Shannon Garcia

“It’s a heist”: Senator calls out Texas for trying to steal shuttle from Smithsonian

Bring the Space Shutle Home Act, Chantilly, Dick Durbin, discovery, John Corbyn, NASA, National Air and Space Museum, One Big Beautiful Bill, senators, Smithsonian, Space, space center houston, Space exploration, space history, Space shuttle, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, ted cruz, texas, Virginia / Shannon Garcia / July 11, 2025

Citing research by NASA and the Smithsonian, Durbin said that the total was closer to $305 million and that did not include the estimated $178 million needed to build a facility to house and display Discovery once in Houston.

Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact, let alone a space shuttle, from the Smithsonian’s collection. The Washington, DC, institution, which serves as a trust instrumentality of the US, maintains that it owns Discovery. The paperwork signed by NASA in 2012 transferred “all rights, interest, title, and ownership” for the spacecraft to the Smithsonian.

“This will be the first time ever in the history of the Smithsonian someone has taken one of their displays and forcibly taken possession of it. What are we doing here? They don’t have the right in Texas to claim this,” said Durbin.

Houston was not the only city to miss out on displaying a retired space shuttle. In 2011, Durbin and fellow Illinois Senator Mark Kirk appealed to NASA to exhibit one of the winged spacecraft at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The agency ultimately decided to award the shuttles to the National Air and Space Museum, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, and the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Houston, we have a problem

A prototype orbiter that was exhibited where Discovery is now was transferred to the Intrepid Museum in New York City.

To be able to bring up his points at Thursday’s hearing, Durbin introduced the “Houston, We Have a Problem” amendment to “prohibit the use of funds to transfer a decommissioned space shuttle from one location to another location.”

He then withdrew the amendment after having voiced his objections.

“I think we’re dealing with something called waste. Eighty-five million dollars worth of waste. I know that this is a controversial issue, and I know that there are other agencies, Smithsonian, NASA, and others that are interested in this issue; I’m going to withdraw this amendment, but I’m going to ask my colleagues to be honest about it,” said Durbin. “I hope that we think about this long and hard.”

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Investors appear to like a company with big space manufacturing ambitions

leo economy, Space, varda space / Shannon Garcia / July 10, 2025

The company has also positioned its W-series of spacecraft, which reenter at a maximum speed of Mach 25, as an ideal test bed for thermal protection materials, navigation, communications, and other sensors that could be flown operationally on hypersonic missiles.

Therefore, Varda’s three main lines of business are military applications, pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, and basic research in microgravity.

The latter is an interesting option at a time when NASA is rushing to manifest research experiments on board the International Space Station—which is due to retire in 2030—and commercial space stations have not yet come online (and may not for several years).

Humans in the loop?

For experiments that can be done without a human astronaut, Varda now offers a less expensive and faster way to get experiments done in space.

It is not difficult to envision an increasingly sophisticated, autonomous spacecraft potentially taking some commercial business away from private space stations (NASA’s program for this is called Commercial LEO Destinations, or CLDs) that are being developed to come online by 2030, or shortly thereafter. However, Varda officials say this is not their intent.

“We don’t view ourselves [as] competitive with those platforms. If anything, we’re a force multiplier,” said Eric Lasker, Varda’s chief revenue officer. “We view ourselves more as the bridge versus some kind of competition to all things CLD.”

Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that Varda is flying missions right now—and quite a lot of them for a small space company. The next five years could see some industries and commercial applications moving toward an autonomous model in space rather than having humans in the loop, simply because that’s the commercial option that exists today.

Despite its autonomous posture, Varda is not actually anti-human spaceflight. Asparouhov said the company would eventually like to build much larger platforms in space that can stay there permanently. Over time, these facilities will naturally need some maintenance.

“Consider an oil rig worker in Dallas where it’s two weeks on, two weeks off. You get to be with your family two weeks, and then you’re at this industrial outpost in the middle of nowhere that’s difficult to get to,” he said. “Ours just happens to be this low-Earth-orbit-based industrial outpost rather than somewhere in the ocean.”

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Gemini can now turn your photos into video with Veo 3

AI, Ai video, Gemini, Google, Tech, Veo 3 / Shannon Garcia / July 10, 2025

Google’s Veo 3 videos have propagated across the Internet since the model’s debut in May, blurring the line between truth and fiction. Now, it’s getting even easier to create these AI videos. The Gemini app is gaining photo-to-video generation, allowing you to upload a photo and turn it into a video. You don’t have to pay anything extra for these Veo 3 videos, but the feature is only available to subscribers of Google’s Pro and Ultra AI plans.

When Veo 3 launched, it could conjure up a video based only on your description, complete with speech, music, and background audio. This has made Google’s new AI videos staggeringly realistic—it’s actually getting hard to identify AI videos at a glance. Using a reference photo makes it easier to get the look you want without tediously describing every aspect. This was an option in Google’s Flow AI tool for filmmakers, but now it’s in the Gemini app and web interface.

To create a video from a photo, you have to select “Video” from the Gemini toolbar. Once this feature is available, you can then add your image and prompt, including audio and dialogue. Generating the video takes several minutes—this process takes a lot of computation, which is why video output is still quite limited.

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Balsa Update: Springtime in DC

Balsa / Shannon Garcia / July 9, 2025

Today’s post is an update from my contractor at Balsa Research, Jennifer Chen. I offer guidance and make strategic choices, but she’s the one who makes the place run. Among all the other crazy things that have been happening lately, we had to divert some time from our Jones Act efforts to fight against some potentially far more disastrous regulations that got remarkably close to happening.

What if, in addition to restricting all domestic waterborne trade to U.S.-built, U.S-flagged vessels, we also required the same of 20% of all U.S. exports?

In late February this year, Balsa Research got word that this was a serious new proposal coming out of the USTR, with public comments due soon and public hearings not much longer after that.

The glaring problem with this proposal was that there were fewer than one hundred oceangoing ships that meet that criteria today, when we probably needed closer to a thousand.

Can we build our way out? No. The US currently only has four shipyards [1] capable of constructing large oceangoing commercial vessels, and it takes them 52 months on average to deliver an oceangoing cargo ship [2]. And that was if you can even get in the order book in the first place; most of these shipyards also take government contracts, the navy is behind on updating its fleet, and there are only so many dry docks to go around. We can theoretically build some shipyards about this, but that would take time as well.

In the meantime, existing oceangoing U.S.-built vessels have a combined capacity that can handle around 2% of current U.S. maritime export volumes, which is a much smaller number than 20%. And once capacity is reached, no more ships will be available at any price, and U.S. waterborne exports will be immediately reduced to a very small fraction of its current volume [3].

This seemed very bad. Maybe Balsa should do something about it?

I tried to squirm out of the responsibility at first, because this was the rational thing to do. With how limited Balsa’s capacity was (only one person working full time, that’s me!), it really only made sense for the entity to take on the highest leverage work we can; the ones where our comparative and absolute advantage absolutely dominated the competition. The work where no one else was on the ball at all. Like, say, trying to put together a set of coherent reforms to the Jones Act.

How might I squirm out of the responsibility? I went through press coverage of the proposal in trade journals, and the list of submitted comments in the USTR public portal. All I needed to do, really, was identify if this observation was being made literally anywhere else that the USTR might see.

Like, the UAW does a bunch of lobbying, surely they would have noticed that they will not be able to export cars? Well, I didn’t find a UAW submission, but did find one from the trade group representing the American auto industry. In the face of crushing export restrictions, they… “encourage USTR to begin implementation of any such restrictions no sooner than 7 years to provide sufficient time for the capacity of U.S.-flagged and U.S.-built vessels to grow to a level where it can meet industry demand.” [4]

…Okay. I guess Balsa might need to do something about this.

First, recall what the political environment was like in early March this year, two months into the new administration. Everyone’s attention was spread quite thin, what with the exciting new tariffs being announced and the Greenland annexation threats.

To make things worse, this proposed restriction was being double billed with another baffling proposal to charge certain cargo ships [6] millions of dollars when they try to deliver imported goods to U.S. ports. Because the dire negative consequences of new $3-5 million dollar port entry fees required no special knowledge to grasp, 99% of the attention and the lobbying might of the American private sector went towards protesting that instead.

But honestly, even without all that, I think the obliviousness is understandable. The U.S. makes trucks and planes, so it’s reasonable to assume that we also make ships and have more than a two digit number of them. The Jones Act killed domestic shipping generations ago, and industries have long adapted to using trucks, rail, or pipelines to move things domestically. As for exports, the nationality of the ships has never mattered there. With American industry severed from American shipbuilding for decades, who exactly was supposed to be keeping tabs?

Of course, a few parties would have been aware. The handful of domestic shipping companies that own all of the Jones Act ships, for instance. But they stand to benefit from the proposal as it sharply increases demand for their services, so they’re not exactly incentivized to speak up. Ditto for U.S. shipyards. I was not surprised by their silence.

More confusing to me was this 60 page economic analysis of the USTR’s complete proposal. This was submitted by the National Retail Federation, but approximately every single industry and trade association in the United States is a co-sponsor.

Regarding the requirement for 20% of U.S. exports to be delivered on U.S.-built ships, the analysts acknowledge that this would be a de-facto restriction of U.S. exports, which would be really bad. But then they proceed to base their analysis on a model where everything is actually fine because the vessels that do not exist actually do exist:

If USTR were to implement this remedy option… it would amount to, in effect, a restriction of U.S. exports out of U.S. ports, a very different scenario than the one we model here. In that event, the results we provide below would be many multiples greater than what we show for the scenario as proposed by USTR, which essentially assumes that the 125+ containerships and all the other new vessels needed to implement it exist. Nevertheless, we have proceeded with the scenario as proposed by USTR. [page 18]

To be clear, in the actual proposal text, there’s no “scenario” from USTR suggesting that any ships would suddenly pop into existence. The proposed policy is simply a requirement for operators to transport 20% of U.S. products on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built ships [6].

I tried to find the scenario suggested by USTR to no avail. I suspect that sufficiently prestigious submitters probably had the luxury of some pre-submission communication with USTR, like formal stakeholder calls or guidance about analytical approaches. Unfortunately, such prior communication may end up significantly constraining your ultimate range of motion.

Despite the questionable analysis, it was still a huge relief to come across. I’d started to wonder if I was missing something obvious since no other submission brought up the fact that this proposal was de facto a restriction of all U.S. exports. But here was confirmation that no, at least one other team had noticed the same fundamental issue.

Congresspeople introduce bills all the time, and the vast majority of them die. Were we wasting our time on something that was 99% going to fail anyways?

Unfortunately, this did not seem to be the case. It was the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (responsible for a wide swathe of trade functions including advising the president on trade issues) that was proposing the above policies. They were doing so via “Section 301 Investigations”, a specific authority to take retaliatory action against “unfair trade practices”. This authority was invoked by the previous Trump administration six times, twice successfully. This gives us a base rate of 33%.

Additionally, of all the previous cases, this one bore the strongest resemblance to one of the two that passed—a 2017 case that was also framed as targeting unfair Chinese trade practices. That one resulted in significant additional tariffs on nearly two-thirds of all imports from China (~$370 billion in annual goods) beginning in 2018 and 2019.

Hundreds of industry representatives flew to DC to deliver their objections in person for that proposed action, resulting in a full seven days of public hearings. It was enacted anyways.

So there was a real chance that this policy would get enacted, and Balsa had noticed a major flaw that no one else was meaningfully pointing out. It was now overdetermined that we should divert some effort towards making a credible case against it.

I submitted Balsa’s initial public comment on March 22nd, and also a request to present testimony at the public hearing, which was accepted.

Conveniently, I was attending a maritime legislation conference in D.C the weekend prior. I shamelessly took advantage and put my public comment and presentation script in front of all the industry and trade reps I could chase down, and got the contact info and feedback of some of their in-house policy teams.

The consequences of the export restriction was surprising to some of them, but none of them were skeptical about my conclusion after reading through my analysis—another good sign that I was not the one missing something. In some cases, the organizations they were heading represented a plurality of interests, and while they had a notion that the restrictions to U.S. exports would be harmful, they felt unable to speak up about it as some of their members stood to benefit [7].

I made some last minute updates to my testimony based on their feedback and my observations.

On March 26th, I presented Balsa’s findings to a panel of representatives from eleven different government departments and agencies and took their questions.

Almost sixty testimonials were provided to the panel over two days of hearings. The overwhelming majority of speakers were there to object to the port fees. And this was important work; the proposed port fees were going to immediately and negatively impact the economy, this was obvious, and it was well worth it to hammer it home from dozens of angles [8].

Around a sixth of the presenters supported the proposals and came to make the case for why the USTR shouldn’t listen to the haters. These presenters generally represented American labor unions, the domestic shipbuilding industry, and states where unions and/or the shipbuilding industry were unusually important funders of their sitting political representatives.

Besides us, only a handful of the presenters spoke out against the export restrictions [9]. The majority of these presenters still primarily focused on the port fees, however.

Presenters who focused more on export restrictions included representatives from petrochemical industries who pointed out that the U.S. has no chemical or LNG tankers and no current capacity to build them, and shippers who noted extreme cost premiums and prohibitive timelines when trying to work with American shipyards.

In general, I found that the presenters understood that U.S.-built ships were unviable for their specific industries or companies, but didn’t grasp that this was a universal problem rather than a sectoral one [10]. Still, their testimony helped usefully signal that American shipbuilders were fundamentally uncompetitive, which helped legitimize our rather more dire analysis when we presented late on the second day. We just had to spell out the full-scale consequences; it wasn’t that companies like North Florida Shipping would need to pay $40 million instead of $10 million per vessel, it was that after the tiny order books filled up, no more ships would be available at any price.

So that’s basically what Balsa conveyed in our testimony. Afterwards, we had an opportunity to submit post-hearing responses to the questions that we were asked during the hearings. I got one question from the Department of Commerce requesting our analysis of the security implications of continuing to allow Chinese-built ships to dock at our ports (i.e. standard practice today), so we also submitted a response to that.

Around a month after the public hearings, the USTR published updated proposals and gave a summary of the arguments made in the public hearing. Here’s an excerpt from their summarized findings regarding the export restrictions:

Several comments expressed concern that the proposals would only punish U.S. exporters. Some asserted that the proposals would lead to a decrease in U.S. exports and would ultimately divert ships from U.S. ports. Several comments noted that the timelines for the proposals are too aggressive and not achievable. Most of these comments noted that there is currently insufficient capacity of U.S. ships and one comment noted a lack of U.S. mariners.

In response, they got rid of almost the entire thing. (More about that in the next section.)

I think Balsa can take something like 1-3% of the credit for this, and I have no regrets in spending the (relatively small amount of) time and money that we did to guarantee that our analysis was heard by the USTR. Along the way, we also made many useful and promising contacts with some congressional offices and other people working on maritime policy, which is a fantastic bonus.

The revised proposal that the USTR released in response to the public comments is for export restrictions to now only apply to LNG. Beginning in April 2029, 1% of exports must be delivered in U.S.-built vessels, and the percentage ratchets up annually.

This is still very awkward, because there exists no U.S.-made LNG tankers and no current capacity to build them. Building the capacity will take time, which means that starting in 2029, the U.S. may not be able to export any LNG.

But this is objectively a much smaller problem; instead of eliminating 90% of all waterborne U.S. exports (worth around $600 billion annually), it will be eliminating “only” a $30-40 billion dollar industry [11] if enacted.

More relevantly for Balsa, the correct people have noticed and are taking reasonable actions. The Center for LNG, which represents the U.S. LNG industry, has filed a comment to the USTR pointing this out. So has the Cato Institute, the Chamber of Shipping of America, the International Tank Container Organization, and various others.

And more importantly, this administration clearly really wants to export a lot more LNG, so I really don’t anticipate this restriction sticking around.

Zvi and I have minor disagreements about the counterfactual impact of an additional submission from Balsa Research, but I’ve ultimately decided that it is time to return to hunting the biggest fish—taking steps towards the actual repeal of the Jones Act.

Balsa Research is once more 100% focused on Jones Act reform! We are looking to hire someone based in D.C. to do research for us, please get in touch if you think you would be a good fit, and/or forward this to people in your network that you think would be.

We’re also developing specific reports digging to the bottom of specific pro-Jones Act talking points. Since the American Cargo for American Ships Act has passed the House and is currently before a Senate subcommittee, we will be first investigating the value of cargo preference laws for bolstering the American maritime sector.

If you would like to support this sort of work, please consider making a donation.

You can also view our new Request for Applications for a labor market analysis of the Jones Act, now that we are ready to get back to funding more work.

Thanks for reading!

[1] Possibly five, but Fincantieri Marinette Marine is situated on Lake Michigan, and the St. Lawrence Seaway is not wide enough for reasonably sized ocean carriers to be transported from the Great Lakes out to the ocean.

[2] Since the 1980s, the domestic shipbuilding market has shifted to building smaller vessels or vessels focused on coastwise transportation. Most shipyards would need a period to transition to develop the capacity to build commercial vessels suitable for international ocean trade, even if you don’t care about costs. More on this if you’re interested: 2023 CRS one-pager on domestic shipbuilding, 2025 GAO report on navy shipbuilding, 2024 pieces by Brian Potter and Austin Vernon on American shipbuilding.

[3] Note that in this scenario, Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. territories are left in the lurch as well, as the ships that serviced them are diverted into servicing the most profitable 10% of international trade routes instead.

[4] I’m inclined to cut them some slack though; new tariffs on Mexican and Canadian steel and auto parts were likely top of mind at the time.

[5] Ships built in China, or ships that are part of a fleet that has any Chinese-built ships. Balsa estimates that this would affect approximately 45% of all ships in the global commercial fleet.

[6] Actually, it requires operators to transport 100% of U.S. products on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built ships, but if you submit some paperwork, you can get that number down to 20% for your specific entity. For the sake of simplicity, I have assumed that approximately every entity will immediately file this paperwork, but it’s worth noting that this means that the provision as written is actually stricter than that.

[7] Likely, that plurality of interests prevented them from looking too hard at the issue of American shipbuilding too much in the first place

[8] Balsa was originally going to join in on the hammering, actually. We had done analysis for both the port fee and the export restrictions for our written public comment, so we had the material. But when the final list of panelists were released, it became evident that there were much bigger players who were going to make the same arguments we did around the port fees. And they were going to do it better, since they had things like exclusive industry data and entire policy teams that were larger than one person, so we might as well save our five minute allotment to focus on the more neglected policy.

[9] A comprehensive list is available here.

[10] Again, this was reasonable and unsurprising.

[11] LNG specifically refers to super-cooled liquid natural gas requiring specialized tanker vessels for intercontinental transport, while pipeline exports carry natural gas in gaseous form to Canada and Mexico. This means that 100% of LNG exports are transported via tanker vessels, and therefore subject to this restriction.

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Nissan feels the effect of US-China trade war

Cars, EV adoption, Nissan, trade war / Shannon Garcia / July 8, 2025

Nissan’s future product portfolio is feeling the effects of some of Trump’s other policies. Working with congressional Republicans, the president has chosen to end federal tax incentives meant to encourage the adoption of clean energy vehicles like EVs. As a result, many new EVs will get $7,500 more expensive for most customers from October 1.

There’s no question that EV incentives help spur demand, given the higher purchase price of an EV. No credit means lower demand, so Nissan is delaying a pair of EVs it plans to build in Canton, Mississippi, according to Automotive News. The automaker has told its suppliers to expect a 10-month delay to the original schedule for an electric Nissan crossover now due for November 2028, and an Infiniti version that will now go into production in March 2029.

It’s not the first time this year that the production schedule at the factory in Canton has been torn up and redone. In April, Nissan said it had to “face reality” and accept that “the sedan market is shrinking,” as it cancelled a pair of electric sedans that were also to be built in Canton in the coming years.

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China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space

china, geosynchronous orbit, military space, orbital refueling, satellite servicing, shijian-21, shijian-25, Space, us space command, US Space Force / Shannon Garcia / July 8, 2025

The SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then.

This image from a telescope operated by s2a systems, a Swiss space domain awareness company, shows China’s SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites flying near one another on June 26. Credit: s2a systems

Two Chinese satellites have rendezvoused with one another more than 20,000 miles above the Earth in what analysts believe is the first high-altitude attempt at orbital refueling.

China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites, known as SJ-21 and SJ-25 for short, likely docked together in geosynchronous orbit sometime last week. This is the conclusion of multiple civilian satellite trackers using open source imagery showing the two satellites coming together, then becoming indistinguishable as a single object.

Chinese officials have released no recent public information on what the two satellites are up to, but they’ve said a bit about their missions in prior statements.

SJ-25, which launched in January, is designed “for the verification of satellite fuel replenishment and life extension service technologies,” according to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the Chinese state-owned contractor that developed the satellite. SJ-21 launched in 2021 and docked with a defunct Chinese Beidou navigation satellite in geosynchronous orbit, then towed it to a higher altitude for disposal before returning to the geosynchronous belt. Chinese officials described this demonstration as a test of “space debris mitigation” techniques.

More than meets the eye

These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. For example, a docking in geosynchronous orbit could foretell an emerging capability for China to approach, capture, and disable another country’s satellite. At the same time, the US Space Force is interested in orbital refueling as it seeks out ways to extend the lives of military satellites, which are often limited by finite fuel supplies.

The Space Force sometimes calls this concept dynamic space operations. While some military leaders remain skeptical about the payoff of in-space refueling, the Space Force has an agreement with Astroscale to perform the first refueling of a US military asset in orbit as soon as next year.

China appears to be poised to beat the US Space Force to the punch. The apparent docking of the two satellites last week suggests SJ-21 is the target for SJ-25’s refueling demonstration, and US officials are watching. Two of the Space Force’s inspector satellites, known by the acronym GSSAP, positioned themselves near SJ-21 and SJ-25 to get a closer look.

Retired Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw is a vocal proponent of dynamic space operations. Because of this, he’s interested in what happens with SJ-21 and SJ-25. Shaw was deputy commander of US Space Command before his retirement in 2023. In this role, Shaw had some oversight over GSSAP satellites as they roamed geosynchronous orbit.

“The theory behind dynamic space operations stemmed from a kind of operational frustration with our inability to conduct the full range of activities with GSSAP that we wanted to at Space Command, as the warfighter—largely due to the combination of fixed fuel availability and expected satellite lifetime,” Shaw told Ars.

As other countries, mainly China, step up their clandestine activities in orbit, military officials are asking more of the GSSAP satellites.

“It was operationally driven then, a couple years ago, but it’s now manifesting itself in much wider ways than even it did back then, particularly in the face of activities by potential adversaries,” Shaw said. “That’s why I’m more confident and even more zealous about it.”

Geosynchronous orbit is a popular location for military and commercial satellites. At an altitude of some 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers), a satellite’s orbital velocity perfectly matches the speed of Earth’s rotation, meaning a spacecraft has a fixed view of the same region of the planet 24 hours per day. This is useful for satellites providing military forces with secure strategic communications and early warning of missile attacks.

Now, geosynchronous orbit is becoming a proving ground for new kinds of spacecraft to inspect or potentially attack other satellites. Ground-based anti-satellite missiles aren’t as useful in striking targets in high-altitude orbits, and there’s a consensus that, if you were to attack an enemy satellite, it would make more sense to use a weapons platform already in space that could move in and connect with the target without blowing it up and creating a cloud of dangerous space junk.

Keeping watch

The US military’s GSSAP satellites began launching in 2014. They carry enough propellant to maneuver around geosynchronous orbit and approach objects for closer inspection, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Six GSSAP satellites have been launched to date, but the Space Force decommissioned one of them in 2023. Meanwhile, China’s satellite operators are watching the watchers.

“We’ve seen where GSSAP safely and responsibly approaches a Chinese vehicle, and it just quickly maneuvers away,” Shaw said. “We tend to fly our GSSAPs like dirigibles, using relatively slow, minimum energy transfer approaches. The Chinese know that we do that, so it is relatively easy for them to maneuver away today to avoid such an approach.

“If tomorrow they’re able to refuel at will and operate even more dynamically, then the marginal cost of those maneuvers for them becomes even lower, and the challenge for GSSAP becomes even greater,” Shaw said.

Danish Rear Admiral Damgaard Rousøe, Danish Defence Attaché, right, observes space domain awareness data with US Space Force Lt. Col. Mark Natale, left, Joint Commercial Operations cell director, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 26, 2024. Credit: US Space Force/Dalton Prejeant

China launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2016 with a robotic arm that could grab onto another object in space, then sent SJ-21 into orbit four years ago on its “space debris mitigation” mission.

Northrop Grumman launched two satellites in 2019 and 2020 that accomplished the first dockings in geosynchronous orbit. Northrop’s satellites, which it calls Mission Extension Vehicles, took control of two aging commercial communications satellites running low on fuel, maneuvering them to new locations and allowing them to continue operating for several more years. It’s easy to see that this kind of technology could be used for commercial or military purposes.

But these Mission Extension Vehicles don’t have the ability to transfer fluids from one satellite to another. That is the step China is taking with SJ-21 and SJ-25, presumably with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, which most satellites use because they combust on contact with one another.

US Space Command’s Joint Commercial Operations cell, which collects unclassified satellite monitoring data to bolster the military’s classified data sources, estimated the SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then. The video below, released by s2a systems, shows SJ-25 approaching SJ-21 on June 30.

A time-lapse of yesterday’s SJ-25 / SJ-21 coverage, recorded from 08: 30 to 20: 53 UTC. pic.twitter.com/HUPWBTXZc9

— s2a systems (@s2a_systems) July 1, 2025

The unclassified data does not confirm that the two satellites actually docked, but that is likely what happened. The satellites came together, or merged, on June 13 and June 30 but separated again within a few hours. These may have been practice runs, aborted docking attempts, or sudden maneuvers to avoid the prying eyes of the US military’s GSSAP satellites loitering nearby.

Now, the SJ-21 and SJ-25 have been flying together for more than five days with no discernible changes detected from ground-based telescopes. Thousands of miles over the equator, the two satellites appear only as dots in the viewfinders of these telescopes positioned around the globe.

What we don’t know

COMSPOC is a Pennsylvania-based company that collects and processes data from commercial satellite tracking sensors. COMSPOC fuses optical telescope imagery with radar tracking and passive radio frequency (RF) data, which uses radio signals to measure exact distances to satellites in space, to get the best possible estimate of a spacecraft’s position.

“With most telescopes… at 1 kilometer or a half a kilometer, somewhere in there, you’re going to start to lose it when they get that close,” said Paul Graziani, COMSPOC’s founder and CEO, in an interview with Ars. “I think it’d be difficult for any telescope, even a really capable one, to get within 100 meters. That seems to be a stretch for telescopes.”

That’s why it’s helpful to add radar and RF data to the mix.

“When you add all of that together, you become much better than the 1-kilometer [precision] that a ‘scope might be,” said Joe Callaro, COMSPOC’s director of operations. “RF tells you if part of that blob is moving and the other part isn’t, and even when they all become one pixel, you can tell things about that.”

Even then, companies like COMSPOC have a degree of uncertainty in their conclusions unless Chinese or US officials make a more definitive statement.

“We are not working with the government,” Callaro told Ars before last week’s apparent docking. “We are not clearing this. The charge that I have for my team is we won’t make assertions as to what’s going on. We will only tell what our software gives us as a solution. We can say, ‘Here are the elements, here’s the visual, but what it means and what it’s doing, we will not assert.’

“We will not say they’re docked because unless they told me, I wouldn’t know that,” Callaro said. “So, we will say they’ve been together for this amount of time, that the mission could have happened, and then they separated, became two, and separated at whatever speed.”

SJ-21’s behavior for the last couple of years suggested it was running empty after undertaking large propulsive maneuvers to capture the Chinese Beidou satellite and move it to a different orbit.

Callaro served as a tactician in the Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center, then joined the Aerospace Corporation before taking the job as operations lead at COMSPOC. He doesn’t buy China’s suggestion that SJ-21 was purely an experiment in collecting space debris.

“That is not how I see that at all,” Callaro said. “The fact that we can calculate all the maneuvers it takes to get out and get back, and the fact that afterwards, it spent a couple of years basically not moving, probably because it was low on fuel, sets up the idea [that there’s more to SJ-21’s mission]. Now, SJ-25 goes out there, and it’s supposed to be a fuel tank, and it’s perfectly aligned with SJ-21 and now we see this happening, tells me that it’s much more a counter-space capability than it is a trash remove. But that’s what they say.”

Unless China makes a public statement on the refueling of SJ-21 by SJ-25, observers won’t know for sure if the servicing demo was successful until the satellites detach. Then, US officials and independent analysts will watch to see if SJ-21 makes any substantial maneuvers, which might indicate the satellite has a full tank of gas for whatever mission Chinese officials send it off to do next.

Listing image: Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space Read More »

As California faces court battles, states scramble to save their climate goals

climate goals, electrification, EVs, Policy, Science, syndication / Shannon Garcia / July 8, 2025

With or without authority to regulate heightened emissions, states plan to meet climate goals.

Traffic jam forms on Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. Credit: Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

When President Donald Trump signed legislation to revoke California’s authority to enforce stricter tailpipe emissions standards and to ban sales of gas-powered cars by 2035, the effects rippled far beyond the Golden State.

Seventeen states relied on California’s Clean Air Act waivers to adopt stronger vehicle pollution rules on their own, including New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington.

California, joined by several states, immediately sought a court injunction, calling the revocation illegal on the basis that the waivers are not subject to congressional review and that it violated decades of legal precedent and procedure. These same states recently launched an Affordable Clean Cars Coalition to coordinate legal action and policy to defend their rights to transition to cleaner vehicles.

As the legal battle plays out, states that have relied on the waivers are leaning into expanding multimillion-dollar ways to keep their EV transitions on track. Among their efforts: amping up rebates, tightening rules on the carbon intensity of fuels, and cracking down on pollution where trucks congregate.

“Climate change is still around, whether we have the waiver or not. So we have to figure out ways to make sure that we’re doing what we can to address the problem at hand,” said Michelle Miano, who heads the New Mexico environment protection division of the Environment Department.

According to data from the California Air Resources Board, the states that have passed tougher pollution rules account for about 40 percent of new light-duty vehicle registrations and 25 percent of new heavy-duty vehicle registrations in the United States, where the transportation sector is the highest source of greenhouse gas emissions as of 2022.

Among these stronger rules are the Advanced Clean Cars (ACC) I and II and Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT), which require automakers to sell a growing share of electric passenger cars and medium and heavy-duty trucks to reduce emissions from gasoline-powered counterparts.

The goal is for all new vehicles sold to be electric by 2035.

Bolstering incentives

Without ACC and ACT, states are betting they can increase demand for EVs by reducing the costs of buying a vehicle with rebates, vouchers, and grants and boosting the number of charging stations in their states. These incentives can range from a few thousand dollars for individual EV purchases to hundreds of thousands for building charging infrastructure and fleet upgrades.

On June 18, New York announced a $53 million expansion to its voucher program for electrifying last-mile truck fleets, offering vouchers from $340,000 to $425,000 for each truck, depending on the model.

“Despite the current federal administration’s efforts to erode certainty in the ongoing transition to cleaner vehicles, New York State will continue to act to protect our air, lands, and waters,” said Amanda Lefton, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation.

In Oregon, where over a third of in-state emissions are from transportation use, the government this month opened applications for $34 million in grants toward the purchase of zero-emission trucks and developing charging stations for EVs or retrofitting diesel trucks. Lawmakers are considering expanding a popular rebate program through a bill introduced in February. The program so far has given car owners almost $100 million for EV purchases. (The program has been suspended twice after running out of money. It resumed as of May 2025.)

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey promised in May to announce “dedicated additional grant funding” for electric vehicles and vowed to increase “grant funding opportunities” for charging. Advocacy groups, including the Environmental League of Massachusetts, are counting on increased funding for its MOR-EV rebate program, which provides up to $3,500 for new EV purchases. This year, the rebate program has distributed $15.7 million in total incentives, according to the program’s statistics page.

In Washington state, lawmakers earmarked $126 million—a $16 million increase from 2024—to subsidize purchases of electric truck fleets and chargers. Many states are targeting trucks because they account for a huge share in emissions relative to their number on the road.

Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, credited state rebates and investments in charging infrastructure for helping Colorado reach a 20 percent electric vehicle market share in the first quarter of 2025. One in five new cars sold in the state was electric. Toor also credited the state agency’s EV buyer’s education campaign launched in late 2022, which promoted available rebates and incentives for prospective EV owners.

The scope and generosity of these programs vary widely depending on each state’s climate priorities, budget capacity, and access to federal or market-based funding streams.

“Those types of incentives can be expensive,” said Terrence Gray, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. “In Rhode Island, our budget is tight. There’s not a lot of funding available right now, so we would have to make a very strong argument that there’s a strong cost benefit to invest in these types of areas.”

With the Trump administration threatening to cut down federal funding for EV rebates through the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, states will have to increasingly rely on themselves to fund these programs.

“The federal government isn’t going to come save us,” said Alex Ambrose, an analyst with the nonpartisan think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective.

Some are already ahead on this. California and Washington state have devised carbon markets that charge major polluters—like oil refiners, power plants, large industrial facilities, and fuel suppliers—for each ton of carbon dioxide they release. California’s auctions bring in about $3 to $4 billion per year, which support programs such as public transit and EV rebates. Washington’s system, launched in 2023, covers around 97 major emitters and has raised over $3 billion in its first two years, funding clean transportation, air quality devices, and EV chargers.

The states of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and other Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states have signed up to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, which is a cooperative cap-and-invest program launched in 2009 that limits emissions from the power sector and reinvests proceeds into clean energy programs like EV rebates.

Making fuels greener

While many states focus on promoting electric vehicles, others are also targeting the fuel of gas-powered cars, by adopting or developing standards that lower the carbon intensity.

These policies require fuel producers and importers to blend cleaner alternatives like biofuels, renewable diesel, or electricity into the fuel mix.

Patterned after California, Washington has a clean fuel standard in effect since 2023, targeting a 20 percent reduction in carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 2034 compared to 2017 levels.

Oregon has a similar program in place that aims to reduce carbon intensity in fuels by 37 percent by 2035.

New Mexico approved its Clean Transportation Fuel Standard in March 2024. A formal adoption hearing before the Environmental Improvement Board is scheduled to begin in September.

“We know that those (electric) vehicles aren’t for everyone and so we are very respectful of folks that decide to not purchase them,” said Miano, New Mexico’s environment protection division head.

No East Coast states have enacted a clean fuel standard, but New York state legislators may change that.

There are bills in the State Senate and Assembly that, if passed, would require fuel providers to reduce the carbon intensity of their transportation fuels by at least 20 percent by 2030. (Legislation has passed the Senate but remains at the committee level in the Assembly as of June.)

Michigan also had bills introduced in its Senate and House in 2023, but neither passed before the 2024 session ended. Similar bills have not been introduced since then.

Some of these clean fuel standards have faced criticism from environmental advocates, who argue that they allow polluters to buy their way out of reducing emissions.

But Trisha DelloIacono, policy head at advocacy group CALSTART, said the fuel standards remain one of the few politically viable tools to gradually shift the transportation sector toward cleaner fuels.

“What we need to be looking at right now is incremental changes and incremental progress in a place where we’re fighting tooth and nail to hold on to what we have,” DelloIacono said.

Where trucks congregate

There’s also a policy tool called indirect source rules, or ISR.

The rules are called “indirect” because they don’t regulate the vehicles themselves, but the facilities that attract emissions-heavy traffic, like large warehouses, ports, or rail yards. The rules hold the facilities owners or operators responsible for reducing or offsetting the pollution from their profitable traffic.

Studies show that the pollution from these trucks often ends up in nearby neighborhoods, which are disproportionately lower-income and communities of color.

California is currently the only state enforcing ISRs.

In Southern California, large warehouses must take steps to reduce the pollution caused by truck visits, either by switching to electric vehicles, installing chargers, or paying into a clean air fund. It’s the first rule of its kind in the country and it survived a court challenge in 2023, paving the way for other states to consider similar action.

New York is one of them. Its lawmakers introduced a bill in January that could require warehouses with over 50,000 square feet to reduce emissions from trucks by meeting certain benchmarks, such as hosting electric deliveries or offering bike loading zones. New York City has its own version of the rule under deliberation in the Council. As of June 2025, the bill remains stalled in the environmental committee. City Council has until December to act before the bill expires.

In New Jersey, where warehouse growth has boomed, legislators in 2024 proposed a bill that would require “high-traffic facilities” to apply for air pollution permits and provide plans to reduce diesel truck pollution.

“This is really being pushed by the community groups and environmental justice communities, especially in North Jersey. But also, warehouses are starting to pop up even in very rural parts of South Jersey. So this is very quickly becoming a statewide issue in New Jersey,” said Ambrose of the New Jersey Policy Perspective.

In Colorado, its regional air quality council in April announced plans to ask its air quality control commission to use ISR for areas with the worst air quality.

Industry groups, especially in the logistics sector, are pushing back. The industry group Supply Chain Federation told The Wall Street Journal that the southern California ISR was a “backdoor approach [that] does little to cut emissions and instead raises costs, disrupts supply chains.”

Still, experts say this may be one of the few options left for states to cut emissions from traffic-heavy facilities. Because these rules don’t directly regulate the car companies or trucks themselves, they don’t need federal approval.

“We definitely have to be nimble and fluid and also understand the kind of landscape in the state,” DelloIacono said.

As California faces court battles, states scramble to save their climate goals Read More »

Figuring out why a nap might help people see things in new ways

Biology, Insight, memory, naps, neurobiology, Science, sleep / Shannon Garcia / July 6, 2025

An EEG signal of sleep is associated with better performance on a mental task.

The guy in the back may be doing a more useful activity. Credit: XAVIER GALIANA

Dmitri Mendeleev famously saw the complete arrangement of the periodic table after falling asleep on his desk. He claimed in his dream he saw a table where all the elements fell into place, and he wrote it all down when he woke up. By having a eureka moment right after a nap, he joined a club full of rather talented people: Mary Shelley, Thomas Edison, and Salvador Dali.

To figure out if there’s a grain of truth to all these anecdotes, a team of German scientists at the Hamburg University, led by cognitive science researcher Anika T. Löwe, conducted an experiment designed to trigger such nap-following strokes of genius—and catch them in the act with EEG brain monitoring gear. And they kind of succeeded.

Catching Edison’s cup

“Thomas Edison had this technique where he held a cup or something like that when he was napping in his chair,” says Nicolas Schuck, a professor of cognitive science at the Hamburg University and senior author of the study. “When he fell asleep too deeply, the cup falling from his hand would wake him up—he was convinced that was the way to trigger these eureka moments.” While dozing off in a chair with a book or a cup doesn’t seem particularly radical, a number of cognitive scientists got serious about re-creating Edison’s approach to insights and testing it in their experiments.

One of the recent such studies was done at Sorbonne University by Célia Lacaux, a cognitive neuroscientist, and her colleagues. Over 100 participants were presented with a mathematical problem and told it could be solved by applying two simple rules in a stepwise manner. However, there was also an undescribed shortcut that made reaching the solution much quicker. The goal was to see if participants would figure this shortcut out after an Edison-style nap. The scientists would check whether the eureka moment would show in EEG.

Lacaux’s team also experimented with different objects the participants should hold while napping: spoons, steel spheres, stress balls, etc. It turned out Edison was right, and a cup was by far the best choice. It also turned out that most participants recognized there was a hidden rule after the falling cup woke them up. The nap was brief, only long enough to enter the light, non-REM N1 phase of sleep.

Initially, Schuck’s team wanted to replicate the results of Lacaux’s study. They even bought the exact same make of cups, but the cups failed this time. “For us, it just didn’t work. People who fell asleep often didn’t drop these cups—I don’t know why,” Schuck says.

The bigger surprise, however, was that the N1 phase sleep didn’t work either.

Tracking the dots

Schuck’s team set up an experiment that involved asking 90 participants to track dots on a screen in a series of trials, with a 20-minute-long nap in between. The dots were rather small, colored either purple or orange, placed in a circle, and they moved in one of two directions. The task for the participants was to determine the direction the dots were moving. That could range from easy to really hard, depending on the amount of jitter the team introduced.

The insight the participants could discover was hidden in the color coding. After a few trials where the dots’ direction was random, the team introduced a change that tied the movement to the color: orange dots always moved in one direction, and the purple dots moved in the other. It was up to the participants to figure this out, either while awake or through a nap-induced insight.

Those dots were the first difference between Schuck’s experiment and the Sorbonne study. Lacaux had her participants cracking a mathematical problem that relied on analytical skills. Schuck’s task was more about perceptiveness and out-of-the-box thinking.

The second difference was that the cups failed to drop and wake participants up. Muscles usually relax more when sleep gets deeper, which is why most people drop whatever they’re holding either at the end of the N1 phase or at the onset of the N2 phase, when the body starts to lose voluntary motor control. “We didn’t really prevent people from reaching the N2 phase, and it turned out the participants who reached the N2 phase had eureka moments most often,” Schuck explains.

Over 80 percent of people who reached the deeper, N2 phase of sleep found the color-coding solution. Participants who fell into a light N1 sleep had a 61 percent success rate; that dropped to just 55 percent in a group that stayed awake during their 20-minute nap time. In a control group that did the same task without a nap break, only 49 percent of participants figured out the hidden trick.

The divergent results in Lacaux’s and Schuck’s experiments were puzzling, so the team looked at the EEG readouts, searching for features in the data that could predict eureka moments better than sleep phases alone. And they found something.

The slope of genius

The EEG signal in the human brain consists of low and high frequencies that can be plotted on a spectral slope. When we are awake, there are a lot of high-frequency signals, and this slope looks rather flat. During sleep, these high frequencies get muted, there are more low-frequency signals, and the slope gets steeper. Usually, the deeper we sleep, the steeper our EEG slope is.

The team noticed that eureka moments seemed to be highly correlated with a steep EEG spectral slope—the steeper the slope, the more likely people were to get a breakthrough. In fact, the models based on the EEG signal alone predicted eureka moments better than predictions made based on sleep phases and even based on the sleep phases and EEG readouts combined.

“Traditionally, people divided sleep EEG readouts down into discrete stages like N1 or N2, but as usual in biology, things in reality are not as discrete,” Schuck says. “They’re much more continuous, there’s kind of a gray zone.” He told Ars that looking specifically at the EEG trace may help us better understand what exactly happens in the brain when a sudden moments of insight arrives.

But Shuck wants to get even more data in the future. “We’re currently running a study that’s been years in the making: We want to use both EEG and [functional magnetic resonance imaging] at the same time to see what happens in the brain when people are sleeping,” Schuck says. The addition of the fMRI imaging will enable Schuck and his colleagues to see which areas of the brain get activated during sleep. What the team wants to learn from combining EEG and fMRI imagery is how sleep boosts memory consolidation.

“We also hope to get some insights, no pun intended, into the processes that play a role in generating insights,” Schuck adds.

PLOS Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003185

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

Figuring out why a nap might help people see things in new ways Read More »

Housing Roundup #12

Housing / Shannon Garcia / July 5, 2025

Abundance and YIMBY are on the march. Things are looking good. The wins are each small, but every little bit helps. There are lots of different little things you can do. In theory you have to worry about a homeostatic model where solving some problems causes locals to double down on other barriers, but this seems to not be what we see.

There are definitely important exceptions. Los Angeles is not so interested in rebuilding from the fires and backpaddled the moment developers started to actually build 100% affordable housing because somehow that was a bad thing. New York’s democratic party nominated who they nominated. Massachusetts wants to seal eviction records.

Overall, though, it’s hard not to be hopeful right now. Even when we see bad policies, they are couched increasingly in the rhetoric of good goals and policies. In the long term, that leads to wins.

I’ll start with general notes, then take a tour around the nation and world.

At some point a tenant with rent control effectively owns the apartment, but they and their family are forced to live there forever, including for two years before each time the apartment is passed down.

Matthew Zeitlin: classic landlord vs (fourth generational) rent stabilized tenant in nyc story. The interesting wrinkle is that even if the landlord can get the tenant evicted, they can’t raise the rent *unless it’s to a subsidized tenant.*

Christian Britschgi: A rent control law that lets family members pass down units to their children is very obviously a physical taking. SCOTUS had an opportunity to rule on this question last year but punted.

As I covered in my newsletter yesterday, there is chance they might take up a similar physical takings claim case challenging LA’s eviction moratorium. Not directly about NYC rent control but could make future challenges easier.

There’s also the crazy part where a subsidized tenant will pay triple the rent a non-subsidized tenant would if the apartment got freed up. And yes, they also put up enough barriers that selling the apartment also is not a practical option.

Thus you get stories like this rent controlled building selling at a 97% discount, or $9,827 per unit. The new buyer is presumably gambling on finding or being given some way to free the building, which I assume will operate at a loss and would be uneconomical to repair properly.

If you are a New York City voter in the coming general election, consider that one candidate in particular wants to double down on this strategy.

This term has done so, so much damage. Even if affordable housing was ‘a thing’ in that it was housing that was affordable, ‘non-affordable’ housing would still make all housing more affordable, and some affordable units is always better than no units.

Misha: It’s amazing how a simple phrase like “affordable housing” is actually a potent brain poison that renders society way worse

Dan Livingston: It’s a legally defined term. Not a general concept.

Misha: Yes that’s part of the process by which makes society worse off

Zac Hill: In addition to all the [obvious etc], even on the claim’s own terms, aren’t 17 ‘affordable’ units better than the previous state of 0 ‘affordable’ units?

samstod: This is sort of like how everyone seems to complain they are only building luxury apartment buildings, and then lobby for stuff like 800 sq feet minimum, full kitchen, and a parking spot for studios. “Why do they keep building 1200 sq ft 2 bedrooms?”

The thing is, it’s often so much worse than that.

Alex Tabarrok: Affordable Housing Is Almost Pointless

What is the most important feature of affordable housing? Simple! It’s right there in the name, right? Affordable. But no. When the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) evaluates housing projects for tax credits it gives out points for desirable projects. Quoting Richard Day:

Richard Day: For the general scoring track, 10% of points are awarded for extra accessibility features, 13% are awarded for additional energy efficiency criteria, 15% are awarded based on the makeup of the development team, and an extra 4% are headed out to non-profit developers. Only 3% of scorecard points are awarded based on project cost.

…

This is what Ezra Klein calls Everything Bagel Liberalism and what I called in one of my favorite posts the Happy Meal Fallacy.

The icing on the cake, by the way, is that Day argues that the IHDA is a better system than the even more convoluted and expensive system for affordable housing promoted by Chicago’s Department of Housing.

Arpit Gupta: I didn’t realize that a basic reason affordable housing costs so much is that the actual cost carries such a low weight in winning the bid.

Scott Lincicome: Incentives matter. And politicians’ incentives are often different from those of consumers, producers, & investors.

The job of affordable housing needs to be to make available housing at a low price point. Remarkably often, the projects do not even do that.

Seth Burn: Coase wept.

Max Dubler: A publicly funded affordable housing project came in at $800,000/unit [all one bedrooms]. The same developer built a mostly market rate building NEXT DOOR for $350,000/unit.

Alec Stapp: In a better world, spending $1 million per unit to build affordable housing would be the kind of scandal that causes public officials to resign from office.

That housing might be many things. It is not affordable. What is happening? Again, lots of different interest groups and demands to meet other goals drive up prices.

Meanwhile, even when you do go ‘100% affordable housing’ near a major transit stop you can still get progressive nonprofits opposing it because it might cast a bit of shadow on a nearby schoolyard, while at least two parents there say ‘our schoolyard nadly needs more shade.’

State Senator Scott Weiner: Certain activists fought market-rate housing in the Mission, arguing it had to be 100% affordable housing.

2 Mission orgs then proposed 100% affordable & the same activists are fighting it.

It’s never been about “affordable housing.” It’s always been about straight-up NIMBYism.

There’s always a reason to oppose new housing for these folks. It’s just a matter of finding the rationale of the day.

Even worse is ‘inclusionary zoning’ which as I understand it is purely a requirement that some percentage of new apartments have to be rented at loss. If you think of this as a tax and redistribution scheme, because that is exactly what it is, it is obvious that this makes absolutely no sense as a way of achieving any goal other than preventing housing construction or enabling corruption.

Max Dubler: So-called “Inclusionary Zoning”—the practice of requiring homebuilders to rent some percentage of new apartments at a loss—is bad policy that lets elected Democrats pretend to care about poor people while NIMBYing new housing, worsening the housing shortage, and raising rents.

John Wilthuis: When I explain IZ to folks who are new to the housing issue, I have to repeat the part about how it’s unsubsidized, because nobody believes it on first telling.

It does make sense to potentially tax new housing construction if and only if you have otherwise already restricted the ability to build in ways that mean that building is highly profitable but the ability to get permission to build is fixed. In that case, if you’re locked into the first half of that decision you might as well collect the fees I guess, but you should just charge them money.

Josh (370k views so fair game): abundance agenda urban planners have no capacity to understand that the profession cannot exist if development is deregulated. we literally maintain regulations, that’s what planning is. this is not the best era to advocate for your own unemployment.

YIMBY Martial Law Enforcer:

Why is it that the term ‘private equity’ makes people lose their minds? Admittedly this is an extreme case, but the less crazy versions aren’t conceptually different.

JMac: It doesn’t matter. Private Equity will buy them all up the moment they hit market. You could build a house for every man, woman, and child, and Private Equity would buy them all up and rent them out. House availability is not and never was the problem.

House gets built

House hits market

Private Equity buys house

Private Equity rents house out.

This is how it goes. This is how it’s gone ever since Trump repealed the Obama-era law barring companies from buying residential properties for the first year on market.

So let me get this straight. You build a house for every man, woman, and child, far more houses than people want to live in. Then mysterious ‘private equity’ buys them all, and then they charge what, exactly? They all form a conspiracy to set prices at a monopoly level and no one notices? One PE company buys all the nation’s housing stock? Something else?

Tyler Cowen brings us this job market paper from Felix Barbieri via Quan Le about the impact of institutional ownership on the rental market, with supply effects proving larger than concentration effects:

In the last decade, large financial institutions in the United States have purchased hundreds of thousands of homes and converted them to rentals. This paper studies the welfare consequences of institutional ownership of single-family housing.

We build an equilibrium model of the housing market with two sectors: rental and homeownership. The model captures two key forces from institutional purchases of homes: changes in rental concentration and reallocation of housing stock across sectors.

To estimate the model, we construct a novel dataset of individual homes in metropolitan Atlanta, identifying institutional owners of each house and scraping house-level daily prices, rents, vacancies, web page views, and customer contacts from Zillow.

We find that institutional acquisitions increase average renter welfare by $2,760 per year (with rents decreasing by 2.3%). This net benefit reflects two opposing effects: higher concentration raises rents by 3.8%, but higher rental supply lowers rents by 6.1%. On the other hand, the welfare of the average home buyer decreases by $49,950. On the supply side, institutional acquisitions benefit house sellers but harm the average landlord.

I noticed I was confused. o3 explained that the average annual rent was $28k but that reduced search frictions and greater choice meant that the overall benefit was ~10% of the rent. That seems like a lot, and reminds me of a lot of economist talk of ‘well you have greater product variety or are forced to buy more [X] so you’re actually fine and totally not poorer.’

It’s not totally impossible the benefits are this big, if the rent market was previously super thin, and before there would be highly slim pickings, especially in the exact right location and size. When I rented in Warwick, there was a clearly best house, and if I’d had to go with my second choice I do think I’d have faced a >10% welfare hit, as in if they’d asked for 10% more rent we’d cheerfully have taken it anyway.

10% still does seem like a lot in general.

By o3’s calculation there are about 30x times as many people renting in a given year as buying that year, so this is a clear net gain, even if you don’t count that often individual sellers pick up that extra $50k that the buyers pay (and they at least partly reclaim it when they sell). So this is good unless you strongly want more people to own on the margin instead of rent, and given mobility concerns my guess is we want more renting than we have in such areas.

Here’s another bizarre mind worm, mostly for fun this time:

Catholic Charm: Boomers are selling their houses for high prices and then downsizing and paying for starter homes with cash. So young families can’t afford the homes they’re putting for sale and then get outbid the houses they can afford. They’ve totally ruined the market it’s insane.

Well, the issue is the concept of a starter home is a common thing now because people can’t afford a house that meets their needs. They’re buying houses that they’ve already outgrown or know they will outgrow in a few years because they can’t afford a home they can grow into.

I have no issue with older people staying in their current homes, that’s what I plan to do.

You see, if the old people consume more house, then that’s good for everyone else’s ability to ‘afford’ houses because those houses are expensive. But if they downsize to less house, thus making more housing available for others, that’s bad, because they took away the cheap houses. Wowie.

The generalization of this is fascinating. There are a lot of people who think:

Affordable housing is good.
Making housing better makes it less affordable.
Therefore make sure people don’t make housing better.

This covers renovations, and gentrification, and more.

There is actually a great instinct behind this, which is that it would be great if we could allow people on tight budgets to ‘buy less house’ and still have a house, in terms of both quality and quantity. Because those people would be better off buying smaller lower quality houses.

And that’s right about that! Improving houses obviously makes people on net better off, as willingness to pay goes up for a reason, but if quantity of units is fixed those particular people would benefit from the available housing stock staying worse.

The thing is, it would be very easy to give it to them. All you have to do is allow people to choose to build or rent out smaller housing, and crappier housing, if everyone involved wants to do that. Legalize smaller rooms, smaller apartments and single room occupancy. Create a new class of amenities so that some are ‘required’ but others currently required are ‘standard’ such that you have to disclose and put in the rental or sales contract that they’re missing and point this out verbally, but make it legal to waive them if the tenant or buyer wants that.

We could very easily create a world in which those struggling with expenses could make modest but manageable sacrifices and be able to live where they need to live. We choose not to do that.

This seems great.

Alexander Berger (CEO OpenPhil): Exciting update: @open_phil is doubling down on our YIMBY, innovation, and metascience success by launching a >$120m Abundance & Growth Fund to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific & technological progress. Funding from @GoodVentures, @patrickc, + others.

Scientific and technological progress drive long-run prosperity. @bfjo & @LHSummers estimate that *new ideasaccount for ~50% of US per-capita GDP growth, with social returns of $14 for each $1 invested in R&D.

…

Luckily, these challenges are tractable. Through our decade of funding YIMBY housing reform, we’ve seen that policy advocacy can make a real difference (so far, especially on ADUs).

Now is the time: across the political spectrum, there’s growing recognition of the need to address these constraints. Both parties have members advocating for housing abundance, energy abundance, and reduced bureaucratic barriers to innovation, presenting a unique opportunity.

Aaron Regunberg offered some substantive critiques of the general abundance agenda, Jordan Weissmann delivers continuous knockout blows in return, as the arguments amount to ‘there are various factors [X] and [Y] making things worse, you only deal with [X] not [Y]’ to which the answer is, ‘actually we also are working on [Y] and also [Y] often acts through [X], and also [X] alone would help what is the issue.’

I want to be clear that this is not me picking on Aaron. This is me picking out the best and most substantive critique, because the other critiques are worse.

As the results add up, the vibes are clearly shifting. I am here for it. Daniel’s comment here is Obvious Nonsense. Green New Deal and Socialist rhetoric in general says it is ‘abundance’ because they assert their policies will somehow lead to everyone having all the things except the bad people who shouldn’t have them, except no it is a shame but actually that’s not how the world works. The choice of rhetoric is telling and it is bizarre how everyone can suddenly shift into ‘abundance was always good politics’ mode. In which case, yes, happy to nod.

Daniel Cohen: The Ezra-Abundance discourse was a centrist co-optation of the Green New Deal’s original abundance politics. Now Zohran is taking it back for the left. Not sure why so many people are surprised… #Abundance: welcome home.

Derek Thompson: The rapid online shift from “abundance is obviously shit politics“ to “abundance is obviously great politics, and it was our idea first, and now we got it back!” is a nice reminder that people are just making up discourse on the fly, and the book is still just 13 weeks old and, like everything else in the world, nobody knows how this is going to turn out.

It is so funny that Zohran is presenting as an abundance candidate while trying to do so many obviously anti-abundance things, especially vast imposition of greater rent controls and other requirements on those who would actually build or rent housing but also many other socialist policies. It is still great progress. I want everyone to have to acknowledge that abundance is the goal, even if they have no intention of doing things that cause abundance. Then it’s on us to point this out.

David Mamandi: According to Mamadani, the city won’t “slow down” new private housing projects. All the developers need to do are meet his criteria for

Affordability

Rent-increase limitations

Union labor

Sustainability.

At that point developers are free to …. wait, no, they still need to go through “land use review.” LOL!

Mamendani: That means when private developers come to me with a plan that meets our goals around affordability, rent-stabilization, union labor and sustainability, it will be fast tracked through land use review. The days of the city slowing projects down are over.

Yeah, if he gets to be mayor we’re not building all that housing.

It’s happening. No, I don’t think Austin will get tired of all this winning.

AURA: Austin City Council votes 10-1 to legalize 5-story single-stair apartments, making Austin the largest US city outside of NYC to legalize single-stair! 🎉🎉🎉

Many thanks to all the supporters and to @CMChitoVela for leading this exciting reform! We did it y’all! 🙌

It’s not happening in Colorado yet but the governor is calling for it.

Jared Polis (Governor of Colorado): In Colorado, we are laser-focused on cutting housing costs and increasing the supply of new housing that Coloradans can afford. In my State of the State address, I called for Smart Stair reform to increase the supply of housing people can afford in the neighborhoods where people want to live near transit and job centers.

This new study shows that smart stair buildings are less costly to build and are safer.

hek!: single stair midrises aren’t more dangerous!! Pew Research study looked at fire risk in single stair buildings. this matters because most US/Canadian cities require double stair: consuming ~10% additional space just for stairs and increasing costs up to 13%!

these costs + standard USA zoning issues means that it’s really hard to build these mid rises – even if they’re extremely desirable AND when we do build them, they are frequently suboptimal for humans + over priced

Paris is filled with Haussmannian 6 story complexes – surprisingly denser than NYC!

*liberal definition of metro vs city used here lmao

There’s also a bill that’s been introduced in DC, which also includes a single exit.

This change alone would solve so many problems. The second stair has never made physical sense, the Europeans and others around the world use single stair with no issues, and now we crunched the numbers and we now the second staircase takes up a huge percentage of the building without making anyone safer.

Put it another way. The second staircase reduces space by 10% and raises costs by 13%. How many people would pay an extra 10% in rent to have a second staircase? It’s hard for me to imagine many making that choice.

Why didn’t it happen sooner? This seems a little harsh, but only a little:

Alex Armlovich:

Be careful when you find buried treasure out in the open. It could be a trap or an illusion

Essentially nobody in the last century in the US checked if 2 staircases are necessary for apartment buildings until 2021. Now a dozen states have changed. Which is pretty insane

Before Single Stair Twitter, there was one lonely architect in Toronto who was like “uh you guys nobody else in the world does it like this” but his op-ed was completely ignored

He didn’t have a YIMBY movement around back then to help, he was just one lonely smart guy 🫡😭

This is good example of our anonymous Canadian hero from the replies!

I seem to also recall an oped in the Globe or the Toronto Star, or some paper of record in Toronto

It seems Ireland forces only 25% of net growth to go to Dublin and its suburbs, so up to 2040 Dublin is only permitted to grow at 20%-25% total. This is of course exactly the opposite of what would make everyone better off, as evidenced by everyone wanting to move to Dublin, instead its population was lower in 1991 than 1911.

Brian Botter asks what explains this graph, where housing in the West is super unaffordable relative to income.

He rules out lot sizes, and construction cost differences are only moderate. It is clearly supply and demand, people want to move West (and South), the amenity index explains part of why, and demand can’t keep up (the version of this map he has is interactive).

The West has grown in population 27% since 2000 versus 20% for America, despite California’s best efforts, and if not for lack of housing it would have grown a lot more. This is all about inability to build more housing where people want to live, in particular because we are not legally permitting people to do so. That’s it.

Ah yes, that time the Mayor of Los Angeles, who it seems can Just Do Things, issued an executive directive making it fast and easy to build 100% affordable housing with zero government subsidies, then furiously backpaddled when developers started building.

Meanwhile, LA is forcing Simpsons producer Rick Polizzi to demolish his 24-year-old Simpsons-inspired treehouse after LA demanded it be permitted like a ‘single-family dwelling.’ This happened after the fires.

Collin Rugg: Attorney Paige Gosney says they secured zoning permits in 2023 but can’t get building permits from the Department of Building and Safety. “Staff wanted soil reports, structural designs, Americans With Disabilities Act compliance and all this stuff that is just kind of absurd,” Gosney said.

Meanwhile, LA is making everyone suffer to even rebuild the exact same house that burned down, let alone build something new that is better. They’re torturing them less than they usually torture builders, but that isn’t saying much.

Cremieux: It’s almost unbelievable that California requires you to file for permits galore to rebuild the exact same home that was there before on a burned down plot.

It’s hard to find anyone who seriously thinks this is acceptable.

Garrett: I was just talking about this today with a builder who lost their home in the Palisades Fire. Not only do they have to file for the permits, they are making them pay for them after everything they’ve been through which is totally unacceptable imo.

Cremieux: Have been hearing similar. Friend is trying to just sell his plot and move on because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to rebuild for years.

Garrett: They did cut *someof the red tape for some who are affected, so they don’t have to go through the entire permitting process but it’s still a bit much. I understand why it’s required, but they are so slow and tbh, they should not be charging for it.

They’re not all getting the entire value of their homes and property back and rebuilding a home that one may have had for decades is going to be so much more expensive now. Paying $15-50k+ for permitting is ridiculous when you consider how much in property taxes these folks pay.

Want to Build Back Better? At least you’re not going with the Biden version, here’s Ezra Klein explaining the 14 steps to apply for that funding, and Jon Stewart slowly realizing how absurd it is, and screaming, among other things, ‘OMFG.’ Bharat Ramamurti claims this is a ‘deeply misleading’ clip, that the process was like this because of GOP sabotage and wasn’t the design intention. Even if fully true, I do not feel it makes things that much better.

Kelsey Piper: ‘We’ve taken action to cut red tape’. ‘Did the action you took….work?’

Kane: Los Angeles has only issued 11 building permits for rebuilding after the fire, but the mayor is claiming with a straight face that “homes are under construction throughout the Palisades”

LA Mayor Karen Bass: Homes are under construction throughout the Palisades — ahead of expectations.

We’ve taken action to cut red tape and expedite the permitting process to get families home.

Kane: It gets worse lmao

Rachel Keuler: Only 1 of those permits is in the Palisades, where Karen Bass says that homes (plural) are under construction.

Zac Hill: “High School Zac Has Taken Action To Get Avril Lavigne’s Phone Number: News At Eleven”

It’s amazing that the claim of ‘homes under constructions’ isn’t even obviously literally true, as in it is not clear there are two of them.

The good news is that by all reports San Francisco is turning itself around on crime and quality of life, such as this report of spending a week seeing few homeless and no broken car windows, feeling fully safe.

Except that means:

Hunter: > SF turns itself around

> Still doesn’t build housing

> $5,000 median rent for a one-bedroom incoming

Armand Domalewski: Call me crazy but the fact that you need experience navigating San Francisco’s choppy political waters in order to build a small office building does not exactly make our city seem like a welcoming place for investment at a time where we very much need it.

Instead, they’re taking a bold stance that phone booths require sprinkler systems. Anyone with a rudimentary ability to think about the physical world understands that this is not motivated by worried about fire.

Last year, a Caltrain official built himself an illegal apartment inside a train station for $42k, and now we have pictures. The building already existed, so no even without legal issues you cannot simply build more of these, but yes we want a full explanation.

Sheel Mohnot: We finally have images of this apartment! A Caltrain official secretly built himself a hidden unit inside Burlingame station using $42k of public funds. It looks like a dorm room / a startup founders 1st office.

Armand Domalewski: I am genuinely curious why he was able to build this for $42k a unit. What costs did he avoid that he couldn’t avoid if he did this legally? If CA could build $42k unit studios we’d end homelessness in a year.

Debra Cleaver: for starters, the building itself already existed, and presumably was plumbed and wired for electricity. So I imagine he added furniture, appliances and made some sheetrock to divide the space?

Armand Domalewski: That is true for all modern office buildings yet office to apartment conversions are notoriously expensive.

Joe Cohen: Everyone’s response: “it’s impressive what he was able to do with $42k. Maybe he should be put in charge of CA housing.”

Each little requirement for apartments seems like a good idea, but add them all up and the costs involved escalate quickly. I wonder if what we should do is actively have a two-class housing structure (yes I know, young adult dystopian writers, eat your hearts out), where you can choose to be in either conforming or non-conforming housing.

Berkeley legalizes middle-housing city-wide, eliminating single-family housing, legalizing duplexes, quadplexes and small apartments.

YIMBY and abundance are scoring some impressive wins in California, including making CEQA (their version of NEPA) not apply to a broad range of housing.

This bill passed the Senate by 62-2. I’ve learned that such votes are remarkably not indicative of how close things were, but it still indicates no one is worried to vote yes.

Gavin Newsom is not holding back. On this issue he’s actually been impressive.

Gavin Newsom (Governor of California): To the NIMBY movement that’s now being replaced by the YIMBY movement, go YIMBYs. Thank you for your abundant mindset. That’s a plug for @ezraklein.

Yimbyland: ITS HAPPENING!!!

All new housing projects under 50 units in the state of California will be exempt from CEQA!! The state is finally coming to its senses!

Jerusalem: I honestly can barely believe this happened. Total YIMBY victory in California today. After Newsom signs this bill; CEQA will no longer apply to *anyinfill housing under 85’. No inclusionary zoning or labor provisions.

Armand Domalewski:

Except for SF projects over 50 units

Except for 100% affordable projects

(Both subject to prevailing wage still)

But otherwise yes!!!! 🙂

Alex Armlovich: It’s a huge deal but I want to manage national expectations of instant Austin-style outcomes until SB79 joins it

Partially rolling back CEQA for housing will make California *almost normal*…but still probably ranked ~44th in the US for enviro review

Elon’s My Hero: Now every building is going to be exactly 84.9 feet tall. That’s going to look… wonderful…

(I notice again how absurd the term ‘prevailing wage’ is, if it’s so prevailing why would you need a law to stop them hiring people for less money? Call the thing by its name, and it’s unclear how big a tax this is on projects or how much it will matter.)

I notice that you don’t actually get ‘every building is 84.9 feet tall’ style outcomes. People don’t actually push zoning options to their limits, people don’t optimize as much as they should.

Having CEQA apply to infill housing, or really almost any residential housing, was always a terrible idea. There are neighbors who can sue, so this interferes with ability to build almost anything. But very obviously, the ‘environmental’ impact of infill housing replacing existing low-value construction is mostly a fake concern. Instead, you drive sprawl, with construction going out into places you can actually do environmental damage, plus you discourage density when density helps a lot with carbon emissions as well, even disregarding the economic impacts.

About SB 79, that was introduced by Scott Weiner. It would legalize apartments near mass transit. The standard argument against this is that those new apartments would not be ‘affordable,’ and instead by ‘luxury’ homes. They would be too valuable to the people who live there, who would pay too high a price to reside in them. Oh no.

In the linked thread, Max Dubler makes the argument that they will still be cheaper than buying existing houses. That’s true enough, and if it convinces people, great. But it’s beside the point. The point is that we can build more housing where people want to live, that will be valuable to the people living there, creating lots of value and in turn will drive down rents elsewhere. More housing is good, let people build housing, in the places people want to live, especially where they’ll have access to mass transit.

I do have one worry with such bills. If you say that mass transit causes upzoning, will that cause cities to avoid building mass transit? Given how little mass transit gets built at this point, that’s a risk I am willing to take.

Is 2025 the last chance for California to build housing that lets it retain population for the 2030 redistricting, where it is projected to lose five house seats and thus electoral votes, importantly altering what maps win the presidency? Darrell Owens argues building a house takes five years. My presumption is that actually building by that time won’t have much effect on this scale.

But planning to build future housing does already help. Prices are forward looking and rational. So if more housing is coming, current prices should fall in anticipation, or demand should rise knowing it will be easier to stay in the future, in some combination.

On its face, this seems like a very big deal once the rules work their way through?

Michael Andersen: This Oregon bill, the first of its kind in the country that I’m aware of, just passed: 50-2 in the House, 28-2 in the Senate. A lot will depend on rulemaking, but this opens the door to a Japan-like system where the state defines its own version of lower-density zoning codes.

It’d pre-approve zoning & building permits for a state-defined catalog of 1-11 unit buildings on standard urban lots. two great laws that go great together.

Andrew Damito: Oregon’s legislature just passed HB 2258, which enables the state land use planning agency to preapprove a series of housing designs for structures up to 12 units, and require that cities auto-approve the structures anywhere, with very few exceptions.

WOW!

My thoughts?

The law falls into the same trap as other blue-state YIMBY laws as it relies heavily on rulemaking instead of simply vacating local restrictions, meaning we won’t see any regulatory changes for at least a year, and will take longer to see housing emerge from it.

There’s potential for homebuilding productivity increases through industrial scaling. If the state pre-approves prefab & modular housing designs, builders could lower costs through mass production. America’s disparate codes have prevented that.

The Oregon LCDC is very YIMBY, even using its rulemaking powers to end parking minimums in all Oregon cities through its Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities rulemaking in 2023. You can bet that they will be ambitious in pre-approving housing.

@andersem’s optimism that this opens the door to a Japanese-style state abrogation of lower density zoning isn’t unfounded.

This bill doesn’t just require approval of specific housing designs, the state can also set rules requiring approval of variances to the designs.

This all looks like it will add up to a pretty big deal (within Montana).

Michael Anderson (April 25): Last week, Montana voted to:

– legalize 6-story apartments on most commercial land

– sharply cut parking mandates

– limit excess impact fees

– cut condo defect liability

– require equal treatment for manufactured homes

– legalize single-stair buildings up to 6 stories statewide

headline we rejected for this article: “Montana is so YIMBY, it’s getting embarrassing”

A recent study found that eliminating parking minimums alone can boost new home construction by 40–70 percent.

Several narrower bills tackle other obstacles to housing construction.

SB 133, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Greg Hertz (R-Polson), limits the impact fees that cities charge developers, which increase the cost of construction. Specifically, it eliminates administrative fees, caps fees growth to inflation, and limits the imposition of fees to infrastructure projects that are directly linked to a proposed development.

Hertz also successfully ran bills to limit construction defect litigation (SB 143) and transfer decision-making on historical preservation permits from volunteer-run boards to professional city staff (SB 214).

SB 252, introduced by Sen. Dave Fern (D-Whitefish), requires cities to treat manufactured homes on equal footing as stick-built construction.

SB 532, introduced by Sen. Forrest Mandeville (R-Columbus), allows one ADU by right on parcels outside cities. (Hertz’s SB 528 from the prior session legalized ADUs within cities.)

Finally, SB 213, introduced by Sen. Daniel Zolnikov (R-Billings), puts Montana among states such as Connecticut and Washington that are re-legalizing single-stair residential buildings. SB 213 orders new rules for the state building code to allow for the construction of single-stair buildings up to six stories when they meet fire safety standards.

I too had no idea this one was in the works:

Matthew Yglesias: It seems like Maine quietly passed one of the most dramatic statewide upzoning bills I’ve ever heard of without anyone paying much attention.

Here’s what they changed, the big one is up front but the ADU help is great too:

At least three dwelling units allowed on any residential use lot.
Up to four units where served with water and sewer.
No more sprinkler requirements for most ADUs.
ADUs no longer limited to single family lots or conforming lots, and no longer require owner occupancy.
Subdivision review threshold raised from three units to five.

It still needs to get through the Senate and governor, but North Carolina State House unanimously (107-0) passed HB 369, a ban on parking minimums in new developments statewide. You can just prevent people from stopping you from doing things.

In new ‘who could have predicted it news,’ it turns out if you change how people pay the market clearing price doesn’t move and maybe the old system had its advantages? Maybe it was actually a stroke of genius to normalize the renter paying the agents, and we didn’t notice because New York City rent is too damn high despite this?

Gabrielle Fahmy: Rents jumping shocking 15% after NYC ditches broker fees: ‘It’s discouraging’

Rents shot up a shocking 15% in the week since the controversial FARE Act took effect, with the average rental in the Big Apple jumping from $4,750 to $5,500, according to an analysis by real estate analytics firm UrbanDigs.

The FARE Act, which prohibits agents representing property owners from charging renters a “broker fee,” also requires that all fees a tenant owes be included in rental agreements and real estate listings.

The law change has created what insiders tell The Post is a “shadow market” — apartments that aren’t listed so landlords can still get tenants to cover the fee.

“We’re going to be looking for apartments again like it’s 1999 … where you have to know who to call and when to call,” said Jason Haber, co-founder of the American Real Estate Association and a broker at Compass. “It’s going to be an odyssey.”

Renters meanwhile have been sharing horror stories online, with receipts — like screenshots of conversations with brokers flat out telling them they get one price if they pay the broker fee and another, much higher rate, if they don’t.

…

Another said a landlord was asking $6,800 for a 3-bedroom with a broker fee — or $8,000 with no fee, which is illegal to advertise under the new law.

Karol Makowicz: Who could have seen this coming.

Typical broker fee is 15% of rent, getting rid of that fee on a one year least meant rent went up 15%, wow, who could have predicted this. The average lease lasts 3-4 years, in theory the price should drop back down for future years.

I presume it mostly won’t and tenants are in general a lot worse off now. There is some value in getting that up front payment up front, but it’s clearly not worth the marginal price that has attached. So we had this great trick, and it is gone now. Damn.

Meanwhile, we’ve managed to get rid of parking requirements in the full core, but they alas live on in much of the city, so this is a chart of where you want to live in New York City, be in the blue area, or at least be in yellow. Red doesn’t even count, that’s suburbs.

Also, yes it would help if New York didn’t require all elevators be large enough to let a wheelchair turn around. I get that it’s nice to be able to do that but this actually substantially raises construction costs, and wheelchairs can go backwards.

No, you fools!

Bernard Stanford: This is the equivalent of taxing everyone who pays their rent to fund a subsidy program for people who decide they’d rather not.

Gintautas Dumcius: Eviction records can now be sealed in Massachusetts.

Bernard Stanford: If “one tough chapter” doesn’t bare on a person’s future, but landlords are sub-optimally biased, then the state could step on with an insurance scheme and provide benefit while profiting.

…

Even cases of actual misconduct, not simply failure to pay, are eligible to be sealed! Landlords don’t have the right to know whether a prospective tenant was violent or threatening towards a past landlord? Note that criminal records are also sealable in Massachusetts.

The ultimate consequence is quite simple:

The added costs and dangers of being a landlord increase

At the margin, landlords will sell rental properties to become SFH, or opt not to purchase new construction to rent, or opt not to buy buildings and convert them to rentals

The availability of rentals decreases

Due to scarcity, average rent rises

Hence everybody pays more and is worse off, except those who welch on their rent or break the terms of their lease and get evicted, who are now relieved of some of the consequences of their past actions.

Adam Rezabek: There is also another consequence: landlords will have to use all stereotypes known to men to try and guess which prospective tenant will be an issue and which will be not. Ofc this isn’t legal, but I think it will happen regardless

Do not underestimate the effect Rezabek refers to. I remember that ‘ban the box’ rules that prevented checking job applicants for criminal records similarly ended up hurting exactly the groups with criminal records, because of updates on (lack of) evidence. A similar pattern will no doubt happen here, on all correlations, legal or otherwise.

This also likely decreases new constructions outright.

Mostly it increases rents and moves a lot of rental stock off the market. I do expect a substantial impact here. A bad renter is expensive. Now, not only can you not filter out past bad renters, renters know that if they defect they can have their records sealed. So not only do you get negative selection, everyone will behave way worse.

There’s some great bills passing that would be awesome as national standards.

YIMBYLAND: SMALL LOT STARTER HOMES PASSES IN TEXAS AFTER NEARLY DYING

– 3,000 sf lots

– 31 units/acre by-right in SF zones

– 5′ max setbacks

– Limits parking mandates to 1 space/unit, no carport mandates

– Developers can sue for delays, cities pay damages

– 5 acres required for development

This is a neutered version of the bill, but it’s still a great start.

YIMBYLAND: TEXAS PASSES 6-STORY SINGLE-STAIR BILL! 🤠

– Legalizes 6-stories, 4-units/floor, in TX state building code

– Cities that adopt standard amendments to state building code would by-default legalize 6-story single-stair apartments

– Paves way for streamlined adoption by cities

I feel like I’m getting annoying at this point, but this could be you if your state had the courage. It is 100% possible to make real, impactful, housing reforms and Texas is leading the way.

It gets better:

Alex Armlovich: Texas SB840 is ending single-use commercial zoning, allowing apartments on top of habitable commercial uses statewide

This is by far the most muscular “Residential in Commercial Zoning” preemption bill I’ve ever seen

All the loopholes closed + a right of private action (!)

This bill is a bullseye painted on Dallas’s dogshit terrible zoning code & weak permitting process

Even after Austin’s recent reformist turn, I think this bill will have a measurable impact. And Houston too!

But Dallas is the biggest baddest NIMBY. And they got rolled 😂👏

YIMBYLAND: This law legalizes development & preempts cities over 150k from imposing

– Density limits below 36 unit/acre

– Heigh restrictions below 45ft

– Setbacks over 25ft

– Parking reqs over 1/unit

Poland is the latest story of building more houses and housing costs going down.

Acts Maniac: nobody in Europe is talking about the polish housing supply miracle.

The median household in polish cities (!) now only spends 13% of their income on housing.

They build about 200k units a year for a 36 million people country.

Michal Mynarski: why so? The difference of quantity and quality of shelter you can get for the same percentage of min/avg pay within last 15 years is outstanding. When I get to Wroclaw in 2011 usual price for a room was 2/3 min salary. Right now you can easily find a studio in that range.

As usual note the y-axis starts around 12 on the first chart, but this is still a huge decline. The second chart is space per person.

Discussion about this post

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New evidence that some supernovae may be a “double detonation”

astronomy, astrophysics, Science, supernova, Type Ia supernova, white dwarf / Shannon Garcia / July 3, 2025

Type Ia supernovae are critical tools in astronomy, since they all appear to explode with the same intensity, allowing us to use their brightness as a measure of distance. The distance measures they’ve given us have been critical to tracking the expansion of the Universe, which led to the recognition that there’s some sort of dark energy hastening the Universe’s expansion. Yet there are ongoing arguments over exactly how these events are triggered.

There’s widespread agreement that type Ia supernovae are the explosions of white dwarf stars. Normally, these stars are composed primarily of moderately heavy elements like carbon and oxygen, and lack the mass to trigger additional fusion. But if some additional material is added, the white dwarf can reach a critical mass and reignite a runaway fusion reaction, blowing the star apart. But the source of the additional mass has been somewhat controversial.

But there’s an additional hypothesis that doesn’t require as much mass: a relatively small explosion on a white dwarf’s surface can compress the interior enough to restart fusion in stars that haven’t yet reached a critical mass. Now, observations of the remains of a supernova provide some evidence of the existence of these so-called “double detonation” supernovae.

Deconstructing white dwarfs

White dwarfs are the remains of stars with a similar mass to our Sun. After having gone through periods during which hydrogen and helium were fused, these tend to end up as carbon and oxygen-rich embers: hot due to their history, but incapable of reaching the densities needed to fuse these elements. Left on their own, these stellar remnants will gradually cool.

But many stars are not left on their own; they exist in binary systems with a companion, or even larger systems. These companions can provide the material needed to boost white dwarfs to the masses that can restart fusion. There are two potential pathways for this to happen. Many stars go through periods where they are so large that their gravitational pull is barely enough to hold on to their outer layers. If the white dwarf orbits closely enough, it can pull in material from the other star, boosting its mass until it passes a critical threshold, at which point fusion can restart.

New evidence that some supernovae may be a “double detonation” Read More »

From Le Mans to Driven—where does F1: The Movie rank?

Cars, culture, F1 the movie, movie review / Shannon Garcia / July 3, 2025

How well does the world of F1 translate into the tropes of a sporting movie?

Damson Idris (left) and Brad Pitt (right) star in F1 The Movie, directed by Joseph Kozinski. Credit: Apple

It may not have escaped your attention that there’s a new film about motorsport called F1: The Movie. It’s a return-to-racing story with elements you’ll have seen before, just maybe with other sports. A driver has been looking to slay his personal demons. There’s a wise veteran, an impatient rookie, and an underdog team with its back to the wall. Except this time, the backdrop is the multicolored circus of Formula 1, seen close up at 200 mph.

Backed by Apple and made by people responsible for high-energy productions like the recent Top Gun: Maverick, the film takes advantage of some of those same ingredients. For one, the filmmakers got an all-access pass from the powers that be, filming on the actual Formula 1 grid during 2023 and some of 2024. Having seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton as a producer helped with that. And the filmmakers were able to capture remarkable footage in the process thanks to powerful cameras that are now much smaller than the versions they strapped to some US Navy fighter jets.

The movie comes with a prebuilt audience, one that’s grown enormously in recent years. The Drive to Survive effect is real: Motorsport, particularly F1, hasn’t been this popular in decades. More and more young people follow the sport, and it’s not just among the guys, either.

NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - JULY 04: The cars of the upcoming F1 based movie are seen driving on track during previews ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 04, 2024 in Northampton, England. — Spot the camera car. Credit: Joe Portlock – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

I’m not a new fan, but I only started really paying attention to the series at the end of 1993. I’d have reviewed the film sooner, but the screenings occurred while I was on vacation, and the 24-hour races on consecutive weekends at the Nurburgring in Germany and Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium were not to be missed.

The setup of F1 sees Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt) brought back to the world of F1 30 years after a crash ended his rookie season. We find Hayes racing in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, filmed at the actual race last year. He’s lured back to F1 by his old friend, who now owns APXGP, in a Hail Mary attempt to score some points before the end of the half-completed season, thus saving the team.

An F1 driver’s most immediate rival is always their teammate—they both have to drive the same car, after all, so comparisons are immediate. (Pedants: please no long arguments about different setups or upgrades—you know what I mean.) And thus Hayes’ rival is Joshua Pearce (played by Damson Idris), a young driver in his first season who sees no reason to trust a driver whose arrival in his team mid-season seems more like a practical joke. That’s as much of the plot as I’ll reveal, but the writing is so formulaic that you can probably construct the rest for yourself quite easily.

What works, what doesn’t?

That’s not to say it’s a bad film. Yes, it requires some suspension of disbelief if you know enough about racing, but the issues are pretty small. The racing scenarios seem outlandish, but all of them have happened at one time or another—just perhaps not all to one team in nine races. Mostly, it’s a very close look at some parts of the sport most of us would never see—an actual F1 wind tunnel test filmed at Williams’ facility, which required assurances to the sport that this wasn’t just a way for that team to gain some more wind tunnel hours. McLaren’s impressive MTC shows up, too, though I’m quite sure you can’t park either a car or a bike by that particular door and expect to find either there when you return.

Brad Pitt, an actor playing Sonny Hayes, and Idris Damson, a driver for the fictional APX GP team in the Apex F1 movie by Apple Studios and Bruckheimer Films, pose for a portrait during the F1 Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi at Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on December 5 to 8, 2024. — Pitt and Idris filming on-track at the Yas Marina circuit during the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Credit: Gongora/NurPhoto via Getty Images

That’s the level of detail you can expect to trip you up. You may notice that a sequence that’s supposed to be in Spain or Belgium looks a little too much like Brands Hatch, an hour outside of London. Or that a seat fitting should take at least some amount of time.

Among the film’s biggest successes is what we don’t see. The cars don’t have an endless sequence of gears for the driver to punch their way through. No one suddenly remembers to accelerate all the way halfway down the straight rather than out of the apex like in real life. No race cars are driven out of tracks into high-speed pursuits, and no drivers have conversations with their rivals mid-race at 8,000 rpm.

All of that qualifies F1 for a podium position among racing movies. Neither the recent Rush nor Ford v Ferrari could resist some of those dumber tropes, and even the most desperate racing junkie will admit that neither Driven nor Michel Vaillant are really worth the time it takes to watch them unless the intention is to Statler-and-Waldorf your way through it with a friend.

And of course, there’s Days of Thunder, which was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who also produced F1. The NASCAR movie loses what was third place in my personal pantheon of racing movies to the carbon-fiber newcomer. There’s little distance between them; I’m just much more interested in F1 than stock cars.

Only 3rd place?

The only problem is that all this has been done before. The last time F1 was this big, the same combination of fast cars and good-looking drivers captured Hollywood’s attention just the same. John Frankenheimer was the man who got to make the movie, and 1966’s Grand Prix broke new ground at the time, starring James Garner, who I’m told turned out to be rather fast behind the wheel in filming. Its story is sentimental, and some of the acting is a little wooden, but it’s visually exciting and features spectacular footage of the 1966 F1 season.

James Garner and Toshiro Mifune starred in Grand Prix. FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images

The fact that Grand Prix broke so much more new ground than F1 means that Frankenheimer’s film finishes just ahead for me. But neither can quite supplant the magic of Le Mans, the 1971 film starring Steve McQueen, which was recently remastered on Blu-ray.

McQueen might have been one of the world’s biggest movie stars at the time, but he mostly wanted to be a racing driver. He wasn’t bad at it, either—in 1970, he almost won the 12 hours of Sebring in a Porsche 908 despite having broken his foot in six places a couple of weeks earlier. The actor was originally up for Garner’s role in Grand Prix and never gave up on a motorsports movie, capitalizing on his success in the late 1960s to get his own project underway.

Objectively, as a movie, Le Mans can be considered a failure. There is no dialogue for the first half-hour, just the occasional narration from a trackside announcer that contextualizes the scale of the annual 24-hour race. There was no script for months during filming, and the film went through directors John Sturges and Alan Trustman before Lee H. Katzin finished the job.

Even so, there was an assortment of many of the actual race cars that competed in the 1970 race at Le Mans. And the town had graciously allowed McQueen’s production company to close some of the roads used by the track for more filming. The cars were mostly piloted by the elite racing drivers of the time, but McQueen drove his own character’s Porsche 917K—at racing speeds but with heavy film cameras rigged onto it—as did Siegfried Rauch in the Ferrari 512.

This is what happens when you let a frustrated racing driver make a movie. CBS via Getty Images

Other footage had been shot in the actual 1970 race, both trackside and onboard, thanks to the same Porsche 908 that McQueen drove earlier that year in Florida, which was used as a camera car. At times, it’s more like a documentary. But only at times. With Le Mans, there was no CGI, and no other tracks were standing in for filming.

F1 can’t quite make that claim. At times, the cars seemed to be at slightly different scales on track—a product of Pitt and Idris being filmed driving slightly smaller, slightly slower F2 cars. Perhaps my biggest issue was with some of the unsporting behavior you see on screen. Those antics work better in a comedy like Major League; in a serious drama, it feels a little like disrepute.

None of that will stop me watching F1 again, however.

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

From Le Mans to Driven—where does F1: The Movie rank? Read More »

Paramount accused of bribery as it settles Trump lawsuit for $16 million

cbs 60 minutes, kamala harris interview, paramount, Policy, Trump / Shannon Garcia / July 2, 2025

Payout to future presidential library

Paramount told us that the settlement terms were proposed by a mediator and that it will pay $16 million, including plaintiffs’ fees and costs. That amount, minus the fees and costs, will be allocated to Trump’s future presidential library, Paramount said. Trump’s complaint sought at least $20 billion in damages.

Paramount also said that “no amount will be paid directly or indirectly to President Trump or Rep. Jackson personally” and that the settlement will release Paramount from “all claims regarding any CBS reporting through the date of the settlement, including the Texas action and the threatened defamation action.”

Warren’s statement said the “settlement exposes a glaring need for rules to restrict donations to sitting presidents’ libraries,” and that she will “introduce new legislation to rein in corruption through presidential library donations. The Trump administration’s level of sheer corruption is appalling and Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism.”

Trump previously obtained settlements from ABC, Meta, and X Corp.

Paramount said the settlement “does not include a statement of apology or regret.” It “agreed that in the future, 60 Minutes will release transcripts of interviews with eligible US presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns.”

FCC’s news distortion investigation

Trump and Paramount previously told the court that they were in advanced settlement negotiations and are scheduled to file a joint status report on Thursday.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been probing CBS over the Harris interview and holding up Paramount’s merger with Skydance. Carr revived a complaint that was previously dismissed by the FCC and which alleges that CBS intentionally distorted the news by airing two different answers given by Harris to the same question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Paramount accused of bribery as it settles Trump lawsuit for $16 million Read More »

Author name: Shannon Garcia

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Discussion about this post

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What we don’t know

Bolstering incentives

Making fuels greener

Where trucks congregate

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Discussion about this post

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What works, what doesn’t?

Only 3rd place?

Payout to future presidential library

FCC’s news distortion investigation