Dear Weekend Jolter,
Who’s up for a round of armchair sociology?
Say the world is struck by a calamity unprecedented in the modern age, and, in response, good citizens are instructed to work from home if possible and keep their children home from school; college grads are allowed to pause student-loan payments; and landlords are told not to evict tenants for falling behind on rent.
After months, and in some cases years, of this “new normal,” however warranted the changes may have been for a limited time, returning to old habits would be a challenge, would it not?
In fact, resistance to doing so is, today, evident across the board. Educators nationwide are dealing with a rise in chronic absenteeism, as students fell out of the habit of attending class during Covid’s remote-learning period. The political pressure on Biden to “cancel” student debt, and his willingness to do so, merely took payment delinquency to the logical next level. We all know how difficult it’s been for corporate bosses to call back employees to the physical office (he typed, from his basement . . .). As for rent payments: It’s not so far-fetched to suspect that recent, brazen incidents of “squatters” taking over residences and refusing to leave connect in some way to a cultural shift in which paying bills on time — or paying them at all — has been downgraded in importance.
This is just one theory. Whatever the reason, squatting does appear to be gaining newfound popularity in cities across the country, afflicting property owners who too often discover that tossing unlawful occupiers is counterintuitively complicated. The National Rental Home Council (NRHC), a trade group representing the single-family-home rental industry, told NR that members have reported a sizeable increase, especially in certain markets, over the past few years.
Some of the headline-grabbing incidents almost defy belief. One man who has been hunkering down in a Seattle-area home for nearly two years and isn’t paying rent got a court order to keep out the landlord, who has resorted to staging protests and raising money over his case. As David Zimmermann reports, the landlord and his attorney have filed four eviction proceedings but have encountered delays in the courts — and resistance from a legal group aiding the “tenant.” Los Angeles is seeing a rash of bizarre incidents involving mansions and other luxury properties. Per Los Angeles Magazine, after a Hollywood Hills couple went on vacation, they came home to find their mansion “filled with squatters, at least one of whom was using their bedroom to create Only Fans content. Someone had changed the locks and rented out rooms with fake leases.” NewsNation recently profiled a California man who runs a team that confronts and removes squatters from people’s homes, for a fee.
Many factors, of course, may explain the squatting scourge, including rising prices and the wind-down of pandemic-era government programs. The NRHC says that genuine hardship contributes in some cases but cautions that something more organized may also be at play, involving social media. Indeed, guides have been popping up online, including on TikTok, instructing people how to spot seemingly unoccupied or otherwise vulnerable properties and move in.
In the case of one recent high-profile confrontation in New York City, lax local laws evidently played a role, as David reported earlier this month:
A New York City homeowner was arrested for unlawful eviction after arguing with squatters who, she says, stole her $1 million home last month.
The New York Police Department took Adele Andaloro, 47, into custody after she attempted to change the locks on her Queens property that she inherited following her parents’ deaths, ABC Eyewitness News reported Monday. The standoff between Andaloro and the squatters occurred on February 29.
In New York City, squatters can claim tenant rights after living on a property for 30 days. . . . Under New York City law, homeowners cannot change the locks, switch off utilities, or remove personal items belonging to their tenants from a property. The law was created, in part, to fill the city’s vacant and abandoned buildings with people who previously loitered on the streets. However, squatters have taken advantage of it.
Jonathan Turley, in a USA Today piece last summer, pinpointed the breakdown in deterrence as a driver, with local authorities not doing enough to help property owners, forcing them “into overtaxed housing courts with notoriously slow dockets.” (He recommended cities set up “rapid response teams” to empower prosecutors to make quick judgments and fast-track cases.)
Atlanta, for now, faces the biggest challenge where rental properties are concerned, according to the National Rental Home Council. The association conducted a study last fall finding 1,200 illegally occupied homes in the metro area — where overburdened courts and sheriff’s offices can make eviction a drawn-out process — with Dallas–Fort Worth and Orange County, Fla., also seeing hundreds of cases between them. NRHC CEO David Howard said in a statement that this is a property-rights issue “first and foremost,” but it presents a public-safety issue as well, all while reducing the available housing stock.
The bright side of the bad headlines is that the issue has stirred lawmakers to action, in New York, Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere. A Georgia bill backed by the NRHC is already heading to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk after unanimously passing the state senate; it would essentially create a fast track for removing and charging squatters. The legislation further specifies, in a line that ought to get would-be squatters’ attention, that “the court may award the plaintiff the fair market value rent for the duration of the party’s occupancy, and other monetary relief found appropriate by the court.”
Make paying the bills great again.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On a truly independent voice, in the Senate and in American politics: Joseph Lieberman, R.I.P.
Israel can’t necessarily count on America: Biden’s Shameful Betrayal of Israel at the United Nations
This wouldn’t just be a bad deal for taxpayers, but for homeowners too: Biden’s Latest Housing Proposal Is Like a Bad Credit-Card Promotion
ARTICLES
Dominic Pino: What Led to the Collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge
Dan McLaughlin: The Department of Education’s FAFSA Fiasco
Audrey Fahlberg: Bob Casey’s Abortion Evolution
Brittany Bernstein: Ex-California Oil Official Says Newsom Administration Pressured Him to Illegally Withhold Drilling Permits
Brittany Bernstein: Inside the New York State Bar Association’s Race-Obsessed Equity Seminar
Charles C. W. Cooke: Biden’s EV Mandate Is an Affront to Car Lovers
Rich Lowry: No One Is Above the Law. That Means a Trump DOJ Must Indict Joe Biden
James Lynch: As Mayor, MAGA Senate Candidate Touted ‘Anti-Bias’ Cop Trainings, ‘Equitable’ Police Department
James Lynch: Berkeley Set to Repeal Natural-Gas Ban
Becket Adams: No One Knows How to Save the Press
Haley Strack: A Country’s Resilience, in the Face of Horror
Jeffrey Blehar: Will NBC Please Spare Us Their Sanctimony?
Ryan Mills: DeSantis Spikes the Ball as Disney Drops Suit Challenging Loss of Special-District Status
CAPITAL MATTERS
“The federal government made improper payments multiple times greater than the entire budgets of the cabinet departments tasked with law enforcement and diplomacy last year.” Dominic Pino puts government waste in perspective: $236 Billion in Improper Federal Payments in 2023, GAO Says
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Even Armond White can be pleasantly surprised: Chisholm Biopic Goes from Default to Virtue
Brian Allen catches a show in Amsterdam on a modern, late artist whose lasting work speaks a language its own. “No irony or easy-sleazy cant” here, Brian says. See for yourself: Savant of the Beautiful, Matthew Wong, in Amsterdam
FROM THE NEW, MAY 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Four More Years of Trump?
Jean M. Twenge: Smartphones Are Damaging Our Kids
Brian Stewart: What You Can’t Say in a TED Talk
Dominic Pino: Deficits Forever
WELCOME TO THESE EXCERPTS. THEY’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU
If you’re the parent of a high-school senior (or are yourself one), you may already be painfully aware of the FAFSA fiasco. If not, Dan McLaughlin has the latest, drawing on first-hand experience:
If, like me, you have a college-bound high-school senior in your family, you’ve likely been on the receiving end of yet another colossal screw-up by our federal government: the overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA. Every year, students (or more commonly their parents) need to fill out the FAFSA with information about their income, assets, and expenses in order to qualify for federal student aid. Many colleges require the FAFSA before awarding other forms of need-based aid, and some require it to be filed even by people without need before they can qualify for scholarship aid. There’s a more detailed and onerous form, the CSS, operated by the College Board and required by some schools. Filling these out is like doing your taxes, only more so. Typically, the forms are available in October, and schools may set filing deadlines in the fall so that they can deliver financial-aid awards at or near the time they send out acceptances.
Not this year. The FAFSA wasn’t even fully available until January 8, after the Department of Education briefly flicked on the lights on the form on December 30 just so it could claim that it launched in 2023. I was on two college visits over the weekend; one school said that it was just starting to receive the first batch of FAFSA need assessments for its accepted students, and the other had decided in the fall that this was going to be a disaster and pushed its date for students to commit to the school back from May 1 to June 1. For schools with rolling deadlines, that means that students who are ready to commit now will have a leg up on those whose decisions hinge on available aid. It also means that undecided students may end up wasting time visiting campuses they would otherwise have crossed off their lists by now. On Monday, Gavin Newsom signed an emergency law extending by a month the deadline for California students to apply for scholarships, and the state has already pushed back the commitment date to May 15. . . .
The Department of Education aimed to revamp the FAFSA for students filing for the 2024–25 academic year. It did so at the direction of Congress, which passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020. The theory was that the form could be simplified, in part by directly incorporating data from the IRS into the department’s calculations, while at the same time the amount of aid being awarded could be increased by liberalizing the criteria. The reality: FAFSA applications are down 33 percent this year, shutting more students out of receiving aid or, perhaps, going to college at all.
From NR’s editorial, why Biden’s plan to aim government subsidies and incentives at the housing market is a terrible one:
While prices have moderated from their peak, they have not done so nearly enough to make up for the more than doubling of borrowing costs. President Biden says he has a solution, but like most forms of government interference, it would only make the problem worse.
During the State of the Union address, Biden unveiled a plan to give homebuyers $400 per month for mortgage payments over the next two years “as mortgage rates come down.” It didn’t take long for most people with a basic understanding of economics or an ounce of common sense to recognize that government subsidies — especially during a time of falling interest rates — would lead to more demand and, thus, even higher housing prices.
No problem, Biden now says — he has an idea to increase housing supply. Right now, one of the reasons why inventory is relatively scarce is that a lot of homeowners who locked in low-interest-rate mortgages for decades are reluctant to sell and be forced to purchase a new home with higher rates. In response, Biden wants to offer up to $10,000 per year in tax credits to those who sell their starter homes and purchase new homes with higher-rate mortgages. This, the theory goes, would help unlock inventory.
But — on top of the cost to other taxpayers — it would be a rotten deal for any homeowner to take Biden up on such a proposal.
To start with, the closing costs associated with selling and then buying a home (broker commissions, inspection and appraisal fees, loan-origination fees, etc.) would easily take up most if not all of that $10,000. But more importantly, increased housing payments would quickly exceed $10,000, and after that credit expires after the first year, the new homeowner would be drastically worse off.
Just to provide an example, according to Rocket Mortgage, “first-time home buyers tend to stay in their homes for about 11 years.” Eleven years ago, according to the St. Louis Fed, the average 30-year fixed mortgage was 3.52 percent and the median house sold for $258,400. Now, the most recent data have the median sales price at $417,700 and interest rate at 6.87 percent.
Assuming the recommended 20 percent down payment, the mortgage payment on a median home purchased in March 2013 would be $931 per month, compared with $2,194 today. That’s a difference of $1,263 per month, or over $15,000 per year.
In scenario one (staying in their current house), the homeowner would have $212,268 in remaining mortgage payments over 19 years and then would be free of mortgage debt. In scenario two (selling), the homeowner would have to pay $500,232 over the next 19 years, and a total of $789,840 in remaining payments.
The new issue of NR is out, and it’s chock-full of things that are, well, worth subscribing for. MBD has a cover story gaming out four possible scenarios for what a Trump Term Two could look like. Another highlight: Jean M. Twenge’s data-driven essay drawing hard connections between the rise of smartphones/social media and the growth of mental-health challenges facing kids around the world:
The growing popularity of smartphones and social media over the past decade and a half has fundamentally changed teens’ lives. With communication moving online, Gen Z teens became much less likely to hang out with their friends in person. American teens and young adults spent about an hour a day socializing in person in 2012, but that figure sank to a half hour a day by 2022. They also went out with their friends much less frequently.
Technology use can also interfere with sleep, and it has: Half of U.S. teens were significantly sleep-deprived in 2022, up from a third in 2012. It’s not a coincidence that 2012 was the first year the majority of Americans owned a smartphone and around the time that daily social-media use became nearly universal among teens.
This generational shift in how teens spent their leisure time (more time online and less time with friends in person, along with less time sleeping) coincided with a striking increase in loneliness, depression, and unhappiness. More than twice as many American teens suffered from major depression in 2022 than did in 2011, with nearly all of the increase occurring before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. These statistics are from a screening of thousands of randomly chosen teens across the country, not just those who have sought help from a professional. Thus the increases cannot be explained away by overdiagnosis or greater help-seeking.
After staying stable for two decades, the number of American teens reporting that they felt lonely, left out, useless, or joyless suddenly increased after 2012. Teen happiness, which had increased between the early 1990s and the early 2010s, suddenly declined after 2012. Within a few years, it had fallen to all-time lows.
Could these trends be caused by greater willingness among teens to admit to mental-health issues or unhappiness? If so, we would not expect to see any changes in objectively measured behaviors related to mental-health issues. But those changes have occurred: Emergency-room admissions for self-harm, a behavior linked to depression, doubled among older teen girls and more than quadrupled among ten- to 14-year-old girls in the U.S. between 2010 and 2021. These data are collected directly from hospitals by the CDC and so are not influenced by changes in self-reports. Even more troubling, suicide rates among American children and teens have doubled since 2010, another trend that can’t be explained by self-report biases.
In short, more kids and teens are suffering from mental-health issues, and this trend began long before the Covid-19 pandemic. Adolescent mental health, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has declared, is “the crisis of our time.”
But how do we know that smartphones and social media are the cause of the crisis? Isn’t it possible that something else caused the startling increase in teen depression?
The changes in the way teens spend their time don’t just coincide with the increases in depression and loneliness; these increases are large, widespread, and of significant impact. An alternative explanation would need to have the same qualities.
For example, perhaps the increase in depression is due to factors such as school shootings, the opioid crisis, or the increase in students’ college debt. These explanations, however, are all specific to the U.S. If any of them were the reason for the increase in teen depression and loneliness, we would not see similar upticks in other countries where they are less prevalent. But, in fact, similar trends appear among teens in the U.K., Europe, and Latin America, with anxiety and loneliness beginning to increase in 2012 — just as in the U.S. In a 2021 paper, my co-authors and I found that loneliness increased in lockstep with internet use across countries but was unconnected to economic cycles, trends in income inequality, or changes in family size.
ICYMI last weekend, Haley Strack ran a piece documenting her experience during a recent trip to Israel. What she saw, and heard:
Before their seven-year anniversary last year, a young couple who had been long-distance for almost their whole relationship decided to close the distance. In September, the woman, a twentysomething from London, moved to Israel, where the man, a young IDF soldier, waited. He died three weeks later fighting in Gaza. She’s now not sure what to do or where to go. London is no longer home, and Israel is the country where she lost everything. Maybe being surrounded by communal grief is somehow more comforting than the alternative — isolation. In this sense, she is not alone.
Israelis greet one another now with “How is your family?” Almost everyone has a loved one or a connection to someone serving in the Israel Defense Forces, and upon meeting someone, it makes sense to ask that question. The best lens through which to understand another Israeli seems to be one of grief and also sacrifice: how much you’ve lost to the war, or how much you might have at stake. There’s no right way to grieve, but self-help literature usually suggests that tragedy is personal, subjective, and isolating. Since Hamas slaughtered children, whole families, and innocent civilians on October 7, Israel’s grieving process has been healthily reliant on unity.
Crowds of young music lovers attended the Nova music festival on October 7, the now-infamous site of Hamas’s bloody assault. The Nova survivors from that horrific day are young people who, like normal hippie-centric ravers, use concerts as a way to promote peace. Many of them have taken to music again, to help their grieving process. They meet weekly as part of a survivors’ program; they take surfing lessons in Tel Aviv and attend DJ sets together. One survivor told me — though she was wracked by guilt to say it — that if there’s anything good to come out of October 7, it’s that strengthened sense of community.
Emily Hand was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri the morning of October 7. Her case is now famous, thanks to her father, Tom, who immediately broadcast her story to any media outlet that would listen after the attack. At first, Tom thought that Hamas had killed Emily in the initial onslaught. Then he learned that she was alive, somewhere in Gaza. Eventually Emily was returned home, thanks in part to Tom’s intensive media campaign. But the Hands lost a lot — time, family, their home. Hamas murdered Emily’s mother on October 7, which Tom had to explain to Emily when Hamas finally let her go. And for the past five months, despite all that his family has been through, Tom has stayed in the spotlight to speak up for Hamas’s remaining hostages. That means that for the past five months he has had to relive the worst day of his life and the death of his daughter’s mother. When he speaks about that day, he still cries.
Shout-Outs
Evan Gardner, at the Free Press: The SAT Is Back. Or Is It?
The Financial Times: How Ukraine war distracted Moscow from Isis-K threat
Marc Thiessen, at the Washington Post: Take it from me: See your music heroes before it’s too late
CODA
Facebook has been feeding me a steady diet of ads lately for an upcoming Sigur Rós concert in my area. This is kind of an obscure pitch, and I wondered what about my keystrokes (or my choice of background music while I work?) tipped off the algorithm regarding a show all the way out in September. Alas, I will surrender to the algorithm — and include a Sigur Rós song here, even if I don’t plan to see them. Off the Icelandic band’s breakthrough Ágætis byrjun (and no, I can’t pronounce that), do enjoy . . . this moody number, whose name I also can’t pronounce but which captures all the haunting, atmospheric grooviness of that album.
Thanks for reading, enjoy the weekend, and Happy Easter.