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    Why Are Jobless Claims Still High? For Some, It’s the Multiple Layoffs.

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    A California study shows the extent of dependence on benefits over the last year and how many people have shuttled in and out of work.Jobs are coming back. Businesses are reopening. But a year after the pandemic jolted the economy, applications for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly, shockingly high — higher on a weekly basis than at any point in any previous recession, by some measures.And headway has stalled: Initial weekly claims under regular and emergency programs, combined, have been stuck at just above one million since last fall, and last week was no exception, the Labor Department reported Thursday.“It goes up a little bit, it goes down, but really we haven’t seen much progress,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist for the career site Indeed. “A year into this, I’m starting to wonder, what is it going to take to fix the magnitude problem? How is this going to actually end?”The continued high rate of unemployment applications has been something of a mystery for many economists. With the pandemic still suppressing activity in many sectors, it makes sense that joblessness would remain high. But businesses are reopening in much of the country, and trends on employment and spending are generally improving. So shouldn’t unemployment filings be falling?New evidence from California may offer a partial explanation: According to a report released Thursday by the California Policy Lab, a research organization affiliated with the University of California, nearly 80 percent of the unemployment applications filed in the state last month were from people who had been laid off earlier in the pandemic, gotten back to work, and then been laid off again.Such repeat claims were particularly common in the information sector — which in California includes many film and television employees who have been sidelined by the pandemic — and in the hard-hit hotel and restaurant industries, as well as in construction.The Policy Lab researchers had access to detailed information from the state that allowed them to track individual workers through the system, something not possible with federal data.California’s economy differs from that of the rest of the country in myriad ways, and the pandemic has played out differently there than in many other places. But if the same patterns hold elsewhere, it suggests that the ups and downs of the pandemic — lockdowns and reopenings, restrictions that tighten and ease as virus cases rise and fall — have left many workers stuck in a sort of limbo.A restaurant may recall some workers when indoor dining is allowed, only to lay them off again a few weeks later when restrictions are reimposed. A worker may find a temporary job at a warehouse, or pick up a few hours of work on a delivery app, but be unable to find a more stable job.“This shows the oscillation of employed, unemployed, employed, unemployed — people cycling back into the system,” said Elizabeth Pancotti, policy director at Employ America, a group in Washington that has been an advocate for the unemployed. “We did not see that in previous recessions.”What that instability will mean for workers’ long-term prospects remains unclear. Economic research has found that extended periods of unemployment can leave workers at a permanent disadvantage in the labor market. But there is little precedent for a period of such prolonged instability.Distributing food in Inglewood, Calif., in January. The pandemic’s economic effects hit Black workers in the state especially hard.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“We don’t know what happens if you’re out of work for two months, you come back to work for two months, you’re out of work for two months, you keep going back and forth,” Ms. Pancotti said.The California data shows how the economic effects of the pandemic have been concentrated among certain industries and demographic groups — and how the consequences continue to mount for the most affected workers, even as the crisis eases for many others.Nearly 90 percent of Black workers in the state have claimed unemployment benefits at some point in the pandemic, according to the Policy Lab analysis, compared with about 40 percent of whites. Younger and less-educated workers have been hit especially hard.Those totals include filings under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which covers people left out of the regular unemployment system, a group that disproportionately includes Black workers. The record-keeping for that program has been plagued by overcounting and fraudulent claims. But even a look at the state’s regular unemployment insurance program, which hasn’t faced the same issues, reveals remarkable numbers: Close to three in 10 California workers have claimed benefits during the crisis, and more than four in 10 Black workers.“That degree of inequality is mind-blowing,” said Till von Wachter of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the report’s authors.Many of those who lost jobs early in the crisis have since returned to work. But millions have not. The Policy Lab found that nearly four million Californians had received more than 26 weeks of benefits during the pandemic, a rough measure of long-term unemployment.“We have solidly shifted into a world where a large-scale problem of long-term unemployment is now a reality,” Dr. von Wachter said. Black workers, older workers, women and those with less education have been more likely to end up out of work for extended periods.Nationally, nearly six million people were enrolled as of late February in federal extended-benefit programs that cover people who have exhausted their regular benefits, which last for six months in most states. The aid package signed by President Biden last week ensures that those programs will continue until fall, but benefits alone won’t prevent the damage that prolonged joblessness can do to workers’ careers and mental and physical health.“The recovery needs to be on the scale of being a once-in-a-generation economic upswing to really pull those people back into the labor market,” Ms. Konkel said.The latest data provides little sign of that happening. More than 746,000 people filed first-time applications for state unemployment benefits last week, up 24,000 from the previous week, according to the Labor Department. In addition, 282,000 filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.Most forecasters expect the labor market recovery to accelerate in coming months, as warmer weather and rising vaccination rates allow more businesses to reopen, and as the new injection of government aid encourages Americans to go out and spend. Policymakers at the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that they expected the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5 percent by the end of the year, a significant upgrade over the 5 percent they forecast three months ago.“We’re already starting to see improvement now, and I think that will start to accelerate fairly quickly,” said Daniel Zhao, an economist at the career site Glassdoor.But government aid can do only so much as long as the pandemic continues to limit consumers’ behavior. The pace of the recovery now, Mr. Zhao said, depends on a factor beyond the scope of normal economic analysis.“The dominating factor right now is how quickly we can get vaccines in arms,” he said. More

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    Hurt by Lockdowns, California’s Small Businesses Push to Recall Newsom

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHurt by Lockdowns, California’s Small Businesses Push to Recall GovernorThe pain for such enterprises been particularly acute in the state, leading some to back an effort to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom.Daniela Del Gaudio, left, and Alexandra Del Gaudio, are the founders of the Wild Plum, a yoga studio in the San Fernando Valley in California. By the time they reopened last month, they said, they had $70,000 in debt.Credit…Rozette Rago for The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 6:26 p.m. ETLOS ANGELES — Alexandra and Daniela Del Gaudio had never been to a political rally before, let alone one to protest a coronavirus lockdown and recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. But things had changed in the sisters’ lives since they opened the Wild Plum, a yoga and wellness space, in 2018.The Wild Plum, in California’s San Fernando Valley, closed in March when Mr. Newsom issued pandemic stay-at-home orders for the state. By the time the Wild Plum reopened last month, when Mr. Newsom relaxed the latest lockdown restrictions, the sisters had amassed $70,000 in debt. So there they were at a recent anti-Newsom rally in a restaurant parking lot in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, along with dozens of other business owners.“Everyone says to walk away, but we put everything we have into this,” Daniela Del Gaudio, 33, said. “We’re banging our heads trying to figure out what to do.”California was one of the earliest states to go into lockdown last spring, and it is now emerging from a second lockdown, which started in December. That stop-start-stop has created a groundswell of anger toward Mr. Newsom, a Democrat in the third year of his first term, that is increasingly fueling a movement to recall him from office in one of the bluest of blue states.Demonstrators rally for a recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom in Huntington Beach, Calif., in November.Credit…Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressThe recall threat to Mr. Newsom has considerable momentum. Since March, 1.5 million Californians have signed a petition to oust Mr. Newsom, enough to trigger an election for a new governor. If enough of the signatures are verified, it will be the fourth recall election of a governor in American history.After they are verified and costs are estimated, the state has 60 to 80 days to schedule an election. Voters will be asked two questions on the ballot. The first is whether Mr. Newsom should be recalled. The second: Who should replace him? If the first question on the recall comes up short, the second becomes moot.The recall campaign has been funded by the Republican National Committee, which committed $250,000, as well as Silicon Valley tech investors such as Chamath Palihapitiya, who donated $100,000. Small-business owners have also been an engine behind the effort, said Randy Economy, the spokesman for the Recall Gavin Newsom campaign.“He’s broken the back of small-business owners and put many of them out of business for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Economy said. He said many were incensed when Mr. Newsom was photographed in November having dinner at the French Laundry, a temple to haute cuisine in Napa Valley, in violation of state guidelines. (When photos of the dinner were leaked, Mr. Newsom apologized for his behavior.) Small businesses across the country have suffered from shutdowns that sometimes seem to flare up as suddenly as surges in the coronavirus itself. Restaurants, gyms, corner stores and spas have closed, some after trying to hang in there for months.The pain in California has been acute. Nearly 40,000 small businesses had closed in the state by September — more than in any other state since the pandemic began, according to a report compiled by Yelp. Half had shut permanently, according to the report, far more than the 6,400 that had closed permanently in New York.Few of the pandemic choices that Mr. Newsom has faced have been easy. California has suffered enormously from Covid-19, with more than 3.5 million cases and 47,000 deaths. Los Angeles County, one of the hardest-hit places in the recent virus surge, has more than 1.2 million cases and 19,000 deaths.Dan Newman, a political strategist for Mr. Newsom, said the governor was focused on coronavirus vaccinations and reopening the state. Mr. Newman blamed “state and national G.O.P. partisans” for supporting “this Republican recall scheme in hopes of creating an expensive, distracting and destructive circus.”Acknowledging that the pandemic has “heavily impacted our small businesses,” the director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, Dee Dee Myers, pointed to several state programs that offer them help. They include the California Small Business Covid-19 Relief Grant Program, the California Rebuilding Fund and the Main Street Hiring Tax Credit.Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Newsom had “proven that he is woefully unqualified to lead the state of California.”In places such as Los Angeles County, where Mr. Newsom won 72 percent of the vote in 2018, and neighboring Orange County, a more conservative area, the small-business anger is particularly intense. One local business owner leading the movement to open California’s economy is Andrew Gruel, 40, a chef who owns Slapfish, a seafood restaurant chain.Mr. Gruel argued in an interview last month that California’s lockdown rules were confusing and hurt small businesses disproportionately. “None of the rules make sense,” he said one afternoon from the Slapfish in Huntington Beach.As evidence, Mr. Gruel pointed to the Walmart just up the road. While local restaurants could not have diners sit outside in the first lockdown, even six feet apart and with plexiglass between them, a Burger King inside the Walmart remained open, he said.“And that was legal,” he said. “It’s like W.W.E. in there, people cross-body blocking each other for B.K. delight.”Opposition to Mr. Newsom’s pandemic policies is particularly intense among small businesses in the Los Angeles area.Credit…David Walter Banks for The New York TimesMr. Gruel said he had laid off 100 people, had closed one of his restaurants permanently and was worried about the rest of Slapfish’s two dozen locations. The company has lost around $100,000 and taken on a lot of debt, he added.That afternoon, he let people sit outside anyway, even though it was against the lockdown restrictions at the time. “You could do a citizen’s arrest,” he suggested.Local business associations said they were also furious. Nick Rimedio, who serves on the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said the lockdowns had widened a class divide. While quarantine has been almost relaxing for what he called the wealthy “Zoom class,” it has been a nightmare for the poor and middle class who have storefronts or work service jobs in businesses in the area, he said.“If you’re well-to-do, if you have a healthy stock portfolio, if you can work from home, you’ve saved on your commute. You’re doing great,” Mr. Rimedio said.Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, a cozy bar in Sherman Oaks, has become another anti-lockdown leader. In December, she posted a video on Facebook in which she was masked and near tears. She pointed the camera at a movie set with outdoor tables, which was legal, and then contrasted that with her newly built outdoor dining setup, which had just been banned. The video went viral, and she started a GoFundMe page that has raised $220,000.Last month, Ms. Marsden, 48, gathered dozens of local business owners, including the Del Gaudio sisters, to discuss how to survive and what to do to push for reopening. Many owned bars and restaurants; others owned gyms or spas. Almost all of their locations had been closed since March.They sat at different tables, spaced a few feet apart. Most wore masks most of the time.“Our retirement savings are gone,” said Joe Lyons, who owns the Celtic Raven Pub in Winnetka, Calif., with his wife, Belinda.Credit…Rozette Rago for The New York TimesBelinda and Joe Lyons, who own the Celtic Raven Pub and co-own JJ Sullivan’s Irish Pub in the San Fernando Valley, said they had furloughed 12 people. One of their suppliers was demanding payments they could not make, they said. The Celtic Raven landlord has been pressuring them for 10 months of unpaid rent. By March 1, they will be personally liable for $49,000 in back rent.“It’s going to kill us,” Mr. Lyons said. “Our retirement savings are gone.”But the hardest part, Ms. Lyons said, was Mr. Newsom’s policies.“When we were told we could open last June by Gavin Newson, I put full insurance back with the intention of reopening, only to be told that we could not,” she said. “That cost me over $8,000 that I’m still paying, as the insurance company would not cancel.”Another attendee was Guido Murga, the owner of One Headlight, a hospitality supplies distributor. He said his business was down because restaurants, his main customers, were hurting.“I sell napkins, straws, cherries, olives, to-go cups. When they close, I close,” he said. “I’m drowning week to week.”Ms. Marsden had never led a rally before, but she got into the energy of it.“Come April or May, how many of us will be here?” she asked, her voice rising.“None!” some in the crowd shouted.“I’m drowning week to week,” said Guido Murga, whose supply business in Los Angeles depends on restaurants.Credit…Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThe event was disrupted midway through when a small group of virus skeptics who had joined the crowd grew boisterous and demanded that people stop wearing masks. The moment reflected the complexity at play. Those fighting to open businesses in a responsible way were tangling with more Trumpist factions, who saw new allies in some of the apolitical business owners.Carey Ysais, owner of the bar Kahuna Tiki, stood up to call everyone back to order.“Guys, where you’re at is a different place than where we’re at,” Mr. Ysais said, as the anti-mask crowd jeered. “Are you a bar owner? Excuse me, are you a bar owner?”The Del Gaudio sisters did not leave optimistic.“We were raised to work hard. We’re not even given that opportunity,” Alexandra Del Gaudio, 36, said. “We’re trying to pull our families out of poverty.”Thomas Fuller More

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    How a Minimum-Wage Increase Is Being Felt in a Low-Wage City

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Jobs CrisisCurrent Unemployment RateWhen the Checks Run OutThe Economy in 9 ChartsThe First 6 MonthsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow a Minimum-Wage Increase Is Being Felt in a Low-Wage CityIs $15 an hour too much, or not enough? Fresno, Calif., may be a laboratory for a debate over the minimum wage that is heating up on the national level.Elsa Rodriguez Killion, a Fresno restaurant owner, worries that California’s rising minimum wage will force her to cut jobs.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021, 5:05 p.m. ETEven before the pandemic, Elsa Rodriguez Killion realized that Casa Corona, her restaurant in Fresno, Calif., was going to have to change with the times.She spent money on digital marketing. She invested in technology that enabled online orders, for dishes like the restaurant’s signature chile verde. And there was something else she had to keep up with: California’s rising minimum wage.The minimum rose to $14 an hour on Jan. 1, the fifth annual increase under a 2016 law. It is set to reach $15 for most employers by next year. With price increases, Ms. Rodriguez Killion was able to absorb some of the added payroll expense. But she also cut more than 20 percent of the 160 jobs at her restaurant’s two locations in the last five years, not including those lost because of the pandemic.“Every year we have had to make hard decisions to let labor go,” said Ms. Rodriguez Killion, 47, who opened Casa Corona with her brother and sister more than 20 years ago. She worries that paring more of her work force is inevitable.On the flip side of her anxiety is the measurable difference felt by some Fresno workers, even if the higher pay is still often not enough to live comfortably.“It helps tremendously,” said Elisabeth Parra, 25, a Walmart cashier who lives with her mother. Since her pay rose to the $14 minimum last month, she said, “I’m able to help my mom more with bills.”Fresno may be a laboratory for a debate that is heating up on the national level. President Biden wants to gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, from the current $7.25, achieving a longstanding priority of the labor movement and the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.For now, at least, such a provision is part of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. House Democrats, who voted in 2019 for a $15 minimum wage, intend to do so again when they send the pandemic legislation to the Senate. But chances there are clouded by parliamentary questions — and the objections of two key Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, along with Republicans.Backers have long said that increasing the minimum wage would raise the living standard of workers and help combat poverty. With more money, workers would be inclined to spend more, strengthening the economy.Opponents contend that minimum-wage increases cost jobs, particularly in struggling cities like Fresno. What’s more, they say, any broad standard, whether statewide or nationwide, does not account for local variations in the cost of living or business conditions.According to a study by the Congressional Budget Office, raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would decrease employment by 1.4 million — but it would still raise 900,000 people out of poverty. The report’s conclusions were wielded by both proponents and foes of the $15 proposal.The pandemic-induced downturn has raised the stakes. Those favoring a minimum-wage increase say it is more essential than ever, especially since sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, including leisure and hospitality, have a higher proportion of low-wage workers. Critics counter that lifting the wage floor would severely harm small businesses trying to bounce back.“This is the debate that usually takes place in some academic circles,” said Antonio Avalos, the chairman of the economics department at California State University, Fresno. But the experience of Fresno, an inland city of 500,000 isolated geographically and economically from coastal metropolises like San Francisco and Los Angeles, underscores the core tension between the competing economic arguments.Fresno is the hub of an agriculture-rich area, with produce that includes almonds, pistachios, oranges and grapes. Its economy is tied directly to the agriculture industry, though its location has also made it a draw for warehouses. In recent years, Amazon and the beauty emporium Ulta Beauty both opened sprawling fulfillment centers there.Fresno’s economy is tied to agriculture, but its location has also drawn warehouses, including an Amazon distribution center.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney for The New York TimesFresno County, where more than half of the population identifies as Hispanic, has one of the state’s highest poverty rates, and one of its lowest median wages. The typical local worker in 2019, the last year for which data is available, made under $17 an hour. A quarter of workers made $12.50. Before California enacted gradual increases under its 2016 law, the minimum wage was $10, a level typical for fast-food jobs and other low-wage occupations.Some Fresno business owners saw little impact from the raises.Arthur Moye, who owns Full Circle Brewing Company, a craft brewery, has not had to reduce his staff because the wage increases had been “a slow roll,” he said. Instead, he has adjusted both the pay and the work. “We might increase expectations on the people that are here earning that higher wage,” devoting more scrutiny to job candidates and doing more to develop those they hire, he said.But others, especially restaurant owners like Ms. Rodriguez Killion, say costs are becoming untenable, especially as they contend with the pandemic’s impact.A 2019 study by the University of California, Riverside, funded by the California Restaurant Association, a trade group, found evidence that the rising minimum wage was slowing growth in the state’s restaurant industry.Kris Stuebner, an executive at Jem Restaurant Management Corporation, which operates KFC and Wendy’s franchises in Fresno, said the wage mandate had been particularly tough for restaurant operators like him, who have to allocate a percentage of their profits to things like franchise royalties and advertising fees.He has not reduced his work force, he said. But to offset the rising labor costs, he said, he has had to raise prices and look for places to save money. He formed an internal maintenance department because he could no longer afford to pay an outside company to fix issues like plumbing.“It’s this balancing act — you’ve got all these balls in the air to juggle,” he said.Several employers questioned the logic of applying a statewide minimum wage in a place like Fresno, where the cost of living is much lower than in coastal cities. In voices tinged with resentment, some describe the rising minimum wage as akin to a “payroll tax grab” by the government because payroll taxes for employers are tied to employees’ wages and rise when wages do.Some business owners also noted that they had had to raise wages for employees already making more than the minimum to keep the pay scale fair. And some mentioned indirect results: When the minimum wage increases, the price of other things, from gas to cleaning linens to produce, increases as well.Yet hiring has continued. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, restaurant employment in Fresno rose by about 7 percent from the end of 2016 to the end of 2019, before the pandemic — a slightly higher rate than in California as a whole.The minimum-wage law allows the governor to delay a planned increase for a year if the economy weakens. With the pandemic gutting their industry, restaurant owners in Fresno and elsewhere urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to do so.When he didn’t, some owners were outraged.“It’s frustrating as can be,” said Chuck Van Fleet, the owner of Vino Grille & Spirits and the president of the Fresno chapter of the California Restaurant Association. “You’ve got somebody who’s out there saying, ‘Hey, I’m trying to do what’s right for everybody.’ And the only thing he wants to do is increase wages.”At the same time, the wage increases in California have offered hope to some workers in Fresno, whose incomes have grown.Ms. Parra, the Walmart cashier, has lived almost her whole life in Fresno. She recently graduated from California State University, Fresno, with a degree in mass communications and journalism, focusing on advertising, and dreams of becoming an art director.She was making $15 an hour in a part-time job at a public relations firm before she was let go in the spring during the first coronavirus surge. She started working at Walmart in October for $13 an hour, the minimum wage last year.Jessica Ramirez makes $15.65 an hour at the Amazon warehouse in Fresno, but even with food stamps, she finds her pay barely enough to support her five children.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney for The New York TimesWhen the wage went up, Ms. Parra said, she could more easily help with rent and pay the phone and cable bills at the apartment that she shares with her mother, who makes $18.50 an hour at a heating and air-conditioning company.She noted, however, that her wages were not enough for her to live on her own. “I wouldn’t say that we’re poor, but I also wouldn’t say that we’re well off,” she said. “But because there is both of us who have incomes, we’re able to do O.K.”Mayor Jerry Dyer said there were “mixed feelings, obviously,” about the rising minimum wage. “As a mayor of a city, it’s important that we have people in our community who are making a livable wage,” he said.But Mr. Dyer, a Republican, said he also understood the pain that businesses might be feeling. “I’ve heard from businesses that if the minimum wage goes up too much, they’re not able to be competitive,” he said.“That’s the challenge that we face,” he said.One prevailing question is whether $15 is enough.In Fresno, it often isn’t. M.I.T.’s Living Wage Calculator estimates that a living wage in Fresno for a family of four, with both adults working, is $22.52 an hour. In the past year, Fresno’s median rent increased by 11 percent, to $1,260, according to Apartment List’s National Rent Report, among the greatest increases in the country.For 40 hours a week, Jessica Ramirez, 26, makes $15.65 an hour at the Amazon warehouse in Fresno. She is the primary breadwinner for herself, her partner and her five children, but even with food stamps and occasional gig work, she said, her wage is barely enough for them to get by.Ms. Ramirezsaid she was renting a three-bedroom house for $1,350 a month — roughly half of what she makes.She wants to go to college, but even more, she wants a better life for her children. “I’m their provider,” she said. “I have to give them a home. That’s what they need — a home.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis.

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis.Is it possible to import growth without also importing housing problems? “I can’t point to a city that has done it right.”Construction of homes in Eagle, Idaho, in 2018. The Boise area has become one of the fastest-growing areas in the country.Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesFeb. 12, 2021Updated 10:11 a.m. ETStatistically speaking, Idaho is one of America’s greatest economic success stories. The state has low unemployment and high income growth. It has expanded education spending while managing to shore up budget reserves. Brad Little, the state’s Republican governor, has attributed this run of prosperity to the mix of low taxes and minimal regulation that conservatives call “the business climate.”But there is another factor at play: Californians, fleeing high home prices, are moving to Idaho in droves. For the past several years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states, with the largest share of new residents coming from California. This fact can be illustrated with census data, moving vans — or resentment.Home prices rose 20 percent in 2020, according to Zillow, and in Boise, “Go Back to California” graffiti has been sprayed along the highways. The last election cycle was a referendum on growth and housing, and included a fringe mayoral candidate who campaigned on a promise to keep Californians out. The dichotomy between growth and its discontents has fused the city’s politics and collective consciousness with a question that city leaders around the country were asking even before the pandemic and remote work trends accelerated relocation: Is it possible to import California’s growth without also importing its housing problems?“I can’t point to a city that has done it right,” said Lauren McLean, Boise’s Democratic mayor.That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.Housing costs are relative, of course, so anyone leaving Los Angeles or San Francisco will find almost any other city to have a bountiful selection of homes that seem unbelievably large and cheap. But for those tethered to the local economy, the influx of wealthier outsiders pushes housing costs further out of reach.According to a recent study by Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, the budget for out-of-town home buyers moving to Boise is 50 percent higher than locals’ — $738,000 versus $494,000. In Nashville, out-of-towners also have a budget that is 50 percent higher than locals. In Austin it’s 32 percent, Denver 26 percent and Phoenix 23 percent.Riverfront Park in downtown Nashville. Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, found that out-of-towners had a home buying budget that was 50 percent higher than locals.Credit…William DeShazer for The New York TimesFrustrating as this is for prospective home buyers, the real pain is felt among low-income tenants, a quarter of whom — about 11 million U.S. households — are already spending more than half their pretax income on rent. As rising costs filter through the market and the rent burden gets more severe, food budgets get squeezed, families double up and the most vulnerable end up on the streets.In city after city, studies have shown that homelessness has a distinct financial tipping point. As soon as the local rent burden reaches the point where renters on average spend more than a third of their income on housing, the number of people on the streets starts to rise sharply, according to researchers at Zillow and elsewhere.Cities are built around jobs, and the nation’s inequality reflects that. In a trend that has been exhaustively documented by economists and journalists, over the past four decades the U.S. economy has bifurcated into high-paying jobs in fields like tech and finance and low-paying jobs in retail and personal services. It could be described as two separate societies, but in U.S. metropolitan areas these societies are intertwined.This is as true in Boise as it is in San Francisco. Some work has to be done in person. No matter how high housing costs get, there is not, as of yet, a way to telecommute to a cleaning job. So unless the hordes of expatriate Californians flocking to cheaper cities expect their children to be in remote school forever, to never again eat at a restaurant, to always tidy their own homes — and unless companies leaving California expect to do without the services of janitors and security guards — the underlying problem will persist in every next city that has the misfortune of becoming desirable.Scholars started documenting California’s affordable housing crisis in the mid-1970s, and since then liberal and conservative economists have identified stringent zoning regulations and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) politics as leading causes of the nation’s housing problem. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken up the NIMBY issue. Jack Kemp, the secretary of housing and urban development for the first President George Bush, convened a housing advisory commission whose 1991 report was called “Not in My Back Yard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing.”President Barack Obama spoke against “rules that stand in the way of building new housing” in a speech in 2016, and President Donald J. Trump, echoing Mr. Bush, signed an executive order in 2019 establishing a White House council on affordable housing. (Mr. Trump reversed course a year later, ending an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in the suburbs.)The problem is that opposition to new housing also has bipartisan agreement. Blue cities full of people who say they want a more equitable society consistently vote to push housing costs onto others. They will vote for higher taxes to fund social programs, but also make sure that whatever affordable housing does get built is built far away from them. Red suburbs full of people who say regulation should be minimal and property rights protected insist that their local governments legislate a million little rules that dictate what can be built where. What does it mean to respect property rights? In zoning fights, it gets fuzzy.“Normally we think of ownership as determining who has a right to use a piece of property in a certain way,” said Emily Hamilton, an economist and director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. But when a city tries to add density, she said, it’s common to see this framed “as harming the property rights of people who could experience changes in their neighborhood.”It’s a distant memory now, but in the weeks before the pandemic shut down the economy, housing policy was having a minor political moment. The field of Democratic presidential candidates, including President Biden, had released a flurry of federal housing proposals that varied in their particulars but revolved around a series of tax breaks, affordable housing funds and promises to encourage intransigent local governments to make it easier to build.The track record of previous administrations suggests that the federal government can accomplish only so much. That’s why Dr. Hamilton, who closely follows local housing policies, is encouraged that there are also a flurry of proposals coming out of state and local governments.In 2018 the City Council in Minneapolis voted to outlaw the practice of declaring some neighborhoods off limits for apartment buildings — what’s known as single-family zoning — becoming the first major U.S. city to do so. Since then, a half-dozen states have introduced bills to limit single-family zoning. Various others have passed laws to prevent cities from banning backyard cottages and require them to permit more apartments. Ms. McLean, the mayor of Boise, recently started an effort to rewrite the city’s zoning code.The action might be local, but the message should carry nationwide: The only way to solve the housing crisis is to address it in every city it visits. Otherwise, we’re just spreading it around.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    A Long, Lonesome Look at America

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    Twilight falls over a county road in Crook, Colorado.Flags billow along an empty sidewalk in Martin, Tennessee.In Detroit, Oregon, the wreckage from a wildfire sits beneath burned-out hills.These photographs were taken on a 10,000-mile road trip across the United States.They reflect our country’s beauty, loss, confusion, hope, division, grace and grandeur.They’re scenes of an America cloaked in solitude — and of a country on edge.Supported byContinue reading the main storyThe World Through a LensA Long, Lonesome Look at AmericaJan. 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETI was only a few days into a meandering trip across America, and already I was easing into something of a nighttime routine. Earlier in the day I’d pinpointed a promising campsite in Ozark National Forest. Now, I found myself ascending an isolated forestry road to get to it, my tires crackling over its rough, potholed surface.When I could no longer hear the road noise from the scenic highway that carried me into the mountains, I found a small clearing in the woods, shimmied my car into a level position and climbed into the back. Gathering my camping stove, I stepped outside into a light rainfall and, under a tall canopy of trees, lit the burner.All night I’d been enveloped in a thick foggy haze: not much to see, wipers running full tilt. I hadn’t interacted with anyone in days, and now even the landscape was hidden from view. But the rain seemed to be letting up — enough in this small glade, at least, for me to heat a pot of water for a solitary cup of tea. In the morning, I thought, if things cleared, there’d even be hope of seeing the surrounding mountains in their autumnal glory.Lichens on the rock reflect the turning of the leaves at Sam’s Throne, in Ozark National Forest.So it went, it seems, with much of 2020: our lives — and our country — enveloped in a haze of uncertainty, without our knowing whether the next day would bring a modicum of relief or a deepening of our solitude.Cattle in a field near Encino, N.M.Flocks of geese head west over Nebraska.In October I set off on a trip to witness and document this singular moment in American history — to look quietly and intently at our country, to parse its scenery.A polka-dotted awning on a vacant street in Glenwood, Ark.A boarded-up building in Carter, Wyo.The Rio Grande near Taos, N.M.To limit interaction and prevent exposure, I outfitted my car as a makeshift camper van, removing the rear seats and installing a sleeping (and living and working) platform in their place.After stocking up on food and water, I headed southwest from my hometown, Hudson, Ohio, largely avoiding highways and preferring instead to pass more slowly through less populated areas. Most nights I spent at remote, unimproved campsites — away from any developed campgrounds — in our sprawling network of national forests.The fringes of Kootenai National Forest, in northwest Montana.A barn near Libby, Mont.On many of my previous trips across the country, my spirits have been buoyed by the fleeting social interactions that occur sporadically throughout the day — at diners, motels, knickknack shops, campgrounds.Traveling in isolation, though, was a categorically different experience.Even in the casual places where travelers still gathered — gas stations, coffee shops, rest areas — there were generally no offhand conversations, no sharing of experiences, no sense of spontaneous connection. Strangers transacted and, still strangers, went their separate ways.A service station in Dale, Ore.Without the promise of social interaction, the landscape itself — both natural and built — became my focus.Often it felt like a companion. Often it felt like a manuscript, open to interpretation.Early morning light illuminates the Guadalupe Mountains, east of El Paso.A pair of deer in McKittrick Canyon.Wintry colors in Prineville, Ore.Reviewing the photographs from my trip, I found that my eyes were drawn to projections of my own isolation: lone structures, unpeopled scenes, solitary sets of tire tracks.The Fox Community Church in Grant County, Ore.A Forest Service road near Sisters, Ore.A vacant strip mall in northwest Tennessee.Looking outward, I saw within.An aptly named business in Ronan, Mont.Silhouettes against the night sky in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, in central Idaho.What also struck me were the scars. In town after town I saw sidewalks emptied, shops struggling, restaurants barely clinging to life.It all added up to the same bleak assessment: The pandemic has acted like an accelerant, hastening trends toward online commerce that threaten the future of brick-and-mortar stores and streetside businesses — the economic and communal mainstays of small towns throughout America.A café in Ojo Caliente, N.M.A service station in Vaughn, N.M.The economic fallout wasn’t the only visible trauma. In Colorado, Oregon and California, the widespread effects of the worst fire season on record were ubiquitous.Heading west from Fort Collins, Colo., along State Highway 14, I watched as crews scrambled to battle the Cameron Peak fire, the largest in Colorado history. The devastation along Highway 22 in Oregon was astonishing.Handmade signs along State Highway 14 in northern Colorado.A scorched tree trunk in Willamette National Forest.The charred remains of a home in Detroit, Ore.Our country’s political divisions were also omnipresent — in the form of yard signs, flags, billboards.In some places, the public posturing read like communal declarations. More than at other points in recent memory, businesses (as opposed solely to individuals or residences) seemed to trumpet their political affiliations.A politicized marquee on a theater on North Main Street in Springhill, La.A billboard in Carlsbad, N.M.A sign outside a farm in Bossier Parish, La.A roadside stand offering political merchandise in Medina, Tenn.There was, of course, an endless array of beauty. Gazing at the sandstone arches in eastern Utah, standing silently over the pristine waters of the McDonald Creek in northern Montana, looking out at a herd of bison in Southern Colorado, I saw the sublimity and the precariousness of our natural treasures reflected in their own forms.The Corona Arch, near Moab, Utah.McDonald Creek in Glacier National Park.A bison at the Medano-Zapata Ranch, on the eastern edge of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. In the 19th century, American bison were hunted nearly to extinction; fewer than a thousand remained from an estimated population of 30 to 60 million.If much of the American landscape can be read, then much is also continuously rewritten — particularly in our forests, grasslands and wildlife refuges, the arenas for our never-ending attempts to strike a balance between conservation and extraction, between profit and preservation.A U.S. Forest Service sign in Ouachita National Forest.A nearby logging operation.In many ways the trip felt like an extended ode to such places — our national forests in particular.Twelve days and some 4,500 miles in, I woke before dawn in the southern stretches of Bitterroot National Forest, near the border between Idaho and Montana. Temperatures outside had fallen into the low 20s; cocooned in my car, I hadn’t noticed. But, cracking the door open, I felt a rush of cold air.I peered out into the darkness.Clear skies above Bitterroot National Forest.Startled by the cold and beckoned by the Montanan scenery, I opted for an early start, descending the mountains north toward Missoula. I fell into an early-morning trance — until, 20 minutes later, I saw a fellow traveler who’d pulled his car to the side of the road and exited it. He was staring into the distance.I turned to my left, in the direction of his gaze, and saw Trapper Peak, purple and majestic, dressed in unspeakable beauty. Somehow, inexplicably, I hadn’t noticed its grandeur.I pressed the brakes and slowed to a stop some 100 feet away. I, too, exited my car and stood alongside the road.Together in solitude, we took in the scene.Pastel skies at sunrise over Trapper Peak, in the Bitterroot Mountains.Stephen Hiltner is an editor on The New York Times’s Travel desk, where he edits the weekly World Through a Lens column. You can follow his work on Instagram and Twitter.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Unemployment Claims Expected to Have Remained High Last Week

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUnemployment Claims Expected to Have Remained High Last WeekThe weekly report, which will be published Thursday morning, might show a drop in claims because of the Christmas holiday.Victor Lopez-Lucas plays with his daughter Kenya, 1, as they wait in line to receive food donations in Bradenton, Fla., on Tuesday.Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesDec. 31, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETNew clues to the economy’s trajectory heading into 2021 will come Thursday morning when the government reports the latest data on initial claims for jobless benefits.While the Christmas holiday might cause a dip in the numbers, with state unemployment offices that process claims closed for at least one day last week, new filings are expected to stay at a very high level, in the range of more than 800,000 per week, said Greg Daco, chief economist at Oxford Economics. “That’s very elevated and we are facing an economy that has slowed down significantly.”Applications for benefits declined during Thanksgiving week, only to move higher later, and a similar catch-up phenomenon could happen after Christmas and New Years, too.In California, widening restrictions on restaurants and other businesses and an uptick in coronavirus infections may cause filings to jump, said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco.“California has locked down even more, and there is no end in sight in terms of cases and hospitalizations,” he said. “We’re seeing more layoffs and that hasn’t shown up in the numbers yet.”The $900 billion stimulus package that President Trump signed into law Sunday comes too late to affect the jobless claims data. It will take months for the impact of the aid to be felt, and most economists expect the rate of layoffs to remain high.When fresh monthly jobs data is released by the Labor Department next week, Mr. Anderson expects that it will show a rise in the unemployment rate to 6.9 percent in December, up from 6.7 percent last month. The unemployment rate has fallen sharply since peaking at 14.7 percent in April but hiring has slowed as the economy has faltered in recent months.What’s more, the pace of layoffs has been persistently high, as sectors like dining, travel and entertainment are struggling while the pandemic has kept many people at home.The introduction of vaccines is a bright spot, as are positive economic signs, like surging stock prices and a booming housing market. But it will be months before enough Americans can be inoculated to allow people to go to restaurants, events and movie theaters without fear of being infected.“The trend is not good with the additional closures implemented around the country,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Edward P. Lazear, Economist and Presidential Adviser, Dies at 72

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    Edward P. Lazear, a pioneering labor economist at Stanford University who advised President George W. Bush during the financial crisis, died on Monday. He was 72.The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said. It did not say where he died.Professor Lazear may be best remembered as the founder of a field that has come to be known as personnel economics, which seeks to understand how businesses hire, retain and pay employees. He also founded the Journal of Labor Economics and the Society of Labor Economists.But perhaps his most critical job was as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when the American financial system buckled after a housing and debt bubble had burst, forcing the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions and rescue a sinking economy.“Eddie Lazear was a rare combination —-an extraordinary academic economist and a dedicated public servant who brought that intellect and skill to the solution of big policy problems,” said Condoleezza Rice, director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where Professor Lazear held a senior fellowship.In a statement, Mr. Bush called him “a trusted confidant” and “a beloved colleague.”Edward Paul Lazear was born in New York City on Aug. 17, 1948, and grew up in Los Altos, Calif. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1971 and received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where he worked with the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker and adopted his approach of applying economic tools to new domains.Professor Lazear began his professional career in 1974 as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He taught there for almost 20 years before joining the Stanford faculty.“He was the most natural economist I ever came into contact with,” said Paul Oyer, an economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “He was a deep economic natural thinker; he was born to be an economist.”Professor Lazear wrote a seminal paper about the relationship between worker pay and a company’s productivity and profits; it was based on a case study of the Safelight Glass Company. Productivity at the business soared when it shifted from paying workers an hourly wage to paying them according to the number of windshields they repaired. Professor Lazear figured out that this improvement hadn’t come about just because people had worked harder to earn more money. Rather, he found, the shift in wage policy had changed the composition of the installers: Slower workers had left the company and faster workers had taken their jobs.Professor Lazear wrote another famous paper explaining the rationale behind mandatory retirement, which was outlawed by Congress in 1986. He proposed that it is worthwhile for companies to pay workers less than what they are worth to the business when they are young, and then to raise their wages over time, to the point where they are paying them more than they are worth. But that, he found, meant that employees would try to hang on to their job for too long. Mandatory retirement thus helped solve the problem.“He is the father of a field that has had a lot of influence in the way firms design compensation and make hiring and retention policies,” said Erik Hurst, a labor economist at the University of Chicago. “This is of first-order importance for how people live their lives.”Professor Lazear fell squarely on the right of the economic policy spectrum. He was a fierce critic of the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus policies. He later championed the tax cuts signed by President Trump in 2017. He believed in the efficiency of markets and disliked the minimum wage and other government interventions.But even his ideological opponents acknowledged his integrity and commitment to rigorous thinking.“I admired the purity of his commitment to economics,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and Treasury secretary. “It is very rare among economists who work on things that have a bearing on politics.”Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard, said Professor Lazear’s work had often reached conclusions at odds with conservative views and policies.“He was not ideological on all things,” Professor Katz said, pointing out Professor Lazear’s work with Richard B. Freeman on the value of works councils, which are used in many European countries to give workers voice and power to negotiate with employers.Professor Lazear’s work also served to dispel the notion popular among American conservatives that policies that guaranteed job security condemned Europe to high unemployment and low productivity.During the financial crisis of the late 2000s and its aftermath, Professor Lazear was a critical voice demanding attention to the faltering job market as millions of people lost jobs and many people struggled to find work for months or even years.“You can see in his policy work these concerns for workers and their skills and how hard it is to transition between industries,” said Austan Goolsbee, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.Professor Lazear is survived by his wife, Victoria Lazear, and his daughter, Julie Lazear. More