could be a crisis waiting to happen.The pride and the anxiety both reflect the fact that community banks are big lenders in the commercial real-estate market, which has been rocked by falling property values as large office buildings sit empty.But executives at these firms — which number about 4,100 in total — say there is an important distinction, and some industry analysts concur. They caution that small banks are being lumped in with lenders to the owners of half-empty towers in Manhattan, San Francisco and Chicago, which are in the most trouble.Instead, a majority of commercial building loans by community banks are for smaller buildings — like those housing doctors and local businesses — that tend to be fully leased. And while there are concerns about financial pressure on apartment building landlords if interest rates remain high, missed payments on those types of mortgages have not risen substantially.“The focus has been on office as that is the weak category,” said John Buran, the chief executive officer of Flushing Financial, based in Uniondale, N.Y., which operates branches as Flushing Bank in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn and on Long Island. “Most community banks don’t have the type of exposure.”All of Flushing Financial’s loans are performing well, said John Buran, the firm’s chief executive.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A federal judge in Pennsylvania denied a request to delay the rule, siding with the agency and diverging from another court’s decision earlier this month.A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Tuesday declined to block the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements, diverging from another judge’s recent finding that the agency’s move was on shaky legal ground.The decision clears one obstacle to the F.T.C.’s move to prohibit virtually all noncompete agreements, which prohibit employees from switching jobs within an industry and affect roughly one in five American workers. The rule is set to take effect on Sept. 4.Several business groups sued to block the ban as soon as the F.T.C. voted to adopt it in April, saying it would limit their ability to protect trade secrets and confidential information. ATS Tree Services, a tree-removal company, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, arguing that it used noncompetes to “provide its employees with necessary and valuable specialized training while minimizing the risk that employees will leave and immediately use that specialized training and ATS’s confidential information to benefit a competitor.”But on Tuesday, Judge Kelley Brisbon Hodge ruled that ATS had not proved that it would suffer irreparable harm from the rule. Denying the company’s motion for a preliminary injunction, she said the lawsuit was unlikely to ultimately prevail on the merits.Judge Hodge’s decision “fully vindicates” the F.T.C.’s authority to ban noncompete clauses, “which harm competition by inhibiting workers’ freedom and mobility while stunting economic growth,” Douglas Farrar, a commission spokesman, said in a statement.A lawyer representing ATS, Josh Robbins of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law group, said the firm was disappointed by the court’s decision and would “continue to fight the F.T.C.’s power grab.” Mr. Robbins declined to say whether the firm intended to appeal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Much of President Biden’s agenda polls well, but voters roundly dislike his handling of the economy. That’s a campaign challenge for his vice president, as she mounts a presidential bid.President Biden has signed more major economic legislation than any other president has this century. He presided over record job growth and a recovery from pandemic recession that was the envy of the wealthy world. He crafted an ambitious, multinational industrial policy meant to help America and its allies rebuild strategic manufacturing capacity to counter China.But voters gave Mr. Biden little credit, focusing instead on the inflation surge that plagued much of Mr. Biden’s term.That shortcoming was jeopardizing Mr. Biden’s re-election chances well before he fumbled through a televised debate last month and re-inflamed questions about his age. Polls showed that the economy and prices topped voters’ issue concerns, and that they roundly preferred former President Donald J. Trump to Mr. Biden on the issue.As Mr. Biden steps away from the 2024 campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris tries to rally support for the presidential nomination, economic questions loom large over her candidacy.Will Ms. Harris, 59 and unburdened by the age questions that dogged Mr. Biden, fare any better at selling the Biden-Harris economic record — including its investments in low-emission energy, advanced manufacturing and other industries? Can she maintain Mr. Biden’s connection to certain blue-collar voters in pivotal states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, while re-engaging economically disaffected young voters who had grown disillusioned with the president?And can she overcome voter anger over inflation, which peaked at 9 percent in 2022 but has since fallen closer to the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The East Solano Plan, a proposal for a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area, stoked tension, fear and mistrust among some neighbors.Silicon Valley’s plans for a start-up city are on hold.The East Solano Plan — a proposal backed by a roster of technology billionaires to build a city of up to 400,000 people on farmland about 60 miles from San Francisco — is being delayed at least two years to study the project’s impact on the environment, the company behind the development said in a statement.The proposed city was meant to be a walkable urban community in a rural corner of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is now home to sheep farms and windmills. Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who came up with the plan and is now the chief executive of the company behind it, pitched it as a way to build significantly more housing, something California badly needs, in a short amount of time.The company’s investors, a who’s who of Silicon Valley, included a number of billionaires including Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the Emerson Collective.But the proposal created tension in the area. California Forever, the company driving the development, spent years buying some $900 million of farmland without revealing anything about the identities of its backers or plans for a new city. As its land holdings grew and surrounded Travis Air Force Base on three sides, neighbors and members of Congress feared it could be linked to foreign spies.The company further alienated neighbors by filing a $500 million antitrust lawsuit saying that a group of farmers who had refused to sell their land were colluding to raise prices. Despite being locked in an expensive legal battle, those neighbors had no idea who was behind the company until The New York Times revealed it last year, sowing fear and mistrust that only seemed to grow.Last week, a report commissioned by Solano County estimated the full project would require tens of billions in infrastructure investment but warned that details about the development remained so vague it was hard to assess its full impact. While most large projects often go through years of study, the report noted that “this was filed with the County only a few months after the public became aware of intentions of the proponents.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

At the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a senator from California, unleashed a scathing critique of the Trump economy.The future vice president billed President Donald J. Trump’s tax cuts as a giveaway to the rich, argued that the booming stock market was leaving the middle class behind and warned that his reckless trade agenda was hurting farmers in the heartland.“Frankly, this economy is not working for working people,” Ms. Harris said. “For too long the rules have been written in the favor of the people who have the most and not in favor of the people who work the most.”As Ms. Harris prepares to potentially replace President Biden atop the Democratic ticket, she now faces the challenge of articulating her own vision for steering a U.S. economy that is still grappling with inflation while drawing sharp distinctions with Mr. Trump, who has promised more tax cuts and tariffs.Ms. Harris has been an ardent defender for the White House’s economic agenda during the Biden administration, promoting the benefits of legislation such as the American Rescue Plan of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But as an attorney general and a senator, she was at times more progressive than the president, pushing for universal health care while calling for more generous tax benefits for working-class Americans and paying for them with bigger tax increases on companies.In recent weeks, Ms. Harris has embarked on an economic “opportunity tour,” making the case that wage increases have been outpacing inflation, that manufacturing jobs are growing and that Democrats have been fighting to forgive student loan debt. Those arguments now foreshadow the case she will be making to voters as she runs against Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Antitrust cases contend that use of RealPage’s algorithm, which lets property owners share private data, amounts to collusion.Imagine a system that lets big landlords in your city work together to raise rents, using detailed, otherwise-private information about what their competitors are charging.Such a system is already underway, according to a series of lawsuits filed by tenants and prosecutors across the country. The plaintiffs argue that real estate software from a company called RealPage is being used by apartment owners to increase rents.Through the Texas-based company’s YieldStar product, plaintiffs say, landlords share rental pricing data and occupancy rates — information the company funnels through algorithms to spit out a suggestion for what landlords should charge renters. Those figures are often higher than they would be in a competitive market.In a vast majority of cases, landlords adopt the suggested prices, passing the costs on to tenants, the plaintiffs assert. RealPage, owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, advertises its software to landlords as a tool that can help them outperform the market by 3 to 7 percent.RealPage has denied that it facilitates collusion through its software. In a statement on its website in June, the company blamed “a host of complex economic and political forces,” including an undersupply of rental housing units, for rent increases nationwide.A company spokeswoman, Jennifer Bowcock, said by email that the lawsuits were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how revenue management software works. The software often recommends rent reductions, she added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A proposal to make landlords’ tax breaks contingent on rent limits has drawn industry pushback, progressive applause and some alternative approaches.When the Biden administration laid out a suite of plans this week to address housing affordability, it added a bold update to previous proposals — and sent the housing industry and the economics world buzzing.The White House called on Congress to pass legislation giving “corporate landlords” — defined by the White House as those with over 50 rental units — a choice to cap annual rent increases on existing units at 5 percent annually or lose federal tax breaks based on property depreciation.The proposal is expected to go largely unaddressed this year, with Congress in campaign mode. But public reaction has been lively.Tenant organizations and progressive leaders generally allied with the administration’s economic team cheered the news. Yet a range of economists, Wall Street analysts, real estate groups and landlord associations responded with forceful critiques, assailing the limits as counterproductive.“Increasing the supply of affordable rental housing nationwide — not politically motivated and self-defeating rent control proposals floated during election campaigns — is the best way to alleviate affordability constraints for renters,” Robert D. Broeksmit, the president of Mortgage Bankers Association, said in a statement.The policy would affect about 20 million units in the country, roughly half of all rental properties.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Ford, General Motors and other automakers are slowing investments in electric vehicles and doubling down on more profitable gasoline cars and trucks.For much of the last five years, automakers have been spending billions of dollars in a frantic race to develop electric vehicles and build factories to produce them, with expectations that consumers would flock to these new models.But in the past 12 months, the growth rate of electric vehicle sales has slowed sharply as some car buyers have balked at the high prices of electric cars and trucks and the hassles of charging them, especially on long trips.The shift in consumer sentiment is now forcing many automakers to pull back on aggressive investment plans, and pivot, at least partly, back to the internal-combustion engine vehicles that still account for most new car sales and a large share of corporate profits.The latest example came on Thursday when Ford Motor said it would retool a plant in Canada to produce large pickup trucks rather than the electric sport-utility vehicles it had previously planned to make there.Ford’s move comes a day after General Motors said it expected to make 200,000 to 250,000 battery-powered cars and trucks this year, about 50,000 fewer than it had previously forecast.“After the pandemic, there was a huge exuberance around E.V.s, and I think a lot of the manufacturers thought that growth was going to continue,” said Arun Kumar, a partner and managing director in the automotive and industrial practice at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. “But the reality is that’s not the case, and it’s a smart move to make sure you’re not losing market share in internal combustion.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More