Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 63 Shares109 Views

    in Economy

    The Rent Revolution Is Coming

    Here’s a list of places you might imagine seeing an argument over housing policy. A city council meeting. A late-night zoning hearing. Maybe a ribbon-cutting to christen a new affordable housing complex.Instead, there was Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., on a stage dressed as the pope with a half-dozen hecklers in yellow T-shirts berating his new housing plan from the audience in front of him. Mr. Lucas had arrived at the outdoor Starlight Theater on a warm August evening for a cameo appearance in a local production of “Sister Act.” Just before he walked onto the stage, the demonstrators, who belonged to a group called KC Tenants, unfurled a banner that read “Mayor Lucas: Developing Displacement.”A pack of uniformed security guards promptly smothered the scene. During the slow procession to the exit gates that followed, members of KC Tenants chanted, “The rent is too damn high!” while the audience tried to focus on the mayor/pope and the dancing nuns.Such is the state of housing in America, where rising costs are flaring into pockets of resistance and rage. Take two-plus years of pandemic-fueled eviction anxiety and spiking home prices, add a growing inflation problem that is being increasingly driven by rising rents, and throw in a long-run affordable housing shortage that cities seem powerless to solve. Add it up and the 44 million U.S. households who rent a home or apartment have many reasons to be unhappy.That unhappiness extends across the economic spectrum. At one end are renters who aspire to buy a home but have had their dreams dashed by high home prices and, now, rising mortgage rates. At the other are low-income tenants who make up the bulk of the 11 million households who spend more than half of their income on rent. In between is a hollowed-out middle class that is steadily losing ground, although not enough to qualify for much sympathy or help.The confluence of all these forces has fueled a swell of tenants’ rights activism that has brought organizing muscle and policies like rent control to cities far beyond the high-cost coasts. Kansas City, Mo., is a leading example. With a population of 500,000, where the avenues are lined with brick buildings and side streets have modest homes with raised porches, the city offers little to suggest a renters’ revolution. Zillow’s home value index puts the typical Kansas City home at $230,000, or more than $100,000 below the national level.But with a steadily expanding economy driven by the logistics and medical industries, Kansas City has seen its rents increase 8.5 percent from a year ago, outpacing the rest of the nation, according to rental search site Apartment List. Over the past decade, Kansas City, like many places, has added a collection of high-end towers and apartments even as its stock of low-income housing has withered. The strain from rising rents, which landlords say they need to cover their costs, is creeping from people working in low-income service professions to middle-income teachers and city workers, part of a festering affordable housing crunch that spreads more widely across the nation each month.KC Tenants is one result. Pairing aggressive protests with traditional lobbying, the group exploded onto the political scene during the pandemic and has since become instrumental in passing tenant-friendly laws like an ordinance that gives renters a lawyer during eviction proceedings. It has also left a trail of embittered opponents who find the group’s tactics, such as protesting outside judges’ homes, ill-suited to what many residents describe as a cordial Midwestern town.Organizers with KC Tenants protesting a new set of housing ordinances during a council meeting at City Hall.Barrett Emke for The New York Times“It’s a transition in politics for us,” said Mayor Lucas, a Democrat, who says he meets with the leaders of KC Tenants regularly, despite being a frequent subject of the group’s protests. “There is a new, almost tougher political edge, in the sense that there are people who are organizing and intrigued by politics and are very angry and are not coming out of the same institutions that built a lot of us.”America’s housing problem was simmering long before the pandemic, and tenant organizing is a well-established trade. What’s changed is the depth of the housing shortage and the suddenness with which Covid-19 and inflation have tipped smaller cities into an affordability crisis. This has opened the aperture for policies once deemed politically impossible, in a wider range of markets.Unlike homeowners, whose budget problems are blunted by a litany of tax breaks and fixed-rate mortgages, renters are mostly unprotected from rapidly rising prices. Once cities around the country passed widespread eviction moratoriums and emergency rent caps that were followed by tens of billions of dollars in pandemic rental assistance, it was only natural for housing activists to push for some of those temporary policies to be made permanent.Politically speaking, inflation has only helped. Nationally, rents are now 20 percent higher than they were in early 2020, creating an opportunity for renter-friendly laws to get baked into long-term policy.“People take for granted that rent is always going to go up,” said Tara Raghuveer, a co-founder of KC Tenants. “There’s so little political imagination about what could be different, and now I think that’s changing.”A hyper-focused worker who blends the rhetoric of a revolutionary with the efficiency of a chief executive, Ms. Raghuveer also directs the Homes Guarantee campaign, which works to create tenant unions around the country. She described KC Tenants as both a local movement and national experiment through which organizing ideas can be test-driven.“I think every national organizer should be accountable to a local base,” she said.During a three-day visit in which I hung around the office and shadowed meetings and protests, Ms. Raghuveer returned repeatedly to an idea that has become a refrain among tenant groups: the hope that growing resentment over housing costs is fostering a broad tenant identity that will inspire a wide range of renters to organize and vote with a shared interest. In the activist nomenclature, this is known as “tenants as a class.”That’s an audacious goal in a country where homeownership is all but defined as success. An irony of the nation’s housing problem is that it’s become so pervasive that it has created as many opportunities for cleavage as it has for coalition. Need has grown faster than resources, making housing policy a prism through which a stealth conflict between the middle class and the truly poor is filtered.Even so, what’s clear is that in Kansas City and elsewhere tenants are becoming a real constituency. That’s not something you could say as recently as a few years ago. But a few years ago the rent wasn’t quite so high.Getting the DataTara Raghuveer, KC Tenants’ founding director, working outside the East Patrol Division Station where the group camped out waiting for Board President Tiana Caldwell to be released on bond.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesKC Tenants began, more or less, as homework.Ms. Raghuveer, now 30, was in her final year at Harvard when she settled on a topic for her senior thesis: evictions, inspired by the work of Matthew Desmond, the Princeton sociologist and author of “Evicted,” the 2016 book that explored the housing struggles of low-income families in Milwaukee. She’d grown up in Mission Woods, a suburb on the Kansas side of the Kansas-Missouri border, and conducted her thesis research in the Kansas City metropolitan area.After college, Ms. Raghuveer was invited to talk about her thesis in policy forums, and that’s how she met the women who would help her start KC Tenants.One was Tiana Caldwell, whose husband contacted Ms. Raghuveer as the family bounced between hotels after being evicted from their apartment amid Ms. Caldwell’s treatment for ovarian cancer. Another was Diane Charity, a 72-year-old retiree who rents a two-bedroom townhouse and who met Ms. Raghuveer during a presentation at the local health department.“She gave all these stats and I said, ‘I need to talk to you,’” Ms. Charity said. “We’ve been telling these stories forever, and no one’s listening. But she had what it took — I’m sorry to say this, but to talk to white people and people in power, you got to have data.”KC Tenants was founded in 2019 by a group that included Ms. Charity and Ms. Caldwell. A local union allowed the group to work out of its offices, and a folding table there formed KC Tenants’ first headquarters. That’s where Ms. Raghuveer was working when the Covid-19 pandemic erupted.‘Shut it down’For all the uncertainty that the pandemic wreaked on markets and the economy, there seemed to be at least one prediction that housing experts and policymakers agreed on in its early days: a “tsunami of evictions” was imminent.Nearly three years later, that prediction has yet to materialize. The economic recovery from the immediate shock of Covid was faster than many expected, and in the meantime trillions of dollars in federal stimulus spending and eviction moratoriums helped plug the gaps. Still, the attention that Covid brought to housing insecurity is poised to be a lasting remnant of the pandemic economy, even after rental assistance wanes and the patchwork of moratoriums expire.It shows up in cities like Los Angeles, where the City Council this month voted to expand tenant protections for renters in the same meeting that it voted to end its Covid-related eviction moratorium. Last year, voters in St. Paul, Minn., passed a new rent control ordinance. The uneven rollout of federal rental aid, in which bureaucratic hurdles frequently prevented cities and states from getting money to tenants, inspired a number of cities to experiment with cash assistance programs that are now becoming a permanent feature of the policy landscape.For organizers, the pandemic provided an almost perfect opportunity to build their ranks. Here was a crisis that affected large swaths of renters pretty much all at once, in contrast to the normal state of affairs in which tenants who are falling behind or evicted are dealing with problems that seem unique to their lives and mostly handled in private. “Embedded in tenant organizing are deeper questions about the structure of our political economy,” said Jamila Michener, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell who has studied tenant organizations. “It’s getting people to think about not just how you can leverage power against your landlord or get the city council to help you, but also questions like: Why does the economy seem to be rigged against people like you so systematically?”In 2019, Jenay Manley was making $11.50 an hour at a QuikTrip gas station when a paperwork error cost her a voucher that covered a portion of her rent through the federal Section 8 housing program. To help make up for the loss, she allowed a former boyfriend who she said was abusive to move back in. One night, she texted a friend who had been displaced by a rent hike to ask what she could do. The friend, Maya Neal, suggested that she go to a KC Tenants meeting. There, she heard Ms. Caldwell tell her story of being evicted during cancer treatment.Maya NealBarrett Emke for The New York Times“It was just this clarifying moment of, We’re not OK. People are not OK,” she said. “We are struggling, and no one knows. And the more of us who tell our story, the more of us realize our story is worth being told.”A few months later, after leaving the night shift at QuikTrip, Ms. Manley, along with her sister and three children, stationed herself along Interstate 70, next to a minivan with “#CancelRent” scrawled across a window in purple marker. She was there to protest the burden of Covid on tenants in a socially distant manner.In July 2020, KC Tenants protested the end of a local eviction moratorium and tried to halt eviction proceedings by logging onto virtual court hearings and continuously reading a script — “Every eviction is an act of violence” — so that judges and lawyers couldn’t hear one another. By October, the group’s members were chaining themselves to the courthouse doors.They also started targeting lawyers and public officials, including through a rally in the front yard of Judge J. Dale Youngs, who oversees the circuit court in Jackson County. Mr. Youngs said in an interview that at one point the group spray-painted “FU” onto a flagstone path in his yard. He added that he did not know if “FU” was the completed thought or if the vandal was interrupted before the message could be finished.“I’m a pretty big supporter of the First Amendment, and I’m the first to admit democracy is messy,” Judge Youngs said. “But when you go protest in front of someone’s private home, I think the only reason you’re doing that is to let them know that you know where they live. And there’s something kind of inherently not cool about that.”Locals argue over how effective these protests were, but there’s little doubt that housing pressures brought on by Covid helped open the door to policies that otherwise would never have happened. The biggest, by far, is a new right-to-counsel ordinance in which the city will pay for a lawyer to represent any tenant facing eviction. The measure was drafted by KC Tenants, according to Andrea Bough, the City Council member who introduced it.In an interview in her office, Ms. Bough expressed the same anxiety I had heard all around town, including from the mayor and from low-income tenants: even though Kansas City remains inexpensive compared with larger cities, it is spiraling into the same affordability problems as those places and is no more equipped to solve them.“We aren’t to the point of a widespread housing crisis, but if we don’t do something we’re going to get there,” she said.The right-to-counsel law, which went into effect this year, has already changed the landscape. Julie Anderson, a Kansas City attorney who represents a number of local landlords, said that the cost of an eviction had risen by a factor of five and that the process now took from three months to a year, up from a month or so. Her clients are unhappy, but it’s also been good for business: Ms. Anderson said she had hired two lawyers and three paralegals to handle the extra work.“That part of my practice was very uneventful,” she said. “Now, post-Covid, almost everything is contested.”The Tenant ClassBarrett Emke for The New York TimesKC Tenants now has 4,300 members, seven full-time employees and piles of yellow T-shirts ready for distribution. The nonprofit organization operates out of a second-floor office inside a Methodist church, and is funded through a mix of individual donors and foundations. It has a $450,000 annual budget.This month, members launched a separate entity, KC Tenants Power, that is registered as a 501(c)(4) and has more leeway to engage directly in politics. Like everyone else these days, Ms. Raghuveer seems to spend most of her time on video calls, talking in front of a banner that reads, “Eviction Kills.”Tenant-organizing has been central to any number of social justice and civil rights movements stretching from the turn of the twentieth century, but, in recent decades, it has rarely been successful outside localized pockets. An enduring issue in organizing tenants as a class is that homeownership is still most families’ goal.Covid has illustrated this. Once remote workers could live anywhere they wanted, many renters left big, expensive markets for smaller cities where they could afford a home.Ms. Raghuveer believes in a growing tenant identity, but she has no delusions. She doesn’t imagine that one day she’ll lead a protest march in which public-housing tenants lock arms with residents of luxe buildings, where one-bedrooms start at $3,000 a month and include access to rooftop pools and private dog parks. What she does believe is that housing instability, however it is experienced, can be a catalyst for a broader coalition that operates across traditional political lines.She pointed to a recent effort to help a local trailer park where the county was evicting residents in order to build a jail on the property. This would normally have been an organizing no-brainer. However, during a meeting, several members of KC Tenants said they were reluctant to get involved because a number of the cars and trailers in the park had Trump stickers and flags on them. Other members responded by recalling that the group’s community agreements, which they read before every meeting, declare that KC Tenants does not make assumptions about anyone.So a group went to knock on doors.“This little skinny gal comes to my door, and I’m like, ‘Who in the hell is this?’” said Urban Schaefer, a resident of the park who helped organize it after meeting Ms. Raghuveer. “A lot of people were skeptical about it.”In the end, about a dozen members of KC Tenants worked with residents to demand a better deal. And the county sweetened its offer: six months of free rent and at least $10,000 in relocation costs.Inventing HopeAn organizing meeting for tenants Gabriel Tower Apartments, in Kansas City.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesThere weren’t any MAGA hats at the KC Tenants meetings I went to, but it was a generally diverse group with a range of motivations for being there. There were Black women, who are among the people most affected by eviction, both locally and nationally. There were white men, who began whatever they were about to say with acknowledgments of privilege. And there was a child of the housing bust, whose faith in the American dream was shattered when his family was foreclosed on and a chain of moves followed.During a meeting of a tenants’ union in the gentrifying Midtown neighborhood, I met an economics professor who had come because she had wanted to better understand the housing problem. Later, at meeting in a Section 8 building on the other side of Troost Avenue — long the city’s dividing line between its Black and white residents — several attendees sat in wheelchairs, and one said he’d recently slept under a bridge.Small frictions abound. At one recent meeting, a young man talked about the “carceral state,” only to have Ms. Charity reply: “Are you talking about jail?”This diversity is, unintentionally, the policy conundrum that Mayor Lucas and other officials are grappling with as more people look to the government for help with housing.Around the country, developers have spent the past decade building mostly higher-end units. Eli Ungar, the founder of Mac Properties, which is based in Englewood, N.J., and owns about 9,000 apartments, including 2,000 in Kansas City, bluntly laid out the economics. The cost of development is now so high that the most reliable way to make money is by building apartments for tenants who regard the cost of rent as “a matter of curiosity.”This leaves two groups behind.“The folks who think of themselves as middle class and are feeling increased worry and pressure as rents go up faster than incomes, and the people who are most vulnerable in our society and desperately need housing that no developer can provide without a massive subsidy,” Mr. Ungar said. “As a citizen, I would be entirely comfortable with my taxes being higher to provide well-maintained housing for those who can’t afford it. The question is how that is achieved, and market-rate developers are not unilaterally going to say, ‘I will reduce my income to achieve this goal.’”Caught in the teeth of a housing problem that is growing faster than local budgets, public officials inevitably try to solve both problems at once, pitting the middle class against families who live on minimum wage or fixed incomes. This was the crux of the “Sister Act” protest.Mayor Quinton Lucas, in Kansas City, last year.Chase Castor for The New York TimesAs part of a new housing plan, Mayor Lucas had proposed a $50 million bond issue to fund low-income housing, but at the same time he wanted to loosen the city’s regulations for apartment projects that receive tax breaks through a program designed to create affordable housing in market-rate projects. The shift would allow developers to substitute middle-income units for those reserved for families in the lowest income brackets.KC Tenants framed the change as selling out families closest to the edge. The mayor’s retort was that the previous iteration of the program had resulted in no new units for anyone, and his hope was that the revisions would push developers to build middle-income housing, which the city needs as well.In the interview, he cast himself as a leader trying to navigate a difficult problem in world of limited resources.“We don’t have a Scandinavian tax structure,” he said. “Maybe we can get to it, but I don’t know that it starts in Kansas City.”Two days after the “Sister Act” protest, when the City Council held its vote on the plan, the chambers were packed with yellow T-shirts. After a 9-to-4 vote in favor of the new policy, Ms. Neal, an early KC Tenants member, yelled, “How dare you!” Security hauled her out with her arms behind her back in a scene that members’ cellphones captured from every conceivable angle.Ms. Neal being escorted out of the council meeting at City Hall.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesWhen Ms. Neal was gone, Ms. Caldwell, the once-evicted tenant whose cancer is now in remission, continued the chant. “Not another penny for the slumlords!” she shouted. She was removed just as fast, only instead of getting booted to an outdoor bench, like the one where Ms. Neal sat after she’d left the building, Ms. Caldwell was arrested and taken to a local police station.An hour later, the lawn outside the station was crowded with yellow shirts. Members of KC Tenants lay on the grass typing on laptops and eating pizza. A slice was waiting for Ms. Caldwell when she emerged a short time later to cheers.“I’m feeling great,” she said to the crowd, as her 15-year-old son joined her. “I’m doing this so that my baby will never have to.”After a chant of “Tiana, we got your back!” a small group that included Ms. Caldwell and Ms. Raghuveer went to a wine bar to relax. The bar was closing, but Ms. Raghuveer said she’d called the owner, who’d promised to keep it open for them. She added that he was a renter. More

  • 188 Shares169 Views

    in Economy

    With So Much Riding on the Fed’s Moves, It’s Hard to Know How to Invest

    Where the markets go from here depends on whether and how deftly the Federal Reserve pivots from its hawkish stance.Making money was easy for investors when they could still plausibly believe that the Federal Reserve might back down on its aggressive campaign to subdue inflation at any cost. But harsh words from the Fed chairman, Jerome H. Powell, backed by a string of large interest rate increases, finally convinced markets that the central bank meant business, sending stock and bond prices tumbling.A nervous confidence returned as October began, with stocks experiencing a big two-day rally, but then prices sank anew. Investors at first seemed more confident that the Fed would reverse course, but anxiety returned as they worried about how much damage would be inflicted before that happened. Where the markets go from here, and how to position an investment portfolio, depends on whether and how deftly the Fed changes its strategy.“A crescendo of factors is coming together that makes me think we’re going to have another few weeks of pain before the Fed capitulates,” said Marko Papic, chief strategist at the Clocktower Group.Mr. Papic thinks a dovish turn may come soon, as the Fed signals that it would settle for inflation two or three percentage points above its 2 percent target.Others think more pain lies ahead, maybe a lot more. A prerequisite for a pivot might be a “credit event,” said Komal Sri-Kumar, president of Sri-Kumar Global Strategies, meaning a default by a large investment firm or corporate or government borrower, often with severe consequences. Mutual FundsA glance at mutual fund performance in the third quarter. More

  • 113 Shares109 Views

    in Economy

    Apple Store in Oklahoma City Becomes Second to Unionize

    Workers said pay was adequate and benefits were good, but complained that managers’ practices often seemed arbitrary.Apple employees at a store in Oklahoma City have voted to unionize, becoming the second of the company’s roughly 270 U.S. retail stores to do so.The result, announced by the National Labor Relations Board on Friday night, suggests that an initial victory by a union at a store in Towson, Md., in June was not an isolated development in an organizing campaign that dates back to last year.According to the labor board, 56 employees voted in favor of the union and 32 voted against. The workers will be represented by the Communications Workers of America, which has members at AT&T Mobility, Verizon and media companies like The New York Times, and has sought to represent tech-industry workers in recent years.Sara Steffens, the union’s secretary-treasurer, said in a statement that workers at the store, known as the Penn Square location, had faced an aggressive anti-union campaign, but she predicted that “Apple retail workers across the country will continue to organize, especially after this momentous victory.”Apple said in a statement that “we believe the open, direct and collaborative relationship we have with our valued team members is the best way to provide an excellent experience for our customers, and for our teams.”More on Big TechInside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.A Deal for Twitter?: In a surprise move, Elon Musk has offered to acquire Twitter at his original price of $44 billion, which could bring to an end the acrimonious legal fight between the billionaire and the company.Hiring Freezes: Amazon is halting corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year, joining Meta as the latest tech companies to pull back amid the economic uncertainty.TikTok Nears Deal with U.S.: The Biden administration and the Chinese-owned video app have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns over the platform, but hurdles remain over the terms.In interviews, employees at the store said that they received solid benefits, like health care, stock grants and paid family leave, and that their pay had improved over the past several months. The company recently raised the minimum starting wage at its stores to $22 an hour and said it had increased starting wages by 45 percent in the United States since 2018.But workers complained that supervisors’ decisions about hiring, pay and job assignments were often opaque and said a union would bring greater transparency to their store.Leigha Briscoe, an employee involved in the organizing who works in sales, said employees were given very different tasks during the first year of the pandemic, when they often worked from home, with little explanation for the disparities.“Some people were at home making posters, doing drawing projects, and others were on the phone taking calls eight hours a day,” Ms. Briscoe said. “There was a lack of clarity as to what the plan was.”Workers also cited confusion over how to earn promotions at the store.“Some people have been in their current roles for years trying to get promoted and are not really getting anywhere, but whenever they get feedback on an interview for a promotion what they get is very subjective goals,” said Michael Forsythe, another employee involved in the organizing, who helps oversee the repair room at the store.Mr. Forsythe said workers were sometimes told to work on their “customer focus,” but were not given more concrete suggestions like “I want you to have a three-week average of 80 percent customer satisfaction score.”Mr. Forsythe said the idea of unionizing first occurred to him late last year, after employees across the company had begun to protest management’s plans to bring them back to the office. The protest ballooned into a broader campaign, known as #AppleToo, that sought to highlight a variety of workplace problems, including harassment and pay disparities, and caught Mr. Forsythe’s attention.In April, a store in Atlanta filed a petition for a union election, and Mr. Forsythe and other employees at the Oklahoma City store began to discuss unionization.The Atlanta store later withdrew its petition, as the company announced a raise and highlighted the benefits it offered and the potential costs of unionizing, denting support for the union.But by then, the Oklahoma City store had formed an organizing committee and more employees were expressing interest in a union. The Oklahoma City workers filed their petition in early September.Employees said supervisors had responded to their campaign by holding round-table discussions and one-on-one conversations in which they emphasized the downsides of a union, including the dues that workers would have to pay and the possibility that they could lose benefits during the bargaining process. Supervisors also said having a union would make it harder to change workplace arrangements when they were in need of updating, like during the pandemic, according to these employees.Workers at the Oklahoma City store said their market leader, a manager who oversees several locations, was in their store regularly during the campaign, even though they would typically see him no more than a few times a year.Patrick Hart, an employee at the store who helps customers resolve issues with products, said the impact of the company’s response was limited because many employees did their own research about how joining a union would affect them.“We are all extremely educated people — Apple hires a certain kind of person,” Mr. Hart said. “We know how to look into things.” More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Economy

    Biden Tries to Reassure Voters on Health Care Costs Before Election

    At an event in Southern California, the president says his administration is working to keep costs down and warns that Republicans will drive prices higher if they gain power.LOS ANGELES — President Biden on Friday tried to reassure Americans stung by high inflation that his administration was working to keep health care costs down, promising a community college audience in Southern California that he was committed to doing even more.But his remarks in Irvine, Calif. — the first of two West Coast speeches devoted to health care costs — come just days after government data revealed that overall inflation remains high as voters prepare to go to the polls for midterm elections early next month.Surveys show that Americans are deeply frustrated by the impact of sharply higher prices on their pocketbooks. They are expected to rebuke the president and his party in the elections, with most analysts predicting that Democrats will lose control of one or both chambers in Congress.Speaking to a friendly audience, Mr. Biden argued that Republicans would drive prices higher if they gained power. He noted their opposition to his efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which he said would force prices down for medication for millions of seniors. And he said Democrats had pushed through price caps on critical drugs like insulin.“If Republicans in Congress have their way, it’s going to mean the power we just gave Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices and other costs over time goes away — gone,” Mr. Biden said, standing in front of signs that said “Lowering Costs for American Families.” “Two-thousand-dollar cap on prescription drugs goes away — gone. The $35 month cap on insulin for Medicare is gone.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.Mr. Biden’s three-state, four-day trip is also intended to boost the fortunes of Democratic candidates by using the presidential bully pulpit to highlight the party’s accomplishments. On Wednesday in Colorado, he stood next to Michael Bennet, one of the state’s two Democratic senators, to announce a new national monument — a key campaign promise for the embattled lawmaker.In Los Angeles on Thursday, Mr. Biden hailed the use of money from his infrastructure legislation to help complete a new subway line. During his remarks, he made certain to single out Representative Karen Bass, a Democrat who had fought for a provision that directs jobs on the project to local workers.“Local workers can be first in line for these jobs thanks to Karen,” Mr. Biden said. “I really mean it, Karen. Thank you very much.”At the community college in Irvine, Mr. Biden focused his attention on health care — and on Representative Katie Porter, a two-term Democrat running for re-election in a key swing district in Orange County.Ms. Porter, who is facing Scott Baugh, a Republican former state assemblyman, pushed for the drug pricing measure. At the event on Friday, Mr. Biden singled her out, crediting the success of Democratic legislation to her efforts to fight on behalf of her constituents..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“That’s why Katie’s leadership and the work of the Democrats in Congress was so consequential,” he said. “Katie, I’m not just being nice because I’m in your district. It happens to be true. No, no. I mean, you’re a fighter. You’re decent. You’re honorable and everybody respects you.”Friday’s event at the Irvine Valley Community College was an official one, not a campaign rally. But Ms. Porter used her time at the podium to assail Republicans.“Every single Republican in Washington voted against patients, against families and against taxpayers,” she said. “In the Senate, Republican politicians voted to limit how much Americans can save on prescription drugs and to prevent all patients from getting insulin. And House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has vowed that next term it’s his priority to return Big Pharma its unchecked power to charge patients whatever it wants.”She called that a “slap in the face” to the Californians she represents.Republicans sought to portray the president’s efforts to bolster candidates’ prospects as in vain. “Joe Biden is the last person Democrat candidates want to see on the campaign trail,” Michael McAdams, the communications director for the National Republican Campaign Committee, said after the event, noting reports that Democrats recently shifted money away from some California districts to candidates need help more.“His policies are so unpopular House Democrats are being forced to abandon spending in California districts he won by double-digits,” Mr. McAdams said.Friday evening, Mr. Biden was scheduled to fly to Portland, Ore., a liberal community where the Democratic Party would not normally need the help of the sitting president. But Mr. Biden is hoping to help boost the fortunes of Tina Kotek, the Democratic candidate for governor.Although the state has not elected a Republican leader in decades, polls suggest that Ms. Kotek is in a tight, three-way race with Christine Drazan, the Republican candidate, and Betsy Johnson, a former Democrat who is being financed by Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike. The White House is hoping that a visit by Mr. Biden will help underscore the party’s commitment to her.Republicans predicted that the president’s trip will not prevent their party from grabbing the top electoral prize in the state.“Joe Biden’s disastrous policies continue to hurt Oregon families, and there has been no bigger fan of his out-of-touch approach,” said Kaitlin Price, a spokeswoman for the Republican Governors Association, citing Ms. Kotek, Ms. Johnson and Kate Brown, the state’s current Democratic governor.“This last-ditch effort from national Democrats is proof of their hysteria as they watch Christine Drazan take hold of once deep-blue Oregon that is desperate for change,” Ms. Price said. More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Economy

    Lessons From Liz Truss’s Handling of U.K. Inflation

    The sharp policy U-turn by Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister, reveals the perils of taking the wrong path in the fight against scalding inflation.Government leaders in the West are struggling with rising inflation, slowing growth, and anxious electorates worried about winter and high energy bills. But Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister, is the only one who devised an economic plan that unnerved financial markets, drew the ire of global leaders and the public and undermined her political standing.On Friday, battered by savage criticism, she retreated. Ms. Truss fired her top finance official, Kwasi Kwarteng, for creating precisely the package of unfunded tax cuts, billion-dollar spending programs and deregulation that she had asked for.She reinstated a scheduled increase in corporate taxes to 25 percent from 19 percent, a rise she had previously opposed. That announcement came on top of backtracking last week on her proposal to eliminate the top 45 percent income tax on the highest earners. The prime minister, in office a little over five weeks, also promised that spending would grow less rapidly than proposed, although no specifics were offered.The drama is still playing out, and it’s unclear if the Truss government will survive.In the United States, President Biden, while waging his own political battles over gas prices and inflation, has not proposed anything like the kind of policies that Ms. Truss’s government attempted, nor have any other leaders in Europe.Still, for European governments whose economies are suffering greatly from shocks and energy price surges caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, there are timely lessons from the debacle playing out in London.One of the strongest was delivered early on by the International Monetary Fund: Don’t undermine your own central bankers. The I.M.F., which usually reserves such scoldings for developing nations, on Thursday doubled down on its message. “Don’t prolong the pain,” Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director, admonished.How to blunt the impact of inflation on the most vulnerable without further stoking inflation is the dilemma that every government is confronting.The Bank of England in London has aggressively tried to slow the sharp rise in prices by slowing the British economy.Alberto Pezzali/Associated Press“That is the question of the hour,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University who was attending the annual meetings of the World Bank and I.M.F. in Washington this week.Tension between the fiscal spending policies proposed by a government and the monetary policies controlled by central banks is not unusual. At the moment, though, central bankers are engaged in delicate policy maneuvers in the fight against a level of inflation not seen in decades. With the rate in Britain nearing 10 percent, the Bank of England has moved aggressively to slow down climbing prices through a series of interest rate increases aimed at crimping consumer and business spending.Any expansion of government spending is going to interfere with that aim to some degree, but Ms. Truss’s plan was far too big and too ill defined, Mr. Prasad said.“Measures to help households hit hard by energy increases, by themselves, would not have created that much of a stir,” he said. Many other countries have proposed exactly that. And the European Union has proposed a windfall tax on energy profits to help finance those subsidies.Ms. Truss, instead of coming up with a way to pay for energy assistance, pushed to eliminate a corporate tax increase and cut income taxes for the wealthiest segment of the population. The result was a reduction in government revenue and a ballooning of Britain’s debt.“Overall, the package did not have much clarity in terms of how it would support the economy in the short run without raising inflation,” Mr. Prasad said.By contrast, Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, cited the way governments and central banks worked in tandem when the pandemic struck in 2020 to keep economies from collapsing, issuing vast amounts of public debt.“Central banks printed every single dollar, euro and pound that governments spent” to support households and businesses because of the Covid crisis, Mr. Vistesen said. But now the circumstances have changed, and inflation is setting economies aflame.The actions of the Federal Reserve in the United States illustrate the switch central banks have made: In the harrowing early weeks of the global outbreak of the coronavirus, the Fed embarked on an extraordinary program to stimulate the economy and stabilize markets. This year, the Fed has been swiftly raising interest rates in a bid to slow growth.Both the United States and eurozone countries have somewhat more wiggle room than Britain, because the dollar and the euro are much more widely used around the world as currencies held in reserve than the British pound.Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s former chancellor of the Exchequer, left 11 Downing Street after Ms. Truss fired him on Friday.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressEven so, European governments can help households and businesses get through an energy crisis, Mr. Vistesen said, but they can’t embark on an open-ended spending spree.They also need to take account of what is happening in other economies. The richest countries that make up the Group of 7 are essentially part of the same “monetary and fiscal convoy,” said Will Hutton, president of the Academy of Social Sciences. By championing a Thatcher-era blend of steep tax cuts and deregulation, he said, the Truss government strayed too far from the rest of the flotilla and the economic mainstream.The adherence to 1980s-era trickle-down verities also revealed the risks of sticking with outdated policies in the face of changing circumstances, said Diane Coyle, a ​​public policy professor at the University of Cambridge.“The situation in 1979 was very different,” Ms. Coyle said. “There were sclerotic high taxes and an overregulated economy, but not anymore.” Today, taxes in Britain are lower, and the economy is less regulated than the average member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of 38 major economies.“The character of the economy has changed,” she said. “Public investment in research and skills are more important.”In that sense, what was missing from Ms. Truss’s economic plan was as important as what was included. And what Britain is lacking, said Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at University College London, is a visionary public investment program like the trillion-dollar climate and digitalization plans adopted by the European Union or the climate and infrastructure program in the United States.A rate of Inflation nearing 10 percent in Britain has affected the price of groceries and how people spend their money.Alex Ingram for The New York Times“If you don’t have a growth plan, an industrial strategy innovation policy,” Ms. Mazzucato said, “then your economy won’t expand.”Both Ms. Mazzucato and Ms. Coyle emphasized that Britain had some specific economic handicaps that predated the Truss administration, including the 2016 vote to exit the European Union, a stubborn lack of productivity, anemic business investment, and lagging research and development.Still, Ms. Coyle offered some advice that referred pointedly to Ms. Truss. “I think the main lesson is: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    Biden’s ‘Made in America’ Policies Anger Key Allies

    The president’s plans to bolster America’s electric vehicle and battery production have opened a rift in relationships in Asia and Europe.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s efforts to bolster domestic manufacturing are coming under diplomatic fire from key allies, with European governments accusing his administration of undercutting the trans-Atlantic alliance with “Made in America” policies that threaten their economies.The objections center on policies included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to make the United States less reliant on foreign suppliers by providing financial incentives to locate factories and produce goods in the United States, including electric vehicles. Mr. Biden has touted the law as key to creating “tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and clean energy manufacturing jobs, solar factories in the Midwest and the South, wind farms across the plains and off our shores, clean hydrogen projects and more — all across America, every part of America.”But that has prompted cries of protectionism by foreign officials and accusations that the Biden administration is violating trade laws by giving preferential treatment to U.S.-based firms.“We are having concerns that a number of the provisions are discriminatory against E.U. companies, which of course obviously is a problem for us,” Valdis Dombrovskis, the European Union’s commissioner for trade, told reporters in Washington on Thursday.The disagreement represents the first major rift between the United States and Europe since Mr. Biden took office last year. The president, who promised to take a softer diplomatic touch than the Trump administration had with its “America First” agenda, has worked closely with European allies on a number of priorities, including punishing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. In his first months in office, Mr. Biden quickly moved to repair relations with Europe, including by resolving a 17-year dispute over aviation subsidies.But the unified front between the United States and Europe showed signs of strain during this week’s annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. European officials complained to the top ranks of the Biden administration that provisions in the expansive climate and energy law to support domestic production of electric vehicles violate international trade rules that require countries to treat foreign and domestic companies equally. They argued the provisions are unfair to their domestic car industries.Mr. Dombrovskis said that he and other European officials would be directing their concerns to Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, whose agency is responsible for implementing much of the law, along with Katherine Tai, the U. S. trade representative, and Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary.Read More on Electric VehiclesRivian Recall: The electric-car maker said that it was recalling 13,000 vehicles after identifying an issue that could affect drivers’ ability to steer some of its vehicles.China’s Thriving E.V. Market: More electric cars will be sold in the country this year than in the rest of the world combined, as its domestic market accelerates ahead of the global competition.A Crucial Mine: A thousand feet below wetlands in northern Minnesota are ancient deposits of nickel, a sought-after mineral seen as key to the future of the U.S. electric car industry.Banning Gasoline Cars: California is leading the way in the push to electrify the nation’s car fleet with a plan to ban sales of new internal-combustion vehicles by 2035, but the rule will face several challenges.In a meeting with Mr. Dombrovskis on Thursday, Ms. Tai “shared her view that seriously combating the climate crisis will require increased investments in clean energy technologies,” the Office of the United States Trade Representative said in a statement. Both Ms. Tai and Mr. Dombrovskis “asked their teams to increase engagement” on the issue.European officials are discussing whether to contest the law, which was passed by Democrats along party lines, at the World Trade Organization, which could be time consuming and fruitless, or to formally raise the matter through the Trade and Technology Council that was formed last year.The crux of the international fight centers on more than $50 billion in tax credits to entice Americans to buy electric vehicles. The law restricts the credit to vehicles that are assembled in North America. It also has strict requirements surrounding the components that go into powering electric vehicles, including batteries and the critical minerals that are used to make them. That is creating new incentives for battery makers to build recycling and production facilities in the United States.Foreign companies that manufacture cars and car parts in the United States can also qualify for the credit. But some foreign carmakers, particularly those from Asia, tend to import more components for electric vehicles from outside the United States, meaning that fewer of their models qualify.That has sparked accusations that the terms of the law were written to benefit U.S. companies like General Motors or Ford, rather than foreign companies like Toyota and Honda, even though many foreign companies have invested heavily in the United States.“We understand that some trading partners have concerns with how the EV tax credit provisions in the law will operate in practice with respect to their producers,” said Eduardo Maia Silva, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “We are committed to working with our partners to better understand their concerns and keep open channels of engagement on these issues.”European officials are concerned that the U.S. law will drive a wedge between European companies and their home countries if carmakers such as Porsche are under pressure to set up shop in the United States instead of opening more factories in Germany. Since the law went into effect, Honda, Toyota and LG Energy Solutions of South Korea have all announced major battery investments in the United States.A previous version of the bill would have offered the tax credit to only U.S.-produced vehicles. But Canada and Mexico both lobbied against that draft version, and the measure was ultimately expanded to apply to vehicles produced throughout North America.Asian allies have also expressed concerns about the law.When Vice President Kamala Harris met with South Korean leaders in Tokyo and Seoul last month, the allies did not hesitate to express their frustration.Hours before Ms. Harris attended the funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Korean officials, including Prime Minister Han Duck-soo expressed their concerns about the legislation to the vice president in a closed-door meeting. The Japanese government has also expressed concerns.Frank Aum, a senior expert on Northeast Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said the tax credit was a “direct harm” to South Korean companies like Hyundai and Kia that wouldn’t get the benefit of the tax credit.“South Korea is feeling very much betrayed because of the investments that they have made in the electric vehicle battery and semiconductor industries in the U.S. over the last couple years,” he said.Just months before he signed it into law, Mr. Biden stood with the chairman of Hyundai in Seoul to celebrate the South Korean company’s investment in a new electric vehicle and battery manufacturing facility in Savannah, Ga. In meetings with Mr. Han and later with President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea in Seoul, Ms. Harris said she would consult with South Korea as the law is implemented. The Biden administration has downplayed the tensions, saying that it is relying on its strong relationships with other governments to talk through those differences and fight the bigger battle of climate change.In an Oct. 7 speech at the Roosevelt Institute, a Washington think tank, Ms. Tai called out the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — a proposal that would encourage cleaner manufacturing by levying a tax on imported goods based on how many greenhouse gasses their production emits — saying that those European measure could also cause tensions with allies. But the United States and Europe should work through those differences to combat climate change together, she added.“As we seek to reduce our carbon footprints and benefit our industries, we’re each going to do things that cause anxiety, whether it’s the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism or the Inflation Reduction Act. But this also creates an opportunity for us to work together, to tackle this existential crisis that threatens all of us,” Ms. Tai said.Still, trade experts have warned that the U.S. efforts could potentially kick off a similar wave of protectionist measures to match those adopted by the United States.Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, said last month that the European Union should consider adopting electric vehicle bonuses for cars that are produced within the E.U. and meet rigorous environmental standards.In that event, America’s policies could backfire in the long run, if American cars or components face similar barriers to being sold in Europe or Asia, said Chad P. Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.“I think the risk on the U.S. side is that if we don’t address some of their major concerns, that they’ll ultimately do the same thing,” he said.Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, said at an event this week that he hopes that eventually U.S. allies will benefit from America’s investment in its production of goods such as critical minerals because it will also solidify their supply chains.A Treasury Department spokeswoman declined to comment on how Ms. Yellen responded to the complaints of her European counterparts this week. In remarks at her closing news conference on Friday, Ms. Yellen touted the ambitions of the Inflation Reduction Act without acknowledging the concerns in Europe and Asia.“It’s our nation’s most aggressive domestic action on climate,” Ms. Yellen said. “And it puts us on a strong path to meet our emissions reduction goals.” More

  • 163 Shares159 Views

    in Economy

    Consumer spending was flat in September and below expectations as inflation takes toll

    Retail and food services sales in total were little changed in September against the estimate for a 0.3% gain.
    Excluding autos, sales rose 0.1%, vs. the estimate for spending to be unchanged.
    The numbers are not adjusted for inflation, indicating that consumer spending slowed.

    Customers shop at the GU Co. store in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, US, on Friday, Oct. 7, 2022.
    Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

    Consumer spending was flat in September as prices moved sharply higher and the Federal Reserve implemented higher interest rates to slow the economy, according to government figures released Thursday.
    Retail and food services sales were little changed for the month after rising 0.4% in August, according to the advance estimate from the Commerce Department. That was below the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.3% gain. Excluding autos, sales rose 0.1%, against an estimate for no change.

    Considering that the retail sales numbers are not adjusted for inflation, the report shows that real spending across the range of sectors the report covers retreated for the month.
    A Bureau of Labor Statistics report Thursday indicated that consumer prices rose 0.4% including all goods and services, and 0.6% when excluding food and energy.
    Miscellaneous store retailers saw a decline of 2.5% for the month, while gasoline stations were off 1.4% as energy prices declined.
    A slew of other sectors also posted drops, including sporting goods, hobby, books and music stores as well as furniture and home furnishing stores, both of which posted a -0.7% drop, while electronics and appliances were off 0.8% and motor vehicle and parts dealers fell 0.4%.
    General merchandise store sales rose 0.7%. Gainers also included online stores, bars and restaurants, clothing retailers and health and personal care stores, all of which saw 0.5% increases.

    While the gains for the month were muted, retail sales rose 8.2% from a year ago, matching the rise in the consumer price index. Shoppers remain generally flush with cash though there are indications of late that they are dipping into savings to make ends meet.
    The Fed has enacted multiple interest rate hikes aimed at reducing inflation and bringing the economy back into balance. Markets expect the central bank to raise rates up to 1.5 percentage points more through the end of the year.
    A separate report Thursday showed that import prices fell 1.2% in September, slightly more than the 1.1% estimate. Exports declined 0.8%.

    WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Economy

    Reno Is Booming. Some Workers Feel Left Behind.

    Companies are flocking to the Nevada city, but the rising cost of housing, gas and groceries is making daily life a struggle for many who work there.As an employee at a UPS warehouse outside Reno, Nev., Christina Pixton spends her nights moving thousands of heavy packages on their way to far-flung locales like San Francisco, Phoenix and Chicago.But the warehouse is not air-conditioned, and one night last month, there was no relief outside, either, with smoke from a California wildfire more than 100 miles away causing hazardous air quality. For Ms. Pixton, who has asthma, the irritation to her lungs was the latest challenge she had to learn to navigate in Reno.These are boom times in and around Reno. Warehousing and casinos have long been the city’s main businesses, and the surge in e-commerce since the start of the pandemic has companies snapping up facilities as fast as they can be built.Yet Reno and the surrounding area have also seen the cost of things like housing, gas and groceries rise, making daily existence in this growing metropolis increasingly difficult for many of the people who live here, like Ms. Pixton.Christina Pixton, a UPS worker, and her husband make six figures combined, but struggle with the daily costs of living. While gas prices have fallen to an average of $3.91 a gallon across the United States and $5.34 in Nevada, the average in Reno is $5.75, according to data from AAA. It costs Ms. Pixton $70 to $80 a week to fill up her Toyota Highlander, she said.In the past five years, home prices in the area have risen 70 percent, according to Zillow. That’s good news for homeowners like Ms. Pixton. The typical home in Reno is worth $568,103, up 10.2 percent over the past year. But average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Reno has increased 10 percent compared with last year and 40 percent from three years ago, according to data from Zumper, which tracks housing data.And while homes and planned communities are being developed where farmland once was, affordable housing has become a much-discussed issue among residents and policymakers. Reno’s City Council approved additional affordable housing projects in March. In neighboring Sparks, Mayor Ed Lawson has pushed for denser development — building up and not just out — and more development on federal lands.Housing developments are popping up all over Reno and the surrounding area.Other changes are affecting the way of life in Reno. By the time Ms. Pixton, 37, wants to go shopping after her shift ends around 11 p.m., stores that were once open are now closed after scaling back their hours during the pandemic. When she does make it to Walmart or Target, she often finds scant offerings on the shelves because of continuing supply chain issues and the fact that the Walmart, one of the few locations for miles, draws people from neighboring cities.In a city whose economy is partly driven by getting goods to people across the country expeditiously, Ms. Pixton is left scrambling to find Uncrustables frozen sandwiches for her two sons and the right brand of dog food for the family’s Labrador retriever.“This isn’t a sustainable pattern,” said Ms. Pixton, whose husband works as a foreman at an HVAC company. “We make six figures, and we’re still stuck in this struggling pattern.”In May 2021, Ms. Pixton received a raise to $19 an hour, up from $16. It was a market-rate adjustment that UPS put in place across the country to stay competitive when hiring and retaining workers.But in January, it went back down to $16. As a union steward, Ms. Pixton found herself telling other workers the bad news. Fifteen people quit that week, she said.“It’s been quite hellish,” Ms. Pixton said. “It was not a completely livable salary, but it was something where we could struggle and not have to get a second job.”A spokesman for UPS said that, starting on Oct. 2, another market-rate adjustment brought hourly pay for part-time workers back to $19 an hour.The area offers plenty of affordable land for warehouses, along with access to an interstate and an international airport.In recent years, e-commerce companies have flooded the market. The Reno-Sparks area, with a population of about half a million, ticks a lot of boxes for companies seeking to expand back-end operations. There’s no state income tax, cheap land is available, there’s access to a main interstate and an international airport, and it’s close to California, whose huge economy and millions of people are significant draws for consumer companies looking to easily connect with their customers.In 2014, when Elon Musk came to Nevada to celebrate the opening of Tesla’s giant Gigafactory warehouse, meant to build batteries for his company’s electric vehicles, he encouraged other executives to follow.“What the people of Nevada have created is a state where you can be very agile, where you can do things quickly and get things done,” Mr. Musk said at the time, standing among the state’s legislators.And follow they did. Chewy, Amazon, Thrive Market and Apple have opened or expanded warehouses in the area over the past decade. Third-party logistics companies like OnTrac and Stord have also propped up new facilities in town.Reno’s highways and back roads are dotted with “Now Hiring” billboards.Reno has just a 0.5 percent vacancy rate for warehouses, according to data from the real estate service firm CBRE. About 8.8 million square feet is under construction in the Reno-Sparks area, according to CBRE, and about 80 percent of it is already leased.“We were a good market on a great trajectory averaging four million square feet, probably going to five,” said Eric Bennett, senior vice president of CBRE, which helps lease space to companies. “The pandemic obviously increased the absorption.”Some of these companies have set up their own distribution channels to get their products where they need to go. Others use UPS. All of them need hundreds of people to complete the strenuous work of moving their goods through the facilities and getting them to consumers.“Now Hiring” billboards dot Reno’s interstate and back roads. A chocolate factory was willing to pay as much as $25 an hour. A sign outside a Petco warehouse says a starting salary could be as high as $22 an hour. Hidden Valley Ranch’s plant says its starting hourly wage is $21, with other benefits including a 401(k), paid time off, and health care with dental and vision. Many retailers like Walmart are also trying to attract seasonal workers.Those opportunities are siphoning off potential UPS workers and creating more manual labor for those who remain, said Ross Kinson, a business agent for the local Teamsters.Ross Kinson, a business agent for the local Teamsters, said the increased competition for workers had left some UPS shifts short staffed.Workers like Ms. Pixton.Like many in Reno, she is a California transplant. She moved from Chico with her now-husband, John, in 2008, when Reno was reeling from the housing crisis. Casinos filed for bankruptcy. New construction ground to a halt. She worked in the medical and fast food industries before turning to warehouses.She started at UPS in 2018, attracted by the health care benefits and pension package, and initially made about $13 an hour. She works part time, usually 28 to 32 hours per week. Even though other companies have offered higher wages, she has stayed at UPS because the health benefits cover her children and her pension will vest in about a year.Ms. Pixton has stayed with UPS because of the health care benefits that cover her sons.When the pandemic hit, she felt the impact of millions of stuck-at-home shoppers buying all kinds of merchandise. Before Covid, about 70,000 packages would flow through her hub on a normal summer evening. During the pandemic summer of 2020, that number rose as high as 240,000, though it’s now around 115,000 to 140,000 packages a night.“We’re handling the most amount of packages of any shift because we are getting all of the inbound local businesses. We’re getting the transfers from Sacramento and Oakland and Salt Lake City,” she said. “We’ll get all inbound stuff from other states and have our outbound stuff as well.”Six people are considered a skeleton crew in her department, but Ms. Pixton said that often only three or four were working.As the holiday season approaches, UPS says it plans to hire about 100,000 workers, and is speeding up the process by eliminating interviews and allowing candidates to apply online. At the hub where Ms. Pixton works, UPS is looking to add 400 workers.UPS plans to add seasonal workers for the holidays and has been advertising on online job boards.The current contract that UPS has with the Teamsters went into place in 2018 and expires in 2023. Mr. Kinson said the union would push to formalize language regarding the market-rate wage adjustment for part-time workers for the next contract.“We’d negotiate on good faith,” a UPS spokesman, Glenn Zaccara, said. “The wages they are receiving is industry-leading.”Reno is known for its casinos, but warehouses have long been an economic engine as well.But in a city like Reno that has seen rapid growth, workers argue that the terms of the contract haven’t kept up with reality.“In this area it’s got to be $19 an hour,” Mr. Kinson said. “It has to be or it won’t work.”Loni Goddard works at Kerala Ayurveda, a wellness company, and rents an apartment in Reno. In 2020, her one-bedroom apartment cost $950 with internet and cable. When she re-signed her lease in April, the rent rose to $1,490 — not including internet and cable.“During the pandemic, everyone was getting temporary raises in Reno,” Ms. Goddard said. “At the beginning of 2022, most or all of the raises disappeared and so did the people.”At her UPS job, Ms. Pixton is bracing for the holiday rush. But, she noted, every day has essentially become peak season, considering how much work there is and how few people there are to do it. And while she wishes that more people would join UPS to alleviate some of her workload, she understands why some look elsewhere for employment.“If you’re making less than what you’re paying in gas,” she said, “what’s the point of going?” More