Monthly Archives: September 2024

A plot of land in Southern California could be a game-changer for the housing crisis

Originally published in Vox on September 12, 2024.
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Soaring prices put purchasing homes out of reach for most people, but building new housing is slow and expensive.

So far, most solutions to this housing crisis have focused on subsidizing prospective buyers. But what if there were a way to make housing cheaper at every step of the process: cheaper to build, cheaper to buy, and still affordable for the next resident?

In San Bernardino, a sunny California city located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, a first-of-its-kind experiment is underway to test these ideas on a single plot of land. Think of it as an affordable housing policy trifecta: three different strategies to bring down housing costs — all at once.

The first innovation is to streamline manufacturing. About 90 percent of homes are built on the land they rest on, but in San Bernardino, manufacturers assembled a modest house — 1,462 square feet, three bedrooms — in a factory before transporting it to its final destination on Ramona Avenue.

The existence of a new moderately sized single-family house is itself a coup when most new homes far exceed 2,000 square feet. Back in the 1940s, nearly 70 percent of new homes were 1,400 square feet or less. Today, that number hovers around 10 percent because rising land and construction costs — along with arduous permitting regulations and a preference for larger projects from lenders and investors — have made smaller homes nearly impossible to build using traditional production techniques.

In the case of San Bernardino, not only are smaller houses less expensive for residents, but factory manufacturing further lowers the price by allowing developers to complete projects more quickly. Manufactured homes cost 45 percent less per square foot than their “site-built” counterparts, according to Freddie Mac.

The second innovation is an 800-square-foot accessory dwelling unit (ADU) located on the same plot of land, about 20 feet away from the house. The matching cream-colored unit provides two more bedrooms and bathrooms to another family, below market rate. In other words, the ADU increases affordable housing without requiring additional land, making more efficient use of the space.

The third innovation: the land itself is owned by a local affordable housing development group, which is using a community land trust to ensure that both the manufactured house and the ADU remain reasonably priced for generations. The community land trust, in effect, limits how much the homeowners could ever resell the property for when they’re ready to move on.

Dora Davila, a 42-year-old medical lab technician born and raised in San Bernardino, recently moved with her three children to the new manufactured home on Ramona Avenue. Her family had been living in an apartment, and despite months of searching, could find no houses available that were affordable.

“We were looking at mobile home parks but, the thing is, none of them had a yard and I wanted space for my kids,” she said.

Davila struck gold one day when she overheard a coworker talking about their sister, who had moved into the new ADU on Ramona Avenue this past winter. The developers were now looking for a family for the adjacent house. Davila immediately reached out to the housing development group, Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, Inc.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” she told me. “It seemed too good to be true — there’s really no place that we could find something in our budget for our family.”

Dora Davila and her children outside their new home.

Dora Davila and her children outside their new home.Dora Davila

Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services had led a few other projects in southern California using factory-built housing, but never before on a community land trust. They broke ground in December 2022, and despite some construction delays, Andy Lopez, the project manager, suspects it would have taken at least nine more months to build on Ramona Avenue should they have tried to go the traditional site-built route. (It took about a year, but they’re estimating future projects could be completed in four to six months.)

Already, one other California city is looking to replicate the San Bernardino model, and federal housing officials are excited by the idea. The lower-priced houses are built to meet the construction standards set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), meaning they get special financing options, and can be produced more efficiently at scale.

“Manufactured homes built into the HUD code are special because they are the one truly reliable means we have of lowering construction costs for new homes,” said Dan Hardcastle, a special policy adviser at HUD.

In August, HUD announced it would be expanding the types of housing units that could be built under its code, paving the way for manufactured duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes.

Lopez says their goal is to combat misperceptions of manufactured housing, and to “show the community how attractive factory-built housing has become.” They know there’s still a stigma; many believe factory-built homes are dingy, clunky trailers on wheels, not regular places that look like any other home in a traditional neighborhood.

A local government caught wind of the idea

Palm Springs, California is a well-known travel destination and a luxurious retirement spot, drawing wealthy retirees from other expensive cities who have helped drive up housing prices to well above a million dollars on average.

But the average household income in Palm Springs is just about $67,000, making it very difficult for those who work in the city’s hospitality and tourism industries to buy homes.

Ariel Tolefree-Williams is an affordable housing administrator for the city, hired in early 2023 to launch new projects. She learned about the community land trust/manufactured housing pilot happening about 55 miles southeast in San Bernardino and wondered if Palm Springs could offer up its own vacant land for this model. She got in touch with Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services, and now the city is moving forward with projects on three plots of city-owned land, subdivided to build six manufactured single-family homes. Each home will rest on a community land trust also owned by the city, and be sold for roughly $170,000 to $200,000, a much more doable price for prospective families. If the project is successful, then Palm Springs plans to build more homes on other vacant properties.

A photo of a modest single-story home with carport and a front yard.

The accessory dwelling unit (ADU) at the Ramona Avenue Gateway demonstration project.NPHS Inc. and NPHS Community Land Trust

Tolefree-Williams said the projects allow the city to do something useful with its vacant single-family lots. Most housing developers are less interested in those, she explained, because they’re focused on bigger residential projects that can yield greater returns.

Some local residents initially objected when they heard manufactured homes were coming to Palm Springs. But Tolefree-Williams said concerns waned when constituents learned more about the building materials and the solar energy components. “We’re going to do a lot of community meetings and outreach in September to make sure folks understand it,” she added.

Challenges to expanding the model

A big barrier to expanding this model is the restrictive zoning codes written long ago to exclude factory-built homes from most areas.

“There are a lot of communities around the country that place restrictions on manufactured housing,” said Hardcastle, the special policy adviser at HUD. “I think you’re seeing this take off in California because they just have such high costs for purchasing and constructing homes.”

In other words, the state’s desperation has created an openness to unconventional ideas. But even in California there can be reticence to trying new things.

“There can be a lot of hold-up with obtaining various permits from the city, partly because they don’t really understand manufactured housing placed on permanent land — they’re used to it going into a [trailer] park,” said Jesse Ibarra, the chief business officer of Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services. “So we’ve had to do a lot of education with the permitting process.”

Another challenge can be finding enough special licensed contractors (known as c47 contractors) qualified to assemble manufactured homes to national standards.

Some people may be less enthusiastic about buying a house on a community land trust, since it would deny them the chance to maximize the money they could earn as their house increases in value. However, while community land trusts cap the amount of profit a homeowner can generate, owners still get to keep whatever they pay down on the mortgage when they sell.

“Some people see it as glorified rentership, but most folks see it as a much better deal than renting,” said Ibarra. “It can be a stepping stone to a bigger home, and you can save that money instead of giving it all to a landlord.”

While this San Bernardino pilot is now underway, there are some remaining kinks to iron out.

Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services plans to collect rent for the first few years and then eventually sell at least the single-family house to Davila, once they recoup their development costs. Their task will be to figure out exactly how to structure the agreement. Would Davila, or whoever else lived in the single-family house, also own the adjacent ADU and then lease that out to whomever they like? Or should that be kept under Neighborhood Partnership Housing Services’s purview? Put differently, should the first-time homeowner also become a landlord, or is that too complicated? And how does the community land trust piece fit in, if there are two units on one parcel? “We’re figuring all that out now,” said Lopez, the project manager.

Davila understands she’s part of a housing experiment. She’s just happy to have a comfortable place her family can finally call home.

“The noise outside the windows, we don’t hear anything,” she said. “I haven’t slept this well in such a long time.”

Why I changed my mind about volunteering

Originally published in Vox on August 26, 2024.
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Last fall, a reader asked me what they could really do, as one person, to aid people living on the streets. “I often feel helpless to enact change,” they wrote.

I’d been covering homelessness in America and knew that even the sprawling support organizations that have been working on outreach for decades had failed to end the crisis. My mind immediately went to systemic solutions, like voting for candidates who prioritize building more housing, or supporting efforts to loosen zoning codes.

But when I called experts, their answers surprised me. Some of our ideas overlapped, but many of their suggestions were ones I had admittedly not entertained: passing out socks or hand-warmers, donating items like sleeping bags to local shelters, or giving office supplies and bus passes to nonprofits serving unhoused people.

The reporting left me uneasy. Why did I think only about structural change and disregard more immediate help? And why don’t I do more of those day-to-day charitable things, or know many people who do, either?

I did growing up. I have clear memories of bagging meals at food pantries, of cleaning up parks, of Walking for the Cure. I sold lemonade for Darfur and baked brownies for victims of Katrina. In Hebrew school, I learned about giving tzedakah, a form of charity, and our obligation to “repair the world.”

But over time, those childhood activities started to look, well, childish. My coming of age in the 2010s coincided with critiques of individual action that were gaining prominence in media, politics, and academia — overlapping with a growing national focus on inequality and the climate crisis. It was the era of Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, and our whole country grew more fluent in rebukes of billionaires and plutocracy.

Different arguments began to emerge: Volunteering, donating, and modifying one’s personal behavior were, at best, unproductive; at worst, they were harmful distractions from the change we really need. Be wary of those tote-bag shoppers at Whole Foods, championing recycling and reducing one’s carbon footprint. Didn’t they know that BP coined the idea of the “carbon footprint” to shift blame off its own oil production? Didn’t they understand that “lifestyle politics” was not the answer? Volunteering or bake sales didn’t threaten the status quo. They were what people in power wanted you to be doing.

Real social change would come only from mass protest and collective pressure on governments and corporations. It didn’t hurt that such protests against poverty, police brutality, and rising global temperatures were also exciting, and seemed to offer young people better and more visible ways of making a difference.

As a left-leaning college student, I was persuaded by leaders who warned that personal consumer choices would never amount to real social change. I also grew familiar with arguments by activists and intellectuals that nonprofits were too often complacent and even disincentivized to solve real problems, since doing so could threaten their own funding streams. Contributing my time and money to this “nonprofit industrial complex” would be a mistake. Cutting checks wouldn’t change anything other than the balance in my savings account. For real social progress, we’d need systematic policy shifts, comprehensive legislation, and political power.

Since I received the reader’s note about homelessness last fall, I’ve been thinking more about the cost of all this cynicism. Were the arguments against individual action even helpful?

I also started to wonder if these beliefs contributed to the American “friendship recession” and loneliness crisis I kept hearing about. Back in 2000, in his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam highlighted declines in American church attendance, volunteering, civic associations, and team sports; it seems our “social cohesion” had only gotten worse since then. Gen Z and millennials volunteer at lower rates than adults born in earlier generations, even though there is pretty overwhelming research that volunteering and donating makes people happier, and boosts their self-esteem, physical health, and lifespan.

It’s not considered socially acceptable to tout personal benefits derived from charitable acts. It’d be unusual to hear volunteers say they’re going to a soup kitchen to improve their self-esteem. Perhaps this is because those gains suggest that there are more selfish motivations for behaviors we want to think of primarily as selfless. But wealthy philanthropists don’t seem shy about citing their self-interest, and often say their humanitarian work leaves them with deep feelings of pleasure, optimism, and agency.

It struck me as rather sad that those of us who are not billionaires may have convinced ourselves that volunteering or fundraising was mostly a waste of time.

When did I become someone who placed such exhausting value on optimizing my time, anyway? It suddenly felt much more arrogant than altruistic. Convenient, and uncaring.

Perhaps most importantly, had distancing ourselves from charity and service made the world a better place? Has it made my own life better?

A few developments helped sour so many in my left-leaning generation on individual action.

The climate movement over the last 15 years played a leading role, rejecting solutions based on individual responsibility, and emphasizing the limits of forgoing meat or driving hybrid cars. Activists organized worldwide youth climate strikes and pipeline protests, focusing the public’s attention on governments, oil companies, and fossil fuel lobbyists.

In the 2016 presidential primary, where he captured over 70 percent of the Democratic youth vote, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders took aim at “corporate polluters” driving the climate emergency. And perhaps no claim had more cultural influence than the widely shared, though misleading, statistic that just 100 companies were responsible for 70 percent of the world’s emissions.

There was also a largely successful effort to link curbing climate change with anti-capitalism. The 2011 Occupy protests got an even bigger boost following Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014. (Vox called it “the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade.”) Naomi Klein’s influential book This Changes Everything, also published in 2014, made the case that capitalism itself was an existential threat, that saving the planet would not be possible without overhauling the economic order.

In many ways, the growing emphasis on collective action felt clarifying, righteous, and long overdue. Student debt activists who emerged from Occupy helped millions of people process their feelings of shame and guilt over falling victim to predatory loans. New and influential left-wing outlets, like Jacobin, helped shape my generation’s consciousness and inspire us to demand more from those in power.

At their best, these collectivist messages inspired hope, agency, and empathy — spelling out a concrete playbook for a more just planet. At their worst, though, they fueled despair, cynicism, and nihilism, promising a better world only if near-impossible political changes were made, and fast. Social and economic conditions were characterized as terribly as possible, to galvanize more people to upend them. Even those who weren’t necessarily looking to foment a revolution contributed to growing negative attitudes around individual action. The Effective Altruist movement, for example, argued that most charities were wasteful and ineffective, save for some rare exceptions.

A recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that young people are far more fearful than hopeful about the future: They worry about the moral direction of the country, don’t think their vote will make a real difference, and don’t volunteer for community service. It’s not that people today are choosing to protest instead of recycling; it’s that in our current environment, many people are doing neither. Despite all the attention on collective action and solidarity, many young adults are isolated and pessimistic about social change.

I set a New Year’s resolution to volunteer. Here I was, a self-motivated journalist with professional research skills; finding charitable work I could donate my time to shouldn’t have been too hard.

But it was more difficult than I expected. I’m not a member of a faith-based organization, neither my workplace nor my union organizes volunteer events, and my initial inquiries to nonprofits through volunteermatch.org went ignored. Lacking something I could easily plug into, I felt the poverty of my institutional connections in a new way. Robert Putnam would be nodding sagely, I thought.

Finally, I stumbled on something called a “giving circle,” where people donate money collectively, mostly to local nonprofits. It resembled a book club but for philanthropy, and I found one focused on women and children in the DC area.

The full group, roughly 250 people, convenes annually to vote on donating their pooled membership funds, though those who want to be more involved can participate in subcommittees that review grant applications to help narrow down the list. Since I report on housing, I decided to join the housing subcommittee and our group of roughly 20 began meeting weekly on Tuesday nights. ​​It was unfamiliar work, but I appreciated it and all the women involved who took the reviews so seriously. I learned about extraordinary groups in the DC area, like Together We Bake, which has trained hundreds of women in food production, and SafeSpotDC, which helps victims of child abuse.

I also started reading books on volunteering, grasping for new ways to make sense of what I was feeling. I read in Arthur Brooks’s book, Who Really Cares, that secular liberals like myself are stingier givers — less likely to donate to charity or volunteer than the general population, and much less likely to donate or volunteer than religious conservatives. The larger decline in organized religion loomed over this research.

“For many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks,” Brooks writes. He even observed that proponents of income redistribution were less likely to give blood. “If everyone in the population gave at the same rate as government aid advocates, the supply would drop by about 30 percent,” he reported.

I squirmed when I read this. I’d never given blood. I found a study that said among first-time blood donors, the most frequently cited reason for giving was “influence from a friend.” I couldn’t think of anyone encouraging me to donate, but that felt like a weak excuse.

Around the same time, the Red Cross declared an emergency blood shortage; donors had dropped by 40 percent over the last two decades. With Brooks’ book fresh in my mind, I decided to sign up. In early February, I went downtown to a blood donation center; the whole thing was relatively quick, and I felt happy when I left.

I caught a charitable bug. None of this was hard, I realized. I just hadn’t prioritized any of it. I found a local homeless organization that had an Amazon wish list of needed items. I sent them tampons, pads, wipes, underwear, and hand-warmers, and chided myself for not having done such easy things sooner.

The US has long been defined by its culture of volunteerism. When French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s he marveled at the many civic groups, later arguing that such volunteer organizations were integral to American democracy. Our bustling nonprofit sector would become a global symbol of entrepreneurialism and freedom.

It’s become common to say this vibrant civic fabric has since frayed. America is hanging out less. Our “social fitness” in shambles. But over the last year, I’ve found plenty of data that complicates this narrative.

Volunteer rates have not fluctuated very much over the last 75 years. There were declines in the 1980s, then surges following the 9/11 attacks and again during the Trump presidency. Researchers find mixed evidence that social capital is declining, though there’s more consensus that volunteering itself has become more episodic and time-limited than before. Nonprofit donations are down, but crowdfunding contributions keep soaring.

Some scholars say the Bowling Alone thesis was always missing the forest for the trees, that Putnam’s analysis privileged the kinds of activities white people of means were most likely to do.

“You had the largest immigration rights mobilization in 2006 ever, and then the white people were all reading Putnam,” Erica Kohl-Arenas, a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, told me. “Numbers are not down in terms of people as part of associations, groups, or affiliated networks, but they might be down in terms of those who say, ‘I’m going to go look at the Yellow Pages to do five hours of service a week.’”

In contrast to the Yellow Pages form of service, so-called informal volunteering — meaning unpaid acts of service not coordinated through legal nonprofits — is harder to track, practiced more by communities of color, and almost never included in official counts of philanthropy.

“There’s lots of volunteering that doesn’t involve an organization,” said Mark Snyder, the director of the Center for the Study of the Individual and Society at the University of Minnesota. “When neighbors on a block shoot a message to your group text asking if someone can keep an eye on your kid, or bring over a meal, these things aren’t considered volunteering. But do you get paid for it? Do you get a sense of benefit by helping?”

Paul Schervish, a retired sociologist who directed the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, spent his career urging colleagues to take interpersonal and intra-family caregiving more seriously. He noted that while charitable giving is measured at roughly $500 billion annually in the US, remittances to relatives in poorer countries exceed $100 billion per year.

“None of those payments are included in what we talk about when we talk about philanthropy,” he told me. “Furthermore, Hispanics rank lower on charitable giving than other ethnic groups, but part of that is they are offering their homes up to family and living with extended family members so much more often, and carrying out these remittances. Care for each other, and even within your own family, is something that we don’t pay attention to.”

Schervish argues that a proper understanding of philanthropy has always been more vast than the way Putnam and conventional theorists have sliced and diced it. It should encompass both informal aid for friends and family, and acts of service for people more distant from you. Look no further than the Greek word philia, he says, referring to non-romantic love, that shares the same root as our modern word philanthropy.

“Philia or friendship love, for Aristotle, extends out in concentric circles from the family to the entire species,” Schervish has written. “Friendship love is a relation of mutual nourishment that leads to the virtuous flourishing of both parties.”

Or put differently, rather than debate whether acts of philanthropy are motivated by selfishness or selflessness, or whether it “counts” if it’s service for your aunt versus your neighbor versus a child in Africa, Schervish encourages thinking about donors, volunteers, and all caregivers as people who take action in connection with others, who “view others in need as familial.”

I took the point that the popular view on social cohesion may have oversights. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that people today are feeling more despair, especially younger people.

I know firsthand that many Americans are overwhelmed by negative news stories, which compound in exhausting ways. It’s become far too hard to know what’s true, and all the contradictory information leads some to give up trying to make sense of the world altogether. The proportion of readers who say they avoid news is close to an all-time high.

Volunteering wouldn’t solve these problems, but given what we know about volunteering’s benefits, it seems it could certainly help. One University of Oxford researcher surveyed over 45,000 employees whose companies offered wellness benefits like massage classes, coaching sessions, and mindfulness workshops. The only option that seemed to actually have a positive effect on well-being, the study found, were those jobs that provided workers with opportunities for charity or volunteering.

Volunteers help bag to-go meals at Catherdral Kitchen on August 21, 2013, in Camden, New Jersey. Cathedral Kitchen is a multi-service soup kitchen that has been serving the Camden homeless community since 1976. They serve between 300 and 600 dinners each night, as well as offering biweekly dental services, and periodic medical and legal services as well.Andrew Burton/Getty Images

A friend from my giving circle pointed out that the vast number of activities billed as self-care are pricey beauty treatments, boutique fitness classes, and other ways to “treat” ourselves. They all tend to advance the idea that feeling better, and even simply feeling good, is found in helping oneself rather than each other.

Still, it can be harder for young people today to volunteer, Snyder, from the University of Minnesota, told me. “Young people are scrambling more than cohorts before to make a living, making ends meet through multiple jobs,” he said. “There are fewer discretionary hours available in a day.”

I reached out to the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. In 2014, it found that a large majority of American teenagers value personal achievement and happiness over caring for others, priorities they felt their parents also shared. Richard Weissbourd, who directs the center, told me they’ve re-surveyed youths several times over the last decade and found similar results. Teens consistently rank happiness and personal achievement most highly, and caring for others and concern for the common good at the bottom.

“The irony of course is that by encouraging everyone to prioritize individual success and happiness, people are getting further from the kinds of activities and mental frameworks that drive satisfaction, fulfillment, community, and peace,” Weissbourd said.

While most news stories on mental health tend to focus on youth struggling in middle and high school, Weissbourd said his research has him worrying most about people ages 18 to 25, who he finds doing “twice as badly” as younger teens. “There’s a lot of apocalyptic thinking and not a lot of action there,” he said. “It’s like a deep tiredness, a feeling like people are in deep winter.”

Meanwhile, though the climate crisis drove people like me to be more distrusting of calls for individual action, some climate leaders have been calling for a different approach. More activists now stress that systemic and individual change should be understood as two sides of the same coin, and that individual action can be necessary for building sustainable, transparent political movements.

“A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief,” Jason Mark, the editor of Sierra magazine, wrote in 2019. “This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.”

In his book Giving Done Right, Phil Buchanan, the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, refers to a longstanding debate over whether it’s useful for donors to spend money on alleviating effects of problems, rather than attacking the problems’ underlying causes. Philanthropy certainly has some great victories in funding “root” solutions, but Buchanan urges against the mentality that only permanently eradicating a problem is worth doing. “You shouldn’t assume that a focus on roots is necessarily superior,” he writes. “Trimming branches is also important.”

In a way, it can feel safe to distrust the value of individual action. Being wary of philanthropy and charitable groups that promise to better the world resonates with the skepticism I’ve been trained to have, professionally and culturally. It also allows me to avoid making sacrifices; there’s no real vulnerability or bets required.

But as time goes on, and as I think about the family I might one day raise, I’m coming to appreciate the value of letting go and taking gambles on hope, as long as they point generally in the moral direction I want to go.

With all these questions swirling in my head, I cold-emailed a local rabbi. She offered to meet and pointed me to a story in Exodus about Jews who agreed to accept the Torah from God before really knowing what was in it. “Naaseh v’nishma,” the Israelites said, which roughly translates to “we’ll do, and then we’ll understand.” The lesson, the rabbi told me, is about diving in with imperfect information, of learning through doing.

Schervish, the retired sociologist, thinks I should worry less about carving time outside of my regular routine to volunteer, and to count acts of service I take for my friends, partner, colleagues, and others just as much as philanthropy organized through 501c(3)s.

“Meeting the true needs of others is how you nourish somebody, but what that nourishment is, and what those true needs are — we’re always going to find people debating about that,” he told me. “And you’re going to have debates within yourself. But it’s always the right question.”

This was his gentle reminder that determining how to live morally requires wrestling that is messy, personal, and evolving. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But I don’t want imperfect information to stop me from diving in, now.

Naaseh v’nishma, I signed up to donate blood again.

US teacher strikes were good, actually

Originally published in Vox on August 25, 2024.
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Few things have bedeviled education policy researchers in the US more than public school teacher strikes, driven by educators on the vanguard of resurging labor activism. While union membership nationwide continues to decline, nearly one in five union members in the US is a public school teacher — and their high-profile, disruptive strikes generate significant media attention and public debate.

But do these strikes work? Do they deliver gains for workers? Do they help or hurt students academically?

Answering these questions has been challenging, largely due to a lack of centralized data that scholars could use to analyze the strikes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics used to keep track of all strikes and work stoppages across the country, but since its budget was cut in the early 1980s, the agency has only tracked strikes involving more than 1,000 employees. Given that 97 percent of US school districts employ fewer than 1,000 teachers, the majority of teacher strikes are not federally documented.

Now, for the first time ever, researchers Melissa Arnold Lyon of the University at Albany, Matthew Kraft of Brown University, and Matthew Steinberg of the education group Accelerate have compiled a novel data set to answer these questions, providing the first credible estimates of the effect of US teacher strikes.

Their data set — which covers 772 teacher strikes across 610 school districts in 27 states between 2007-2023 — took four years to compile. The three co-authors, plus seven additional research assistants, reviewed over 90,000 news articles to plug the gaps in national data. Their NBER working paper, published on Monday, provides revealing information about the causes and consequences of teacher strikes in America, and suggests they remain a potent tool for educators to improve their working conditions.

Teacher strikes lead to significant wage increases on average, regardless of length

By and large, teacher strikes in the US are not common, nor are they lengthy work stoppages. The median number of strikes per year over the 16-year study was 12.5, with the typical strike lasting just one day. Sixty-five percent of strikes ended in five days or less. Their longest identified strike was 34 days in Strongsville, Ohio in 2013.

Almost 90 percent of the teacher strikes identified involved educators calling for higher salaries or increased benefits, and the researchers found that, on average, strikes were successful in delivering those gains. Specifically, the strikes caused average compensation to increase by 3 percent (or $2,000 per teacher) one year after the strike, reaching 8 percent, or $10,000 per teacher, five years out from the strike.

More than half of strikes also called for improved working conditions, such as lower class sizes or increased spending on school facilities and non-instructional staff like nurses. The researchers found that strikes were also effective in this regard, as pupil-teacher ratios fell by 3.2 percent and there was a 7 percent increase in spending dedicated to paying non-instructional staff by the third year after a strike.

Importantly, the new spending on compensation and working conditions did not come from shuffling existing funds, but from increasing overall education spending, primarily from the state level.

That these strikes were effective is notable, particularly since labor strikes overall have not been associated with increases in wages, hours, or benefits since the 1980s. The study authors suggest strikes among public school teachers may be a more “high-leverage negotiating tactic” than other unionized fields because teachers can be less easily replaced by non-unionized workers or tech automation.

Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers find no relationship between whether a strike is short or long in terms of the effect it has on teacher salary.

Lyon of the University at Albany thinks that part of why teachers may be so successful in achieving such significant increases is because teacher strikes can send public signals in ways other labor strikes often can’t.

“Because education is such a salient industry, even a one-day strike can have a big impact,” she told me. “News media will pick it up, people will pay attention, and parents are going to be inconvenienced. You have these built-in mechanisms for attracting attention that other types of protest do not.” Another study she co-authored with Kraft earlier this year found that teacher strikes more than double the probability of US congressional political ads mentioning education, underscoring their power in signaling the need for educational change.

Students were not academically harmed by the strikes

Previous research on teacher strikes in Argentina, Canada, and Belgium, where work stoppages lasted much longer, found large negative effects on student achievement from teacher strikes. (In the Argentina study, the average student lost 88 school days.)

In contrast, the researchers find no evidence that US teacher strikes, which are much shorter, affected reading or math achievement for students in the year of the strike, or in the five years after. While US strikes lasting two or more weeks negatively affected math achievement in both the year of the strike and the year after, scores rebounded for students after that.

In fact, Lyon said they could not rule out that the brief teacher strikes actually boosted student learning over time, given the increased school spending associated with them. A recent influential meta-analysis on school finance found that increasing operational spending by $1,000 per student for four years helped student learning.

It’s possible higher wages could reduce teacher burnout, or the need to work second jobs, leading to improved performance in the classroom. Still, Lyon explained, it’s also possible that increased spending on teachers would not lead to higher student test scores, if wage gains went primarily to more experienced teachers, or to pensions, or if teachers were already maximizing their effort before the strike.

Strikes were more common in conservative, labor-unfriendly areas

Overall, the researchers found that teacher union density has fallen more sharply than previously recognized. According to federal data, 85 percent of public school teachers reported being in a union in 1990, falling to 79 percent in 1999, and then to 68 percent by 2020.

“As someone who studies unions, that statistic alone is still pretty surprising to me,” Lyon said. “And it came from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey, which is one of our best data sources.” Tracking teacher union membership can be complicated because of mergers, and because the two national unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — include non-teachers and retired teachers in their ranks. Still, even with the drop, the 68 percent dwarfs that of the private sector, where just 10 percent of workers are in unions.

Roughly 35 states have laws that either explicitly ban or effectively prohibit teacher strikes, but those laws haven’t stopped educators from organizing labor stoppages. (Nearly every state in the #RedforEd teacher strikes from 2018 and 2019 — including Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Oklahoma — had banned teacher strikes.)

In compiling their data set, Lyon, Kraft, and Steinberg included both legal strikes and illegal work stoppages, including mass walk-outs, “sick-outs” (when teachers call in sick en masse), or so-called “wildcat strikes” (when educators strike without the support of union leadership).

Perhaps counterintuitively, they found strikes were more common in more conservative, labor-hostile states, something they attributed mostly to large-scale coordinated strikes across districts happening more often in those places. Individual district strikes were more likely to occur in liberal areas, where such actions are legal.

The teacher uprisings over the last decade have helped boost support from parents and the broader public, who report in surveys backing for educator organizing and increased teacher pay. The percentage of the public who see teacher unions as a positive influence on schools rose from 32 percent in 2013 to 43 percent in 2019, according to Education Next polling. A majority of the US public supports teachers having the right to strike, which suggests educators may be comfortable using this tactic going forward.

Kamala Harris’s recent embrace of rent control, explained

Originally published in Vox on August 6, 2024.
—–

At her first major campaign rally since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris made a relatively unexpected promise.

Speaking in Atlanta to a crowd of 10,000 supporters, Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.”

Harris’s remarks to cap rents echoed a recent proposal from the Biden administration just two weeks earlier to limit rent hikes to 5 percent nationwide over the next two years for all landlords who own more than 50 units. (They estimate this would cover over 20 million units across the country.) The Biden plan — which would require congressional approval — would exempt not-yet-built units, so as to not discourage much-needed new housing. The two-year rent cap, Biden officials said, would serve as a way to drive down costs while new housing was under construction.

Harris’s seeming embrace of the Biden plan isn’t the first time she’s expressed support for rent control. In 2019, after Oregon adopted a then first-of-its-kind statewide rent control measure, she tweeted in praise of the bill signing. “No one should ever have to choose between paying their rent each month or feeding their children,” Harris wrote. As a senator, she also introduced legislation to offer tax relief to renters who earned less than $100,000 if they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

Still, it wasn’t clear Harris was going to stick to a pro-renter position on the presidential campaign trail — she’s already abandoned several more left-wing stances she previously embraced while a candidate in 2020. Over the last ten days, Harris has rejected Medicare for All, distanced herself from a federal jobs guarantee, and said she would no longer oppose fracking.

But when it comes to affordable housing, Harris has so far stuck closely with the political playbook of the president, who started campaigning on lowering housing costs more aggressively this year.

Over 22 million households now spend more than a third of their income on rent, and home mortgage rates have soared since 2022.

Rent caps, however, have long been controversial among economists, most of whom argue that the policy hurts housing markets and ultimately limits supply, thus driving costs up further. A review of more than 200 empirical rent control studies released in March found a “wide range of adverse effects” for communities with rent caps, and that landlords were more likely to allow rent-capped units to fall into disrepair.

Still, a growing movement of housing activists has been pressing federal lawmakers to embrace the policy, citing the imminent threat of displacement many tenants face. More than 650,000 people in America experience homelessness on any given night, and federal data published in late 2023 showed a rise in homelessness in most states.

From a campaign perspective, rent caps poll quite well. In one May survey published by Navigator, a Democratic-aligned research group, pollsters found most voters overwhelmingly support cracking down on rent-gouging by corporate landlords, and cracking down on misleading rental fees. Measures to build more homes as a way to drive affordability were far less popular with voters, by contrast, than providing financial aid to renters and regulating rents.

The rent cap pledge didn’t come out of nowhere

Biden’s announcement in mid-July to embrace rent caps on “corporate landlords” came from mounting political pressure, and a sense that he needed to do more to court voters who were feeling badly about the economy and their daunting housing costs.

A Redfin-commissioned survey from February found almost two-thirds of homeowners and renters said that housing affordability made them feel negatively about the economy. Other surveys have suggested that many of the young people and voters of color who helped Biden win in 2020 were now wavering in their support for him, and those voters are more likely to be renters.

Activist pressure came largely from the Tenant Union Federation, a national group that seeks to mobilize renters to advocate for higher standards. This group, formerly known as the Homes Guarantee Campaign, had successfully pushed the Biden administration to release a non-binding “blueprint” for a renter’s bill of rights in January 2023, and since turned its sights to rent control. Activists were specifically interested in rent control Biden could enact without going through Congress, and homed in on the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates the entities that issue billions in government-backed mortgages every year.

In January 2023, these activists helped push a Congressional letter, led by Democrats, asking Biden to take on corporate landlords and end “price gouging in the real estate sector.” The leaders proposed a suite of executive actions the government could take, with their top recommendation to direct the Federal Housing Finance Agency to establish new renter protections, including rent caps.

By July 2023, a new letter from Democratic senators directly urged the Federal Housing Finance Authority to enact “limits against egregious rent hikes” in properties with government-backed mortgages.

While most economists have long warned about negative effects of rent control, tenant activists and their progressive allies in academia and law have been working to challenge perceptions that rent control inevitably hurts housing markets. They point to the debate around the minimum wage, where for decades economists argued that raising the wage would invariably hurt workers and the economy, yet more recently researchers have determined that such increases can actually be effective at boosting living standards for low-wage workers with little to no impact on job loss.

Advocates argue that empirical studies are similarly challenging the conventional wisdom that rent control limits new construction or the overall supply of housing, and they point to examples in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, and California to make their case.

In a letter the Tenant Union Federation sent to the Federal Housing Finance Agency last fall, activists noted that 182 cities and municipalities across the country had some form of rent regulation as of 2018, and California, like Oregon, had passed new statewide rent limits in the last five years.

Despite successfully pushing federal lawmakers to embrace potential new renter protections and even rent control, Biden and, so far, Harris have declined to go as far as the Tenant Union Federation wants. Some activists, for example, oppose the idea that rent caps would be temporary and exempt new units. The president also declined to endorse a plan that relied solely on his own executive power.

“The whole fact that [Biden] went to Congress to deal with it is messed up,” Elizabeth Olvera Perez, a tenant and leader in the Louisville Tenants Union, told the Nation recently.

Tara Raghuveer, the director of the National Tenant Union Federation, praised Harris’s announcement in Atlanta, acknowledging that it had not been a given that it would be a priority for the vice president. “Rent caps are a winning issue,” Raghuveer tweeted. “Candidates up and down ballot should take heed.”

Most economists remain against rent control

Skeptics of rent caps point to St. Paul, Minnesota, as a cautionary tale.

In November 2021, St. Paul voters approved a ballot measure to cap annual rent increases at 3 percent for most apartments in the city, beginning in May 2022. (The city council loosened this policy in September 2022, to exempt new development for 20 years.)

Developers and investors sounded the alarm, and a year into the experiment, the federal housing department reported that new building permits in St. Paul had plummeted nearly 50 percent compared to a year before, while those in nearby Minneapolis were up 16 percent.

St. Paul planning officials said they weren’t jumping to any conclusions about whether rent control was responsible for the declining construction, and reported their own permitting numbers were somewhat higher. (Tenant activists also argue it’s too soon to legitimately assess the policy’s impact.)

Still, opponents and conservative intellectuals say St. Paul is confirming their worst fears that rent control will make housing more expensive in the aggregate, even if it provides relief to some existing renters in the short term.

Conservatives characterize Biden and Harris’s new embrace of rent control as further evidence that the administration is against landlords. Writing in City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock argued that he doubts the Biden administration’s proposal would actually be limited to just two years. “Almost all rent control laws make such promises; governments often can’t help themselves and keep expanding the laws’ reach anyway,” he said, pointing to New York City’s experience.

Even some prominent liberals have come out against the Biden administration’s new embrace of rent caps.

“Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit,” Jason Furman, the top economic adviser to the Obama administration, recently told the Washington Post. “The idea we’d be reviving and expanding it will ultimately make our housing supply problems worse, not better.”

Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, echoed the criticism, saying Biden’s plan “would lead to less affordable housing being built and substantially increase housing costs.”

Legislative tea leaves suggest that Congress is likely to move forward with some sort of federal housing package next year. If Democrats sweep in November, and Harris continues to champion rent control, a national rent-cap policy looks a lot more likely. Whether that takes the form of a broad restriction on corporate landlords, or something more targeted to properties with government-backed mortgages is less clear. However, if Republicans retain control of at least the House or Senate, then the odds of rent caps being passed through Congress are virtually nonexistent.

Tenant activists, meanwhile, will continue to pressure Biden, and Harris, to use presidential executive authority to limit rent hikes. At this point, it’s unclear whether Harris would embrace such a move if she wins the election, even as her boss has thus demurred. The Harris campaign did not return a request for comment.

The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies

Originally published in Vox on July 30, 2024
——

Abortion was always slated to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election. But virtually no one predicted that politicians would be openly blasting those ambivalent about having children.

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said in a now-famous statement in 2021. “It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

That wasn’t all on the subject from Vance. He also argued in 2021 that parents should get additional votes on their children’s behalf. People without kids “should face the consequences and the reality,” he said.

Other conservative voices have joined in. Speaking in Vance’s defense last week, Blake Masters, the former Arizona Senate candidate, said bluntly that people without children shouldn’t lead in politics: “If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations?” he asked.

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO, weighed in to call Harris an “extinctionist” because she noted some young people cite climate anxiety as a reason not to have kids. “The natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!” Musk concluded.

One starting place to understand where all this is coming from is pronatalism: a broad ideological movement driven by concern that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that.

Not all pronatalists are politically conservative, and not all conservatives are particularly pronatalist. People with different backgrounds and ideologies are concerned about what a shrinking population will mean for future generations, though the movement does include anti-abortion advocates like Vance and Masters who have been more vocal. Still other card-carrying pronatalists staunchly oppose coercing women into having children they don’t want.

Those worried about declining birth rates paint a scary picture of the future. As the number of babies dwindles, the number of workers will shrink, too. There will be fewer people paying taxes to support welfare systems, which will still be supporting large elderly populations. The result, they warn, will be economic stagnation and political strife: higher unemployment, more acute labor shortages, diminished investment, fewer innovations, and greater poverty.

There is some reason to be wary of these grim predictions. Past population panics have fueled some of the world’s most horrific chapters. Back when leaders thought the world was producing too many humans, governments around the globe pushed mass sterilization campaigns, forced abortions, and gruesome eugenic regimes.

Others see the increased focus on birth rates as a way to scapegoat individuals — primarily women — for societal issues that politicians could otherwise address, such as improving care for the elderly or taxing the rich more aggressively.

That there’s a “proximate economic problem … doesn’t necessarily mean increasing birth rates is the solution,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The concerns about fertility aren’t taking place in a political vacuum, in the US or anywhere else.

Around the world, far-right leaders have campaigned on platforms to roll back abortion rights, restrict immigration, and boost the number of native-born children. In China, government officials recently scrapped gender equality as a priority and advised women “to establish a correct outlook on marriage and love, childbirth, and family.” In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has promoted a policy of “procreation not immigration.”

Even talking about population decline as an issue can feel risky. Though not all pronatalists are against reproductive rights, a louder conversation that frames falling birth rates as a major problem inevitably boosts the issue’s salience, creating space for potentially more reactionary ideas.

Still, those who want to voluntarily increase the number of children say we must have a real conversation, no matter how uneasy it makes us. Some are hopeful about emerging technologies — like artificial wombs and lab-grown eggs — to one day bring more humans to life. Others warn that sexist, racist, and ethnonationalist forces will fill the void if liberal leaders fail to solve the problem themselves.

“If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control,” warned Dean Spears, the director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT Austin. “Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.”

Spears may be right, but it’s a gamble. Nobody really knows whether you can sustainably boost birth rates without coercing women into having kids or restricting the opportunities they might otherwise pursue. Efforts to substantially reverse declining fertility in other countries have so far failed, and right now, at least in the US, most adults without children say they just don’t want them.

Why people are talking about birth rates more now

All over the world, fewer children are being born, including in some of the most populous nations like China, India, the US, Brazil, and Mexico. Earlier this month, the UN announced it is likely the number of people on earth will peak in the next 75 years — a big change from even a decade ago, when demographers thought that moment was still well over a century away.

Concern about declining birth rates is not new, but until recently, it didn’t seem to have much domestic relevance for the United States.

By the turn of the 21st century, many countries were already grappling with plummeting fertility. In 2004, journalist Phil Longman published The Empty Cradle, outlining the political and economic risks of depopulation; he traveled all over the world encouraging leaders to take it more seriously.

At the time, there was a major exception: the United States. Even as the US provided virtually no support for working parents, American birth rates stayed elevated. Experts attributed this primarily to higher birth rates among Latino immigrants, higher teen births, and potentially America’s religious culture.

“At that time it was possible to look at all these numbers and say the United States is immune to this,” Longman told me. “Our birth rates were still barely above replacement level, so people could be like, ‘Oh well that’s the European disease, that’s the South Korean culture, American exceptionalism will save us.”

Holding the US as an exception, the overarching consensus became that countries that were more successful at boosting birth rates were those that provided more support for women to balance their domestic life with jobs and other pursuits. Sweden’s egalitarian welfare policies were designed by intellectuals in the 1930s who specifically wanted to boost Swedish birth rates, and by the end of the century, Nordic countries with more expansive welfare systems seemed to be doing better on the birthrate front than more socially conservative countries like Italy and Japan.

“Feminism is the new natalism,” a Tory member of Parliament in the United Kingdom said in a 2003 report on the threat of low fertility in Europe. Over the last 10 years, though, even the Nordic countries have seen hastening drops in fertility. Declining birth rates finally hit the US starting in 2007 and have continued to fall ever since.

Why? There are several leading explanations advanced by different people:

  • Women are postponing marriage and childbearing later into their reproductive years and using more effective birth control methods more consistently.
  • People are having less sex overall, with some arguing that smartphones and the internet have dominated attention that previously went toward dating and love.
  • Some say people have recognized that smaller families are easier to manage if women want to balance child-rearing with careers and other personal pursuits.
  • Others argue the mental health crisis has brought more despair about the future and a corresponding unwillingness to bring unconsenting children into an overheating world.
  • Others look to broader “doomer” narratives about parenting and lament the overly negative messages some media outlets send about raising kids.
  • Still others say birth rates are falling primarily because of high costs and point to surveys suggesting people would have more kids if they felt it was easier to afford.

The decline in birth rates since 2007 has been driven primarily by women in their 20s. Maybe people will have the same number of kids ultimately, but just later in life? Experts say that no longer seems very likely.

This may be because the decline is less about fewer large families with four or five kids and more about significantly fewer families having even one or two children compared to a generation ago. “The decline in the rate from zero kids to one kid is mostly driven by singleness,” said Lyman Stone, a demographer who identifies as a pronatalist.

Can policy really make people more willing to give birth?

The burning question in the pronatalism conversation is whether governments can do anything to restore a country to “replacement rate” (an average of 2.1 births per woman) without restricting women’s rights.

Some social conservatives have blamed falling birth rates in Western countries primarily on women’s career aspirations and the overall decline in marriage. But Spears, of UT Austin, says that can hardly explain why we’re seeing similar drops in nations like India, where marriage rates remain high and where most women don’t work in the formal labor market.

Can governments do anything to reverse this? Last year, my colleague Anna North reviewed examples of countries that were trying to reverse fertility declines. Germany increased investments in child care. Russia began offering lump-sum payments of about $7,000 to families with more than two kids. Hungary started offering newlyweds loans of $30,000, which Orbán said would be forgiven if the couple had three children. None of these interventions have been enough to fully reverse the population decline, and Spears tells me there isn’t anything he’s seen “with strong evidence of an effect.”

But some experts and advocates believe that it’s possible — if the incentives are large enough.

“A lot of the pronatalist policies have been worse than half-hearted,” Folbre, the economist, told me, pointing to examples like $4,000 in subsidies from governments in Italy and Singapore, which really amounts to just a couple months of child care aid.

“What’s actually being spent [by governments] is a very small percentage of the cost of raising children, and leaders should take as many steps as possible to socialize those costs and reduce costs of parents,” she said.

Stone, the demographer, is optimistic about the potential of policy to voluntarily boost birth rates, and he recently established a think tank — the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies — dedicated to researching these questions.

He pointed to some recent empirical reviews on the topic, like this one from 2021 that assessed family policies in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia since the 1970s, and found social reforms can increase fertility. Another review from 2022 looked specifically at maternity leave policies and concluded they “do in fact increase fertility when benefit increases are generous.”

Stone is motivated by surveys that suggest women are having fewer children than they really want, but he recognizes that most women don’t want very large families, either.

Boosting fertility, in Stone’s view, may ultimately come down to more muscular spending while reducing other costs, such as housing and student loans. While incentives with sticker prices upward of $200,000 per baby may seem initially eye-popping, Stone argues that it looks more reasonable when compared to annual Medicaid spending and other health interventions.

The darker corners of the pronatalism movement

Not everyone concerned about falling birth rates is interested in gender equity or voluntary solutions.

Last December, a relatively fringe group gathered in Austin for the first-ever Natal Conference to discuss boosting babies, with some guest speakers decrying the liberal cultural forces they see as responsible for the world’s decline.

Peachy Keenan, a pseudonym for one conservative speaker, argued her fellow pronatalists need to make motherhood and large families a more hotly desired status symbol, but to avoid “market[ing] natalism” to progressive feminists.

Other speakers included right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, who lamented that “the actual meaning of masculinity has been destroyed by vampire feminists,” and Malcolm and Simone Collins, who were subjects of a viral Guardian profile earlier this year that revealed they smack their children.

This corner of “pronatalism” is composed mostly of tech enthusiasts and hyper-rationalist types, religious fundamentalists and some far-right activists worried about immigration and demographic change.

One of the most prominent members of this coalition is billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed the falling fertility rate is “the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” Musk recently led the push to get Vance nominated as Donald Trump’s vice president.

Some mainstream conservatives like Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney argue that focusing on more extreme voices within the pronatalist movement amounts to “nut-picking”: As he correctly notes, it’s not just far-right conservatives who worry about falling birth rates.

But extreme pronatalists also increasingly hold positions of power. Pronatalist intellectuals with influence in the Trump world have endorsed policies like limiting contraception and banning no-fault divorce. Trump has said he wants to see “a new baby boom.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has blamed Roe v. Wade for killing potential American workers, resulting in strained welfare systems today. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this,” he said during a 2022 congressional hearing.

The presence of such perspectives in the movement is not something most women can afford to ignore.

“The Handmaid’s Tale is a very real risk,” Folbre said, referring to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel in which a government weaponizes women’s fertility. “A lot of the energy behind Donald Trump is related to a panic about the consequences of women having more reproductive choice.”

Stone, the demographer, is against abortion, and I asked him how people concerned about rollbacks of reproductive rights should feel about him directing this new pronatalism think tank. He agreed he “would like to see all the babies born” but said “the key thing to understand” is that evidence showing abortion restrictions lead to higher birth rates is minimal, since in societies with good contraceptive access, people mostly just switch to that.

The data isn’t great, but Stone estimates that one prevented abortion “likely gets you .05 to .15 extra 18-year-olds 18 years later.”

Another study co-authored by Spears at UT Austin similarly found “no evidence of a significant association between abortion legality and birth rates” and that abortion bans can even lower total birth rates overall. (It’s worth noting too since Roe v. Wade was overturned, US abortion incidence has increased.)

Still, efforts to restrict abortion are getting more aggressive, and there’s no certainty that abortion incidence will stay elevated as leaders seek new ways to cut off access. Plus, it’s a less comforting fact about contraception when there are anti-abortion activists in the US working now to conflate abortion with birth control.

Stone argues that liberals will ultimately have to consider compromise with anti-abortion groups on policies where there’s common ground — like child care and affordable housing — even if they support the measures for different reasons.

“At the end of the day, every single political vote involves holding your nose to some extent,” he said. “And if your view is that you can’t support reducing child poverty by 40 percent through a child allowance because pro-life people are also supporting it, then maybe you hate kids.”

Reproductive desires, reproductive justice

One of the top arguments pronatalists make to support their case is that research surveys tend to suggest women have not had as many children as they hoped.

As the United Nations wrote in its 2023 State of the World Population report, current evidence suggests that across Europe and the US, as well as throughout East Asia, women nearing or at the end of their reproductive years say they would have had more children than they actually did. “These data do ultimately point to an appreciable gap between desired and realized fertility across the globe,” the UN concluded.

Leslie Root, a demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, focused her graduate studies on these types of “child-bearing intention” surveys but eventually stopped because she grew concerned with how the data was being interpreted.

She explained that some surveys lacked nuance, failed to consider how desires can change over time, and didn’t account for the context in which a survey is administered, including the presence of family members or partners.

“It’s not always clear what the surveys are asking, especially these retrospective surveys of women over 45,” Root told me. “They ask looking back at your life if you could have had more kids would you have done so but there is obviously a social stigma to saying you wish you had fewer.” (Stone, who also spent his graduate studies focused on the surveys, argues they still provide credible data.)

Root ultimately doesn’t think birth rates are that low, but even if they were, she thinks leaders should treat the problem as an economic one, not a demographic one.

The view that birth rates are “neutral” is shared by Emily Klancher Merchant, a historian and author of Building the Population Bomb, which traces the rise of overpopulation fears in the 20th century.

“If women say they haven’t had as many children as they want, then that’s the primary issue to focus on, not birth rates,” she told me. “And if the problem is with the economy or how to support the elderly, there are many more direct ways to deal with that than through population measures.”

Root and Merchant both say the conversation would be better focused on reproductive justice — a feminist movement focused on supporting one’s right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in safe, healthy communities — than pronatalism.

Many policies supported by reproductive justice advocates are also supported by pronatalists, but feminists say building support for family-friendly measures like universal child care as a way to boost fertility risks gutting them later on if leaders conclude they’ve been insufficient to reverse population trends.

Spears, who believes in reproductive freedom but also thinks falling birth rates are a serious problem, compares this moment to decades ago when leaders realized they needed to address climate change.

In Spears’s view, there’s still time for leaders to reverse declines in population since we’re still years away from when the number of people on earth is set to peak. “Six decades ago there weren’t university majors in sustainability science, there wasn’t a journal called Nature Climate Change,” he told me. His point is that we have never really brought our best resources to bear to tackle these questions, and if we seriously invest in doing so, we could potentially build more economically stable societies that better align with families’ reproductive desires.

“I think that if we truly change society’s commitment to taking care of one another, and to taking care of the people who take care of one another,” he said, “then we could invent new ways to live.”

We deserve a more nuanced conversation about working moms

Originally published in Vox on July 9, 2024.

This spring, a European study came out with the provocative conclusion that having children contributes “little to nothing” to the persistent gap in earnings between men and women.

The study caught my attention because I know the threat of earning less as a parent has had a chilling effect on people in my generation considering starting families. Last year, while I was reporting on motherhood dread in the US, young women told me they feared having kids would mean they’d be penalized in the workplace, affecting their financial security and opportunities. Meanwhile, the media does little to allay that concern: “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children,” the New York Times once declared.

But while these economists found that Danish women who used in vitro fertilization experienced a large earnings penalty right after the birth of their first child, over the course of their careers, this penalty faded out. Eventually, the mothers even benefitted from a child premium compared to women who were not initially successful with IVF.

In other words, the so-called “motherhood penalty” that says women pay a price in the workplace for becoming moms might be less severe than previously thought.

“As children grow older and demand less care, we see that the mother’s earnings start to recover, with much of the immediate penalties made up 10 years after the birth of the first child,” the researchers wrote.

What makes this new European research so notable is that it relies on the same high-quality data that has informed previous studies on the motherhood penalty (including one Vox covered in 2018) but used an even broader sample and an approach the authors argue is better suited for long-term conclusions.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen research that complicates our understanding of the motherhood penalty. After the essay on motherhood dread was published, I heard from Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University sociologist who studies relationships and gender.

She had recently published a paper on gender wage gaps in the computer science field and found that mothers in computer science actually earned more than childless women (though this “wage premium” was significantly less than what fathers earned).

“It was difficult for me to find a home for the attached article because reviewers cannot fathom that mothers might out-earn single women, though there is a growing body of evidence that [they] do,” she wrote in her email to me. “It might be selection [bias] … but given that folks have found this across disciplines suggests that the motherhood penalty really needs to be reassessed.”

I was curious about Sassler’s suggestion that moms might actually earn more and that we don’t often hear that because gatekeepers “seem to like the narrative that women are always screwed by family.”

I decided to dig into the literature, reviewing studies and talking with researchers to get a better sense of what we know. Some aspects of the motherhood penalty debate remain fuzzy and unsettled, including whether moms face a long-term disadvantage in the workplace at all.

There’s also some disagreement over what the problem is, exactly: Is it that mothers earn less than childless women? Is it that they’re earning less than fathers, or men who started their careers at a similar level? What is the social problem to address?

Amid our growing national conversation around declining birth rates and reproductive freedom, a clearer sense of the research on motherhood penalties could help policymakers answer these questions. It could also foster conditions that help more women feel secure making the choice to become parents if they want.

What we know about the motherhood penalty

Putting these unresolved questions aside for a moment, the research we have paints a different picture from the one that suggests having children is inherently a career-killer.

Though it doesn’t always make it into the media discussion, scholars know that the motherhood penalty — which past research has found averages 5 to 10 percent per child for women in their 20s and 30s — can vary significantly based on occupation, the age at which women have their first child, their marital status, their cultural background, and whether they live in an urban or rural environment.

Averages can mask a lot, too. White women tend to experience higher motherhood penalties than Black and Hispanic women, but the magnitude of the penalty has gone down significantly for all women over the last 50 years, thanks to factors such as increased educational attainment and mothers returning more quickly to work after having kids. In some fields, there’s no penalty at all.

“We shouldn’t think of child penalties as something that’s immutable or a constant,” said Henrik Kleven, a Princeton economist who has studied these dynamics closely. “It’s something that has changed over time.”

Moreover, though there’s real evidence that some women experience penalties after having kids, we don’t have very strong evidence that it’s a lasting hit. Other research suggests people may time their pregnancies to when their earnings were already flattening out.

One 2014 study found that for most women who had fewer than three children, the motherhood penalty essentially disappears, both in terms of wages and job status, once they reach their 40s and 50s. As the more recent study on Danish IVF users also showed, the context around the motherhood penalty changes when we take a longer view.

Those considering children deserve to make parenting decisions with the best information possible, including factors that could minimize or even eliminate labor market disadvantages. Finishing school before having kids, for example, is linked to lower or nonexistent motherhood penalties.

Many women would prefer to have kids while they’re younger even if that means they can’t maximize their lifetime earnings. Still, the growing body of research can help make the case for policies that mitigate the negative tradeoffs of having kids and create more family-friendly cultures in the process.

Ultimately, though, should the goal be to try and eliminate all penalties that mothers face?

Kleven, the Princeton economist, thinks it’s unrealistic and undesirable to expect no wage penalty after having kids. “It’s very natural, and I think right, that someone bears a child penalty. I don’t think we necessarily want to move to a world where we outsource all child care,” he told me. Rather, the goal, he said, should be to have “similar-sized motherhood and fatherhood penalties” — for the cost of parenting not to be so gendered.

That’s reasonable, but it’s also not the only potential aim. Women worrying about the cost of motherhood instead might care more about closing labor-market gaps through better employer support, or offsetting income penalties women face in the labor market through new tax and transfer programs, like federal paid leave and child allowances.

Theories on the motherhood penalty, explained

There are a few main explanations for the motherhood penalty.

The first theory is based on the idea that women might reduce their working hours, switch to part-time jobs, or simply reduce their effort at work once they become parents. This is the “human capital” explanation. The less you work, the less you could earn.

A second theory is that mothers might earn less because they were drawn to more flexible but lower-paying jobs. In other words, moms self-select into occupations that are less lucrative but have other advantages, such as requiring fewer hours or offering remote flexibility.

A third theory is that employers discriminate against mothers, viewing them as less dedicated and reliable. This discrimination could affect whether a woman gets hired at all, what her starting salary will be, whether she’ll be promoted, or if she’s considered for any leadership role.

The study out of Denmark has added a new wrinkle. Economists found that the Danish women successful with their first attempt at IVF earned much less than their unsuccessful counterparts the first year after giving birth, but started to recover income losses by year two, and 10 years out were earning the same amount.

Twenty-five years out, the successfully treated women were earning more on average than their unsuccessful counterparts. The researchers predict their total lifetime earnings to be 2 to 3 percent higher compared to those who were not successful. While the economists don’t have firm explanations for why, they hypothesize that it could be because mothers developed certain efficiency skills while raising young kids, or perhaps that they just weren’t out of the labor force long enough to lose critical skills and relationships.

In many other motherhood wage studies, researchers compare the wages and career trajectories before and after women become moms, in what’s known as an “event-study” approach in economics.

Kleven, whose motherhood penalty research has mostly fallen into the “event-study” category, defended his past work as a strong way to show at least short-term penalties but acknowledged that it may not be as clear for measuring long-term ones.

“We have this very simple method where we are just following men and women over time and we see these very sharp patterns in the data around childbirth and our interpretation is that we’re capturing here a causal effect of children on labor market outcomes,” he told me.

Some economists have raised concerns with the Denmark study, pointing out that women with less IVF success — those who are trying to become mothers but have not — may experience their own career setbacks due to disappointment associated with infertility. This could muddy the comparison between childless women and mothers in the labor market, since these childless women were not voluntarily childless. Indeed, past research has shown that infertility can cause “a long-run deterioration of mental health and couple stability.”

Petter Lundborg, the lead author of the Denmark study, agreed infertility anxiety could theoretically skew their results, but he told me that the data suggests mental health wasn’t a major factor and neither was divorce.

“We have this previous paper where we follow these women for 10 years and look at their mental health through the use of antidepressants and we see there’s actually very little of that going on, whereas there’s actually a slight uptick among antidepressant use for people who have kids,” he said. “But these are all small levels that could not possibly explain any of the effects we see, and the same goes for divorce.” He acknowledged the evidence on all this is “mixed.”

What the Denmark study can tell us

How useful are the Danish findings, really, for people living in other countries?

Denmark is a very progressive nation, after all, offering women one year of paid parental leave, affordable child care, and IVF under national health insurance. None of that applies to the US. People who seek IVF generally also tend to be older, further along in their careers, and typically done with their educational training. They’re people less likely to experience large penalties; their pregnancies are inherently planned ones.

All of this threatens how useful the findings might be for a wider audience. The study’s co-author, Erik Plug, said they’d like to transport their research design to other countries to compare, though few have as detailed, accessible data to mine through. (This is why so many fertility studies, even those by American scholars, use Nordic information.)

Still, the Denmark research builds on other studies that indicate that the motherhood penalty is much smaller in magnitude when women are older and have already finished their schooling.

A high-quality Nordic study that looked at women whose IUDs inadvertently failed found the labor market effects of these unplanned pregnancies were much larger for younger women and for women still enrolled in school.

“We can see unplanned pregnancies at different stages of life, and some are more costly,” Yana Gallen, the study’s lead author, told me.

Younger mothers experience this firsthand.

“The concern that having a kid too early (i.e. before hitting one’s labor market potential) will affect one’s career and lifetime earnings is based in reality,” said Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project think tank.

Unless something changes in the way our society values money or distributes money, he added, more women will continue to plan to have their first child later in their reproductive years. Even if that’s not always what they really want.

Policies that could help mitigate adverse workplaces for moms

The US remains the only country in the industrialized world without federally funded paid leave, and research has long indicated that policies like universal child care and moderate-length paid leave can help mitigate motherhood penalties by helping women stay connected to the labor market. (Paid leave longer than a year, by contrast, can negatively affect women’s earnings and employment, partly due to atrophying skills and missed career opportunities, and employer bias that the mother is less committed to her job.)

Another way policymakers could address the motherhood penalty is by trying to offset whatever loss in job earnings moms may incur from taking on child-rearing.

“Maternity presents unique challenges to labor market participation and therefore earnings, but focusing solely on earnings as the relevant metric of inequality misses that societies have other ways of compensating people who face labor market disruptions,” Bruenig told me.

For low-income mothers in particular, researchers find that job turnover or having to reduce their work hours accounts for a significant amount of the motherhood penalty they experience. Low-wage jobs are typically the least likely to offer remote flexibility that makes balancing parenting with work easier, and the least likely to come with benefits like paid leave. Expanding policies like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit could help.

Continuing the cultural shift toward fathers’ contributing more domestic labor could also help reduce motherhood penalties by making it easier for women to balance their work and home duties. Federal policies that encourage both men and women to take parental leave could bolster this; Iceland and Sweden both offer 13 weeks of non-transferrable parental leave for dads, for example, and about 90 percent of new fathers there do take it.

Creating conditions for involved fatherhood in a baby’s first year of life can set egalitarian parenting patterns for a lifetime, Cecilia Machado, an economist who studies the motherhood penalty, recently told the New York Times.

Just as we all could benefit from a more nuanced conversation about motherhood penalties, so too could we gain from a more careful conversation about fatherhood penalties, where differences among subgroups also exist. In 2013, Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald found a positive wage boost (about 4 percent) only for fathers among those dads who were married, living with their children, and the biological parent.

Beyond public policies like child care, paid leave, and child subsidies, there could be more cultural pressure on employers and schools to help people balance their work and caregiving demands. Women recognize they could face genuine financial risks if they have children too early, but that doesn’t mean society can’t do its part to change those economic tradeoffs.

Scholars still have outstanding questions when it comes to the motherhood penalty. Gallen, the economist whose experiment looked at women with IUD failure, told me researchers have much to learn about children’s life outcomes, including life satisfaction overall. “How did the children born into all these different circumstances fare? Are they happy?” she asked. “Or do they seem like they grew up in these strained environments where everybody’s having all these difficult choices? I think that we truly don’t know the answer.”

Lundborg, the Danish study author, says he’s interested to see how their results hold up in different countries. “We do think that the evidence on long-run child penalties has been very weak, and there’s now some new evidence that challenges this notion that kids are responsible for long-run gender gaps in earnings,” he said. “If the results hold, then I think we need to find alternative explanations.”

These findings could ultimately be positive for women hoping to balance careers, financial stability, and parenthood.

“This narrative that kids are to blame for the earning gaps between males and females has been extremely strong in economics,” added Lundborg. “So yeah, let’s see what the future holds.”

Innovation in child care is coming from a surprising source: Police departments

Originally published in Vox on July 5, 2024.
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Earlier this year, a brand-new child care center opened up in San Diego, serving about 25 families.

The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and child care workers are paid 15 percent above the going local average. Its hours of operation are flexible. It stays open from 5:30 am to 7 pm every day, longer than most child care centers, and can accommodate emergencies like unexpected work shifts. There’s only one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.

San Diego’s law enforcement child care center, funded through both public and private money, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans for several others across the US are already underway. A bipartisan bill in Congress would expand the model further.

Supporters call law enforcement child care a win-win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, a recruiting tool at a time when police resignations and retirements are up, and applications are down. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has taken severe blows to its reputation over the last decade.

But it also raises a basic question: Why just police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?

“My response is those other professions haven’t been demonized like law enforcement has,” said Jim Mackay, a retired police detective and the founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments to build them. “My philosophy is if you have a healthy law enforcement then everything else kind of prospers out from that, and we have to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”

There’s no data yet on if this employer-centric model will pay off, but advocates argue that the child care investment is a smart bet. The estimated annual operating cost for each center is $2 million, while the average cost to recruit and train a single police officer is $200,000. In other words, if this helps keep even just ten officers in the ranks, it will have been worth it.

Tanya Meisenholder, the director of gender equity at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, says child care is one of the job barriers she hears about most often from female cops and those considering entering the profession. Women make up only 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the US, though there’s a national campaign underway to increase those numbers.

“Child care is the one thing that’s been brought up over and over not only as a barrier to entry but a barrier to promotion,” Meisenholder said. “Police child care would show the agencies value their employees and are listening to their concerns. It has the potential to be somewhat transformative.”

The idea is spreading quickly

Angelie Hoxie, a state police detective in Idaho, heard about the San Diego child care idea and wanted to see if she could build a similar model for Treasure Valley, which covers the greater Boise region.

Idaho police agencies have struggled with recruitment and retention, and many families are on year-long child care waitlists. The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children said over 90 percent of child care facilities cite staffing as their top challenge.

In early 2022 Hoxie helped launch the Treasure Valley Law Enforcement Coalition and within a year they were lobbying state and federal officials and partnering with a local university and local philanthropy.

By winter 2023, Republican Gov. Brad Little was recommending funding for Idaho police child care programs in his workforce development budget, and by March, a bill to support the effort passed out of both chambers of the Idaho legislature. Republican Rep. Mike Simpson then successfully earmarked $2.65 million from the federal budget to help finance the new child care center. Construction is set to launch this summer with the program to be operational for police families by 2025.

St. Louis County in Missouri is another region set to open a law enforcement child care center next year, following the same model as San Diego: longer hours of service, subsidized rates for parents, and higher wages for workers. Their goal now is to care for up to 75 kids at a time, and by operating for 18 hours a day, upwards of 150 families could be served.

The push was prompted by a rank-and-file woman officer during the pandemic who struggled to find care for her 1-year-old while balancing her new 12-hour shifts. Twelve-hour shifts have since become the norm for the department, even after Covid-19.

“We’re absolutely hoping it helps with both recruitment and retention,” said Tracy Panus, a spokesperson for St. Louis County police.

Democratic Rep. Scott Peters, whose congressional district includes San Diego, introduced a police child care bill last year to authorize $24 million annually in funding under the federal Child Care Development Grant program. The bill would also allow Health and Human Services to provide grants of up to $3 million for new police child care centers. In December the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the legislation.

“There’s no question that [child care] is a priority—it has come up in every single focus group we’ve done,” said Kym Craven, the executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.

Taking some cues from the US military

That police might take on leadership in child care is less surprising when one looks to the Department of Defense, which sponsors the nation’s only federally run universal child care program.

The military child care program, which serves roughly 200,000 children, is known for being affordable and high-quality, and its 23,000 child care workers are paid higher wages than their private sector counterparts. Members of Congress and former military leaders have been in discussions over the last few years about how to expand and improve upon this child care program to boost army recruitment even further.

Still, expanding public subsidies for police child care is not popular with everyone, including those who want less public money subsidizing police departments, and those who want to see public dollars prioritizing child care for low-income families.

Others have raised concerns with the idea of employer-sponsored child care more broadly. In one report published this past winter, Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, argued that employer-sponsored child care “does nothing to address the fundamental challenges within the child care system, nor does it promote a pluralistic system of choice.”

He compared the model to painkillers for cancer. “They can ease the pain for a while, but the body gets sicker, and the temptation to overly rely on painkillers only grows,” he wrote.

Still, advocates for police child care say the public safety needs are too urgent, and the possible benefits to communities and agencies too great to pass up. They hope in five years they will have firmer data showing their investments have worked.

“In this new generation not too many people want to become law enforcement officers,” said Mackay. “We’re really trying to stem that tide.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

What a big new Supreme Court decision could mean for homeless Americans

Originally published in Vox on June 28, 2024.
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The Supreme Court has issued its long-awaited ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the most significant legal challenge to the rights of homeless people in decades.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts.

“The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy,” the opinion read.

Friday’s ruling has huge implications for cities and people experiencing homelessness nationwide. It strikes a fatal blow to two Ninth Circuit decisions — the Grants Pass v. Johnson case and its 2018 predecessor Martin v. Boise — that have shaped cities’ responses to homeless encampments.

Leaders from dozens of cities and states — both liberal and conservative — have been hoping the US Supreme Court would overturn the Martin and Grants Pass decisions, which they claimed were incorrectly decided and left governments hamstrung and incapable of safely managing their communities.

Many groups representing the rights of unhoused people, in turn, argued there was no reason for the US Supreme Court to reconsider the rulings, and warned that doing so will make it both easier to criminalize people experiencing homelessness and much harder to land them permanent housing later on.

The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Martin in 2019, but pressure mounted on the high court as the nation’s homelessness crisis grew worse, especially in the Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction.

Over 650,000 people in America experience homelessness on any given night, and roughly 40 percent of those individuals are sleeping outside on the streets, in cars, parks, train stations, and other places not designed primarily for people. Federal data published in late 2023 showed a rise in homelessness in most states.

Homelessness advocates immediately denounced the ruling, warning that it will make things worse and further marginalize vulnerable Americans.

The Grants Pass decision undoubtedly marks a significant setback to the constitutional rights of homeless people, and local governments will feel more confident passing punitive policies with the Supreme Court’s blessing.

But it will not end the political battles over tent encampments. It only concerns what cities can do, and not what they should do.

Conservatives want clearing homeless tent encampments to be non-discretionary

Those who want cities to be more aggressive in clearing homeless tent encampments are celebrating.

Theane Evangelis, the lead counsel for the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, praised the Court for “restor[ing] the ability of cities on the frontlines of this crisis to develop lasting solutions that meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of their communities, while also keeping our public spaces safe and clean.” She said she hopes that years from now this moment is recognized as “the turning point in America’s homelessness crisis.”

But even though overturning Martin and Grants Pass would make it easier for cities to clear out tent encampments, local governments still hold considerable discretion over whether they should do so.

And especially in liberal cities, where leaders may be more inclined to leave people experiencing homelessness alone (or come under more pressure from advocates to do so), some conservatives have long felt additional legislative and legal action would be needed to actually force cities to act.

“Many cities have used Martin as an excuse, you know, they throw up their hands and say, ‘Our hands are tied,’” said Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who hoped the Supreme Court would overturn the decisions. “We don’t think that was a fair reading, that you can’t enforce your camping bans, and reversing Grants Pass would take that argument away [from cities]. But it still doesn’t require them to do anything at that point.”

Instead, Wurman and others have been promoting public nuisance lawsuits as a way to force cities to disband tent encampments. These types of lawsuits can be based on things like loud noise or air pollution, but also things like unsanitary conditions or other health hazards. Importantly, private citizens have the right of action to bring public nuisance claims.

The first successful example of this strategy was in 2022 against the city of Phoenix, Arizona, when Wurman and colleagues sued for a declaration that a downtown homeless encampment on city property constituted a public nuisance. More than 1,000 people had moved to this encampment — known as “the Zone” — and the plaintiffs pointed to the crime, defecation, drug use, theft, and other safety hazards there that threatened public health. Arizona state law defines “[a]ny place, condition or building that is controlled or operated by any governmental agency and that is not maintained in a sanitary condition” as a “public nuisance … dangerous to the public health.”

A judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs last year, declaring “the Zone” a public nuisance, and ordered Phoenix to address the situation. The encampment is now cleared, but the city is appealing the decision.

Wurman has had less success in his two other lawsuits pursuing the public nuisance strategy.

Last September, two Tucson homeowners and one Tucson business owner sued the city for failing to clear an encampment, citing things like trash, fire set by residents that burned uncontrollably, and car and residential theft.

Like in Phoenix, the plaintiffs asked the courts to declare the campsite a public nuisance and order Tucson to clear it out. The city in turn argued the plaintiffs lacked standing and that they could not be liable for “fundamental government policy,” which includes how and whether to spend its public resources.

In other words, they hope to push legislation to counteract what the Supreme Court just ruled and ensure that homeless people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

They also criticized the decision: “This decision sets a dangerous precedent that will cause undue harm to people experiencing homelessness and give free rein to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment, rather than real solutions,” said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “This ruling allows leaders to shift the burden to law enforcement. This tactic has consistently failed to reduce homelessness in the past, and it will assuredly fail to reduce homelessness in the future.”

Ultimately, liberal homelessness activists hope to use the Grants Pass attention to focus the national conversation on policy solutions they say will actually solve homelessness, including universal rental assistance, repairs to public housing, and funds for eviction prevention. Advocates plan to call for $365 billion in the next year to fund these initiatives.

Following the ruling advocates sent out an email blast inviting people to email their elected officials for more funding for housing and to join the “Housing Not Handcuffs” advocacy campaign.

“We knew from Day 1 that the Supreme Court case wouldn’t end homelessness,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, the communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “Now, we must use this moment in time to ensure that Congress and the White House do their job by funding the housing needed to ensure that nobody experiences homelessness in the richest country in the world.”