 |
|
|
|||||
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active inventory for sale is still rising year over year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent monthssomething weve been closely documenting for several months for our ResiClub members. The side-by-side maps below help you to see that decelerated rate of inventory growth. Left map: Year-over-year change in metro level active inventory between November 2023 and November 2024 Right map: Year-over-year change in metro level active inventory between November 2024 and November 2025 Click to expand Between November 2023 and November 2024, U.S. active housing inventory for sale rose by 26.1%. Between November 2024 and November 2025, U.S. active housing inventory for sale rose by 12.6%. Some of that percentage deceleration is a denominator effect (i.e., as U.S. active inventory rises, it takes an even larger increase to generate the same year-over-year percentage gain). That said, the deceleration is not only due to a denominator effect. In November 2024, there were 196,885 more U.S. homes for sale than in November 2023. In November 2025, there were 120,003 more U.S. homes for sale than in November 2024. The chart belowyear-over-year unit shift in inventoryhelps us to see the trend without the denominator effect. Why has U.S. active inventory growth slowed? Some of it is due to the number of days on the market not rising as quickly or stabilizing in some markets. Part of the slowdown reflects an increase in delistings in softer markets, as some sellers have thrown in the towel and pulled their listings. And, to a lesser degree, a handful of markets have seen a mild pickup in absorption as existing-home sales have edged up slightly from their multiyear troughs. What does decelerating inventory growth mean? Back in September, I published an article titled “The speed of housing market softening has slowedbut softness remains.” I think that framing still holds for what weve seen in recent months. On a nationally aggregated basis, as inventory growth decelerated in the second half of 2025, so did the pace of market softening. Since then, the U.S. housing market has largely stabilized, with national home price appreciation hovering close to 1% year over year and below U.S. income growth. Of course, there remains significant regional variation: Many pockets of the Midwest and Northeast continue to see mild year-over-year home value gains, while many areas in the Southwest and Southeast are experiencing mild year-over-year declines. What to watch in early 2026? As the nationally aggregated housing market transitions from its seasonally slower period into its seasonally busier spring window, a key question will be how inventory behaves. In particular, it will be important to watch whether the recent uptick in delistings in softer markets comes back online. For example, do homes that were pulled from the market in weaker areassuch as Southwest Floridaquickly reappear once seasonality shifts?
Category:
E-Commerce
Earlier this month, the State Department announced that it was instructing U.S. embassy staff around the world to reject work visa applications from individuals involved in what it described as censorship of Americans speech online. In a cable that was first leaked to Reuters, consular officers were instructed to review LinkedIn profiles of visa applicants mentioning work history involving misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance, and online safety. This work includes journalists and fact-checkers, academics, people working in media literacy, and a broad range of tech workers in a field known as Trust and Safety. This isnt the first such visa restriction stemming from what the Trump administration views as censorship. Nor is it the first Republican assault on academics and tech workers who monitor online disinformation. Instead, this represents the latest escalation in a five-year campaign by the GOP and its allies to discredit misinformation research, which theyve long contended silences conservative views. In April 2022, the Biden administration appointed Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, to lead the Department of Homeland Securitys Disinformation Governance Board, tasked with aiding government efforts to understand and mitigate false information related to border security, human trafficking, and domestic terrorism. Almost immediately, the board came under attack from Republicans like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and far-right pundit Tucker Carlson, who likened the body to a Ministry of Truth. Jankowicz herself endured all manner of abuse, including death threats and threats of sexual violence; she resigned her post in May of 2022 and the entire project was shuttered by the end of that summer. In the years since, she cofounded the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit aimed at protecting Americans from disinformation, and serves as its CEO. The Republican attempt to kneecap disinformation researchers, she says, is part of a broader attack not only on trust and safety or content moderation, but on anybody and any organization that attempts to safeguard our shared reality or the truth. ‘Woke speech police’ There was a time when combating misinformation and foreign interference in elections was a bipartisan effort. In 2018, Facebook was summoned to congress to answer for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a British consultancy was accused of targeting Russian election disinformation to Facebook users. We’re here because of what you, Mr. Zuckerberg, have described as a breach of trust, “Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota) said to Zuckerberg. Meta and other tech companies soon ramped up their fact-checking operations. Meta began partnering with news outlets like Snopes, the Associated Press, and others, to fact-check viral information online. It also tightened its data-sharing policies, expanded its policy teams, and implemented a global trusted partner program to work with nonprofits to monitor harmful content online. It was an imperfect system, but certainly better than what platforms had done prior to 2016. But those enforcement policies wound up angering Republicans, who felt disproportionately targeted by them. Tech companies were not in fact censoring their freedom of speech. Even if they had been, it wouldnt be a violation of the First Amendment, which only protects citizens from government censorship. The problem was Republicans tendency to disseminate material that contains misleading content. One study found that conservatives were eight times more likely to spread misinformation than those who lean liberal. After 2020, conservative ire at tech companies for censoring their posts reached a fever pitch, fueled by the platforms attempt to regulate anti-vaccine content during the COVID-19 pandemic and their deprioritizing of reports about allegedly compromising information about President Biden on his son Hunter Bidens laptop. By 2023, when Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, became chair of the House Judiciary Committee, his party began subpoenaing Big Tech and research organizations that study online hate speech and misinformation. In tandem, lawsuits from Republican activists against those very research organizations eventually made it politically and financially cumbersome for many of these organizations to continue functioning. The Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent disinformation watchdog, effectively shuttered its doors due to Republican attacks last year. Big Tech is out to get conservatives, and is increasingly willing to undermine First Amendment values by complying with the Biden Administrations directives that suppress freedom of speech online, Jordan wrote to Zuckerberg in his 2022 subpoena. Because of Big Techs wide reach, it can serve as a powerful and effective partisan arm of the woke speech police. Capitulation As it became clear Donald Trump could defeat Kamala Harris in last years election, Zuckerberg capitulated — first with reticence, then with enthusiasm. In August of last year, he sent a letter to Jordan apologizing for letting the platform go too far in censoring posts related to the COVID-19 vaccinewhich Republicans have sowed skepticism over its perceived safety. Zuckerberg also admitted that Meta demoted posts about the Hunter Biden scandal. Then, this January, shortly before Trumps inauguration, Zuckerberg, wearing a black t-shirt and gold pendant chain, hosted an infamous Facebook Live in which he announced that his company would no longer invest in fact-checking. Echoing Gaetz and Carlson, the CEO attacked legacy media for focusing too much on the threat of misinformation to democracy. Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, he said. Theres also a significant financial motivation behind divesting from trust and safety initiatives. They don’t want to spend all that money on what is a very expensive investment, Jankowicz says. By Metas own estimates the company has spent $20 billion on trust and safety operations since 2016. Its one thing for tech companies to fire their fact-checkers and content moderators — for the most part, theyre within their legal right to do so, as long as they figure out an alternative way to remove child abuse material. Its a very different thing for the government to obstruct tech companies from hiring content moderators, which arguably is a violation of the companys first amendment rights. Theoora Skeadas, a former associate on Twitters Public Policy team, worries that the new rules will be used to harass trust and safety workers in the same way researchers like Jankowicz have been harassed. The work we do as trust and safety workers involves ensuring safe experiences for children and women online, and fighting fraud, terrorism, and hate, she says. I observe the irony, too, that this measure entails heavy-handed censorship. Skeadas says that trust & safety workers are scrubbing their LinkedIn of the keywords the government might find objectionable. A Faustian bargain While Big Tech CEOs were quick to speak out against the Trump administrations blanket $100,000 fees for H-1B workerswhich would have disproportionately impacted foreign software engineers working for major tech firms (and now appears to have been dramatically narrowed in scope)not a single CEO has spoken out against these new rules. That might be because the newfound allyship with Trump seems to be paying off for the platforms. The Trump administration has spent much of this year attacking foreign tech regulators, including in the E.U., which recently passed the Digital Services Actrequiring social media companies to more aggressively police disinformation and other illegal contentand the Digital Markets Act, which was designed to curb Big Techs anti-competitive practices. Since the administration has been in office, there has been an increasing amount of pressure and, I would say, attacks on regulators, civil servants, and researchers abroad as well, Jankowicz says. The administration has even sanctioned foreign officials for attempting to regulate Big Tech companies. This summer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced very similar restrictions to the H1B memo for foreign government workers who the administration viewed as targeting Americans First amendment rights. The administration sanctioned Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and, later, his wife, under this new policy in what appears to be a politically motivated retribution for ordering Twitter be blocked in Brazil and later extended the sanctions to his wife. For the tech companies, theres a clear upside to this Faustian bargain: Go along with the administrations narrative on censorshipeven if that means sacrificing the safety of your own workers and risking the further fracturing of American societyand the entire might of the U.S. government will reward you.
Category:
E-Commerce
The amount of electricity data centers use in the U.S. in the coming years is expected to be significant. But regular reports of proposals for new ones and cancellations of planned ones mean that its difficult to know exactly how many data centers will actually be built and how much electricity might be required to run them. As a researcher of energy policy who has studied the cost challenges associated with new utility infrastructure, I know that uncertainty comes with a cost. In the electricity sector, it is the challenge of state utility regulators to decide who pays what shares of the costs associated with generating and serving these types of operations, sometimes broadly called large load centers. States are exploring different approaches, each with strengths, weaknesses, and potential drawbacks. A new type of customer? For years, large electricity customers such as textile mills and refineries have used enough electricity to power a small city. Moreover, their construction timelines were more aligned with the development time of new electricity infrastructure. If a company wanted to build a new textile mill and the utility needed to build a new gas-fired power plant to serve it, the construction on both could start around the same time. Both could be ready in two and a half to three years, and the textile mill could start paying for the costs necessary to serve it. Modern data centers use a similar amount of electricity but can be built in nine to 12 months. To meet that projected demand, construction of a new gas-fired power plant, or a solar farm with battery storage, must begin a yearmaybe twobefore the data center breaks ground. During the time spent building the electrical supply, computing technology advances, including both the capabilities and the efficiency of the kinds of calculations artificial intelligence systems require. Both factors affect how much electricity a data center will use once it is built. Technological, logistical, and planning changes mean there is a lot of uncertainty about how much electricity a data center will ultimately use. So its very hard for a utility company to know how much generating capacity to start building. Keeping older coal plants running may be an expensive way to generate power. Ulysse Bellier/AFP via Getty Images Handling the risks of development This uncertainty costs money: A power plant could be built in advance, only to find out that some or all of its capacity isnt needed. Or no power plant is built, and a data center pops up, competing for a limited supply of electricity. Either way, someone needs to payfor the excess capacity or for the increased price of what power is available. There are three possible groups that might pay: the utilities that provide electricity, the data center customers, and the rest of the customers on the system. However, utility companies have largely ensured their risk is minimal. Under most state utility-regulation processes, state officials review spending proposals from utility companies to determine what expenses can be passed on to customers. That includes operating expenses such as salaries and fuel costs, as well as capital investments, such as new power plants and other equipment. Regulators typically examine whether proposed expenses are useful for providing service to customers and reasonable for the utility to expect to incur. Utilities have been very careful to provide their regulators with evidence about the costs and effects of proposed data centers to justify passing the costs of proposed investments in new power plants along to whomever the customers happen to be. Regulators, then, are left to equitably allocate the costs to the prospective data center customers and the rest of the ratepayers, including homes and businesses. In different states, this is playing out differently. Kentuckys approach to usefulness Kentucky is attempting to address the demand uncertainty by conditionally approving two new natural gas-fired generators in the state. However, the utility companiesLouisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilitiesmust demonstrate that those plants will actually be needed and used. But its not clear how they could do that, especially considering the time frames involved. For instance, suppose the utility has a letter of agreement or even a contract with a new data center or other large customer. That might be sufficient proof for the regulator to approve charging customers for the costs of building a new power plant. But its not clear what would happen if the data center ends up not being built, or needing much less power than expected. If the utility cant get the money from the data center companybecause they bill customers based on actual usagethat leaves regular consumers on the ook. A data center in Columbus, Ohio, is just one of many being built or proposed around the country. Eli Hiller/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Ohios demand ratchet and credit guarantee In Ohio, the major power company AEP has a specific rate plan for data centers and other large electricity customers. One element, called a demand ratchet, is designed to mitigate month-to-month uncertainty in electricity consumption by data centers. The data centers monthly bill is based on the current months demand or 85% of the highest monthly demand from the previous 11 monthswhichever is higher. The benefit is that it protects against a data center using huge amounts of electricity one month and very little the next, which would otherwise yield a much lower bill. The ratchet helps ensure that the data center is paying a significant share of the cost of providing enough electricity, even if it doesnt use as much as was expected. This ratchet effectively locks in the data centers payments for 12 months, but regulators might expect a longer commitment from the center. For instance, Floridas utilities regulator has approved an agreement that would require a data center company to pay for 70% of the agreed-upon demand in their entire electricity contract, even if the company didnt use the power. Another aspect of Ohios approach addresses the risk of changing business plans or technology. AEP requires a credit guarantee, like a deposit, letter of credit or parent company guarantee of payment, equal to 50% of the customers expected minimum bill under the contract. While this theoretically reduces the risk borne by other customers, it also raises concerns. For example, a utility may not end up signing contracts directly with a large, well-known, wealthy technology company but with a subsidiary corporation with a more generic nameimagine something like Westside Data Center LLCcreated solely to build and operate one data center. If the data centers plans or technology changes, that subsidiary could declare bankruptcy, leaving the other customers with the remaining costs. Harnessing strength in flexibility A key advantage of these new types of customers is that they are extremely nimble in the way they use electricity. If data centers can make money based on their flexibility, as they have in Texas, then a portion of those profits can be returned to the other customers that shared the investment risk. A similar mechanism is being implemented in Missouri: If the utility makes extra money from large customers, then 65% of that revenue increase is returned to the other customers. Change is coming to the U.S. electricity system, but nobody is sure how much. The methods by which states are trying to allocate the cost of that uncertainty vary, but the critical element is understanding their respective strengths and weaknesses to craft a system that is fair for everyone. Theodore J. Kury is a director of energy studies at the University of Florida. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||