Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Netanyahu’s Likely Departure Is Not Easing the Fears of Palestinians - Attacks by settlers in the West Bank have been on the rise for years—and a new Israeli government is no guarantee of change. - link

• Is There Any Time Left for Maya Wiley? - The former City Hall lawyer, who has received the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, considers herself the last progressive standing in New York’s mayoral race. - link

• The Importance of Teaching Dred Scott - By limiting discussion of the infamous Supreme Court decision, law-school professors risk minimizing the role of racism in American history. - link

• The Other Side of the River, Revisited - Police in a Michigan resort town have reopened the case of a Black teen’s mysterious death. - link

• The New Yorker Wins Six National Magazine Awards - The 2021 ceremony recognized the magazine’s coverage of the pandemic and the political upheaval of the past year. - link

From Vox

• Is there an uncontroversial way to teach America’s racist history? -

  

  A historian on the unavoidable discomfort around anti-racist education.

  If you follow politics at all, you’ve likely encountered phrases and terms such as “critical race theory” or “anti-racism” recently.

  There’s a debate raging over the history and legacy of American racism and how to teach it in schools. The current iteration of this debate (and there have been many) stretches back to 2019, when the New York Times published the 1619 Project, but it evolved into a kind of moral panic in the post-Trump universe, in part because it’s great fodder for right-wing media.

  The hysteria over critical race theory, or CRT, has now spilled beyond the confines of Twitter and Fox News. As I explored back in March, conservative state legislatures across the country are seeking to ban CRT from being taught in public schools.

  There are lots of angles into this story, and frankly, much of the discourse around it is counterproductive. The main issue is that it’s not clear what these concepts mean, as tends to happen when ideas (à la postmodernism) escape the confines of academia and enter the political and cultural discourse.

  Conservatives have appropriated critical race theory as a convenient catchall to describe basically any serious attempt to teach the history of race and racism. It’s now a prop in the never-ending culture war, where caricature and bad faith can muddy the waters. But the intensity of the debate speaks to a very real and difficult question: What’s the best and most productive way to teach the history of racism?

  A few weeks ago, I read an essay in the Atlantic by Jarvis R. Givens, a professor of education at Harvard University and the author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Givens studies the history of Black education in America, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries.

  His essay is mostly about the blind spots in the public discourse around race and education. But in it, he raises a point that seems overlooked: The uproar over CRT isn’t about anti-racist education itself — Black educators in Black schools have practiced that for more than a century. Rather, it’s about the form anti-racism takes in classrooms with white students. Teaching this history to Black students comes with its own complications, but we’re having this discussion because white parents are protesting and entire news outlets are obsessed with it.

  So, I reached out to Givens to talk about why this conversation is so hard, how he responds to some of the criticisms of CRT, why he thinks it’s crucial to not get stuck with a single narrative of Black suffering, and why an honest attempt to teach the history of race in America is going to create a lot of unavoidable discomfort.

  A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

  Sean Illing

  The term “anti-racism” has become so muddled that a lot of people probably have no idea what it means. How are you using it?

  Jarvis R. Givens

  It’s about teaching the history of racial inequality and the history of racism, to understand that it’s about more than individual acts of racism.

  The idea is that students — and educators — should have a deep awareness of how racist ideas and practices have been fundamental in shaping our modern world. Students need to be able to have these discussions honestly so that new generations of students aren’t just aware of this history, but can also acknowledge and comprehend how our actions can disrupt those historical patterns or reinforce them.

  But one thing I tried to do in my piece was remind people that anti-racist teaching isn’t new. We’ve been talking about it in public as though it’s this novel thing, and perhaps it’s because so much of this discussion is about how to teach white students, but for well over a century, Black teachers have been modeling an anti-racist disposition in their pedagogical practices. They recognized how the dreams of their students were at odds with the structural context in which they found themselves. And they had to offer their students ways of thinking about themselves that were life-affirming, despite a society that was physically organized in a way that explicitly told them they were subhuman.

  Sean Illing

  I don’t want to pass over what you just said about teaching white students, because that does seem to be what this is really about, and you can see it in the debate over “critical race theory.”

  You gestured at the criticism I hear the most: that CRT (and, I guess by extension, “anti-racism” education) is built on an assumption that the study of racism has to be anchored to a commitment to undoing the power structure, which is seen as a product of white supremacy. To the extent that’s true, the complaint is that it’s not really an academic discipline or an approach to education — it’s a political ideology.

  Jarvis R. Givens

  I hear what you’re saying, and I’m not going to argue that there are no clear political commitments on the part of those scholars who gave us CRT. One thing I’d be interested to hear, however, is an alternative approach to teaching the history of America, or the history of anything, quite frankly, that doesn’t have an embedded set of political commitments.

  Any approach to framing history is going to have some political commitments baked into the narrative. The choices we make about what to highlight or omit, all of that reflects certain values and biases. It’s just that we often take these for granted when it’s the “preferred” or “dominant” history.

  In the end, I don’t see how you can completely remove politics from the work of education or the production of history. I don’t think it’s ever fully possible, and that’s something that isn’t usually acknowledged in these conversations.

  Sean Illing

  From your perspective, what’s missing from the current discourse around anti-racism education?

  Jarvis R. Givens

  The best educational models can teach us to recognize injustices, and they can cultivate a commitment to resisting those things, but equally important — and this is something Black educators have done for a long time in their own communities — is modeling other ways of being in the world, other ways of being in relationship to the world.

  If you’re striving to create more justice in the world, you can’t do that if you’re only focusing on the things you’re trying to negate. You can’t just be “anti” whatever. You have to have some life-affirming vision that you can hold on to, a vision that’s more meaningful and points us in the direction of a better world. You have to teach people not just to resist injustice but to transcend it. This is what the Black educational models I’ve studied have always done, and it’s lost in so much of the debate about anti-racism and CRT today.

  Sean Illing

  Why is it so important to move beyond the “anti”?

  Jarvis R. Givens

  I think it’s important because I don’t want to be stuck with this narrative of Black people as frail and suffering and nothing else. If that’s the image that’s necessary to advance some agenda, we need to rethink some things. I’m not interested in painting this picture of Black folks as only living lives in suffering. If our strategy for seeking justice relies on this image of black folks as damaged and down and out, well, it just falls into a lot of old tropes that we have to be wary of.

  Absolutely, there’s injustice. This is a part of the story, part of our story, but Black life is much more expansive than that. It always has been. And so many of our efforts to demand justice have relied on painting an image of Black people as damaged and deficient, and I’m always interested in trying to resist that, and to expand the aperture for how we have these conversations.

  Our strategy can’t be just about proving injury. At the same time, the public has to stop denying that harm and violence has been and continues to be done. Both of these things are challenges before us.

  Sean Illing

  Take an enormous concept like “structural racism,” which is a catchall to describe how contemporary inequalities have their roots in history and institutions. On the one hand, that’s just obviously true. But at the same time — and I think you share this instinct — we don’t want to reduce people to historical props with no agency, and we don’t want to define any oppressed group by the actions of their oppressors.

  So, how do you walk that line as an educator?

  Harvard University Press

  Jarvis R. Givens

  Yeah, it’s about taking both structure and agency seriously.

  This is one of the things I tried to get at in my book. I was interested in writing against the dominant narrative that we tend to have about Black life and education prior to Brown v. Board. And this is not to diminish the significance of Brown v. Board of Education, but I was interested in thinking outside of the single narrative we’ve inherited: that Brown was necessary because Black people only had schools that were falling apart, with outdated secondhand textbooks, [because] the self-image of Black children was damaged and Black folks had no power.

  All of this was baked into the Jim Crow school structure, this racially divided school structure. Proving this, and demonstrating the inherent inequality of Jim Crow, was necessary to achieve the Brown decision.

  But to take that as the total narrative of Black educational life is a mistake. Having studied the history, it’s hard for me to paint the story in such a broad stroke. This concern, for me, began with the story of Black teachers that were writing textbooks that challenged the distorted representation of Black life in the dominant curriculum. You have all of these organizations that were created to advocate on behalf of Black educators and students. You have people like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis and Angela Davis, who are the products of these schools and the teaching within them. There was still more to that story than just the narrative of aggressive neglect, of Black schools being starved of resources.

  This is all to say, we can hold both things in our minds. We can talk about the violent resistance against Black educational strivings and the intentional underdevelopment of African American schools, but we also have to rigorously account for the things Black folks were doing on a daily basis to make meaningful education possible despite the neglect. And I think that’s necessary if we are to appreciate the suffering and the beauty of Black people’s experience in education, if we are to account for their human striving across generations.

  It’s liberating, as a student of history, to realize that so much of it is manufactured. This is essential not just for those of us who write history, but also those of us who are consumers of it. We have to know that the histories presented to us consist of narratives based on decisions people made to represent some aspect of the past. It’s all distortion in some way. It’s important to know that our narratives and origin stories about the past … well, we create them.

  One of the best things my high school US history teacher did for me was help me understand that no history is an exhaustive representation of anything. She made me aware of silences. When you allow students to have the agency of knowing that history is not always as authoritative as we tend to imagine, it actually invites them to establish a deeper intellectual relationship with the past. It allows us to think about why certain scholars might have chosen to represent certain aspects of the past in the ways that they did.

  Sean Illing

  So much of your work focuses on anti-racist education during the Jim Crow era, but we live in a different world today — a flawed world but undoubtedly a better world. How should anti-racist teaching evolve to meet the realities of this moment?

  Jarvis R. Givens

  This is actually getting at another element that I think is important: A lot of the conversations around anti-racist teaching are directed at white teachers and white students, without actually being named as such. This is obviously very different than talking about how Black educators engaged Black students in the Jim Crow South, or even my own experience growing up in Compton, California, where I attended majority-Black schools with mostly Black teachers.

  I’m not going to offer any prescriptive elements about what it means to try and do this work. But I’ll go out on a limb and say this: A fundamental part of being a critical educator, an educator committed to justice and equality, means being committed to reckoning with the history of racial injustice and trying to teach students in a way that supports the development of a critical awareness of that past, which includes acknowledging how that past continues to structure the ways in which we’re in relationship with one another in the present. It means recognizing that many of the institutions we have inherited have very long roots in this history.

  There’s a moral imperative for all teachers who choose to face those realities of history and own it in the present. Being an anti-racist teacher in this moment means to honor the depth of human suffering reflected in that history by telling the truth about it. But then again, that’s what anti-racist teaching has always demanded of those educators who chose to teach in a manner that was disruptive to the racial inequality in our society. You can’t look away from it because it’s in every direction you turn.

  I do recognize that learning the truth about our histories as different racial groups, and as a country, can be difficult. There’s going to be some level of discomfort, and we have to be real about that. Confronting the history of slavery and Jim Crow has always been difficult for Black people, those who lived through it and their progeny. We don’t experience our ancestors’ suffering in full, but the marks are still there.

  Sean Illing

  “Discomfort” is probably key here. And in that spirit of keeping it real, let’s just say it: There are a lot of white people in this country, especially white parents, who see all the scary headlines about CRT and the 1619 Project, and they don’t like it. They see “anti-racism” as “anti-white” and it’s … uncomfortable. I don’t know how to teach the truth about America’s past in such a politically fraught environment, but it’s something we’re going to have to figure it out in real time, and it’s going to be messy.

  Jarvis R. Givens

  To be honest, I don’t really have an answer, because unfortunately, we haven’t had the courage to teach our history honestly. We just haven’t tried it. What we’ve always had instead is a lot of resistance to talking about our past beyond a surface level.

  But one thing I do know is that there are some people in this country who never had the luxury of not facing this stuff. And they’ve always encountered a lot of discomfort. It’s not comfortable for Black folks or Native American communities to think about the history of land dispossession or slavery or Jim Crow or lynchings, and how the legacy of these things persist today.

  I guess what I’m saying is that certain folks never had the luxury of being comfortable. So now we’re at a place where we’re trying to figure out how to be more intentional in acknowledging our history and its consequences, and that means that discomfort is going to have to be shared in a way it hasn’t been up to this point.

  And if we’re going to talk about how to unify the country, the onus can’t just be on the people who are the descendants of enslaved Black people and displaced Native communities, whose forced labor and stolen land were the primary factors of production in building this country. This is something we all have to encounter, and it’s going to be discomforting for everyone.

• Wall Street isn’t to blame for the chaotic housing market -

  

  The boogeyman isn’t who you want it to be.

  There has to be somebody to blame.

  Housing prices have yanked the dream of homeownership out of the desperate, clutching hands of millions. Countless tenants don’t even have that dream, chafing under the increasing rent burdens they are forced to bear. And to top it all off, the rich just keep getting richer: The stock market is booming, homeowners have accumulated more than $1.5 trillion in equity since the Covid-19 recession began, and personal savings are up for most higher-income households.

  Enter, stage right: Wall Street.

  Some people are furious over reports that institutional investors (often private equity firms) are increasing the demand for homes and pushing prices upward. The Wall Street Journal wrote earlier this year that “yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses” and “competing with ordinary Americans.” Marketplace reported the same, noting one buyer had been outbid six times by all-cash offers. Inman writes that consumers are “increasingly competing against institutional investors.” And the Real Deal goes further, claiming that one of the “main reasons for the skyrocketing prices are actually a huge buying spree from institutional investors.”

  A recent Twitter thread blaming BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, for buying “every single family house they can find … and outbidding normal home buyers” went viral, prompting even J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy author making a play for an Ohio US Senate seat, to accuse “The Left” of ignoring the situation because of BlackRock’s corporate diversity initiatives.

  Blackrock is pursuing an investment strategy that will make it harder for young Americans to own homes. The Left will ignore this, because Blackrock has committed to “racial audits” and other diversity BS. https://t.co/lgtb3xSlO9

  — J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) June 9, 2021

It’s important to understand that institutional investors play a small role in the American housing market. While there are big firms for apartments and other multi-family housing units, there traditionally hasn’t been the same level of investment in single-family homes. Yield-chasing investors have turned to the real estate market because it has become a very profitable place to put your money. And the main reason it has become so profitable is the preexisting housing shortage created by local governments and certain homeowners seeking to block new homes from being built, leading to a nearly 4 million home shortage nationwide.

Investors go where the yield is. They are profit maximizers and face strong pressure to return large gains to shareholders. Want to stop them? Build more homes, ensure that they cannot have a large market share and engage in predatory behavior, and reduce the incentive for yield chasers to further commodify the market.

There are still reasons to be concerned. Institutional investors might flip homes and price out some would-be homebuyers, and they might be markedly worse landlords. And private equity has earned its bad name in many cases: increasing the likelihood of layoffs when these firms acquire companies, having shady connections to springing surprise medical bills on people. And there are worries about what might happen if institutional investors are able to gain significant control of local housing markets — like raising rents above the market rate.

However, the idea that institutional investors are somehow largely to blame for the current housing market catastrophe is wrong and obscures the real problem. Housing prices have been skyrocketing due to historically low supply, low mortgage rates, and the largest generation in American history entering the market looking for starter homes.

The birth of the single-family-home institutional investor

After the Great Recession, millions of foreclosed homes hit the market as the economy cratered. Investors stepped in to buy these properties as prices bottomed out and a new industry was born: the institutional single-family-home investor/landlord.

In many ways, this was a much-needed source of demand for a sector of the economy in crisis. Investors were the only ones buying up these homes, and according to research by the Federal Reserve, their entry into the market “appears to have supported house prices in the areas where it is concentrated.” Meaning it may have helped stabilize certain housing markets, as very few people were in the position to buy homes as the financial crisis took hold.

Institutional investors “grew up in 2010-2013 buying distressed properties that no one else would buy and in fact put a floor on the market, so they provided a very, very valuable service and they basically cleaned up the distressed market, a lot of which required repairs,” Laurie Goodman, vice president for housing finance policy at the Urban Institute, explained.

But as the dust settled, some people were outraged as they saw homes in their neighborhoods that once were owned by middle-income families flipped for a profit or turned permanently into single-family rentals.

In a New York Times Magazine article last year, Francesca Mari documented the egregious harms perpetrated by these landlords on struggling Americans. One man’s house was sold to a private equity firm, which forced their tenant to take on responsibilities usually reserved to the homeowner like “mold remediation, landscaping, [and] carbon-monoxide detectors.” Another woman’s rental home was infested with rats and cockroaches. Many more stories abound about countless fees and the threat of dealing with a giant entity with whom the renter inherently has a large asymmetry of power and information.

Mari attributes the problems with “this new breed of private-equity landlords” to their burning desire to return double-digit returns for their shareholders. It’s an incentive that’s led to patterns like exorbitant fees and onerous requirements in leases — and one that smaller investors and mom-and-pop landlords wouldn’t feel.

However, that doesn’t mean that small landlords are necessarily better or less exploitative than large investors. A 2017 New York Times article notes that “some smaller landlords do not fully understand tenant laws, or simply flout them. Rent from a mom-and-pop landlord, and you might get a handshake lease, an informal arrangement that could give you flexibility, or leave you both in a tenuous position.”

But pre-Covid-19 research shows that institutional investors were still very small players. Mari reported that by 2016, private equity firms had acquired more than 200,000 homes — a fraction of the total number in America. A 2018 research paper notes that these investors “account for less than 1 percent of all single-family housing units across the U.S.”

But as prices have exploded over the past year, could it be that institutional investors have become a much larger player?

Institutional investors are still a very small share of the American housing market

Many of the articles claiming that institutional investors are driving up single-family home prices and are competing with average homebuyers rely on research by John Burns Real Estate Consulting. One even claimed that investors are “a main cause” for the hot market, which is not what the John Burns research details. In fact, the report explicitly states that the US is “not in an investor-induced home price bubble today.”

The report found that the share of total home sales that come from investor purchases has actually declined over the past year. And even at its peak in 2013 (when regular sales had bottomed out due to the recession), it only reached 29 percent of total sales. Last year, the firm estimates that investors make up about 20 percent of housing sales.

Importantly, that number is not just the share of institutional investors but anyone who isn’t just buying a house for their own primary residence — that includes people buying second homes or vacation rentals, mom-and-pop landlords, and small investors flipping homes for profit. According to Marketplace, it could also include so-called iBuyers, investors who “make instant cash offers on homes and sell them soon after.” And, yes, it could also include firms like BlackRock. John Burns looked at houses where the property tax records are going to a different address than the home itself, and Rick Palacios, director of research at the firm, explained that it’s not possible to tell from this data what component of these sales comes directly from institutional investors.

There’s a lot of existing research that indicates institutional investors are a very small share of the investor pool. Goodman cited research released earlier this year that found that institutional operators owned just 300,000 single-family units in 2019. For context, the researchers point out that there are roughly 15 million one-unit detached single-family rental homes. (There are roughly 80 million detached single-family homes total in the US.)

A 2015 study found that large investors made up just 1 to 2 percent of all single-family purchases from 2012 to 2014 while other investors made up 18 to 19 percent. They also found that institutional investors are more likely to purchase homes in neighborhoods “where fewer residents can qualify for a mortgage,” which decreases the likelihood that they are competing with regular homebuyers. Research by CoreLogic not only had similar findings, but wrote that they couldn’t conclude that investors were competing with regular homebuyers: “Possible investors are filling a void in markets where there is less owner-occupier demand.”

It’s possible that this trend has changed over the past couple of years, or that it could change in the coming years, as institutional investors look at the gangbusters housing market and decide to get more involved. But at least right now, these appear to be very small players.

John Burns Real Estate Consulting, LLC

Redfin’s data shows that buyer demand for second homes increased nearly 178 percent from April 2020 to April 2021. (April 2020 was the demand bottom, but as you can see from the graph below, second home demand has well-exceeded pre-recession demand.) It’s possible that a good number of these investor purchases come from second-home buyers.

Redfin

However, looking closely at certain sub-markets, John Burns did find very elevated investor activity. In Naples, Florida, the group found investor sales have risen 57 percent year over year. In Fort Walton, Florida, these sales rose 65 percent; and in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Punta Gorda, Florida, there were increases of 50 percent and above in investor sales. Again, this does not necessarily mean institutional investors.

Marketplace’s lead anecdote in a story titled “Institutional investors are still competition for homebuyers” is about a first-time buyer who bid on six houses and was outbid by all-cash offers. But all cash doesn’t necessarily mean institutional investors. With mortgage rates at record lows, some people are using all-cash offers to win bidding wars, which have exploded in frequency over the past year.

“Cash purchases in Florida are mostly from people who are relocating here from other states to purchase a second home or a retirement property,” said Tampa Redfin agent Wendy Peterson in a Redfin press release.

Goodman explains that, traditionally, institutional investors haven’t competed with regular people trying to buy homes because their best investment is to buy a home that needs significant repairs that would be “very hard for an owner occupant to do.” That works for large firms because they can achieve economies of scale by hiring in-house construction and repair workers or bidding down the price by offering stable work to contractors for multiple homes.

“When an institutional investor needs [$20,000] or $30,000 in repairs, it would cost you or I [$40,000] to $50,000 to do the same repairs if we knew what needed to be done,” Goodman added. “Additionally, it’s really hard for a homeowner to finance those repairs. … That is where the real comparative advantage is, and those are really the homes that they do well and specialize in.” In general, these aren’t homes that homeowners are looking to buy; institutional investors are actually competing with other types of investors, like regular people who make a living flipping properties.

In a market this competitive, it’s certainly reasonable that investors may be competing with people willing to buy homes they would usually balk at due to repairs. But that simply prompts the question: Why is the housing market so competitive? (More on this later.)

There are reports of institutional investors sizing up, but even with these new acquisitions, they are still a very small part of the market. According to Bloomberg, Invesco Real Estate is backing Mynd Management to spend up to $5 billion in order to buy 20,000 single-family rental homes in the US in the next three years. Bloomberg also reported that another fund (one that manages Canadian pensions) is investing $700 million into single-family rentals. Business Insider reported on Redfin data showing investors spent a record $77 billion on home purchases in the last two quarters of 2020 — this amounted to just 55,000 total homes and 39,000 single-family homes. Additionally, this included other types of investors that are not buying these homes to rent but are buying them to fix up and sell.

The fundamentals of low supply of houses, low mortgage rates, and the entry of millions of millennials into the housing market armed with higher personal savings help explain most of why the housing market has careened out of control over the past year. According to the National Rental Home Council, a single-family home rental lobbying group, “single-family rental home companies accounted for less than 0.14 percent of homes purchased” and just 0.09 percent of net homes if you count the fact that many single-family rental investors sold homes as well.

National Rental Home Council

But these fundamentals also are why institutional investors are likely to continue to enter these markets. They indicate that prices will continue to appreciate for the foreseeable future (if at a less drastic rate than the past year has delivered). That has spurred the existence of the “built to rent” market. Instead of simply buying up existing homes, institutional investors are building them so that they can rent them out directly.

Even though they aren’t to blame for the current housing market calamities, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen in the future.

The good, the bad, and the uncertain about institutional investors

The good: Institutional investors could provide a permanent floor to the US housing market, ensuring that there will always be some demand to hold up the critical industry from complete collapse.

“When the market slows down and there is a recession, housing is super cyclical and [institutional investors] will come in and be buyers throughout that,” Palacios told Vox. “They will, in our view, help support and help put a floor on home prices. If you’re a homeowner, you may in the next recession say, ‘I’m actually thankful for these groups. The entire economy suffers immensely when home prices bottom out. So if we now have institutional industry that will soften that blow, I think that is a good thing.”

According to Lauren Lambie-Hanson, a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 28 percent of the house price recovery following the bottoming out during the Great Recession could be attributed to the role of institutional buyers.

In some ways, it can be easier to regulate larger entities — there are formal agreements and lawyers familiar with fair housing law and local tenant protections, and the government can audit hundreds of units en masse instead of trying to go small landlord by small landlord, which would be extremely inefficient.

Even if institutional investors are competing with homeowners for existing homes, that doesn’t mean they’re just taking a home off the market — it simply means they are converting it to a rental property. Since renters are on average less wealthy than mortgage-qualifying would-be homeowners, institutional investors might be creating more housing for lower-wealth Americans. Traditionally, there have been no single-family rentals in desirable neighborhoods, which has made it impossible for less well-off people to live in them. That could start to change.

In the aforementioned paper by Amherst Holdings and the Fed, researchers found that while increases in institutional investor activity lead to higher house prices, they also lead to more rental units. They note it’s possible that institutional investors were just better at “picking neighborhoods that would have experienced larger price increases anyway.”

A 2018 research paper that looked at the impact of single-family rental REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts, a.k.a. institutional investors) on Nashville, Tennessee, indicates that single-family rental investors tend to concentrate in “somewhat less diverse” communities where occupants had “higher levels of educational attainment…higher median household incomes, and lower poverty and unemployment rates.” That indicates that the housing stock that is being converted from owner-occupied to rental units is largely not coming from marginalized communities.

Lambie-Hanson has argued that “there really isn’t any evidence in our research that institutional investors led to higher rents or greater eviction rates for our sample of counties tracked through the recovery.”

The bad: Institutional investors’ incentive to profit and return as much as possible to shareholders is a reason to cut as many corners as possible. Stories like the one Mari outlines in her New York Times Magazine piece are chilling, and it’s clear that even if it might be easier to monitor larger entities, it’s not clear that anyone would actually do that. And in the absence of government watchdogs, tenants would face much larger asymmetries of power than they would with small landlords. An army of lawyers and bureaucracy, for instance, could make it more difficult for tenants who have complaints or are being serviced with unreasonable fees.

And if real estate prices continue to appreciate, that means the growing wealth will be concentrated in the hands of these corporations. If these homes were owner-occupied, they would be concentrated in the hands of homeowners. In a Washington Post op-ed last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Carroll Fife, the director of a California-based housing nonprofit, argued that allowing another “private equity real estate grab… would again give Wall Street carte blanche to use a national crisis to enact a massive, generational transfer of wealth from vulnerable Americans to corporations.”

There is also the concern that since these single-family rentals are concentrated in certain markets, institutional investors could gain market power and raise rents as they face diminishing competition from other landlords.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Conor Sen told me he worries that “if [institutional investors] are seeing this like Amazon in 2005, and years from now they want to be 100 times bigger, I don’t think that’s something a lot of Americans would want — for there to be very few entry-level single-family homes to buy and there are only opportunities to rent.”

The unclear: How will this all affect the housing market, homeownership, and the need for housing abundance?

A lot of this discussion is happening because people don’t want to address the core reason the housing market is currently out of control: the marked undersupply of housing, which has made real estate such a compelling investment. Combating potential oligopolies, asymmetries of power between landlords and tenants, high rents, and overly high home prices begins with ensuring housing abundance. And there’s good evidence that institutional investors are drawn to markets where housing supply has been restricted. CoreLogic’s research found that investors are attracted to markets where rents are high and that in tighter markets, there were “larger increases in investor activity.”

Invitation Homes, the country’s largest provider of single-family rentals, explicitly wrote that it “invest[s] in markets that we expect will exhibit lower new supply, stronger job and household formation growth” and in places with “multiple demand drivers, such as proximity to major employment centers, desirable schools, and transportation corridors.” Essentially, it is looking to invest in job-rich areas where it expects local governments to continue blocking the supply of new housing even as more people try to move there.

Some have cited concerns that this could lead to these investors lobbying against more housing in these communities. However, there’s a countervailing force here: the renters themselves who would want rents to decrease.

It’s possible that increasing shares of renters in these markets will actually reduce the number of people reflexively pushing back against more affordable housing. Sen makes this argument in Bloomberg:

In a neighborhood full of single-family homeowners today, if a big apartment complex is proposed by a developer, nearby residents will probably show up to local government meetings concerned about the impact of the additional housing supply on their home values…But in a build-to-rent community, the proposition of additional high-density housing means potentially lower rents for existing tenants rather than a loss in home values.”

That means there could be more affordable housing produced in neighborhoods where single-family rentals become a larger share of the market.

The role of institutional investors is still being studied, but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they get it, they often ignore the structural problems that are harder to combat. Housing undersupply is the result of decades of locals opposing new home building. It’s not something that can be blamed on Wall Street greed and the nefarious tinkering of a private equity firm. And that’s a much harder truth to stomach.

• The pandemic tattoo craze is here -

  

  Tattoo studios are booked and busy after periods of monthslong closures.

  Tiffany Garcia has tattooed thousands of people over her two-decade career, but she remains intrigued by the first-timers. Since the spring, more clients without any history of tattoos have arrived at Garcia’s studio in Torrance, California.

  It isn’t just young people. Some are middle-aged or divorced, or recently lost someone dear to them. “It felt like people were trying to find themselves or fulfill a purpose with tattoos,” Garcia told me. “I’ve had clients say they never thought to get one in their life.”

  Across the country, tattoo artists like Garcia say they are witnessing a boom in bookings, catalyzed by stretches of business inactivity during the pandemic. People have spent the past year declaring their desire to get inked, whether to memorialize the unprecedented circumstances they’ve lived through or to embrace a new vehicle for self-expression after months of social inhibition. The changes in workplace culture toward remote employment are also a boon: Fewer workers will have to contend with the corporate stigma against visible body art.

  Garcia’s shop, which has six working tattooists (including her), is booked through July and into August. But the studio’s packed schedule doesn’t mean the artists and the shop are financially in the clear. “We are still digging our way out of the pandemic,” Garcia said. “A lot of artists are self-employed, independent contractors, or booth renters, and they couldn’t qualify for unemployment. I had an artist who lived upstairs from the shop lose his apartment, and I am paying back my debts.”

  Many shop owners and artists had to take on loans to hang onto their businesses. Rent was still due, after all, even as Garcia’s business remained closed from March through October 2020. Her studio didn’t qualify for PPP aid; she said she applied many times as an independent contractor and uploaded the required documentation. “Every time I got an email requesting W-2 forms and another tax document that I don’t have, as I’m not an employer with employees,” Garcia said. “No matter how much I called or emailed, I never got answers and eventually received an email stating that my application has been canceled.”

  Garcia eventually secured an SBA loan that has to be paid back with interest (a PPP loan is potentially forgivable, while the SBA loan Garcia received isn’t). The enthusiasm from clients has been helpful, though, and with each passing day, Garcia’s anxiety about her debt eases.

  This newfound security, however, comes after a yearslong cycle of openings and closures that devastated a maturing industry. Tattoo shops in the United States, where 30 percent of Americans have at least one tattoo, generate around $1 billion in revenue annually. The art form is more mainstream than ever, especially among young people: Roughly 50 percent of US millennials have some form of body art.

  Today, there are more than 30,000 working artists and about 20,000 studios in the US. Yet, the body art industry does not have significant power, and there are few professional resources for struggling businesses and artists. For decades, the lack of clear state regulations surrounding body art have hurt the broader perception of the industry; representatives from the National Tattoo Association have actually spent years advocating for more regulation to benefit clients and tattoo businesses.

  “We have no lobbyist, no union, no formal trade representatives of any kind,” North Carolina artist Keron McHugh told the Washington Post, adding that tattooing is a “baby industry.”

  Tattoo studios in California have been under intermittent lockdown since March, with a few weeks of activity during summer 2020 before another period of monthslong closures. In August, barbershops, nail salons, and beauty parlors were given the green light to open, but tattoo parlors were left out, despite the state previously categorizing them all as “personal care services.”

  “What people might not realize is, as tattoo artists, we have to study topics like bloodborne pathogens,” Garcia said. “We learn how to avoid cross-contamination, and we learn about airborne and vector-borne diseases. We’ve always had face masks on hand even before the pandemic, since we work so closely with clients. We’ve been prepared for this.”

  Garcia is part of a cohort of shop owners in Torrance, Long Beach, and Thousand Oaks who filed a lawsuit against the state of California in October seeking to reopen, arguing tattoo studios face stricter regulations and pose the same semblance of risk. (California allowed tattoo shops and massage parlors to reopen toward the end of that month.) Tattoo artists have had to fend for themselves, Garcia said, as an industry with little to no formal lobbying power. Thus, it feels more like a community than an industry. Most artists seem to revel in the freedom and flexibility the profession allows. Still, tattooists and piercers have to contend with the prevailing stigma that their work is less sanitary than other personal care services. And when it came to a catastrophe such as the pandemic, their livelihoods felt neglected.

  Now that business is back on track in the US, clients are pouring in, though at a different rate. Precautionary measures such as indoor capacity limits mean artists can no longer tattoo at the same pace they used to, juggling both appointments and walk-ins; still, social media, especially Instagram, has helped many artists gain visibility even during lockdown. Some were able to build a dedicated audience, schedule appointments months ahead of time, and share their body of work.

  “My experience is that people are still hungry and couldn’t wait to reschedule, even if it’s six to eight months down from their initial appointment,” said Chloé Besson, a Denver-based artist who opened her own studio during the pandemic. “The excitement gave me a little bit of confirmation that it made sense to move forward with opening my shop.”

  Besson felt there was momentum: People wanted to support other artists, small-business owners, and causes they cared about. Over the summer, she raffled off several tattoo designs and raised $14,000 in donations to Black Lives Matter and other Black community organizations. “It seemed like people wanted to step up and put money into something they cared about,” Besson said. This specific type of activism and fundraising feels new, born out of the political circumstances of the past year. Besson’s work and inclusive mission attract clients with a similar mindset — she isn’t sure if people are drawn to her work, her politics, or a mix of both. “I think people are responsive to artists who are honest about the state of their business and aren’t afraid to take a stance,” Besson said.

  Morgan Dodd, a 26-year-old talent manager in New York City, entered a handful of tattoo raffles in summer 2020, some from artists with whom she wasn’t too familiar. “I just started following a lot more artists, and it was fun to see their work,” she said. One of Dodd’s first pandemic tattoos was from a donation flash sheet; an artist would post premade designs on Instagram, and proceeds earned from those tattoos would be donated to a nonprofit.

  “I originally had an appointment with an artist who was doing a donation flash, so I just thought, ‘Why not?’ and bought myself another design,” she said. Dodd entered the pandemic with seven tattoos, and she’s added 12 more to her collection since then. Most of her pieces are selected from a book of premade flash designs, since most of the artists she follows don’t offer custom pieces.

  In May, Dodd spontaneously decided to get a tattoo of the character No Face from the movie Spirited Away at her first rooftop party of 2021. A tattoo artist had set up a booth with a portable printer and transfer paper, and was eager to draw the character. “It felt like such a special moment because all my friends and I were vaccinated, and I wanted to commemorate that,” Dodd said. Most clients, though, likely won’t have such an impromptu tattoo session as Dodd did. Besson’s books are currently closed, but she predicted she can fill up slots through the end of the year. And there are myriad reasons why tattoos are so relevant, whether or not they’re directly related to the pandemic.

  “Tattoos are a way for me to decorate my body and reconnect with myself during this time,” Dodd said. “For me, it’s mostly about the story and the moment of when I got the tattoo and where I was at in my life.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Tokyo Olympics | Sports Ministry not to send its delegation - Decision taken to accommodate maximum support staff, including coaches and physios, for the athletes competing in the Summer Games

• Into the open: struggles of the female athlete - Naomi Osaka has started a conversation about the mental load on young women athletes battling stressors on and off the field

• Gaikwad banks on core strength of adaptability to impress in maiden India outing - Gaikwad joins the illustrious list of Maharashtra cricketers like Chandu Borde and Kedar Jadhav, who have played for India

• Table tennis | Derailed Olympic preparation back on track after Manika agrees to attend national camp - Around 16 people will be part of the camp from June 20 to July 5, including 12 players and four support staff.

• Euro 2020 | Italy and Turkey get ball rolling under COVID-19 cloud - 16,000 supporters will be present to watch Roberto Mancini’s Italy face Turkey in the first game in Group A

From The Hindu: National News

• High Court initiates judicial probe into Malwani building collapse in Mumbai - Bombay High Court said that the incident proved that there existed absolute lawlessness in the municipal wards in Mumbai as well as its adjoining areas.

• ICMR to start national sero surveys to assess COVID-19 spread, says Health ministry - The Centre underlined that breaking the chain of transmission ensures lesser strain on the health infrastructure and better quality of care.

• Government fines ₹75 lakh on Sai Sudha hospital, books officials - The investigation into alleged medical negligence begins, medical records seized.

• Kerala-based beatboxer Ardhra Sajan is upbeat as she hosts up-and-coming artistes on her Instagram page - Ardhra, who blends mimicry with beatboxing and also does fluteboxing, gives opportunity for rising stars to perform on her Instagram page

• Jagan urges Centre to start work on Petro Complex at Kakinada - The Andhra CM met with Central Ministers in New Delhi

From BBC: Europe

• Hungary LGBT: Content aimed at children to be banned - Critics say the legislation is similar to Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda” targeting minors.

• Saman Abbas: Family on the run over teen’s disappearance in Italy - Saman Abbas, 18, has not been seen since fighting with her family over an arranged marriage.

• France to scale down West Africa military operations - French forces have been helping countries in the Sahel region to fight militants.

• French Open 2021: Barbora Krejcikova to meet Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in final - Czech Barbora Krejcikova shows incredible spirit to beat Maria Sakkari in a classic French Open semi-final and reach her first Grand Slam final.

• Backlash against ‘frightening’ tests on whales - An international group of scientists has called on Norway to halt plans for acoustic experiments on minke whales.

From Ars Technica

• Trace fossils, the most inconspicuous bite-sized window into ancient worlds - “One animal could have made thousands of traces during its lifetime, but only left one skeleton.” - link

• Rocket Report: Vandals spray-paint Buran; China to launch first crew in 4 years - “This idea has been around since the dawn of spaceflight.” - link

• Android 12’s beautiful color-changing UI already lives up to the hype - Android 12’s “Material You” UI debuts in Beta 2, and we go hands-on. - link

• Some people can’t get FCC subsidy because “Street” isn’t the same as “St.” - ISPs’ data must exactly match FCC’s or application is rejected. A fix is on the way. - link

• Review: Our favorite trickster god is charismatic as ever in Loki premiere - Pilot episode did everything it needed to do, with soupçon of whimsical swagger. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• A high school senior visits a psychic… -

  “I’ve applied to 10 different colleges,” the student said. “Which ones will accept me? Which one will I attend?”

  “That is hard to say,” said the psychic. “But you will spend an absurd sum of money.”

  “How do you know this?” the student asked.

  The psychic replied,

  “It’s mostly intuition.”

  submitted by /u/The_Time_Consumer
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• A man gets on a bus, and ends up sitting next to a very attractive nun. -

  Enamored with her, he asks if he can have sex with her. Naturally, she says no, and gets off the bus. The man goes to the bus driver and asks him if he knows of a way for him to have sex with the nun.

  “Well,” says the bus driver, “every night at 8 o’clock, she goes to the cemetery to pray. If you dress up as God, I’m sure you could convince her to have sex with you.”

  The man decides to try it, and dresses up in his best God costume. At eight, he sees the nun and appears before her.

  “Oh, God!” she exclaims. “Take me with you!” The man tells the nun that she must first have sex with him to prove her loyalty. The nun says yes, but tells him she prefers anal sex. Before you know it, they’re getting down to it, having nasty, grunty, loud sex. After it’s over, the man pulls off his God disguise.

  “Ha, ha! I’m the man from the bus!”

  “Ha, ha!” says the nun, removing her costume. “I’m the bus driver!”

  submitted by /u/-Tigger
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• A pirate walked into a bar. -

  He had a wooden leg, an eye patch and a hook for a hand. The bartender was curious. “How did you get that wooden leg?” he asked.

  The pirate took a swig of ale. “’Twas a terrible sea battle. I stood bravely, directly facing 12 cannons.All they managed to hit was my leg.”

  The bartender said “What about your hook?”

  The pirate took another long swig. “Arrrr, twas the day the British navy caught me. They tied me to the mast, I escaped by gnawing my own hand off.”

  The bartender was growing sceptical. “And how did you get that eyepatch?”

  The pirate took another swig. “Twas a mutiny. Me own crew left me marrooned on a desert island. But I had no fear. I lay down on the sand to wait to be rescued. As i looked up, a seagull flew over and pooped in me eye.”

  The bartender said “That’s ridiculous, no one loses an eye from bird muck.”

  The pirate finished his ale in one gulp, and grimaced. “Twas the first day with the hook.”

  submitted by /u/ExtraSure
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• Here is an actual sign posted in a golf club. -
  1. Back straight, knees bent.
  2. Feet shoulder width apart.
  3. Form a loose grip.
  4. Keep your head down!
  5. Stay out of the water.
  6. Try not to hit anyone.
  7. If you are taking too long, let others go ahead of you.
  8. Don’t stand directly in front of others.
  9. Quiet please while others are preparing.
  10. Don’t take extra strokes.

  Well done. Now, flush the urinal and go outside and tee off.

  submitted by /u/CockyRoho
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• While in China, an American man is sexually promiscuous and does not use a condom the entire time he is there. -

  A week after arriving back home in the States, he wakes one morning to find his penis covered with bright green and purple spots. Horrified, he immediately goes to see a doctor.

  The doctor, never having seen anything like this before, orders some tests and tells the man to return in two days for the results. After two days, the doctor tells him, “I’ve got bad news for you, you have contracted Mongolian VD. It’s very rare and almost unheard of here in the US. We know very little about it.”

  The man perplexed asks, “Well, can’t you give me a shot or something to fix me up, Doc?”

  The doctor answers, “I’m sorry, there’s no known cure. We are going to have to amputate your penis.”

  The man screams in horror, “Absolutely not !! I want a second opinion… !!!”

  The doctor replies, “Well, it’s your choice. Go ahead, if you want, but surgery is your only option.”

  The next day, the man seeks out a Chinese doctor, figuring that he’ll know more about the disease. The Chinese doctor examines his penis and proclaims, “Ahh… yes, Mongolian VD. Very rare disease.”

  The guy says to the doctor, “Yeah, yeah, I already know that, but what can we do? My American doctor wants to cut off my penis!”

  The Chinese doctor shakes his head and laughs, “Stupid Amelican docttah, always want operate, make more money that way. No need amputate!”

  “Oh, thank God!” the man exclaims.

  “Yes,” says the Chinese doctor. “Wait two weeks. Fall off by itself.”

  submitted by /u/Genius_Mate
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