Kevin Drum

In the New York Times today, Maia Szalavitz writes about how Seattle finally tackled chronic homelessness. A few years ago Lisa Daugaard, a lawyer, developed a program called LEAD:

Instead of re-incarcerating homeless people who typically already have long histories of minor arrests, police departments that participate in LEAD refer them to case management services. The program has an overall philosophy of harm reduction, which, in addition to securing shelter, focuses on improving health, rather than mandating abstinence from drugs and other risky behaviors. LEAD originated as a collaboration of public defenders, the police and prosecutors, who put aside differences to work on solutions.

LEAD worked, but during the pandemic shelters were closed and police stopped arresting people for minor crimes. So Daugaard decided to try something new:

With federal pandemic funds becoming available and desperate hotel owners newly open to being paid to house nontraditional guests, she said she saw “our chance to show that there is another way.”

Ms. Daugaard and her colleagues created a program now known as JustCare. JustCare staff members, rather than police officers, would respond to urgent calls about encampments. After building trust with ‌‌local homeless people, the workers would move them into housing without strict abstinence requirements and then help clean up the site. The police would be contacted only as a last resort.

The common element of both programs is an emphasis on getting people into shelter, not obsessing over behavioral rules or addictions to drugs or alcohol. Addicts would rather have drugs than housing, so insisting that they get clean in return for housing accomplishes nothing except to keep them on the streets.

There's a lesson here for homeless initiatives everywhere. Obviously, one thing you need is actual shelter, and public resistance makes that hard to build. But if you overcome that obstacle, you also need to get people off the street and into your shiny new shelters. The way to do that is to build trust and to let people live the way they want. That doesn't sound attractive to a lot of people, but it works.

This was my last picture taken in Rome. It's a shot of the Naidi fountain (near the Termini train station) taken at sunset. It was a tough picture to take! I had to position myself in the middle of the street, so I was dodging cars while my camera was acting up and mostly not working. Occasionally, if I took a single picture at just the right moment after starting up the camera, it would work. I had to do this over and over just to get half a dozen shots. But I got them!

And here we go with this week's promised announcement on student debt:

President Biden announced on Wednesday that he would cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for those earning less than $125,000 per year [or $250,000 per household], with an additional $10,000 for students who received Pell grants for low-income students.

So we've split the baby: $10,000 in forgiveness for nearly everyone and another $10,000 that's means tested for those who were poor when they were students.

That last is a little odd, since you'd think means testing would make more sense based on what people are making now. But I suppose it sends a signal that we want to make college cheaper at the time for low-income students. Whether anything will come of that in the future, who knows?

Biden's plan also continues the existing payment moratorium until after the election the end of the year, and caps the monthly payments people make if they're enrolled in an income-based repayment plan. The cap would be cut in half, from 10% of income to 5%.

And future students? Well, we still don't know about them. But I'll bet they're all hoping that their debt is forgiven someday too. I'm not sure what effect that will have on their present behavior.

The good news on inflation is that the core level is moderate and dropping. Energy inflation is also coming down thanks to dropping oil prices.

The bad news is that food inflation remains high and rising:

This chart shows the monthly change in inflation, annualized to a yearly level. Because this is a volatile measure, it's best to look at a trendline, and the trendline for core CPI seems to have peaked in early 2022 and has been trending lower ever since.

But no such luck with food. You barely even need a trendline to see what's going on here, but it's still best to look at one anyway. What it tells us is not just that the food inflation rate is high (13.1% in July) but it's continuing an upward trend. Even more than gasoline, food prices are what people see most often and react to most strongly. So all the news in the world about the core rate or the headline rate or even the declining price of gasoline can't wipe out the continuing shock of a visit to the supermarket for plain essentials: The cost of food in July was 11% higher than last year and 1.1% higher than last month (+13% at an annualized rate). Here's a sampling of food price increases from June to July:

Some stuff was flat or even lower in July: Bacon, milk, tomatoes, ham, and a few other items were down significantly. But eggs, flour, coffee, chicken, and other staples were up 30% or more. Those are annualized rates, but even if you divide them by 12 to get an idea of what people actually see on price stickers, these are still eye-watering price increases. And you see them month after month.

As long as food inflation stays high, the public perception of inflation will stay high and news outlets will continue to produce plenty of segments on inflation using masses of B-roll footage of supermarket aisles and clanging cash registers. That's just the way it is.

I was directed toward this blog post over at Hot Air, and I'm commenting on it more out of amusement than because it really matters. It's yet another screed about wokeness:

[New York] Governor Kathy Hochul signed a new law last week that is banning a significant number of words from any use in government documents or speech. All of the targeted words carry an implication of gender. One of the most prominent examples she pointed out was “salesman.”¹...So just in case you were thinking that the crazy train might be slowing down a bit, have no fear. It’s still running full steam ahead in the Empire State.

....In a separate bill, Hochul approved a measure banning the use of gendered terms when referring to office-holders in local legislative bodies. The prime example in that new law was an instruction to change “councilman” to “council member.”

....Part of this is being driven by the agenda of transgender culture, of course, but not all of it. There is clearly a much broader goal among progressives that would see the end of the recognition of the obvious (and wonderful) differences between men and women. I assume this has something to do with “fighting the patriarchy” or whatever the flavor of the week is among liberals today.

New York may be on a kick to replace gendered language in its statutes, but this is hardly an invention of the woke generation. It's been going on since at least the '70s, which is where we got terms like flight attendant, garbage collector, and firefighter.

As for "fighting the patriarchy," it may be enjoying a revival but it's also ancient. We were all talking about that back when I was in college. (And earlier, but I don't think my high school was enlightened enough to be fighting the patriarchy or much of anything else.)

Even they/them, although it's also enjoying a revival, is old stuff. And none of this is meant to end recognition of the differences between men and women. It's meant to make sure that job titles don't simply assume that certain jobs are by default populated only by men (fireman, salesman) or women (stewardess, seamstress).

Wokeness can certainly get out of hand. But gender neutrality is hardly a good example of this. It's been a goal of the feminist movement practically since the beginning, and it's made steady progress for more than 50 years. It's just common sense, not a plot by the deep progressive state.

¹For what it's worth, this law was aimed at changing the word "salesman" to "salesperson" in an old statute about realtors. That's it. Hardly a big deal.

What is this? What are these people looking at?

UPDATE: You guys are too smart and too well-traveled for me. Of course, you all know I've been posting pictures of Paris, so I guess that helped.

Anyway, this is indeed a picture of people ascending the famous outside escalator of the Centre Pompidou. I had a little bit of time to kill the day I took these, but not enough to make it worthwhile visiting the museum itself. So I rambled around the outside taking pictures, and eventually took a whole series of shots of people ascending the escalator.

However, this is a picture of the Pompidou looking east, not west toward the Eiffel Tower.

Suppose President Biden announces that he is canceling all student debt, as many former students would like him to do. What happens to this year's crop of college seniors when they graduate in 2023? Is their debt canceled too? If not, we have a bright line of people ending with the Class of 2022 who have their debt canceled while the Class of 2023 and beyond gets nothing.

(If the cutoff is entering freshmen, you have the same problem, just with slightly different years as the cutoff point.)

Would this fly? Or would you just produce a large number of really pissed off college students who want to know why Mr. 22 got his debt canceled while Ms. 23 still has her entire load to pay off?

I don't see how you make this work. Even if you figured out some complicated scheme to phase out college debt over a series of graduating classes, I doubt you could make it work. It's the biggest obstacle facing the student debt cancellation movement, but nobody ever talks about it in public.

We've heard a lot about how COVID-19 has devastated the commercial office market as more and more people work from home. And it's true that the vacancy rate of office space has gone up over the past couple of years. But the Wall Street Journal tells us the pandemic was not really to blame:

America’s office glut has been decades in the making, real-estate investors, brokers and analysts say. U.S. developers built too many office towers, lured by federal tax breaks, low interest rates and inflated demand from unprofitable startups. At the same time, landlords largely failed to tear down or convert old, mostly vacant buildings to other uses.

....The U.S. office glut traces its roots to a 1981 change in the tax code, brokers and analysts say. In a bid to boost the economy, the Reagan administration allowed investors to depreciate commercial real estate much more quickly than before, among other changes, lowering their tax bills.

Savings-and-loan associations showered developers with easy loans, brokers say. That helped ignite an office-development boom in the 1980s that drove up vacancies to record levels and contributed to the savings-and-loan crisis, when many such institutions failed. Vacancy rates slowly fell in the 1990s, but surged again after the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis.

This got me curious. The office vacancy rate was about 7% before Reagan took office and exploded to nearly 20% by 1986. Then it declined during the Clinton presidency, though it never reached its pre-Reagan level. Here is the office vacancy rate since 2000:

Using my usual technique of drawing a trendline through the start of the pandemic¹ and then extending it, it's obvious that the current vacancy rate is higher than we'd expect. But not that much higher: about 18% vs. 16%.

As this chart makes obvious, vacancy rates generally go up during (and after) recessions and then go down during recoveries. This makes sense, and it also makes sense that vacancy rates went up during the pandemic. They might go up again in 2023. But I think it's likely that they'll then go down as the economy recovers and employers push for more employees to go back to working in an office instead of from home.

Basically, the pandemic added a little bit to a longtime upward trend caused by an office glut. I think it will probably go back to trend growth before long, but that's largely because I don't think that working from home will stay at its current high levels. Reasonable people may disagree on this point.

¹That's 2000-2019 in this case, since the data is annual and 2020 was obviously affected by the start of the pandemic.

The price of gasoline is still going down:

But it was only down a nickel last week. That's half its average decline since the June peak, so things might be slowing down. The price of oil has been flat for the past few weeks, so it would make sense if the price of gasoline started to flatten out too.

How many classified documents did the FBI find in its search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month? Today the New York Times provides a pretty good estimate, though they leave the arithmetic to us:

January: "more than 150."

June: "a few dozen more."

Total: "more than 300."

At a best guess, this means the August haul was somewhere around 100 documents, which fits the Times' description of the number as "scores."

So: the FBI got 100 more classified documents in its August search, including one set that "had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented." And there may be more to come as the FBI continues its review.

POSTSCRIPT: Note that a single document can be many pages long. So if you see something like "over a thousand pages of classified information were seized," it doesn't necessarily contradict anything here.