Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and center-left Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday reiterated their push to combat illegal migration after thousands of unauthorized migrants surged into Spanish exclave Ceuta in late July.

“We are aware that many might be wondering about our cooperation. We come from very different political backgrounds, and we certainly do not agree on everything,” Meloni posted in a “joint message” on Facebook, sharing an archival photo of herself and Frederiksen.

“We do not accept uncontrolled immigration to Europe, and we have promoted a strict immigration policy, both in our Nations and in Europe,” the statement continued.

In response to the Ceuta crisis, which reignited Europe’s long-running debate on illegal migration, Denmark and Italy had sent a joint letter to the European Commission demanding immediate action at the EU’s external borders. The letter was co-signed by 20 other European heads of state and government.

Italy has since been one of the harshest critics of Spain’s left-wing government and its migration policies, with Rome announcing border controls for travelers arriving from Spain on Friday.

Meloni and Frederiksen argued that the adverse effects of illegal migration — “rising crime rates, growing pressure on public services, and an erosion of citizens’ trust” — were indisputable.

“For too long, ordinary people … have paid too high a price because of uncontrolled immigration,” they said.

“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it. We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share,” they said.

Los Angeles offers one of the most vivid examples of our nation’s broken housing system: a quintessentially American expanse of traffic-clogged roads and single-family homes, coupled with the highest home-price-to-household-income ratio of any major city in the country.

To moderate prices, LA urgently needs to build more homes by allowing more density in its neighborhoods — but much of the city’s leadership has vigorously opposed it. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the fight over SB 79, a landmark California law that overrides local zoning to permit taller, denser housing near major transit stops. LA’s city council and its incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, have opposed it and sought ways to avoid complying with it. 

Now, as Bass seeks reelection, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — one of the city’s, and perhaps the country’s, strongest advocates for building more housing — wants to oust her.

Raman has gained unusual traction in a city long resistant to growth and has become a nationally prominent YIMBY. How to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, Raman told Vox in a recent interview, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.” She believes she can do better.  

Earlier this summer, Raman advanced in LA’s mayoral primary, setting up a November runoff against Bass. The race has resonated far beyond Los Angeles, because Raman is making one of the defining problems in American life — the punishing non-affordability of our most productive cities — the centerpiece of her campaign. Its outcome could shape the future of housing in America’s most populous state and help determine whether LA can become the engine of California’s pro-housing turn, or its most potent obstacle. If she succeeds, she might cut a path forward for better housing policy in high-cost blue cities elsewhere.

Just as core to Raman’s appeal is a commitment that’s often seen as at odds with housing abundance. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a forceful champion of tenant protections, including rent control. (Her relationship with the DSA is complicated, however.) She helped shape a stricter rent stabilization formula that was adopted in LA late last year, though it was strongly opposed by rental property owners. 

Many housing policy experts, as I recently wrote, believe rent control can worsen the housing affordability crisis it aims to solve, because it tends to reduce the supply of rental housing. But in high-cost cities and states, interest in it has been surging nonetheless. A rising cohort of progressive politicians, including Raman and Zohran Mamdani in New York City, believes cities must protect current renters from price shocks and displacement while adding housing supply. In doing so, they hope to mount the kind of political support that has long eluded YIMBYs.   

I spoke with Raman about how she thinks about these competing interests, and how she intends to combine them to make a meaningful dent where her predecessors have failed. I was struck by how cautiously she discussed one of the city’s most politically explosive housing policy questions — densifying single-family neighborhoods. Though she has previously pushed for legislation allowing midsize apartment buildings in some wealthier single-family neighborhoods, she emphasized gentler, more gradual change in our conversation. It reflected the core paradox facing housing reformers in LA and nationwide: the need for sweeping change, and the political pressure to make it feel gradual.

Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

You’ve gotten an enormous amount of traction on housing issues in LA. If you win the election, then what? 

When I’m asking for-profit developers and affordable housing developers alike, “What is your biggest barrier to building in LA?” they say that the city of LA is their biggest barrier to building in LA. Whether it is extraordinarily long permit approval timelines, whether it is the failure of the Department of Water and Power [DWP] to be a good partner and to provide real predictability in the building process, both in timelines and in costs. The city of Los Angeles stands in the way of new housing. 

As mayor, I want to do everything in my power to change that. I want to set deadlines by which departments have to respond to applications. I want to bring DWP to the table early and to ensure that they’re a predictable partner for new development. I want to make sure that departments that need to talk to each other are talking to each other quickly and early on in the process, as opposed to providing conflicting answers and taking months and even years to respond. These are all within the power of the mayor to influence and things that this mayor has ignored.

Sometimes rent control and renters’ rights on one hand and new housing production on the other are treated as rival agendas, yet you have made them both central to your politics. What connects them for you?

I don’t think that you can have lower rental costs in a city like Los Angeles without having more housing being built. This is a city that has resisted the construction of new housing for decades, explicitly restricted new apartments from being built in many, many parts of the city for a very long time. We have among the fewest homes per adult of any major city in America and the highest rent-burdened population of any city in America, and to me those two facts are very deeply connected. We can’t really lower rents unless we have more housing here, and lower rents are a big part of how you protect renters.

LA has a rent control system, and you were a champion of a change that tightened that system last year. Do you worry at all that tighter rent control could do damage to housing supply through some of the well-documented mechanisms, like causing landlords to convert apartments to condos? Is that in tension with the goal of increasing housing supply?

Housing built after 1978 cannot be subject to rent stabilization [in LA]. So, making sure that renters in older buildings are protected and trying to incentivize new housing from being constructed to me are not in conflict with one another.

You talked about landlords potentially exiting the market. We’ve also heard concerns from apartment associations and from neighborhoods that there’s been increasing corporatization of housing, that smaller landlords are selling to larger corporate landlords, that being a mom-and-pop landlord is becoming increasingly unfeasible. What we’d love to see is more data on that. And, if that is actually happening, if we are driving landlords out of the market through these changes, if smaller landlords are selling to large corporate landlords, I want to know, and we should be looking at the impacts of this policy accordingly.

I’m very open to learning more. But, so far, what I see is that we have an extremely unaffordable city where all the data has shown us that rents have risen higher than incomes for a very long time. The regulations that we put in place are really trying to ensure that struggling renters are still able to stay in LA.

Is there one specific, concrete housing policy mistake made by Mayor Bass that you would point to? How would you have handled it differently?

There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration, exemplified by the fact that we have not had a deputy mayor of housing for years.

The city has actually opposed and written letters to state officials pushing back against new mandates to build more housing. Instead of telling Sacramento, “How do you want to build that housing?” and trying to shape state laws to suit us — the largest housing market in the entire state — those laws should be written with our input, not written with our opposition. 

I think the most stark example [of Bass’s failures on housing] is this: We’ve had 100 percent affordable housing projects like Venice Dell that are fully funded, that the city has sued and opposed and stalled for years.

“I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing.”

To what degree do you think that LA voters see the housing affordability crisis as a problem caused by a lack of supply — a housing shortage? 

I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing. It’s not universally necessarily agreed upon, but I think if you were to ask people, “Is there a housing shortage? Is there a shortage of housing you can afford?” everybody would say yes.

Why should renters trust private developers?

I think that renters should trust the city to regulate private development such that we actually are building what we need here in LA and such that new building is actually enhancing what people love about their neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s the job of renters to trust developers. They need to trust that their city is going to make sure that we’re working hard to build neighborhoods that are beautiful, and welcoming, and beneficial, and can help families thrive. 

That’s part of why I talk about production and protection always in the same breath. If you see that new construction is going to displace you, I think you’re less inclined to support it or to accept it. But if you feel secure in your current housing, and you know that you’ll be able to stay there, then new housing is less of a threat and can actually be a boon for a neighborhood.

That relates to an argument I’ve heard a lot: that tenants who feel protected from displacement by rent control and eviction protections will be less afraid of new development and more willing to support it. Have you seen evidence of that happening in LA?

There is a very broad coalition of people who are fighting for more housing now, a much broader coalition than I’ve seen in many other places. And it includes renters’ rights organizations that have historically been some of the strongest advocates for tenant protections. They’re actually in council chambers testifying around the need for more density across the entire city, particularly around transit hubs. 

Do you see rent control as a temporary bandaid on a broken housing market, or is it something that should have a permanent place in housing policy?

I think protections against rent gouging are really important, and I think regulation in the housing market is really important. As a city, we have to be very careful about how we regulate these markets so that we are eliciting the best results and outcomes for our residents. I’m going to follow the research, and I’ll always engage with these issues closely. 

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which you are a part, has talked about wanting to “de-commodify” housing and take it out of the private market. The DSA’s Housing Justice Commission says, “the housing market is not necessary.” Do you think that’s a good idea? 

My approach to these issues is driven by how I can help Angelenos who are dealing with spiraling costs that’s driving working families out of the city. The city saw, I believe, a 16 percent drop in people under 18 over the past few years, because families cannot afford to live here anymore. That is a travesty for the city of Los Angeles. 

My question as I approach this is about what I can do to ensure that we can keep people here. We can build new housing through publicly funded housing. I want to be able to make sure that people who will never be served by the private real estate market have support from the city to rely on that can help them stay, whether that’s in the form of housing vouchers, whether that’s in the form of social housing, whether that’s in the form of permanent supportive housing or new public housing.

I’m supportive of measures that are bringing public dollars to the table to build. However, the money that we have available to us will never be able to satisfy the extraordinary demand that there is for new housing in Los Angeles. So now, we have to rely on the private real estate market to make housing available and affordable to a much larger number of Angelenos. 

Rent control primarily protects tenants who already occupy apartments that are covered by rent control. But building more housing is partly about people who don’t yet have a foothold in LA and who would move there if they could afford it. Is it possible to build a housing politics that gives those future residents real weight, even though they don’t vote in city elections?

I think that’s the question of this election in many ways. That’s been the question of my politics. But it’s not just about the future; it is also about our present. It’s also about parents whose children can’t live near them anymore, because it’s too unaffordable here. It’s about rising homelessness, which is inextricably connected to the cost of housing. All the impacts of not having housing are already felt by Angelenos. 

So much of LA is single-family homes, and there’s been research finding that the city’s housing shortage can’t be filled without densifying single-family neighborhoods. Is that politically possible?

Some of the largest numbers of new units being built are actually ADUs, which are densifying single-family neighborhoods. And duplexes and triplexes and other kinds of interventions are in many places already legal to build. That’s been happening and, largely, been non-controversial in neighborhoods. 

Around certain transit hubs, I think potentially greater density will be allowed in single-family neighborhoods through SB 79. So I think some single-family neighborhoods will have to change. But what I’m seeing in LA is a gradual process of adding more density that I think, in many ways, can be even beneficial for homeowners, because they’re able to make additional income or accommodate more people on their lots.

European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber has called for the swift establishment of migrant return hubs in Africa after tens of thousands of unauthorized migrants surged into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in late July.

In an op-ed for German outlet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that was published Monday, conservative boss Weber wrote: “Ceuta has shown that close cooperation with neighboring countries can work. Morocco immediately took people back. No one was able to travel onward into the Schengen area” and, he added, “Europe must quickly establish return hubs in Africa.”

After tens of thousands forced their way into Ceuta — which is situated in North Africa — several international leaders pointed the finger at Spain’s left-wing government and its migration policy. Madrid had previously granted legal status to half a million unauthorized migrants.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing government are among the harshest critics, with Rome introducing border controls for travelers from Spain on Friday and sparking retaliation from Madrid.

Weber echoed proposals made last week by EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner, arguing that countries outside the bloc could be offered closer trade ties, economic collaboration and legal migration opportunities in exchange for accepting the installation of return hubs.

“Migrants who have no right to remain must leave Europe — no ifs, ands or buts!” he wrote, adding that returns must no longer depend on the political will of individual member countries.

Weber called for expanding the EU’s border and coast guard agency Frontex to 50,000 operational personnel, working alongside national forces and monitoring member countries’ compliance with the bloc’s border rules.

Weber also rejected internal border controls within Europe as a long-term solution. “They may be necessary in exceptional situations. But they do not address the root cause of the problem … There can therefore be only one answer: strong, joint European protection of the external border.”

In early June, the European Parliament and European Council announced new EU rules on migrant returns, including removals to countries outside the bloc in return hubs.

Weber also argued that the Ceuta crisis, which left around 100 dead, was the result of unilateral national action and said that the Spanish government’s “political signals” have had “an immediate impact on migration routes.”

This article has been updated.

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PISA, Italy — Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to be beaten at her own game.

With an election approaching next year and a new far-right rival emerging, the Italian prime minister — whose political origins lie in Italy’s post-fascist right — is putting aside the moderate image she has built over her four years in office and hardening her tone on migration and security.

Meloni’s government was the first in the EU to attack the Spanish government over a sudden influx of migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week. 

While France and other countries tightened border checks, Italy went further and announced it had suspended the EU’s free-movement Schengen agreement with Madrid. Now, in Italian airports, passengers from Spain are asked to join a different line. 

Meloni’s office has made clear it has no intention of lifting the controls until at least Aug. 15, escalating the clash with Spain, which retaliated by imposing checks on travelers from Italy.

“We will not back down one millimeter on illegal immigration,” Meloni posted on X while her allies attacked the socialist Spanish government, accusing it of failing to manage migration flows. “Defending our borders, stopping human traffickers, and ensuring effective repatriation will continue to be this government’s policy,” she added.

The clash with Spain is just the latest sign that the Italian leader is doing all she can to secure her core, hard-right electorate in the face of a challenge from the right by Roberto Vannacci, a former general and member of the European Parliament.

With an election expected as early as next spring, Vannacci’s far-right National Future party has been advancing in the polls, overtaking one of Meloni’s coalition partners, the far-right League party, and gaining on another, Forza Italia, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. 

For Meloni, who began her political career in the youth wing of Italy’s post-fascist movement, the challenge strikes particularly close to home.

“There is no doubt that there is concern about containing the competition from National Future,” said Marco Tarchi, a leading right-wing political scientist. “It all boils down to a sharpening of tone. The issues — security, immigration, identity — remain the same as before.” 

During the electoral campaign that brought her to power in 2022, Meloni promised to crack down on illegal migration by putting in place a naval blockade off Italy’s coast. Though that project never ultimately happened, Meloni’s government did open detention hubs in Albania to house migrants while their asylum applications are processed. 

Vannacci, who is campaigning on security and a hard line on immigration, is calling for a more radical solution: “remigration” — a yet-to-be-detailed plan to encourage migrants to return to their countries of origin.

The crisis in Ceuta, during which tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave and nearly 100 died, provided Meloni with an opportunity to show that fighting irregular migration remains an absolute priority for her government.

Meloni’s reaction was “purely the result of domestic political calculations,” said Giorgio Gori, a member of the European Parliament from the left-wing Democratic Party. The Italian prime minister is trying to secure her electorate “by showing that she is loyal to the right-wing slogan and propaganda on migration and beyond.”

For Giovanni Orsina, director of the political science department at Rome’s Luiss Guido Carli University, Meloni’s priority at this stage is “that the Brothers of Italy [Meloni’s party] doesn’t start losing votes too” — in preparation for a potential alliance with Vannacci before or after next year’s election.

“Vannacci has been growing a lot in polls, especially over the past two months,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco from the YouTrend polling firm, noting that National Future is polling at over 7 percent. 

“Without Vannacci, the center-right could lose the upcoming election,” he said. “These seven points matter a lot.”

The Vannacci effect

Nicola Procaccini, Meloni’s lieutenant and co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, denies that Meloni is shifting on policy to protect herself from Vannacci.

“She stands where she has always stood,” he told POLITICO. “She simply isn’t the racist, xenophobic fascist she was made out to be when she first took office. And she isn’t one now, either.” 

Meloni is also facing a challenge to her support for Ukraine, with both the League and Vannacci advocating a softer line on Moscow, opposing military aid to Kyiv and arguing against an increase in defense spending. 

Though Meloni has portrayed herself as a strong backer of Ukraine, her reliance on the League for support has meant Italy has contributed just €3 billion in four years, roughly the equivalent of €1 a month for every Italian citizen, less than the cost of an espresso.

Italy has also declined to join NATO’s PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), an arms-buying scheme set up last summer after U.S. President Donald Trump ended new military aid commitments to Kyiv.

Ukraine is where Meloni’s real difference with Vannacci lies, argued Tarchi, who teaches at the University of Florence and is considered the key figure of a movement called the New Right.

“Otherwise, the gap is artificially exaggerated in rhetoric and posturing for tactical reasons,” he said.

Meloni’s allies haven’t ruled out an alliance with Vannacci but they stress that the possibility will depend on where he stands on key values such as foreign policy.

If he seeks “to position Italy, alongside Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, clearly, it is not possible to stand together,” said Procaccini. “If, instead, he chooses the West — the democracies, Western nations, Western liberal democracies — then we can certainly stand together.”

Editor’s note, August 9, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in April.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.

But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.

Dear Public School Parent,

The way you’ve framed the question makes it sound like keeping your kid in public school means imposing a burden on him. And if that were the case — if we really were talking about sacrificing your child’s well-being — I know exactly what I’d tell you.

I’d tell you not to be bullied by utilitarian philosophers. They argue we have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for our own kids, so they’d probably say it’s wrong to give your child a fancy education while consigning other children to a school with fewer resources. But the 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams argues that this sort of total impartiality is an absurd demand — and I agree.

Williams points out that moral agency — the capacity to act on values and commitments — always comes from a specific person. And as specific people, we have our own specific, individual, core commitments. These “ground projects,” as Williams calls them, are the commitments that give a life its meaning and continuity. A parent has a commitment to ensuring their kid’s well-being, over and above their general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Williams would say any moral theory that requires you to ignore such personal commitments severs you from the very things that make your life recognizably yours.

So if keeping your kid in public school really meant hurting him, I wouldn’t say you have to do it.

But you said your neighborhood school is okay. It sounds like it’s not bad and not unsafe. So I don’t have reason to think that it is actually hurting him. In fact, it might be helping him in ways you’re not fully accounting for. 

Education is complicated. If I were to get into all the details about school choice and vouchers and charter schools and magnet schools, I’d have to write a whole book. So let me just stick to the main points relevant to your dilemma, starting with this: There’s a popular narrative that says private schools are better than public schools, but the evidence does not support that — especially if we take a broad look at what we mean by “better.”

Although studies do show private school students outperforming their public school counterparts on tests, the studies also show that private school advantages disappear mostly or entirely once you control for family background. 

Longitudinal research led by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari at the University of Virginia tracked more than 1,000 children from birth to age 15 in 10 locations nationwide. After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage…vanished.

“If you want to predict children’s outcomes — achievement test scores, the things we care about socially — in high school, the best thing you can use to predict that is going to be family income — regardless of what high school you go to,” Pianta said.

Pianta’s was a modest-sized study with some methodological limitations. But another analysis of two large, nationally representative datasets also found that public school kids did just as well in math as private school kids — or even outpaced them — after accounting for demographic differences. (Math is considered a particularly robust indicator of school quality writ large because, unlike reading, it’s a subject learned mostly at school and not at home.) The researchers suggested that might be because public school teachers have to do stricter certification and can be required to do more frequent professional development, so they may be more reliably up-to-date on the latest pedagogical approaches, like those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.  

Admittedly, the very fanciest of private schools do offer some special advantages. Network effects are real. Maybe you want your kid rubbing elbows with a future senator. And maybe if you send your kid to ultra-elite Andover or Exeter, he’ll have a leg up if he applies to a fancy private college. 

But that is not the same as ensuring your child actually thrives. I’m sure you also care about your child’s psychological well-being. And here, some of the evidence about exclusive, high-achieving schools is worrying. 

The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.

The unrelenting pressure to compete and achieve can be brutal in those schools. When students constantly compare themselves to others and peg their self-worth to achievement, the results are alarming. Studies conducted over decades by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that students attending high-achieving schools are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, and substance use. (These are often private schools, though hyper-competitive public schools can also fall into this trap.) In fact, the National Academies of Sciences now names these students an “at-risk” group for mental health problems, alongside kids who live in poverty or in foster care or who have incarcerated parents.

In addition to potentially providing a less stressful environment, public schools can confer other important advantages. For one thing, your local public school can help you and your child be part of the neighborhood community, which is incredibly valuable for social development and countering loneliness. And being in an environment that’s more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, or class can teach your kid to empathize and get along with a wide variety of people. 

As the American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, these are essential skills and capacities for a flourishing adult life and for a flourishing democracy. Democracy is a way of being in community with people unlike yourself; that’s a mode of life that has to be cultivated, and public schools are great grounds for learning to navigate a shared world.

Plus, public education is free! (Well, “free” — you’ve already paid for it with your taxes, whether or not your kid uses it.) So you could save all the money you’d spend on private school and instead use it on enriching opportunities to expand your child’s horizons. Personally, I’d take my kid to Italy and teach them about Ancient Roman gladiators and Renaissance art and the many flavors of gelato! Or you could collaborate with your child to decide where to donate some of that money to fund education resources for kids elsewhere. 

On balance, since the evidence suggests that a child at a decent public school, with involved parents, probably won’t gain meaningful advantages from switching to an exclusive private school — and may face real psychological risks in a hyper-competitive environment — I don’t see a compelling reason to make the move. If you’ve got the resources to even consider private school, then your home life will probably play the biggest role in your kid’s academic trajectory, regardless of which building he sits in during the day. The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.

That said, I’m not arguing that parents should never pick private school. To some extent, this depends on the unique needs of your kid and your family. Maybe your kid is absolutely in love with music and the private school nearby has an amazing music program. Maybe your kid is being bullied at his current school but has a couple great friends who attend the private school. Or maybe a religious education is very important to you, so a private parochial school makes sense. 

If you do make the choice to send your kid to private school, you’ll have to grapple with the collective action problem you hinted at: Any single family’s departure from a public school barely registers, but when every family with options reasons the same way, the cumulative effect on the school’s funding — and on the kids who remain — can be devastating.

Here, the American political philosopher Iris Marion Young can help you. She points out that our usual model of responsibility — the “liability model,” which says that when something bad happens we should assign blame to a particular individual — is inadequate when we’re dealing with situations of structural injustice. In these situations, it’s a whole system that’s producing predictable patterns of disadvantage. 

Just look at the complex web that breeds educational inequality: Historical housing segregation has concentrated poverty in certain neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods generate less property tax revenue, which means less money for local schools. States can try to offset that, but schools in poorer areas still tend to end up with fewer resources. Families with options leave for better-resourced schools, enrollment drops at the local public school, and the school loses even more funding. The kids who remain get less of the materials — from textbooks to counselors — that would have set them on the path to success. There’s a clear downward spiral, but no one person or decision is the villain.

So instead of blaming any one individual for their personal lifestyle choices, Young says that in cases of structural injustice, we should adopt the “social connection model” of responsibility. Under this model, you don’t bear blame if you send your kid to private school, because systemic problems shouldn’t rest on one family’s shoulders. Young doesn’t think you need to discharge your obligations through personal lifestyle choices. 

But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing. 

You do still have a political obligation: to work toward changing the structure that produces injustice. As a participant in the political system that shapes education in this country, you have some power to act on it. You can vote and organize and advocate. You can pressure decision-makers and support reform movements. The more power you’ve got, and the more privileged you are by the current system, the greater your obligation to take action.  

Make the effort to act on that obligation. Let your child watch as you do. Better yet, involve them in the process. Kids learn from seeing what their parents do: Show them that you’re bent on enacting your values, and you’ll be giving them an education for life.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This is a fun piece in Asterisk about how high-school science fairs have become so ridiculously competitive that they no longer give students a chance to do real independent research.
  
• This week’s question prompted me to listen to the podcast series “Nice White Parents.” It’s a fascinating look at what happens when parents think that choosing public school would mean sacrificing their child’s prospects on the altar of their own political ideals. Spoiler: Practically no parent is willing to sacrifice their own child. But they often don’t realize they’ve constructed a false trade-off.
  
• Living life requires making choices. It’s unavoidable that we’ll feel regret about some of the paths not traveled. But this Aeon essay explains how “living in closer alignment with our values and authentic preferences may help us avoid the worst pain of regret.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

Buc-ee's became something of a viral sensation during the World Cup, but it has a troubling history of suing small gas stations and convenience stores. On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver literally begged the company to sue him for selling merch featuring his squirrel mascot, Mr. Nutterbutter, with branding that reads "Buc-Off." But Buc-ee's has so far declined to take the bait, instead targeting yet another small business that lacks the deep pockets and legal team of HBO.

According to WDTN, an NBC affiliate in Miami Valley, Ohio, Buc-ee's opened its first locations in the state earlier this year. And now it's targeting es …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A draft rule reviewed by WIRED would prevent the census from counting undocumented immigrants. To protect against “distortions,” it would also bar questions about race and sexual orientation.

Most of Donald Trump’s success in politics has stemmed from his reputation as a savvy dealmaker. But in his 11 years on the national political scene, that has been exposed as a fiction — a persona invented by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for the president’s bestselling book “The Art of The Deal,” who followed him around for 18 months and realized in the process that no one would want to read a book about the real Trump. 

After Trump announced his run for president in 2015, Schwartz told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer he felt deep remorse for creating this erroneous image of Trump, saying if he wrote the book today, he would call it “The Sociopath.” He said, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

His words were startling, to say the least, but Schwartz’s description of the president’s true personality was revelatory. The man who touted himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker was a pathologically dishonest hype artist with the attention span of a four-year-old, described by Schwartz as having “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” who seemed “driven entirely by a need for public attention.” His alleged negotiation prowess was actually nonexistent, as the multiple failures of his businesses should have made clear. 

In Trump’s first administration, it became obvious that his idea of dealmaking consisted of willingly succumbing to flattery by malevolent actors and ineffectually bellowing at allies. Professional diplomatic and national security advisers managed to steer him away from most disasters, although he commonly embarrassed the nation on the world stage by displaying his ignorance and fondness for sucking up to adversaries. 

Trump’s second term is a whole other story. 

The president has confused his “Art of the Deal” with the art of diplomacy, and they are most definitely not the same thing. Even if he were actually talented at the former, which he is not, it would have no bearing on the latter, and the consequences of that are turning out to be substantial and damaging. By this point, it’s a cliché that Trump is “transactional,” which many (if not most) people understand to mean he is negotiating on behalf of the American people, bringing riches and security to the nation. In reality, Trump’s often self-serving deals are gravely harming the national interest. 

Diplomacy isn’t just signing a particular agreement between two countries. That may be the culmination of negotiations or just the beginning, but it isn’t actually the goal, especially for a superpower. The aim is to manage relations between countries over the long term to maintain stability and predictability; it’s not a “winner take all” proposition. Credibility is everything for a country like the United States, and now, without it, we are unleashing powerful forces that will be very hard to control.

Trump is a pathological liar. Schwartz discovered that from the very beginning. He was attached to Trump at the hip for many months, listening in on every phone call, observing his conversations and racking his brain to figure out how to present the man as a lovable rogue rather than the damaged personality he really is. The whole world has seen this up close for the past decade. 

At first, allies depended upon the professional diplomatic and national security apparatus to continue to run things in spite of Trump’s erratic behavior and belligerence. They understood early on he loved pomp and circumstance, and that he was easily flattered by obsequious compliments, so they played along, giving him the pageantry of over-the-top state visits and paying homage to him at his properties and the White House. But for the most part, they were just trying to wait out the term, expecting that the American people would realize the error of their ways and revert to being a serious nation. 

This time around is different. A recent report in the Washington Post by Steve Hendrix and Anthony Faiola revealed that the world is no longer taking the U.S. seriously, leaving the government with no credibility. As a result, international relations are unstable and dangerous. 

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When Trump regained office the second time, the world quaked at his swagger, backed up by a bizarre tariff regime that seemed to be put together by Mad Libs. The markets dropped, recriminations flowed, and it looked as if Trump had finally been completely unleashed. To some extent, he had been. He and his close circle had decided to do whatever they wanted and see what they could get away with. But it soon became evident there wasn’t really any strategy or even any particular goals, despite the apparent participation of people like Elon Musk and the authors of Project 2025. In the end, it was all about Trump’s whims, which changed from minute to minute. 

The short attention span Schwartz described is now even more pronounced. The president’s obsession with building monuments to himself notwithstanding, he flits from subject to subject, bellowing threats to all who oppose him and rewarding his cronies with ever more obvious modes of corruption. 

The world has decided to stop paying attention. “[M]ost consequently,” Hendrix and Faiola wrote, “Iran refuses to bend under American bombs and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Russian President Vladimir Putin persists in his war in Ukraine. Europe met Trump’s recently renewed demands for Greenland with a collective sigh, and trading partners have shrugged off the latest tariffs.” 

Over the years, world leaders have had varying reactions to American presidents of both parties. But the country’s leaders have never been disregarded. 

Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Post he was surprised at how long Trump’s bluffs and bellicosity had worked, crediting it to the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

The president’s threats are now seen as empty, and his so-called deals aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. This was most recently on display in mid-July when he made a big, splashy announcement of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Within a day, Trump added a poison-pill requirement by way of a Truth Social post that left the Saudis reeling. His threats to annihilate Iran are now falling on deaf ears because he’s all over the place, usually lying about the progress of diplomatic talks, showing that he’s full of bluster and bombast but lacks a strategy to win and ideas about how to get out. 

America’s political dynamics have us all just trying to hold on until he’s out of office so we can try to rebuild from the rubble. But the loss of credibility, the exposure of the nation’s weaknesses and the people’s willingness to put such a man in charge will not be easily repaired. The long-term damage to our international reputation, coupled with the weakness we are demonstrating in any number of areas, will leave us vulnerable for a long time to come.

The post The world is finally calling Trump’s bluff appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Todd Blanche — whom Republicans hope to confirm as attorney general by the end of the week — has indicated he could steer the Justice Department to prioritize national abortion restrictions, a major shift from how the Trump administration has handled the issue thus far.

In a call last week, Blanche, who is serving as both acting attorney general and deputy attorney general and has previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer, suggested that under his leadership, the department would prioritize restrictions on medication abortion.

“If states have said we are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception, we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that,” Blanche said on a call organized by the White House Faith Office and posted online in full by Intercessors for America, a Christian organization. The call’s contents were first reported by Politico.

The remarks are only the latest to suggest that if confirmed, Blanche might take a more aggressive approach than his predecessor. In a July hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blanche said that if confirmed, he would commit to reviewing how the federal government interprets the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the 1800s that abortion opponents believe could be interpreted to prohibit the mailing of any drug used to terminate a pregnancy. 

Anti-abortion activists have been pressing the administration to revive the Comstock Act since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term; Trump has declined to do so.

When asked about the possibility of enforcing the law to ban mailing of abortion medications, the Department of Justice confirmed that its Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and attorney general, “is undertaking a thorough review” of policies and procedures related to abortion.

Blanche requires one more vote to secure support from a majority of the Senate. Two Senate Republicans — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — have not yet indicated whether they would vote to confirm him. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican up for re-election, said Tuesday she would not vote to confirm Blanche, citing his abortion-related remarks as a key factor.

The confirmation fight comes months before a midterm election in which Republicans — already facing an uphill battle to control both chambers of Congress — have largely avoided talking about abortion. Though reproductive rights dominated the 2024 election, polling suggests that the issue has taken a backseat, with voters primarily concerned about the cost of living. 

Still, national restrictions on abortion remain unpopular. 

Abortion pill restrictions have emerged as a top priority for the anti-abortion movement. Even as bans have proliferated across the country, medical professionals in protective states have continued to prescribe and mail them to people living under abortion bans. This telehealth practice is medically safe and has enabled thousands of people to circumvent their states’ laws and end their pregnancies. 

Anti-abortion activists have called on the federal government to intervene, arguing that the existence of this telehealth model has undercut states’ abilities to enforce bans. But so far, the Trump administration has taken no action to block telehealth abortion, despite pressure from top anti-abortion groups.

Blanche’s remarks suggest that could be changing, though it’s unclear when or how that shift might take place. 

In the White House Faith Office call, he did not reveal what approach the administration might take to limit the availability of abortion medication, or when any switch might take effect — only saying that “victory will be soon and victory will be permanent.” 

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Abortion opponents have pressed for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its decision approving mifepristone, one of two drugs used in most abortions, to be dispensed without an in-person visit. The FDA is currently reviewing mifepristone’s approval, despite a vast body of medical research showing the drug’s safety and effectiveness, including by telehealth. 

They have also pressed for the Department of Justice to revive the Comstock Act to bar the mailing not only of mifepristone, but also misoprostol, an ulcer medication that is prescribed off-label as part of the abortion medication regimen. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department argued that the Comstock Act could not be enforced to enforce a blanket ban on the mailing of mifepristone or misoprostol. 

Democrats have argued that Blanche’s remarks are disqualifying. 

“He wants to strip Americans of their right to choose and strip states of their right to govern,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Tuesday during a meeting of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, posted on the social media platform X that “Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”

Abortion opponents are concurrently pursuing restrictions on mifepristone through the courts, notably in a case filed by Louisiana, in which the state has argued for the government to reverse its decision approving mifepristone for telehealth. That case is set to be heard by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September.

The post Trump’s attorney general pick hints at making national abortion restrictions a priority appeared first on Salon.com.

Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico.

"This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …

Read the full story at The Verge.

BRUSSELS — EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner warned on Thursday the bloc is vulnerable to unauthorized migration if control of its external borders depends on the goodwill of neighboring countries.

Brunner’s remarks came at an extraordinary meeting of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, a week after a major migration surge from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which has reignited debate over how the EU should secure its frontiers.

“What we have seen in Ceuta during the past few days was … a test of our resilience and also of the security of our external borders,” Brunner said.

“We must cooperate with our neighbors, of course. But as long as control depends on the goodwill of one neighboring state, we remain … vulnerable,” he added.

Brunner described last week’s events in Ceuta, when around 72,000 migrants forced their way into the Spanish exclave, as “solid proof that we need a strong and effective tool — and different tools — to combat smuggling.”

Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesús Vivas, who also attended the meeting, said that around 100 people died during the mass border crossing, and that between 3,000 and 5,000 remained in the exclave.

Brunner said the EU should use all available leverage to secure the cooperation of countries bordering the bloc.

“It’s about further strengthening the work with partners … [We need to] step up our migration diplomacy by reinforcing comprehensive partnerships to stem this illegal migration, secure effective returns and create the right opportunities for people at home,” he said.

Brunner said cooperation with non-EU countries was essential “because the goal there is to make sure such events never happen again.”

The conservative Austrian commissioner’s party colleague Integration Minister Claudia Bauer warned on Thursday in a written statement that “another attempted mass crossing” in Ceuta could happen on Aug. 15, quoting Spanish media.

“In light of reports of another attempted mass crossing, Spain must immediately and significantly reinforce border protection in its African enclaves and ensure that this time it will hold,” she said.

The era of set broadcast ownership limits is officially over, after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted Thursday to end the national ownership cap rule.

The agency's two Republicans, Chair Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty, voted to end the ownership cap, which restricts broadcast owners from holding stations that reach a combined more than 39 percent of US TV households, while Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented. It formalizes a policy Carr has long criticized, and which he announced last month that he would seek to end at Thursday's open FCC meeting. In place of a set limit, the FCC says, there will now be …

Read the full story at The Verge.

TikTok says a "moderator error" delayed the removal of a livestream that appeared to show blogger Perez Hilton harming himself, as reported earlier by Wired. Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok US, tells The Verge that the platform notified law enforcement about the situation and banned Hilton's account for violating its community guidelines.

Hilton, or Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., is known for the celebrity gossip blog he started in 2004, where he often posted photos of stars featuring his own often obscene or cruel drawings layered on top.

Though some users claimed Perez's livestream aired for more than 30 minutes, Favazza disputes …

Read the full story at The Verge.

SoftBank contributed $50 million to the Trump Presidential Library in January, just months before announcing that it's leasing land from the federal government to build a sprawling data center in Ohio. The Japanese company revealed the timing in response to a June letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), which raised concerns about bribery.

"Are we expected to believe it's a coincidence that two months after Softbank donated $50 million to the Trump library, his administration announced a massive lease deal for Softbank's data center?" Sen. Warren said in a statement to The …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. 

Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs. 

You’ll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop.

Data center construction has become a proxy for the public’s feelings about AI: something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at — and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests.

So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. You’ll hear Gaby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals. 

It’s a confusing time, and data centers are going to play a major role in electoral politics going forward. So I suspect this won’t be the last we hear from Gaby on movements like Humans First.

Okay: Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Gaby Del Valle, you’re a policy reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to talk to you in Decoder. I think the story you just wrote about data centers and conservative backlash in Florida is just a real preview of what tech policy going into the midterm elections is going to be like.

You were just there. You talked to a bunch of people who are protesting data centers. It is a real alignment scramble in terms of our politics. Tell us what you found.

What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they’re mad are different depending on the community, but they’re also all the same, if that makes sense. They have localized concerns. They were telling me Florida’s really humid. It doesn’t make sense to build a data center that needs to be kept very cool and dry in such a humid place. A lot of them were concerned about their groundwater. They were concerned about PFAS getting dumped into the water.

But I’ve also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizona’s very dry. And they’re also like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center in the desert.” So whatever your community is, you’re like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center here because of X reason,” basically.

The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting you’re doing for pieces to come is that data center build-outs and data center protests do not neatly map to the usual right-left culture war alignment that we have seen play out for so long. And I’m curious about your view on that. Why can’t Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers?

This is so interesting to me. So this is a little bit of backstory that’s going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early founder or organizer with the Tea Party way back when. And this has a similar vibe to me. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s a populous technocrat divide.

You’re seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, “These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.” At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.

That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldn’t help but be struck as I read your story by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers.

I’m curious if they’re just visible. They’re so big, and they require so much development and so much build-out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. “This big thing is happening, and I don’t feel any control. And I’m also worried about 5G, Chinese government interference, and X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there’s a process to say no. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.”

I mean, I think that’s part of it. It’s interesting because I think there’s a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking on the water use question. We now know that they don’t use as much water as we previously thought, et cetera, et cetera. But on the far end of the spectrum, one of the people I talked to told me that cattle born near data centers are all stillborn. I tried to track that down. I was like, “Where did this come from?” And it was one farmer in Texas who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm.

So that got spun out via the internet rumor, social media mill. I think that’s part of it. There’s this issue of social collapse that comes out once you talk to people a little bit. One of the women I talked to said, “I had this friend. ChatGPT told her she couldn’t be friends with me anymore.” You have all of these stories of people harming themselves, going off their medication, or whatever because they’ve been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry.

I think this gives people a feeling of control. Where I can go to my community board meeting or my council members’ meeting, and I can say, “I don’t want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here.” So it’s not just the actual building. I think it’s a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically.

One of my ideas that I’ve been pushing on lately is that the AI products are not winning over hearts and minds in the market. So if the data centers just said Netflix on them, maybe people would like them more.

But instead, that’s where the slop is coming from, and it’s why the jobs are going to go away. It’s also where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that — that people just don’t like the thing that the data centers make?

Yes, absolutely. They don’t like a lot of the things that the data centers make. It’s not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it, but this is a little preview of a different story I’m working on… In Tucson, there’s a data center project that’s getting built out. The people I talked to there said, “Yeah, this might be an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE.” So this technology is fueling mass deportations through, not directly, but creating the non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on.

There are two things to it. Part of it is a NIMBY, “I don’t want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don’t want my town to get polluted. I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the noise pollution.” And then the other part is, “I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.”

Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war coded?

It’s both. It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do. So one woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, “We’re a rural-ish community. We don’t want this big blight on our nice rolling hills.” So that’s a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is neither right nor left. 

On the left, I would say there’s similar culture war concerns, but it’s… I don’t know if this is necessarily a culture war concern, but fueling deportations. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have caught on to the fact that these facilities don’t really have a lot of long-term job prospects. There’s the big construction boom. There’s an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn’t require that many people.

I think people have caught onto that. The promises of the AI data job, or that the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers, are not actually true.

Yeah. At most, it’s a few hundred jobs for each of these facilities, at least in the data centers we have now. Why do you think some of the protests make national news? The Kevin O’Leary data center in Utah is a national story. Maybe it’s just because he’s a cartoon character.

And then there’s a new project in Georgia where there might be a huge OpenAI facility that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but don’t seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are.

Yeah, I think that’s a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive, and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago. I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because it’s related to the president. I honestly think a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether it’ll become a national story or not. And then also the numbers. The Utah one, I don’t remember off the top of my head how big it’s supposed to be, but it’s supposed to be huge. So then that becomes a proxy for all data center development. 

They’re being planned everywhere. And I think what’s so interesting is that the backlash exists everywhere too. I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. They’re on top of it. They’re going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, “Did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?”

Do you think the local governments are being responsive? You’ve now gone to some of these protests; you’ve talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. The basic unit of democracy is supposed to be your local government because you know those people and you can yell at them in the grocery store and the town board meeting. 

We’re seeing there’s a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, “No, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available.” And the people are saying, “No, we’re going to throw you out.” Do you think local governments on the whole are being responsive or not responsive at all?

I think it really depends. In Hernando County, they did pass a moratorium. There are a lot of counties in Florida where moratoriums have passed. But in Tucson, again, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn’t, and they’re at odds with each other. There are all these videos of people yelling at their representatives about NDAs again. And then them being like, “We cannot say whether we signed an NDA,” which is an answer, but whatever.

I think it really depends on a lot of things. How small the communities are, for one. How vulnerable the people in office feel to getting voted out, I think, is another big one. In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the front-runner, Byron Donalds, has taken a lot of money from the AI industry and data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad. 

He was endorsed by Trump, and everyone I spoke to, as proud Trump voters, said things like, “I don’t understand why Trump would endorse him. I’m not going to vote for him.” One woman I talked to who told me she was opposed to everything Democrat said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds has also changed… not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.

How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now?

He says his vision is to make Florida the financial capital of the world. And to a lot of people, that would sound great, but these people are really upset by this, both because they… I mean, there are a lot of other things at play here. Housing costs in Florida have gone up exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just don’t understand. I literally can’t wrap my head around it.

So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also related to people’s cost of living going up and to these, in their words, outside developers coming in and changing a community that’s already changing. He has since said that we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another great example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers. And that he pushed to amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with.

The people I talk to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida, and they’re smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there are around one hundred smaller ones for Netflix or whatever. And they’re okay with that. One woman I talked to works in IT. She said, “I understand that data centers are a boogeyman, and we need them for stuff. But I don’t want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.” Another thing that I think is really interesting-

Wait, can you just explain what “emitting these frequencies” means?

[Laughs] Just the noise. I talked to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. Even they were like, “Yeah, it sucks.” They said, “I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time.” And they work in data centers. I don’t think she meant 5G. 

It’s a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain for. Again, there’s just a piece of all this where it’s a big thing that you can stop. The power of NIMBYism can stop this. Maybe we can’t stop everything else. We can’t stop Facebook from doing targeted advertising that feels like it’s listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. It’s bad. We don’t like it, but no one knows how to stop it.

“I can stop this building from being built” seems like it not only scrambles our culture war lines, but it’s scrambling politics, too. Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One, it’s very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York, London, Beijing, and Amsterdam. Go down the line. 

There are a lot of places that can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running. But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result. It’s just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains.

It feels like people have clocked it, and they’ve clocked that it’s a thing you can stop. I’m curious if there’s anything else. You’ve spent a lot of time covering the right, and I wonder if there’s anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, “let’s build stuff, let’s tear down the White House and build a ballroom” is fine. Building things is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war.

Yeah. I mean, this is, again, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. One of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that’s going to pass. It’s going to give more tax exemptions to homeowners, which I feel is a standard Republican thing — lower taxes for homeowners. People would like that.

She said, “This is terrible. It’s going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.” So she was thinking of the second- and third-order effects of this, even though that’s a pretty populist initiative. But yeah, it’s all so scrambled. 

How do you see the scramble inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I don’t know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024. There was a cultural wave of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the All-In podcast about building and tech and the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end.

I don’t think that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI. We can all see the college students booing at graduation. If the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long.

I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to shake people’s other partisan concerns.

If you’ve got a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also not super gung-ho about deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, where does that leave someone who supports Trump’s immigration policies but doesn’t want a data center in their neighborhood? I don’t know. I think that’s what the party is struggling with right now.

I mean, I think Trump is this perfect avatar for people because he somehow stands for anti-elite sentiment, but also for hard work and capitalism. He’s just this perfect blend of, I don’t even know how to describe it. He contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. They don’t have the juice. They just don’t have it.

Can I make the argument?

Yeah.

I think I can make the argument. I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in, Racine, there used to be a Case factory that made tractors. There was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. This is a real thing that occurred, and all those things are gone. 

So Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what his version of this, even with tariffs, was, “We will bring manufacturing back to all of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity in that hard work.”

At the end of it, you’re going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, “I made that thing. My community made that thing.” I think that is very seductive. I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, and that’s Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff.

Maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because that’s not how anything gets made anymore. And that’s not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy, and you’re like, “Actually, what we’re going to make is data centers.” And no one can see at the end of that, “I made a Jeep Wrangler.” They get to see that Elon Musk got richer; they just lost their jobs, their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop.

And I feel like something gets disconnected in the multitudes where you can tell everyone, “Yeah, the best I can do for you is make you the world’s richest factory foreman.” So people are like, “That sounds awesome. That’s better than whatever nonsense I’m doing online.” But you can’t be like, “I’m going to make Sam Altman richer,” because that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. All of this construction doesn’t do anything for anyone.

I look at the backlash, and all I see is that a lot of people across the political spectrum have come to that realization. You can tear down our communities to build bridges and factories, and you can pollute the skies with smokestacks as long as we all get jobs. But if you’re going to do all that and all I get is more AI-generated movie posters on Amazon Prime whose price keeps going up every month, screw you. And I’m wondering if that connection is… That’s my guess. I’m wondering if you see any hints of that connection in your reporting as you talk to all these people.

I think so. I think the Florida version of making a Jeep Wrangler is like, there were orange groves and cattle ranches, and now there are not. I used to drive past an orange grove when I was a kid. That orange grove is gone. It’s a Publix now. There was an old cow field. Now that’s a mall.

On the one hand, that’s what people want. People want consumption, but they also, at least in Florida, liked thinking that they lived near an orange grove. Like, “Oh, maybe the guy’s using tons of pesticides. Maybe the orange grove is worse for your health than the data center.” I don’t know. I don’t have the stats on this. But you could see the tangible effects of what your economy was producing.

Now it’s just like, “There’s a building that none of us can go in. It makes a horrible noise. And I think it’s drinking all my water?” And then it’s also making your kids dumb and alienated, and making everybody lose their jobs. People don’t like that.

Again, these aren’t Luddites. The woman I talked to said, “I found out about the Humans First organizing [efforts] via Facebook. I know there’s an irony in that. I know there’s an irony in me working in IT and opposing this data center.” They’re not dumb. They understand that all of these things that we’ve built our lives around require something to power them. They just don’t want that something to be within driving distance of their house. They want it somewhere else.

And it’s unclear where that somewhere else should be apart from space.

Apart from space.

That is a very different episode of Decoder. But that’s one answer the industry has: “These people, their stupid concerns are too annoying. We’ll just put the data centers in space,” and maybe they’ll solve that problem. Who knows?

The other answer is, “We’ll just horsepower over their concerns. This is too important. We’re going to do it anyway. And maybe we’ll just subsidize a bunch of education in some community. Maybe we’ll just pay a bunch of extra money. Maybe we’ll pay for everyone’s electricity.”

I don’t know if those have gotten any traction. Is there anything that the tech companies or the neoclouds could do in these communities to overcome the objections? Could they just pay for healthcare? Or is that just a non-starter?

I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece,  because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”

I think what people want more than the data centers not being there is a degree of community input on how they’re built — if they’re going to be built. I think if they got that, they would maybe not be pacified, but they would at least not feel like there’s a big external force coming in and steamrolling their community, especially when they already feel like that in every other aspect of their life.

This is the thing that I’m most curious about. So much of our politics and our culture has been nationalized. Everything happens at the national level. The fact that the mayor of New York is a national political figure is at once very silly and also just the funniest thing that has happened in a long time.

Data centers are very local. They’re happening to people in their backyards, and a data center being built in Florida, Georgia, or Tucson has nothing to do with me in New York. It’s far away enough.

Maybe what you’re hearing from everybody is just, “Somewhere else, and as we get to somewhere else, I won’t care.” But it is very local. And then it is very in person. People are going to the meetings; they’re encountering one another. There have been stories of bridges across party lines from people who would never like each other normally because they both hate the data centers.

Is there an element of a return to actual local politics and actual community building here that could be catalyzed by opposition to data centers?

I really think so. Again, I’m talking to organizers in multiple states who are going to these community, town council, or county council meetings and yelling at their representatives. And sometimes it’s hundreds of people. I think this is maybe a weird analogy, but it reminds me of the local backlash to right-wing organizing and local education policy, which is where a lot of the anti-trans backlash started. You’d go into the school board, and you’d be like, “I don’t want this gender stuff being taught to my child. I don’t want my kids to know that slavery was bad.”

I’m not comparing them in terms of value judgment. I just think it’s at a level of local engagement that is at the same time a national issue. It’s these really, really, really localized policies that may end up driving, if not national policy change and national policy discussions, but at least national political vibes. Whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries and runs for president in 2028, what are they going to be saying about data centers? I don’t know, but I know it’s going to be informed by what happens this year and next year.

I’m actually very curious how Trump handles it. As you said, he contains multitudes. He’s very good at reading his own base. It feels like the Trump base is very much polarized around data centers. There are a lot of people who love Donald Trump but hate data centers. And then there’s his money, which loves the AI build-out and loves data centers. That is a fracture as deep as anything.

A lot of those folks will say, “AI just has a marketing problem. If only we could convince people of the benefits of this build-out and the super intelligence to come, they would be on board.”

The best marketer they could have for that would be Donald Trump. But he doesn’t seem to be willing to make those claims at the level that they might need. And certainly he is very attuned to his base hating AI. How do you think he’s going to play it? And how do you think the MAGA coalition will respond to it?

Okay, so do you remember when Trump was talking about H-1B visas? Or not even when he was talking about it, but just the whole swirl around what we’re going to do about these?

Yeah.

Trump said, “I think we should stamp an H-1B visa to every foreign student’s college graduation diploma.” And I thought, “What are you talking about? Your administration is charging $100,000 for these visas.” He kept saying things like, “These kids are really smart. We need them in America building chips.”

I think he’s just going to do it like that. The thing about Trump is that he can say literally whatever, and he can do literally whatever, and the people who like him will continue to like him. Sometimes they’ll be like, “Oh, well, I don’t like this particular policy of his. I don’t know why he endorsed this candidate,” but they’re still going to back the guy.

But enough to split the difference on this issue? In every other issue, he could polarize the electorate, and he would get there, but, “I’m going to put a data center in the backyard, and it’s going to make that noise.” Maybe not enough.

But the thing is that they don’t see it as coming from Trump. They’re thinking, “These companies are coming into our community.” And if you connect the dots, it’s like, “Who supports those companies? The president. Who is giving the president a lot of money? All these different companies.”

That’s not how people see it. They see it as these tech oligarchs who are just disconnected from politics and disconnected from anything because of all their money. They don’t see that as having a connection to the president. Instead, they see that as having a connection to the governor, to the board of commissioners, or whatever. But Trump is floating above it all. I don’t know why.

Well, I’m curious, and maybe we should end it here. The Florida gubernatorial primaries are coming up. If Donalds loses, even with that Trump endorsement over the data center issue, do you think that will be a signal or a predictor of what will happen in the midterms?

I think it would be a massive signal, if only because Donalds is polling so much further ahead than everybody else. He’s the clear frontrunner, and the lieutenant governor who’s polling second is also pro-data centers. If any of the anti-data center candidates win the Republican primary, that is going to be huge and completely unexpected by everybody in the state. But it could happen. Crazier things have happened.

We’re going to be doing a lot of coverage of this in the months to come, especially ahead of the midterms, because this scrambling of party lines, this scrambling of the culture war, seems very important. The politics we’ve had for so long, they don’t seem like they can hold up to everyone hating the same thing.

Maybe that’s all America needs. It does seem like every American hating these big buildings that make loud noises might be the thing that unifies us, which is good or bad. You can make your own decisions, but I can’t think of anything else. There’s nothing else that’s cutting across party lines this way. Can you?

Literally nothing. Nothing at all. And it’s cutting across party lines, I think, not just in that people hate it, but I had these deeply conservative women talking to me about local environmental and ecological issues. They were talking about pesticides and forever chemicals in their water, which you wouldn’t expect looking at Republican politics five to 10 years ago, that this is where we have ended up.

We’re still doing climate change hoaxes at the national level, and on the ground we’re talking about pesticides. There’s something there.

Gaby, we’re going to have to have you back as the story develops and certainly as we go into all these elections. Thank you so much for being at Decoder.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success.

But the reality is that the laundry list of executive changes likely signal deeper issues within Google's AI organization. That starts with its tenuous position in the AI race, and it stretches to problems like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis' interest in longer-term research over shorter-term product shipping, as well as bubbling p …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Brussels is bracing for an unusual fight between the EU’s smallest country and a British ex-footballing legend.

Peter Shilton, the England goalkeeper who conceded the “Hand of God” goal from Diego Armando Maradona in 1986, has started a new life as an anti-gambling advocate after overcoming a decades-long addiction.

Despite being a diehard Brexit supporter, he’s become the poster boy of the European Parliament’s push to tax online betting in a bid to raise some much-needed funds to finance the bloc’s next €2 trillion budget.

But the campaign has run into strong opposition from Malta. The tiny island in the Mediterranean Sea, with a population of just over half a million people, is home to a burgeoning betting sector. It says that higher taxes will cripple its gambling industry, boost illegal operators and drive firms outside the bloc.

“[Malta] will not accept the introduction of any EU-level taxes designed to sustain the bloc’s spending,” the country’s Prime Minister, Robert Abela, told the Maltese Parliament in June.

But Shilton, who lost more than £1 million in betting on horse racing over 45 years and now runs his own gambling addiction charity, dismisses the arguments by Malta and the gambling lobbies as “window dressing.” He’s in favor of higher taxes as he wants to shrink advertising revenue that is used to lure in new gamblers.

“Deep down they’re after everybody’s money. Simple as that,” he told POLITICO during a visit to Brussels in June.

The topic has split the EU’s 27 governments, pitting gambling-heavy Southern European countries against their more supportive Western European peers, led by France. Capitals are already fighting even though the Commission hasn’t yet issued a formal proposal for the possible tax, which would ultimately need to be unanimously approved by governments.

It’s one of numerous budget battle lines being drawn, with Ireland — which is steering the talks as chair of the rotating Council presidency — set to restart negotiations to facilitate an overall deal on the EU budget before the end of the year.

That’s no mean feat given Dublin’s task to mesh competing spending priorities into a single budget — financing everything from farmers’ subsidies to foreign aid — that is acceptable for each of the EU’s 27 governments.

National capitals will have to unanimously approve new EU-wide taxes — known as own resources — to pay for soaring defense spending and post-Covid debt repayments if they want to avoid drastically increasing national contributions to Brussels.

Supporters of the gambling levy point to the fact that it would rake in over €13 billion throughout the next budget cycle and — for some, more importantly — address a serious public health issue. An estimated 80 million adults globally have experienced a gambling addiction, according to experts.

“We look on it [gambling] as an illness. It’s something that’s inborn in you and that can be ignited,” Shilton said.

Malta’s game plan

Malta has invested heavily in the gambling industry — including lotteries, betting and casinos increasingly operating online — which now accounts for around 12 percent of its gross domestic product.

These firms have relocated to Malta because of its light-touch licensing regime, business-friendly tax regime and balmy weather.

The country is “as dependent on the online gambling industry as Germany is on cars,” said an EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak freely.

While gambling firms need local authorization to operate in most other European countries, securing the Maltese license is crucial to access banking services and gain a foothold in the EU market.

Malta-based firms dominated the German and Austrian online gambling markets before national regulators cracked down. This has prompted the Maltese government to refuse to recognize some court rulings and sanctions issued by other EU countries against its gambling firms.

Given its influence, it is hardly surprising that the gambling industry has found a friendly ear among Malta’s politicians in Brussels.

The Maltese president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, last year gave the opening speech at an international gambling conference in Rome that also featured Italian Foreign Affairs Minister Antonio Tajani.

“I’m more than a little proud that it started in my island home of Malta,” she said, referring to SiGMA, a Maltese events company that focuses on online gambling founded by Eman Pulis, a university friend of Metsola.

Betting lobbies say they oppose higher gambling rates on the grounds that they will fuel appetite for the illegal market, away from the grasp of EU rules.

“A higher tax would lead to worse odds for the customers … and it is relevant because access to the illegal markets in Europe is, obviously, one click away,” said secretary general of the European Gaming and Betting Association, Maarten Haijer.

Nicola Matteucci, an economist at the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy who has undertaken extensive research on the gambling sector, argued there is a “point where prices exceed a certain level and the demand [for gambling] diminishes. But it’s not as immediate as suggested by the industry.”

Matteucci said that most gamblers will be undeterred by slightly higher taxes and worse odds as they are not fully rational consumers.

Anti-gambling groups reason instead that higher taxes will reduce the sector’s spending on commercials, preventing would-be punters from getting sucked in to gambling in the first place.

“Higher taxes will therefore mean less gambling advertising overall and many people would regard that as a public benefit,” said Derek Webb, the founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling advocacy group.

Club Med joins Malta

Malta has joined forces with fellow Mediterranean countries — Italy, Portugal and Spain — to challenge the mooted tax which was first proposed by the Parliament’s socialist lawmaker Victor Negrescu, said four diplomats with knowledge of the discussions.

According to the European Commission’s estimates, seen by POLITICO, a 3 percent tax on the net turnover of the online gambling sector would generate an estimated €1.9 billion per year.

With its big online gambling market, Spain is expected to be among the biggest financial losers, should the tax go ahead. It is estimated to be on the hook for €414 million per year, almost a quarter of the total amount. That compares to a projected bill of €165 million per year for Malta— a disproportionality high amount for such a small country.

Portugal is also reluctant to back the levy. It fears that higher taxes would eat into revenue brought in by state-run betting and lotteries that is currently channeled to the charity Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa‘s healthcare and youth support programs, said a Portuguese official.

Meanwhile, given the relatively low uptake of online gambling, Italy’s misgivings have surprised anti-betting advocates. Rome is expected to pay a mere 7 percent of the proposed new levy — a significantly lower proportion than its regular EU budget contributions.

However, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has previously been receptive to the gambling industry. Last year its MPs passed a resolution encouraging the reversal of a ban on professional football clubs advertising gambling firms.  

As homeownership slips further out of reach in America, more people are spending more of their lives as renters. Millennials and Gen Zs are less likely to own homes than older generations did at the same age, and the median age of a first-time homebuyer recently reached an all-time high of 40, up from 28 in 1991. 

That need not be a bad thing. Renting offers many benefits — flexibility, far lower upfront costs, never having to figure out what a “sacrificial anode rod” is — and homeownership is overrated as a savings vehicle. 

But being a renter in America (as roughly one in three people here are) can also be a very undignified experience. In most states, your landlord can kick you out when your lease ends for no reason at all, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. Many tenants live in fear of receiving their next lease renewal, not knowing if they’ll be displaced by the next rent hike. 

Some progressive policymakers, buoyed by the growing influence of democratic socialism and a resurgent tenant movement, are reviving an old, highly controversial answer to renters’ lack of security: simply ban steep rent increases through rent control. 

In June, New York City, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, froze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 40 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Rent control laws have been passed or tightened in recent years in places from Washington state to Los Angeles to Montgomery County, Maryland, and tenant advocates this year have pushed similar measures in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Providence, Rhode Island, and Redwood City, California. 

Rent control’s advocates argue that the policy not only moderates prices, but also offers tenants stability and a firmer claim to their homes. It helps put “the landlord-tenant dynamic on different and more equal footing,” as Siraj Sindhu, executive director of Reclaim Rhode Island, which backed a Providence rent-stabilization ordinance that passed the city council before being vetoed by the mayor, told me. 

Those are really important goals. I’m a lifelong renter, having literally never lived in an owner-occupied home, and I hate that I can’t predict what my housing costs will be less than a year from now. But is rent control the best way to achieve stability? 

Housing economists have long hated rent control; the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously called it “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.” Decades of research have found that it can have many unintended negative consequences, including depressing housing construction by making it financially impractical to build new rentals. And as we know from today’s crippling housing shortage, nothing is worse for long-term affordability than a scarcity of homes. More recent research, however, suggests that better-designed rent control laws can protect some tenants without having catastrophic consequences for housing supply. 

That rent control keeps coming back as a centerpiece of our housing politics reflects just how impoverished our policy ideas are for providing renters what they lack most: predictable costs and secure tenure. The US has an elaborate policy infrastructure to privilege and subsidize homeownership, while treating renting as an afterthought, like a condition of poverty or at best a waystation on the path to buying a house. That makes ever less sense in a country where millions of people will rent for life, whether by choice or necessity.  

The truth about rent control is somewhere between both extremes. It can, in some cases, certainly be worthwhile. But it remains a highly limited tool, and others can furnish some of the same benefits without fueling the very affordability crisis that they’re meant to address.   

Why economists (mostly) oppose rent control

Rent control polls favorably, and it’s not hard to imagine why — voters despise high prices. Capping rents might intuitively seem fair and costless: The tenant is protected from ridiculously high prices, the landlord profits a bit less, and society as a whole is no worse off. Who could object to that? 

In fact, though, many economists vehemently oppose rent control precisely because it isn’t cost-free — it merely moves costs onto others and makes them less visible.

In uber-expensive cities like New York and Boston, rents are so high because demand to live there far outstrips the supply of homes. In a healthy housing market, high prices signal to developers to build more homes, which then brings prices down and, just as importantly, grows the city’s population and economy by providing homes to people who want to move there. We’ve recently seen this happen in Austin, Texas: The city experienced a rapid run-up in rents during Covid, and builders responded (after the city eased some of its building restrictions) with a flood of new apartments. Rents have since fallen well below pre-Covid levels in real dollars. By contrast, policies that cap rents would diminish the incentive to build rental homes at a time when the US needs many more of them. 

Meanwhile, if rent caps fail to keep pace with landlords’ rising costs, owners may neglect maintenance or even pull apartments from the rental market if they no longer pencil out. One widely cited economics paper documented this dynamic in San Francisco, where the majority of rental housing is rent-controlled and annual rent increases are capped well below inflation. The city’s 1994 expansion of its rent control law, the researchers found, shrank the supply of rental housing among newly covered properties by 15 percent, largely because landlords converted rentals into owner-occupied units. The expansion made tenants 10 to 20 percent more likely to remain in their homes, but at the cost of making San Francisco’s rental housing scarcer and raising the rents of non-rent-controlled apartments. 

Rent control programs are generally not means-tested, meaning that tenants in eligible apartments receive it regardless of their incomes. So a higher-income tenant who happened to secure a regulated apartment can remain indefinitely at a steep discount, while a lower-income newcomer is left to compete for market-rate units, which are exorbitantly priced in part because of rent control.

As a result, rent control laws bear part of the blame for why San Francisco and New York City are so unaffordable, Arpit Gupta, a housing economist at New York University, told me. Trying to suppress rents in cities like these is like trying to hold the lid down on a boiling pot — the pressure inevitably spills over somewhere else. Gupta, who sits on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which sets maximum increases for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, cast the lone “no” vote on the rent-freeze measure this summer. 

The freeze creates “a severe risk of financial distress” for many buildings, he told me. It could prompt landlords to leave apartments vacant after a tenant moves out if the cost to rehabilitate it cannot be recouped through the legally permitted rent. The number of vacant rent-stabilized apartments in the city has already been rising, and Gupta has argued that New York state’s 2019 overhaul of its rent-regulation laws, which further constrained landlords’ revenues, may be partly to blame.

Many leftists don’t like arguments like these because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that housing must be kept financially worthwhile for private owners. I sympathize with that instinct — housing is a human need, and it feels wrong for its availability to depend on profitability. But it doesn’t do us much good to ignore the structure of the economy we actually live in, where housing is overwhelmingly provided by the private market. 

Housing markets can be very good at providing for people’s needs, if we allow them to work better by legalizing more housing construction and pair it with targeted rental subsidies to people with low incomes. 

How rent control got smarter 

One of the clearest ways to understand rent control comes from Shane Phillips, a housing researcher at UCLA. It should be viewed not as a long-term affordability strategy, he has argued, but as a targeted stability tactic. For affordability, there’s no substitute for building enough homes. But in already broken, unaffordable markets, like many of America’s superstar cities, rent control can be a stopgap that lets some residents remain in their homes. It’s reasonable to expect that people’s homes shouldn’t be treated as crude commodities that they can be priced out of at any moment. The question is how to balance security for existing residents against the structural harms rent control can cause to the overall market.

Not all rent control policies are created equal. Old forms of it appeared in places from ancient Rome to imperial China to the Jewish ghettoes of Early Modern Europe. When describing modern rent control, however, researchers distinguish among a few different types. “First-generation” rent controls arose largely as emergency measures across Europe during World War I, becoming very widespread in the US during World War II. These typically froze each unit’s rent at a fixed dollar amount, with few avenues for adjustment as costs rose; over time, they tended to push homes out of the rental market and discourage maintenance, reducing both the quantity and quality of rental housing.

By the 1970s-80s, a “second generation” of rent control laws, often called “rent stabilization,” was adopted in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, municipalities across New Jersey, and numerous California cities. These introduced some important innovations: They allow modest annual rent increases, set by a formula or regulatory board and often pegged to the rate of inflation. They exempt new-construction buildings from price controls, which reduces the disincentive for developers to build new apartments. 

They also often include “vacancy decontrol,” which allows landlords to reset an apartment’s rent to its current market rate after a tenant moves out (after that, the unit remains subject to the annual rent increase caps). Vacancy decontrol is especially important for preserving rental housing supply, experts told me. But it also creates an incentive for owners to try to push tenants out so they can raise the rent. To combat this, most rent-control programs include “just-cause” eviction protections, meaning that landlords cannot arbitrarily evict tenants or refuse to renew their leases; they must cite a serious lease violation (or another legally recognized reason, such as removing the unit from the rental market). 

Second-generation systems remain in place in major US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They tend not to distort housing markets as severely as first-generation laws, but they can still, as seen in the evidence from San Francisco, meaningfully damage housing supply. And Gupta has warned that New York City’s system has been regressing back toward first-generation rent control, with the recent rent freeze and the removal of vacancy decontrol under New York state’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

Meanwhile, the recent revival of interest in rent control has produced some laws whose design may magnify the policy’s worst impacts. Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes some of Washington, DC’s most expensive suburbs, implemented a rent-control law in 2024 that lacks vacancy decontrol, while St. Paul, Minnesota, voters approved a 2021 ballot measure that initially lacked both vacancy decontrol and an exemption for new construction. Both places subsequently saw sharp declines in apartment construction, though the timing alone does not prove rent control was the sole cause. (St. Paul has since added partial vacancy decontrol and a permanent new-construction exemption.)

In a recent working paper, a pair of UCLA economists identified a “third generation” of rent control that is less restrictive than second-generation laws. California passed a statewide rent stabilization law in 2019, for example, that set a high ceiling on allowable annual rent increases: 5 percent plus inflation, or 10 percent, whichever is lower. It exempts new buildings for their first 15 years, and includes vacancy decontrol and just-cause eviction. Oregon passed a similar law the same year, as did Washington state in 2025. Using data from San Diego, the new paper found no discernible loss in housing supply there under California’s law. The implication is pretty intuitive: “The laxer the policy, the fewer the negative consequences,” as Phillips put it. 

The flipside, of course, is that the least restrictive laws also do the least to protect tenants — a 10 percent cap mostly just amounts to an anti-gouging measure, and landlords rarely raise rents by that much anyway. Still, double-digit rent increases do happen. And even a loose cap can offer renters peace of mind and insurance against a life-upending rent hike. 

We need a broader renter stability agenda 

Some current proposals may soon play out the tradeoffs of rent control. This November, residents of Redwood City, located between San Francisco and San Jose, will vote on a ballot measure that would cap rent increases at 60 percent of inflation, with a maximum increase of 5 percent.

Clara Jaeckel, a renter in the city and an organizer with the campaign, told me that the proposed law would allow landlords to petition for higher increases if it’s necessary to cover operating costs. It’s “designed to strike a fair balance between letting landlords have a fair return on their investment and keeping things affordable for renters,” she said. Under California law, the city would still be required to include vacancy decontrol and exempt housing built after 1995. “We believe building new housing goes hand-in-hand with rent control — so we want both of those things,” Jaeckel said.

Limiting rent increases so far below inflation, which is similar to San Francisco’s rent cap, has the potential to meaningfully reduce the quantity and quality of rental housing. But it’s also possible that its negative impacts remain muted. Gupta and Phillips both told me that vacancy decontrol substantially limits the harms of rent control, regardless of the exact percentage rent increase permitted, and the proposed Redwood City rent cap would apply to a smaller share of its rental housing than San Francisco’s law does. 

Voters and policymakers might decide that this tradeoff with housing supply is worth it if it can allow longtime residents to stay in their homes. The Bay Area has become so unaffordable that such laws right now represent one of the few ways that communities in the region can maintain some measure of class diversity. 

But it’s worth considering how to deliver the same stability and affordability without rent control, which for too long has been the fallback that expensive cities and towns reach for after allowing their housing markets to become dysfunctional. It can ultimately only offer tenants a cramped kind of security, trapping them in homes that may no longer suit their needs because leaving would mean surrendering their only affordable option. 

A better stability agenda for renters would give them genuine choices in where to live, and how long to stay. In places with broken housing markets, that means, first and most importantly, repealing exclusionary zoning laws and other barriers to building enough homes. That’s the foundation of affordability for everyone, but especially for renters, whose housing costs rise unpredictably with the market rather than remaining relatively fixed by a long-term mortgage. Renters with low incomes, meanwhile, need help affording housing even in a balanced market, and that ought to be provided far more consistently (Section 8 vouchers and other federal rental-assistance programs currently only reach a fraction of people who qualify).

Other policies can offer the long-term stability that rent control provides, too. “The ultimate issue that a lot of [rent control] interventions are trying to target is the challenge of being a renter and being faced with these cost shocks year after year,” Gupta said. Most American residential leases are one year long, but policy could encourage longer terms, which are common in some peer countries like Germany and Japan, and, Gupta noted, widespread in US commercial leases. 

Another step is to give tenants a presumptive right to remain in their homes — in the vast majority of states, landlords can refuse to renew a lease without any cause because the law simply defers to their private property rights. That is a bigger deal than it might sound like: If you’re a renter in one of the 40-odd states that don’t have a right to renewal, and you have, say, loud young children who irritate one of your neighbors, you can be forced out when your lease ends without any recourse. I’ve seen this happen firsthand as a renter in Wisconsin, and it’s one of many ways that cities can be hostile to families. Protection from arbitrary eviction would benefit renters regardless of whether their units are rent-controlled.

These sorts of policies also need to be balanced with reliable processes for removing tenants who seriously damage property, endanger their neighbors, or repeatedly violate their leases. “Sometimes landlords are taken advantage of. Sometimes they are lied to,” Phillips said. It’s rare to find a jurisdiction in the US that’s both “very concerned about tenants and very concerned about landlords,” he said. Instead, US housing policy tends to oscillate between either extreme, but protecting the rights and interests of both need not be mutually exclusive. 

America will remain stuck with a housing shortage for the foreseeable future, which not only makes housing unaffordable in our highest-demand cities and suburbs, but also gives landlords a structural advantage over renters because they’re shielded from competition. Until that changes, a limited form of rent control can redistribute some of that power back to renters. That may be a bargain worth making, but, Phillips said, cities should make it knowingly: with a clear idea of which renters they intend to protect, and who will bear the cost.