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    How Inflation and High Interest Rates Have Changed the Economy

    As inflation cools and the Federal Reserve cuts rates, an era of economic upheaval is coming to a close, but not without lingering marks.People with jobs have started showing up at homeless shelters in Atlanta. Families who can’t cover their grocery bills are pushing up demand at a Boston food bank. A dearth of available houses is plaguing Sacramento. Yet reports of recent raises abound, and a partly retired homeowner near Pittsburgh is happy about his savings.America’s bout of painfully high inflation — and the period of high interest rates meant to cure it — is finally drawing toward a close. Price increases are nearly back to a normal pace, so much so that the Federal Reserve voted on Wednesday to lower borrowing costs for the first time in more than four years.But even as the nation’s tumultuous pandemic economic era begins to approach its end, the period is destined to leave lingering marks.There are many things to celebrate about the current moment. Inflation has so far cooled without a major economic pullback, a development few economists thought possible. Consumers are still spending at a solid clip. Years of strong job growth and solid wage gains have lifted up many workers, and a run-up in stock prices is padding retirement accounts.The Greater Boston Food Bank has delivered more than 100 million pounds of food every year since 2020, up from less than 70 million in 2019.Sophie Park for The New York TimesYet the past several years have also brought serious and lasting challenges. Prices remain sharply elevated compared with their prepandemic levels, and many families are still struggling to adjust. Some have seen their wages fall behind costs. For others, pay gains have kept pace with inflation, but the memory of cheaper egg and rent prices endures, leaving an ongoing sense of sticker shock. And across the country, housing affordability has tanked, a trend that could take time and even policy changes to reverse.Grocery Inflation Jumped, Then CooledGrocery inflation was even more rapid than overall price increases in 2022, though it has recently calmed notably.

    Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price IndexBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    This Is What It Looks Like to Try to Count America’s Homeless Population

    To fix a problem, you need to know its scope. To do that, you need sheriffs, social workers, volunteers, flashlights and 10 days in January.They go into the streets in search of data. Peeking behind dumpsters, shining flashlights under bridges, rustling a frosted tent to see if anyone was inside. This is what it takes to count the people in America who don’t have a place to live. To get a number, however flawed, that describes the scope of a deeply entrenched problem and the country’s progress toward fixing it.Last year, the Biden administration laid out a goal to reduce homelessness by 25 percent by 2025. The problem increasingly animates local politics, with ambitious programs to build affordable housing getting opposition from homeowners who say they want encampments gone but for the solution to be far from their communities. Across the country, homelessness is a subject in which declarations of urgency outweigh measurable progress.Officially called the Point-in-Time Count, the annual tally of those who live outside or in homeless shelters takes place in every corner of the country through the last 10 days of January, and over the past dozen years has found 550,000 to 650,000 people experiencing homelessness. The endeavor is far from perfect, advocates note, since it captures no more than a few days and is almost certainly a significant undercount. But it’s a snapshot from which resources flow, and creates a shared understanding of a common problem.This year, reporters and photographers from The New York Times shadowed the count, using a sampling of four very different communities — warm and cold, big and small, rural and urban — to examine the same problem in vastly different places.Volunteers and employees of the Downtown Women’s Center prepare to count people who are unhoused, in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesOn any given evening, the forces that drive someone to sleep outside or in a shelter are myriad and complex. A long-run erosion in wages. A fraying social safety net. The fact that hard drugs are cheap and mental health care is not. Year after year, the count finds people experiencing homelessness to be disproportionately Black, disproportionately old and disproportionately sick. Members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community are overrepresented as well.There is one factor — the high cost of housing and difficulty of finding anything affordable — that rises above the rest. The numbers bear this out, explaining why expensive West Coast cities like Los Angeles have long had the nation’s worst homeless problems, why growing cities like Phoenix are now seeing a troubling rise, and why it is seemingly easier to solve homelessness in places like Rockford, Ill., a once-thriving factory town that has lost a lot jobs but where housing remains cheap.“Housing has become a competition for a scarce resource, and when you have that the people who are most vulnerable are going to lose,” Gregg Colburn, a professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of “Homelessness Is a Housing Problem,” said in an interview.The 2023 count will provide a crucial understanding of the legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic and the success of government efforts in blunting its effects. Last year’s count showed homelessness was essentially flat from two years ago, a fact that Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, attributed to widespread eviction moratoriums, billions in rental assistance and an expansion of federal housing vouchers that fortified the safety net. The question for this year, Mr. Olivet said, is “whether we were able to flatten the curve and even start pointing downwards.”Behind each number are tens of thousands of volunteers, outreach workers and public safety officers who spend the wee hours looking for the most destitute members of their community.Sometimes, people gladly answer questions and thank volunteers for what they are doing, with a hope that accurate figures will bring more funding for housing and services. Other times, they feel violated and gawked at.“What are you doing?” a man on a bicycle in Los Angeles asked a team of volunteers in day glow vests as they walked past a downtown sidewalk covered in tents.“Counting.”“Counting what?”“Counting people.”— Conor DoughertyLos Angeles, Jan. 25-26‘Once you enter this whole cycle, you are always on the edge’On the last night of the count, volunteers, along with those working for the Downtown Women’s Center, walk around the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles to count people who are unhoused.In the capital of the capital of homelessness, the people who live outside are used to seeing outsiders. This is especially true in Skid Row, a 50-block neighborhood in downtown where some 3,000 people live in the tents, shanties and recreational vehicles that so thoroughly clog the sidewalks that much of the pedestrian traffic is in the streets. So when dozens of volunteers in reflective vests left the Downtown Women’s Center to count on a recent evening, the people they were counting rarely so much as looked up.“They constantly have visitors, whether it’s proselytizers, outreach teams, people offering them something to eat, people offering them drugs — people doing a homeless count,” said Suzette Shaw, a volunteer who helped with the tally this year. “This community never sleeps.”Ms. Shaw is a 58-year-old student who lives in the neighborhood and was once homeless herself. She lived in various forms of transitional housing — hotels, shelters — until she found a permanent subsidized unit in 2016, whose rent is partially covered with a Section 8 housing voucher. Joining the count is one way she tries to make sense of a neighborhood whose scenes of ragged fabric and open fires are some of the bleakest pictures America has to offer.Volunteers counting people who are unhoused near Skid Row in Los Angeles.Members of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority counted people who are unhoused at an encampment near the Los Angeles River.Given that it has nation’s worst homeless problem, Los Angeles’s count requires assembling a small army that spends three days and several thousand hours amassing their figures. This ranges from volunteers like Ms. Shaw who comb sidewalks for a few hours, to officers like Lt. William Kitchin, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who along with a team of deputies and outreach workers spent a recent Wednesday driving a stretch of the Los Angeles River to tally the residents who live under overpasses and along the banks.More on CaliforniaIn the Wake of Tragedy: California is reeling after back-to-back mass shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay.Fast-Food Industry: A law creating a council with the authority to set wages and improve the conditions of fast-food workers was halted after business groups submitted enough signatures to place the issue before voters next year.Medical Misinformation: A federal judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of a new law allowing regulators to punish doctors for spreading false or misleading information about Covid-19.Oil From the Amazon: If you live in California, you may have a closer connection to oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest than you think.Unlike smaller cities, which often pair the Point-in-Time Count with interviews and outreach, for sensitivity and safety reasons organizers in Los Angeles discourage volunteers from interacting with the people on the streets.Some walk, some drive, but for the most part it happens briskly and the numbers they come back with are large. According to last year’s count, about 20 percent of the entire nation’s unsheltered population — about 50,000 people — lived in Los Angeles County.This has left voters despondent: Surveys consistently show housing and homelessness are the biggest concern of California voters, while a recent poll by the Los Angeles Business Council Institute found residents are furious at the city’s inability to make so much as a dent, with many voters saying they feel unsafe and have considered moving because of the homeless problem.Deputies from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department talk with Reyna Paula, who has built a temporary home, in which she has been living for five years, under a bridge along Coyote Creek.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesSeveral deputies accompanied workers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority as they counted people who are unhoused staying along the riverbed and under bridges in Los Angeles.After a campaign last year that focused almost entirely on homelessness, Karen Bass, the city’s new mayor, declared a state of emergency on her first day in office. This gives her office expanded powers to speed the construction of affordable housing by lifting rules that impede it. “Tonight we’re counting the people on the street, but we also know that it is most important that we prevent new people from falling into homelessness,” the mayor said to a crowd at a kickoff event in the San Fernando Valley. She joined the count shortly after, along with the actor Danny Trejo.Ms. Bass summed up the central problem for Los Angeles and other high-cost U.S. cities: Even as they spend billions on new housing and expanded services, more people continue to fall into homelessness faster than these programs can help people already on the streets. Nationally, some 901,000 people exited homelessness each year between 2017 and 2020 on average. That figure would be a huge accomplishment, but for one detail: About 909,000 people entered homelessness each year over the same period.“Once you enter this whole cycle, you are always on the edge,” Ms. Shaw said.Phoenix, Jan. 25‘I stayed there till they kicked me out’​​Advocates say Phoenix’s streets are increasingly filled with people who simply could not afford an increasingly pricey Arizona.Daniel Greene never thought he would end up homeless in Phoenix, a city that enticed him from Idaho a decade ago with balmy winters and cheap housing. But when his lease was up for renewal in December, Mr. Greene said his landlord raised the monthly rent on his one-bedroom apartment to $1,400 from $700. Arizona has few restrictions on rent increases. Now, Mr. Greene is sleeping in a park while he tries to scrape together a deposit.“I would need $4,000,” he said on Tuesday morning, as a volunteer counted Mr. Greene as part of the city’s portion of the annual Point-in-Time Count.Mr. Greene, 54, is one of thousands of newly homeless people who have been coughed out of the tailpipe of Arizona’s economic engine, casualties of growth that has drawn new factories and hundreds of thousands of new residents, while sending housing costs spiraling.Advocates say Phoenix’s streets are increasingly filled with people who simply could not afford an increasingly pricey Arizona: Average rent in the Phoenix area has risen by about 70 percent over the past five years, and the number of people in shelters or living on the street has gone up by 60 percent.“The cost of housing is the biggest thing we see,” said Kenn Weise, the mayor of the suburban city Avondale, Ariz., and chairman of the Maricopa Association of Governments, which runs the Point-in-Time Count.The path that brought Mr. Greene to a park in downtown Phoenix, repairing a beater bicycle, began, he said, when he fell from a scaffold at his carpentry job a few years ago. Work was impossible after he crushed his leg, but he said he survived on monthly disability checks.The rent on his apartment near the palms of Encanto Park crept up from $525 to $700 before doubling in December, part of the disappearance of modestly priced rentals around Phoenix. A decade ago, almost 90 percent of apartments around Phoenix rented for $1,000 or less. Now, just 10 percent do.“I stayed there till they kicked me out,” Mr. Greene said.Gustavo Martinez, who is unhoused in Phoenix. He lost his job during the pandemic, he said, and feels safer sleeping outside than in a shelter.The Point-in-Time Count is part census, part deeply intimate personal history. Volunteers here ask for people’s name, age and ethnicity, but also whether prison time, drug use or mental illness is a factor in their homelessness. He shoved his furniture and most of his clothes into a $100 monthly storage unit and decided to live outside to try to rebuild his finances. A weekly motel might have been safer, but he figured the open air was free. He is camping out with three other men and spends a lot of time scouring roommate websites.“I’m doing this on my own,” he said.As the first of nearly 1,000 volunteers crisscrossed downtown Phoenix starting before sunrise on Tuesday morning, they met people sleeping in makeshift tents beside new art spaces and camping out in the shadow of construction cranes.One volunteer, Katie Gentry, regional homelessness program manager for the Maricopa Association of Governments, walked up to a gas station downtown where people had come to ask for quarters to buy coffee and escape from the chill; she approached them to ask a litany of deeply personal questions with a matter-of-fact cheerfulness.Daniel Pawlak and Rochelle Putnam have been living in an encampment known as “The Zone.”Alisha Coleman bikes away after being questioned during a Point-in-Time Count.The Point-in-Time Count is part census, part deeply intimate personal history. Volunteers here ask for people’s name, age and ethnicity, but also whether prison time, drug use or mental illness is a factor in their homelessness. One question asks whether people had ever traded sex for shelter.Gustavo Martinez, 56, said he lost his job as a concessionaire for spring-training baseball games during the early days of the pandemic, and he lost his subleased apartment a few months later. He has been bouncing from friends’ couches to shelter beds to living on the streets ever since. He said that he earned a little money cleaning up after the downtown Phoenix farmers market, and that he often spent his time marveling at how anyone could afford to live downtown in the new high-rises sprouting up around him.“Everything is just going up and up and up.”Cleveland, Mississippi, Jan. 25-27‘They were born there, raised there, and they have become homeless there’Kerria Whitley, an intern at the Bolivar Community Action Agency, takes photographs of a vacant home that has been occupied by unhoused folks for documentation.One of Florida McKay’s colleagues had passed on a tip: There was a woman living in a trailer without heat, light or water in Shelby, Miss., a little hamlet surrounded by the soybean and cotton fields north of town. On a cold and gray morning, Ms. McKay and Robert Lukes, who was helping to administer the Point-in-Time Count in the Mississippi Delta, drove past acres of mud-bogged farmland to find her.“The Delta’s a little different from other areas in terms of homelessness,” said Ms. McKay, the director of homeless services for the Bolivar County Community Action Agency, a nonprofit organization. There are plenty of people in need here — the median household income in Bolivar County is less than half of the nation’s and the poverty rate is roughly triple — but they are scattered across the region, making the Point-in-Time Count a sprawling exercise in detective work.On a street corner in Shelby, they parked near a blue and white trailer sagging into the grass. A woman opened the tattered door, hugging herself in the cold, and welcomed Ms. McKay and Mr. Lukes inside. Blankets were stapled over the windows and a rusty propane tank squatted at the end of a bed.Mr. Lukes began the questionnaire: name, age, how long had she been homeless. Vickey Wells, she said, born on Christmas Day, 1971. She had been living in this dark, cold room for most of a year. Asked how long she had been in the community, Ms. Wells seemed puzzled. She grew up down the street. “This is my home,” she said.“The Delta’s a little different from other areas in terms of homelessness,” said Florida McKay, the director of homeless services for the Bolivar County Community Action Agency, a nonprofit organization.Robert Lukes, center, and Ms. McKay with Vickey Wells inside a trailer she has been living for a year without gas, electricity and water.Rural areas are different in terms of homelessness and the Delta is perhaps more different still. In this vast expanse of rural Mississippi, one of the poorest regions of the country, there are very few shelters, very few multifamily housing developments and, relative to the rest of the country, fewer places for rent.It is a landscape of cropland and modest stand-alone homes, where families have lived — or did live — for generations. Some homes have been empty for years, left behind by a Great Migration of Black people out of the Delta that began early last century and has never really stopped. In contrast to big cities, where those who are homeless are often people who have moved there in search of opportunities, many of the people without a place to stay in the Delta are those who have never left. In some cases they seek shelter in the homes left by those who went elsewhere.“People in the Delta that are homeless are from the Delta,” said Hannah Maharrey, the director of the Mississippi Balance of State Continuum of Care, a federally funded program to address homelessness. It’s also the organization that Mr. Lukes works for. “They are literally homeless in their hometown. They lived there, they’re from there, their roots are there, they were born there, raised there, and they have become homeless there.”Some have been kicked out by family or marooned after the death of a parent; some are escaping abuse; some have fallen prey to addiction in a place where the margin for error is virtually nonexistent. Some never left their homes at all, staying as the structures around them decayed and utilities were cut off, becoming homeless without ever moving. The Point-in-Time Count relies on these local ranks and their network of sources — court clerks, gas station attendants, motel owners, police officers, longtime contacts within the homeless community itself. Kimberly Martin, 33, of Eudora, Ark., in a vehicle that she and her partner, Jason Matlock, have been living in for six months, in Greenville, Miss.Jobs in the Delta are scarce, government services are limited and the nonprofit infrastructure is thin, Ms. Maharrey said. The burden of helping the desperate falls largely to churches, neighbors and community groups.The Point-in-Time Count relies on these local ranks and their network of sources — court clerks, gas station attendants, motel owners, police officers, longtime contacts within the homeless community itself. On cold nights, those seeking shelter find sanctuary anywhere they can, in cars, abandoned homes and vacant strip malls. The only way to really know who is staying where is to live in these communities and know the people firsthand.The fact that the rural homeless population is harder to see is what makes the yearly census so important, Ms. Maharrey said. “When I talk to other communities, they find it difficult to believe that there’s homelessness in rural Mississippi, or that there’s homelessness in rural America,” she said. “The Point-in-Time Count gives us a reference point.”In Greenwood, Miss., population around 14,000, the team drove into a wooded lot where Donjua Parris, 43, had been living with her partner since the summer. Four years ago, her partner lost his maintenance job at the apartment building where they lived, she said, and when they were evicted, her family wouldn’t take them in. Ms. Lukes ran through the census questions with Ms. Parris, who shivered in the cold, then he asked her where they should go to find others.“There is a place,” she said, gesturing toward an area on the riverside of a nearby levee, where she said a pregnant woman was living. “She needs help.”A few minutes later, Mr. Lukes had climbed down the levee and found a campsite abandoned. If the woman had been there, she was gone now.Rockford, Illinois.‘Right now, I don’t got to worry anymore’Kathleen Combs speaks to a person seeking shelter for the night at a warming center at Second First Church in Rockford, Ill.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesEmpty bridges, empty alleys, an empty shanty behind a strip mall parking lot. Angie Walker ticked off a list of where people have been known to sleep. Outside, it was in the mid-20s with a light layer of snow upholstered on fences and grass.“Our hope is that nobody is outside,” said Ms. Walker, who oversees the homeless program for Rockford’s Health and Human Services Department. “We don’t usually get that lucky.”They did not, but they were close. After a three-hour search in a Chevy Suburban that at times went off-road and on bike paths, Ms. Walker and her team, which included a retired police officer and a member of the Fire Department, found only one person — a shivering man in a tent who clasped his hands as she ran through a list of survey questions — on the night of Rockford’s count.As Ms. Walker had predicted earlier in the evening, most of the night’s numbers consisted of the three-dozen people who laid on rectangles of padding parceled across a gym floor at Second First Church. On winter nights, the church becomes a warming center, providing a captive audience for Ms. Walker and the dozen others who spent an hour counting bodies and performing surveys after the drive.Not having to worry anymore: That is the goal of the tens of billions that city, state and federal governments spend each year in their so far futile effort to end homelessness.“Right now, I don’t got to worry anymore,” said Shirley Gill, 63, who was in for the evening.Douglas Webb, 54, a Marine Corps veteran, was unhoused and used to sleep in the warming center at Second First. Now he works at the center in the winter.Rockford is one of the country’s biggest success stories, having effectively ended the condition for veterans and chronically homeless individuals, or those who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, who have severe addiction problems or live with a disability of some kind.The road to those accomplishments was a program called “Built for Zero,” a coalition of 105 local governments nationwide whose members commit to reorganizing their social services and gathering monthly data with a goal of drastically reducing their homeless population. (In 2021, Community Solutions, the New York nonprofit that created “Built for Zero,” was awarded a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to expand the program.)Central to the work is a concept called “functional zero,” or the point at which the number of people going into and out of homelessness is equal each month, and anyone who experiences it isn’t homeless for more than a few weeks. This does not mean no one will ever be seen sleeping on the streets: Community Solutions instead likens its strategy to a hospital that can take care of everyone who shows up, even if the medical staff can’t prevent them from getting sick.“Before we get to a place where no one ever has to experience homelessness, we need some milestone that shows we have a system that can be responsive,” said Beth Sandor, chief program officer at Community Solutions.Rockford is one of the country’s biggest success stories, having effectively ended the condition for veterans and chronically homeless individuals.Shannon Kopp and Angie Gibbons talking to a man sleeping in a tent behind a shopping mall in Rockford. He has refused to sleep in a warming center but agreed to accept some supplies and food.Back at the warming center on the night of the count, Douglas Webb, a 54-year-old Marine Corps veteran, provided an example of good news. The first time Mr. Webb visited the warming center at Second First, he said, was after an outreach worker found him under a mass of blankets in a parking garage. Now he works at the warming center in the winter.“I was able to pull myself out of it,” he said.Mr. Webb is part of what is perhaps the most encouraging story in homelessness. Measured by the Point-in-Time Count, homelessness among veterans nationwide has plunged 55 percent since 2010, as the federal government has poured money into housing and support programs for them.Mr. Webb noted that he paid $620 for a one-bedroom apartment, low by national standards. (Rockford’s rents are about half the national level, according to a rental index compiled by Zillow.) This is a reflection of the city’s economic malaise. In the hours before the count, Ms. Walker gave a brief tour of Rockford, with sights that included an abandoned factory that used to provide good paying jobs, the anchor storefront that used to be a Kmart, the boarded-up school where people sometimes live.An abandoned shelter, often used by people without homes, near a highway in a wooded area in Rockford.The city of 147,000 is a picture of Rust Belt decline, with problems that are a magnification of the country’s stratifying economy: Over the past several decades, its base of middle-class manufacturing jobs has withered and been replaced by low-wage retail work, creating a cycle of poverty, despair and crime.As Ms. Walker surveyed a deserted encampment made with tarps and PVC piping, she noted that some of the city’s success in fighting homelessness could be attributed to its decline. In other words, because there’s been so much disinvestment, Rockford’s housing is cheaper and more plentiful than elsewhere. And such is the irony of homelessness: Economically speaking, it’s easier to solve it in places where things are going poorly than where things are going well. More

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    In California’s Housing Fight, It’s Newsom vs. NIMBY

    Laws to encourage more development and denser housing don’t do much good if no one enforces them. As the state political calculus shifts, Gavin Newsom is trying to change that.By any objective measure, nothing that happens in Woodside, Calif., is going to make much difference to a state whose housing crisis is characterized by some of the nation’s highest rents and home prices and has more than 100,000 people living on its streets. The town, a wealthy enclave of the Silicon Valley, is less than 12 square miles and contains about 5,000 of California’s 40 million residents.But earlier this year, when Woodside’s government made a curious announcement that the town was being designated a sanctuary for mountain lions — a move that, as it happened, would also protect a hamlet of multimillion-dollar homes from a new law allowing duplexes across the state — the response was an object lesson in how California politics have shifted as housing has become voters’ primary concern.The Department of Housing and Community Development, California’s main housing agency, said it was investigating the mountain lion plan. The state attorney general followed with a letter (and a news release announcing the letter) that said the proposed sanctuary was illegal, and accused the town of “deliberately attempting to shut off the supply of new housing opportunities.”Along the way legislators, housing advocates and even the Sacramento-based Mountain Lion Foundation pilloried the move. Woodside reversed course after the Department of Fish and Wildlife advised city officials that it was impossible for the entire town to be considered a cougar habitat. Shortly after, the city announced it was taking applications for duplexes.Woodside, Calif., tried to declare itself a mountain lion habitat, a move that would have barred duplex housing in the town. The state pushed back.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesFor the past six years, through boom, bust and pandemic, California’s Legislature has ended each session with a blitz of new laws that aim to make housing more plentiful and affordable. Statewide rent control. Moves to encourage backyard units. A dismantling of single-family zoning rules. The barrage continued in this year’s session, concluded on Wednesday, when lawmakers passed a pair of measures that aim to turn retail centers, office buildings and parking lots into potentially millions of future housing units — moves that caused many political observers to reconsider what is politically possible.The laws received a decent amount of fanfare at each signing, signaling a turn in state policy and priorities. Until recently though, no one put much effort into enforcing them.That has started to change as Gov. Gavin Newsom has, for reasons practical and political, shifted toward an increasingly aggressive effort to enforce laws already on the books. This ranges from small-scale stings, like the state housing agency’s sending letters to local governments telling them that they are out of compliance with state housing regulations, to much larger efforts, like a first-of-its-kind investigation into San Francisco’s notoriously complex development process.In some cases, the governor’s office is working with the attorney general to initiate lawsuits against localities that they believe are breaking the law. Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, who along with Mr. Newsom is running for re-election this year, said he expected this to only get more intense.“We are just getting started,” he said in an interview.The policy is simple: Laws that are good enough to sign should be good enough to enforce. But there are political calculations as well, and they begin with a harsh reality. No matter how much legislation the state passes, its housing crisis is so deep and multifaceted that it will be nearly impossible to show real progress in any given political cycle, and probably not for decades.Read More on the Newsom AdministrationGasoline Cars: California is moving ahead with a ban on the sale of new internal-combustion vehicles in the state by 2035, as part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s big climate plan,Injection-Site Bill: The governor vetoed a bill for supervised drug-injection sites in California, saying the state was not ready to put the idea into practice.Abortion: With the end of Roe v. Wade, Mr. Newsom vowed to “fight like hell” for abortion rights. His state is also looking to enshrine those rights in its constitution.Contentious Bills: The governor must decide whether to sign into law or veto several proposals that have drawn intense lobbying from both sides. Here is a closer look at some bills under consideration.That is a hard sell to voters who would like quick victories. Lacking a slam dunk to point to in campaign ads, Mr. Newsom and others have been applying the law, loudly. Take, for instance, the recent interview in which the governor told The San Francisco Chronicle that “NIMBYism is destroying the state” (referring to the “not in my backyard” attitude that impedes new housing). Or the mad rush to condemn Woodside. Or the Housing Strike Force that Mr. Bonta announced in November.“Over the last 50 or 60 years, cities have not made the right decisions collectively on housing,” said Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Mr. Newsom who oversees housing policy. “That has left us in a place where the state has no choice but to enforce the law.”The notoriously complex development process in San Francisco is the focus of a state investigation.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesCalifornia has long been described as a look at the nation’s future, and in the case of housing, the good and bad, this frame has held true since the end of World War II. Today, as the rising cost of housing has ballooned into a national problem, state legislatures across the country have mirrored California by passing a host of new laws that aim to speed new development and allow denser forms of housing.The Biden administration is hoping to encourage these efforts with a “Housing Supply Action Plan,” which, among other things, would use grant funding as a carrot for local governments that liberalize their housing laws.Those reforms won’t amount to much if cities never follow them, however. And while that might sound obvious, passing laws that nobody follows has historically been where state housing policy began and ended. That’s because, in California and elsewhere, most of the power about where and how to build has traditionally been left to local governments, on the theory that land use is better handled by people closest to the problem.“The role the state was playing is that they would mostly advise cities on what to do and make recommendations,” said Ben Metcalf, who is managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. He ran California’s Department of Housing and Community Development from 2016 to 2019.The problem is that homeowners and renters from a wide range of income levels are frequently antagonistic to having anything, and especially anything dense, built in their neighborhoods. And local elected officials are beholden to them. The result is that even though California has had various housing laws on its books for decades, cities regard them as pliable, and the state, in deference to local control, has rarely challenged them.“For decades there has been a pattern where cities flagrantly ignore state housing law and the state responds by halfheartedly saying, ‘Can you pretty please follow the law?’” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, a San Francisco Bay Area-based nonprofit that supports building more housing around the country. “Then the cities ignore them, and the state says, ‘OK, we’ll get you next time.’”Laura Foote, the executive director of YIMBY Action.Andrew Burton for The New York TimesUntil 2017, when a suite of new laws expanded the Department of Housing and Community Development’s authority, it wasn’t even clear if it had the power to penalize cities that weren’t following state housing dictates. Mr. Newsom’s administration has since used $4 million to create a housing Accountability and Enforcement unit to investigate cities and implement the laws, while legislators have usurped local authorities by forcing them to plan for more and denser housing, hemmed their options for stopping it, and created measures to strip them of land use power when they don’t comply.“It gives us something to ensure that these programs aren’t just writing,” said David Zisser, who heads the housing department’s new enforcement unit.As affordable housing problems spread, California’s enforcement kick could be an indication of an increasingly pitched battle between cities and states over housing. It also gives a clue into how Mr. Newsom might defend himself from political attacks over California’s housing and homelessness problems, something that is all but guaranteed to happen if he seeks higher office. (A Newsom run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024 is currently the stuff of political parlor games, and despite the chatter, the governor and everyone in his camp dismiss such ambitions.)In the interview, Mr. Elliott, the housing adviser, noted that the advantage the governor has in enforcing tough housing measures is that he draws votes from around the state instead of locally. The administration can play the heavy in a local dispute without having to worry about alienating its entire voting base.“It’s very logical, politically, for an individual city council person or an individual member of a board of supervisors to be against an individual project,” he said. “I think the job of the state is to change the political calculus so ‘yes’ becomes the default instead of ‘no.’”There is already some indication that years of state housing bills, combined with rising voter frustrations, have started to create such a shift. When the state housing department opened its investigation into San Francisco in August, London Breed, the city’s mayor, welcomed it with a tweet.“When I ran in 2018, it was a vulnerability to be an unapologetically pro-housing candidate,” said Buffy Wicks, a Democratic Assembly member from Oakland who wrote one of the two main housing bills passed by the Legislature this week. “Now it is absolutely an asset. I get up on the floor of the Assembly and I say, 10 times a week, ‘We have to build more housing in our communities, all of our communities need more housing, we need low-income, middle-income, market rate.’ You couldn’t do that in a comfortable way four years ago.”Cities seem to have absorbed the new reality of a state on closer watch. Last year, after the Legislature passed the duplex law, dozens of cities responded by adopting a slew of new ordinances that don’t explicitly prohibit the units but, through a series of tiny rules, tried to discourage anyone from actually building them.Woodside’s Mountain Lion proposal got the most attention but was far from the only one.When Temple City, in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley, adopted rules for how it would carry out the duplex law — rules that required new units to have a large outdoor courtyard, the highest level of energy efficiency, and restricted future tenants from parking on site or obtaining permits to park on the street overnight — the City Council was clear what the aim was.“What we are trying to do here is to mitigate the impact of what we believe is a ridiculous state law,” said Councilman Tom Chavez, just before the Council unanimously passed the measure.By April, the Department of Housing and Community Development had warned Temple City that its new ordinance was likely in violation of at least five state housing laws. In an email, Bryan Cook, the city manager, said it was working with the state and would consider changing the ordinance after its work with the state was done. More

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    The Next Affordable City Is Already Too Expensive

    Maybe it was the date night when he and his wife spent two hours driving 19 miles to dinner, or the homeless encampment down the street, or the fact that homes were so expensive that his children could never afford to live near him.Whatever the reasons, and there were many, Steve MacDonald decided he was done with Los Angeles. He wanted a city that was smaller and cheaper, big enough that he could find a decent restaurant but not so much that its problems felt unsolvable and every little task like an odyssey. After the pandemic hit and he and his wife went through a grand reprioritizing, they centered on Spokane, where their son went to college. They had always liked visiting and decided it would be a nice place to move.Eastern Washington was of course much colder. Until this winter, Mr. MacDonald, a native Southern Californian, had never shoveled snow. But their new house is twice as big as their Los Angeles home, cost less than half as much and is a five-minute commute from City Hall, where Mr. MacDonald works as Spokane’s director of community and economic development.He arrives each day to tackle a familiar conundrum: how to prevent Spokane from developing the same kinds of problems that people like him are moving there to escape.“I’m realizing more and more how important the future prosperity of this city is about getting housing right,” he said. “If we don’t, it’s going to track more closely with what happened in Los Angeles.”Mr. MacDonald knows the pattern, and so does everyone else who has been following the frenetic U.S. housing market for the past decade. The story plays out locally but is national in scope. It is the story of people leaving high-cost cities because they’ve been priced out or become fed up with how impossible the housing problem seems. Then it becomes the story of a city trying to tame prices by building more housing, followed by the story of neighbors fighting to prevent it, followed by the story of less expensive cities being deluged with buyers from more expensive cities, followed by the less expensive cities descending into the same problems and struggling with the same solutions.It’s easier to change where we live than it is to change how we live.Whether it’s Boise or Reno or Portland or Austin, the American housing market is caught in a vicious cycle of broken expectations that operates like a food chain: The sharks flee New York and Los Angeles and gobble up the housing in Austin and Portland, whose priced-out home buyers swim to the cheaper feeding grounds of places like Spokane. The cycle brings bitterness and “Don’t Move Here” bumper stickers — and in Spokane it has been supercharged during the pandemic and companies’ shift to remote work.No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many cities and states try to blunt it with recommendations to build more housing and provide subsidies for those who can’t afford the new stuff, no matter how many zoning battles are fought or homeless camps lamented, no next city, as of yet, seems better prepared than the last one was.Just a few years ago, a Spokane household that made the median income could afford about two-thirds of the homes on the market, according to Zillow. Now home prices are up 60 percent over the past two years, pricing out broad swaths of the populace and fomenting an escalating housing crisis marked by resentment, zoning fights and tents.Nadine Woodward, the mayor of Spokane, Wash., said the city might be too expensive even for her own son and his wife.Rajah Bose for The New York TimesBeing an “it” place was something Spokane’s leaders had long hoped for. The city and its metropolitan region have spent decades trying to convince out-of-town professionals and businesses that it would be a great place to move. Now their wish has been granted, and the city is grappling with the consequences.The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.Garage doors, a straightforward finishing touch, have become a source of woe for the home-building industry, thanks to supply-chain issues.Was the “Russian flu” of the late 19th century actually a pandemic driven by a coronavirus? And could its course give us clues about our pandemic?Our reporter hid seven tracking devices in her husband’s belongings to see how invasive they were and which ones he would find.Growth is never perfect, and Spokane’s influx has been accompanied by a booming employment market that has increased wages, turned abandoned warehouses into offices and helped the city recover jobs lost during the pandemic. This is normally called progress. But for people who already lived in and around Spokane or the suburbs just across the border in north Idaho, the shift from living in a place that was broadly affordable to broadly not has come on with the suddenness of a car crash. Now many workers are wondering what the point of growth is if it only makes it harder to keep a roof over their head.Even the mayor isn’t immune. In an interview, Nadine Woodward, a Republican who was elected in 2019, noted that her son and daughter-in-law, newlyweds who moved home during the pandemic, were living with her and her husband while they figured out where they could afford to settle. They came back to Spokane from Seattle, where they were long ago priced out. Austin was the next city on their list, but then its home prices shot up to about where Seattle’s were when they left. At this point, even Spokane is seeming pricey.“I never thought I’d see the day where my adult children couldn’t afford a home in Spokane,” Ms. Woodward said.Between Seattle and MinneapolisStanding by a snow-covered lawn on an overcast afternoon, Steve Silbar, a local real estate agent who has been selling homes for five years, explained Spokane’s transformation in terms of a six-inch screen. When he thinks of a typical buyer, Mr. Silbar said, he imagines a couple thousands of miles away, perhaps on a beach, looking at their phones. They’re considering moving to a cheaper city, and do a search for homes.Clients like this are why Mr. Silbar invested $3,000 in a camera that allows him to create three-dimensional tours of his listings, and why the exterior of every home he sells is showcased with an aerial video shot by a drone. In a market that attracts so many outsiders, a virtual walk through the interior and bird’s-eye flight over the street can be the nudge buyers need to bid on a home they’ve never entered, in a city they’ve never seen.“I have to assume that the person that is looking at my listing has never been to Spokane, does not know about Spokane, has no clue,” Mr. Silbar said.Steve Silbar, a real estate agent, showing a home in Spokane. He relies on virtual methods to help buyers from outside the region.Rajah Bose for The New York TimesSpokane is the largest city on the road from Seattle to Minneapolis. This fact is frequently cited as the logic behind its economy: It’s between things. The city was incorporated in 1881 and grew into a transportation hub for the surrounding mining and logging industries. It remains a hub, only instead of shipping out timber and silver, businesses revolve around Fairchild Air Force Base and a collection of hospitals and universities that draw from the rural towns that stretch from eastern Washington to northern Idaho and into western Montana.The transition from past to present plays out across a skyline in which the usual collection of anonymous bank and hotel towers is broken up by historic brick buildings that seem to be either in a state of abandonment or rehabilitation or occupied by low-rent tenants while waiting for redevelopment. The current boom has already made its mark in the form of new apartment towers, warehouses turned office buildings and an empty lot that will soon contain a 22-story building that will be the city’s tallest.Driving around town, Michael Sharapata, a commercial real estate broker who moved to Spokane from the Bay Area in 2017, gave a staccato accounting of new leases, such as the millions of square feet that Amazon occupies out by the airport, or the satellite offices rented by various regional accounting and building firms.His family is coming, too. After Mr. Sharapata and his wife moved north, they were followed, in rapid succession, by his brother-in-law in Austin, another brother-in-law in the Bay Area and his sister-in-law in Salt Lake City.“We were looking for an affordable community that had an opportunity to accommodate all of us,” he said.As in most of urban America, much of the growth in the Spokane area is on the fringes, where heavy equipment and the skeletal outlines of new subdivisions unfold in every direction and into Idaho. Building permits have surged, and the cadre of mostly local builders who had the market more or less to themselves now grumble that the rapid growth has attracted big national builders like D.R. Horton and Toll Brothers.All of this happened fairly recently. In the years after the Great Recession, when homebuilders were in bankruptcy or hibernation, migration to the Spokane region plunged. That pattern shifted in 2014 when, as if a switch had been flipped, waves of migrants started arriving as already high-cost cities like Seattle and San Francisco saw their housing markets go into a tech-fueled frenzy.By the end of 2014, migration to the Spokane region had jumped to more than 2,000 net new residents, compared with a net loss the year before, according to Equifax and Moody’s Analytics. Annual growth has only continued, rising further with the pandemic to more than 4,500 net new residents.Sometimes they come for the chance to buy their first home. Other times it’s a bigger house or some land. Joel Sweeney, an academic adviser at Eastern Washington University, wanted the best of both: a single-family house on a quiet street that was close enough to downtown that he could walk to a good brewery. That sort of Goldilocks urbanity could cost a million in Austin, where he and his wife lived until last year. When they moved to Spokane they paid less than a third of that.“You could not get a house for $299,000 in Austin where you could walk to a bunch of different stuff,” he said.Nurses and teachersLindsey Simler, who grew up in Spokane, wants to buy a home in the $300,000 range, but put her search on pause after a dozen failed offers.Rajah Bose for The New York TimesThe white house with the red door sits on a quiet block near Gonzaga University. It has two bedrooms, one bathroom and 1,500 square feet of living space.Mr. Silbar, the real estate agent, has sold it twice in the past three years. The first time, in November 2019, he represented a buyer who offered $168,000 and got it with zero drama. This year it went back on the market, and Mr. Silbar listed it for $250,000. Fourteen offers and a bidding war later, it closed at $300,000.When Mr. Silbar got into the business, he said, his clients were “nurses and teachers,” and now they’re corporate managers, engineers and other professionals. “What you can afford in Spokane has completely changed,” he said.The typical home in the Spokane area is worth $411,000, according to Zillow. That’s still vastly less expensive than markets like the San Francisco Bay Area ($1.4 million), Los Angeles ($878,000), Seattle ($734,000) and Portland ($550,000). But it’s dizzying (and enraging) to long-term residents.Five years ago, a little over half the homes in the Spokane area sold for less than $200,000, and about 70 percent of its employed population could afford to buy a home, according to a recent report commissioned by the Spokane Association of Realtors. Now fewer than 5 percent of homes — a few dozen a month — sell for less than $200,000, and less than 15 percent of the area’s employed population can afford a home. A recent survey by Redfin, the real estate brokerage, showed that home buyers moving to Spokane in 2021 had a budget 23 percent higher than what locals had.One of Mr. Silbar’s clients, Lindsey Simler, a 38-year-old nurse who grew up in Spokane, wants to buy a home in the $300,000 range but keeps losing out because she doesn’t have enough cash to compete. Spokane isn’t so competitive that it’s awash in all-cash offers, as some higher-priced markets are. But prices have shot up so fast that many homes are appraising for less than their sale price, forcing buyers to put up higher down payments to cover the difference.A dozen failed offers later, Ms. Simler has decided to sit out the market for a while because the constant losing is so demoralizing. If prices don’t calm down, she said, she’s thinking about becoming a travel nurse. With the health care work force so depleted by Covid-19, travel nursing pays much better and, hopefully, will allow her to save more for a down payment.“I’m not at the point where I want to give up on living in Spokane, because I have family here and it feels like home,” she said. “But travel nursing is going to be my next step if I haven’t been able to land a house.” ‘Positive activity’From her seventh-floor office atop the Art Deco City Hall, Ms. Woodward, the mayor, looked out at the Spokane River, where in the warmer months a gondola glides past her window to a park built for the World’s Fair. Spokane hosted the fair in 1974 as a means of revitalizing its blighted downtown, and during the recent interview Ms. Woodward pointed out the window at cranes and construction sites that she calls “positive activity.”Spokane’s job market is among of the strongest in the nation, and the virtuous economic cycle — of people coming for housing, causing businesses to come for people, causing more people to come for jobs — is in full swing. And yet, as in Seattle and California before and increasingly across the nation, the scourge of rising prices, particularly for rent and housing, makes it feel less virtuous than advertised.The recent Realtors report warned of “significant social implications” if the city doesn’t tackle housing. The issues included young families not being able to buy or taking on excessive debt, small businesses not being able to hire, difficulty keeping young college graduates in town.In the dominoes of the housing market, the disappointments of aspiring buyers like Ms. Simler get magnified as they move down to lower-income households. With homes so hard to buy, rents have shot up, and the vacancy rate for apartments is close to zero.All of this has compounded at the lowest end of the market, where the nonprofit Volunteers of America’s Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho affiliate, which runs three shelters and maintains 240 apartments for people who were formerly homeless, said it will lose a quarter of its units in the next fiscal year as more of its funding goes to higher rents.Julie Garcia, right, founder of Jewels Helping Hands in Spokane, at her organization’s warming and food tent for people in need.Rajah Bose for The New York TimesA homeless camp in Spokane, where Mayor Woodward declared a housing emergency last year.Rajah Bose for The New York TimesIn December, as temperatures dropped and shelters filled, advocates and members of the homeless population protested by setting up several dozen tents on the City Hall steps. The encampment was gone two weeks later but has since been reconstructed on a patch of dirt on the other side of town. In the winter cold it smells like ash and soot from the open fires burning to keep people warm.Last year, Ms. Woodward declared a housing emergency, and her administration has put in place initiatives that mirror those of housing-troubled cities on the West Coast. The city has built new shelters, is encouraging developers to repurpose commercial buildings into apartments, is making it easier for residents to build backyard units and is rezoning the city to allow duplexes and other multiunit buildings in single-family neighborhoods.Ms. Woodward pointed to Kendall Yards, one of the developments outside her City Hall window, as an example of what she wanted to see more of. The mixed-density project could be a postcard picture of what economists and planners say is needed to combat the nation’s housing shortage and sprawl. In defiance of the single-family zoning laws that dictate the look of most U.S. neighborhoods, Kendall Yards has houses next to townhomes next to apartments, with retail and office mixed in.People in town seem to love it, but are leery of there being more places like it, especially in their neighborhood.“I think it’s awesome — I have friends there, and we go down there to the farmers’ market and walk around,” said John Schram, a co-chair of the neighborhood council in Spokane’s Comstock neighborhood. “That’s just not my vision of what I want for me. My concern is that I move into a neighborhood because of the way that it was designed when I got there, and when somebody else comes in and wants to change that I’m going to be concerned.”He added: “I have nothing against duplexes and triplexes, just not next to my house.” More

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    Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley

    Mary Beth Meehan and Mary Beth Meehan is an independent photographer and writer. Fred Turner is a professor of communication at Stanford University.The workers of Silicon Valley rarely look like the men idealized in its lore. They are sometimes heavier, sometimes older, often female, often darker skinned. Many migrated from elsewhere. And most earn far less than Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook. More