Nearly 1 In 10 Rent-Regulated Apartments In NYC Were Vacant In 2021
It only takes so long before rising prices and surging crime start to show up in a city’s population and housing data. The latest such data point for New York City is a report from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development that 88,830 stabilized apartments were vacant in 2021.
This number is significantly higher than the previously reported 61,000 by the state, according to the City, who obtained the previously unreleased updated figures.
The Department of Housing Preservation and Development based its estimates on data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau last year. The city has about 1 million stabilized units which are mostly located in buildings erected before 1974, the blog says.
The increased estimates includes 42,860 units that were “unavailable” and “tens of thousands” more still available for rent, according to HPD Chief Research Officer Lyz Gaumer. Collectively this encompasses both apartments that are up for rent and others than landlords are keeping off the market, but are still livable.
Gaumer told The City that the numbers are “a very conservative estimate of the entire warehoused apartment universe.”
“We are accounting for numbers that aren’t necessarily reported to the state,” said HPD department spokesperson Jeremy House. The state uses data that is reported to them by landlords and owners, he noted.
Census data revealed that 4.54% of all New York apartments were vacant as of 2021, up from 3.63% in 2017, The City wrote. A rent emergency for the city is enacted only after vacancies exceed 5%.
The Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord group, says that “the extremely high number should send off alarm bells to lawmakers that something is wrong and needs to be fixed immediately to get these units back on line.”
Down Detector Reports Major Cell Providers All Hit With Disruptions
Earlier this morning, WhatsApp, the instant messaging service owned by Meta Platforms, experienced widespread outages. Now there’s data from Down Detector that shows major US cellular providers and Apple’s messaging service are experiencing disruptions.
Down Detector shows Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T customers started reporting disruptions around 1200 ET.
People also reported trouble sending messages on Apple’s iMessage.
Google searches for “iMessage not working” spiked around noon.
First, let’s begin with US stockpiles of cold-stored orange juice plunged by 43% in September from a year earlier — the lowest level since 1977, according to the latest US Department of Agriculture data.
A combination of crop diseases across Florida’s citrus groves and Hurricane Ian that destroyed crops are creating a supply crunch that has catapulted orange juice futures contracts to as high as $2.18 per pound, the highest level ever.
MSNBC brought together a focus group of Pittsburg-area Trump voters to badger them about the supposed horrors of the January 6th “insurrection” only to have all their propaganda shut down in humiliating fashion.
WATCH:
MSNBC tries to push the January 6th scam on a focus group and they are not having their nonsense pic.twitter.com/DAIjuYRPen
[Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund] told the Post that House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving was concerned with the “optics” of declaring an emergency ahead of the protests and rejected a National Guard presence. He says Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger recommended that he informally request the Guard to be ready in case it was needed to maintain security [on Jan 4th].
[…] Sund says he requested assistance six times ahead of and during the attack on the Capitol. Each of those requests was denied or delayed, he says.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser also wanted a light police presence at the Capitol. She reportedly wanted to avoid a similar scenario as last summer, when federal forces responded to demonstrators opposed to police abuses who assembled near the White House.
Jordan was also simply lying when she claimed she saw footage of Jan 6 protesters throwing excrement on the walls of the Capitol, no such footage has ever been released. That disgusting claim was put out by unnamed staffers of Sen. Chuck Schumer on Jan 7 and they said they saw “brownish footprints” on the ground, not on the walls.
If Jordan spent half as much time reading the news as she does on her appearance perhaps she could have avoided making an ass out of herself.
Regardless, Democrats are so delusional that no one at MSNBC caught any of these mistakes before taking the piece to air.
As Peter Strzok revealed last week on MSNBC, Democrats think the September 11th attacks were “nothing” compared to January 6th — so there’s no amount of hysterical exaggeration that’s too much!
While framing it against 9/11, Nicolle Wallace claims January 6 was “the deadliest attack on the U.S. capital in history.”
Disgraced and corrupt former FBI agent Peter Strzok agrees, saying: “9/11 is nothing compared to January 6” and demands leaders “be on the same war footing.” pic.twitter.com/lI1KTYnE2f
Griner’s lawyers told NYTimes before the appeal on Tuesday that she did “not expect any miracles to happen” but was optimistic that the appeals court’s three-judge panel would reduce her sentence.
Griner, 31, wasn’t in court but participated in the proceedings via video from Correctional Colony No. 1 in Novoye Grishino, north of Moscow.
The denial of Griner’s appeal over her drug smuggling conviction sentence could pave the way for the Biden administration to get further involved in negotiating a deal for her release. In July, Biden officials offered a prisoner swap for Griner, though Russian officials said it was premature to discuss such things.
On Monday, Griner’s lawyers released this statement:
“Brittney is a very strong person and has a champion’s character.
“She of course has her highs and lows as she is severely stressed being separated from her loved ones for over eight months.”
One of her lawyers, Maria Blagovolina, told Reuters that her client’s “punishment doesn’t correspond to the gravity of the crime.”
The WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury basketball star and a two-time Olympic gold medalist was arrested in early February in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport for “smuggling” two vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. Griner admitted her guilt in court but insisted that she had no intention to break the law. She told the court that she had made “an honest mistake.”
“There was no intent in her actions … The substance was used for medical purposes,” Blagovolina said.
Today’s decision suggests further diplomatic talks between the Washington and Moscow are likely but could be very complicated due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Griner’s wife, Cherelle, met with President Biden last month. Cherelle said Biden was committed to bringing her wife home.
“It wasn’t a meeting where the President told me the news that I want to hear,” Cherelle told CNN. “It wasn’t that, but it was one of those still pivotal meetings where … it allowed me to have confidence in what he’s doing right now.”
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan responded to the court decision to uphold Griner’s drug smuggling conviction, calling it a “sham:”
We are aware of the news out of Russia that Brittney Griner will continue to be wrongfully detained under intolerable circumstances after having to undergo another sham judicial proceeding today.
President Biden has been very clear that Brittney should be released immediately. In recent weeks, the Biden-Harris Administration has continued to engage with Russia through every available channel and make every effort to bring home Brittney as well as to support and advocate for other Americans detained in Russia, including fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan.
The President has demonstrated that he is willing to go to extraordinary lengths and make tough decisions to bring Americans home, as his Administration has done successfully from countries around the world. The Administration remains in regular touch with representatives of the families, and we continue to admire their courage in the face of these unimaginable circumstances.
Griner’s best hopes of returning Stateside are now in the hands of the Biden administration.
Home Prices Plunge Most Since 2009, Pulte CEO Fears “Financial & Psychological Hurdles” Ahead For Homebuyers
After tumbling for the first time since 2012 in July, Case-Shiller’s 20-City Composite Home Price index was expected to drop even faster in August (the latest data available) as mortgage rates soared, crushing affordability. Analysts were right as the 20-City Composite index plunged 1.32% MoM (far larger than the 0.8% drop expected), diving the YoY growth in the 20-City Composite to 13.08% (well down from the 14.0% exp)
Source: Bloomberg
That is the biggest MoM drop since March 2009 and the slowest YoY growth since Feb 2021.
“The forceful deceleration in U.S. housing prices that we noted a month ago continued,” Craig J. Lazzara, managing director at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in statement.
“Price gains decelerated in every one of our 20 cities. These data show clearly that the growth rate of housing prices peaked in the spring of 2022 and has been declining ever since.”
Miami, Tampa, Charlotte reported highest year-over-year gains among 20 cities surveyed, while on a seasonally-adjusted basis, prices fell the most in August (MoM) in San Francisco (-4.3%), Seattle (-3.9%), San Diego (-2.8%), and Los Angeles (-2.3%).
The growth in the national home price index has now slowed for 5 straight months (now below 13% YoY for the first time since Feb 2021). The absolute drop in the growth rate of 2.62 percentage points is the largest ever…
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, given the unprecedented explosion in mortgage rates, just where will home prices end?
Source: Bloomberg
We would like to think Powell’s plan does not involve that kind of collapse… or maybe it is – since prices will have to fall considerably more to become affordable for the average American to follow his ‘dream’.
As Lazzara previously concluded, “as the Federal Reserve continues to move interest rates upward, mortgage financing has become more expensive, a process that continues to this day. Given the prospects for a more challenging macroeconomic environment, home prices may well continue to decelerate.”
And by way of example, Pulte Homes today, during their earnings conference call, said that it was expanding incentives, including price-cuts, as sales slump.
“Demand clearly slowed in the period as dramatically higher interest rates created financial and psychological hurdles for potential homebuyers,” Ryan Marshall, PulteGroup’s president and chief executive officer, said in the statement.
Additionally, contracts were canceled in 24% of deals in the period, up from 15% in the second quarter, the Atlanta-based builder said in a statement Tuesday. Purchase contracts fell 28% from a year earlier to 4,924, missing the average estimate of 5,715 from analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. And bear in mind that this is for Q3 (after the heavily lagged Case-Shiller Index) with Pulte warning in today’s call that “demand got even more challenging in October”.
House Dems Walk Back Letter To Biden Urging Ukraine Negotiations After White House Reaction
The White House has responded to a new letter sent to President Joe Biden by a group of 30 Progressive Democrats urging what they dubbed a dramatic shift in policy on Ukraine toward prioritizing diplomacy with an aim to urgently get the warring parties at the negotiating table.
“We’ve been very clear: Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday in response to the letter, adding that “this is a decision that President Zelensky is going to have to make when it comes to any type of conversation with Russia, any type of negotiation.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal had warned in leading the group’s letter, which was also singed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the greater the risk of escalation — to widespread, devastating effect.” She said “my colleagues and I are urging the Administration to engage in a proactive diplomatic push in an effort to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”
The letter had also warned of the possibility of nuclear war, especially if the US doesn’t make efforts toward a diplomatic track with Russia, but many have also noted the glaring contradictions – such as talk of still supporting ongoing massive military aid to the Ukrainians.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also responded Monday, stressing that “We’re not going to have conversations with the Russian leadership without the Ukrainians being represented.” He added, according to The Washington Post, “Mr. Zelensky gets to determine – because it’s his country – what success looks like and when to negotiate.” Kirby explained that while the White House “appreciates [the lawmakers’] very thoughtful concerns,” it remains that Russia’s Putin could choose to end the conflict “at any time.”
The Democrats’ letter was further mocked by a handful of pundits highlighting its contradictions, and that it was more about optics in order to satisfy far left constituents:
The two-page statement points to the death and destruction Russia’s war in Ukraine is causing in Ukraine and the harmful effects it is having outside the war zone, acknowledges that engaging with Russia is difficult, and reiterates that any resolution needs to be “acceptable to the people of Ukraine.” A lot of people were confused.
The letter “is remarkable in that it mostly calls for what the U.S. is already doing — arming Ukraine, wanting a diplomatic solution, recognizing Russia isn’t currently open to one — but presents this as if it would be a big change,” writes University of Illinois political scientist Nicholas Grossman. The CPC’s concerns “seem to be more about vibes than the actual policy, which makes the pre-election timing particularly curious,”agrees political journalist Ben Jacobs. Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall calls the letter’s arguments “completely incoherent” and “contradictory on the key points.”
There is no “dramatic shift” urged in this letter. Rather: the opposite. It’s just PR by the Progressives™ to show they’re politely suggesting diplomacy, which Biden will say he already agrees with. They threaten no tangible legislative action, and endorse the policy status quo https://t.co/RmrGM0woY3
All of this prompted Jayapal to issue a statement in follow-up, perhaps walking back or seeking to clarify elements of the letter…
“In a letter to President Biden today, my colleagues and I advocated for the administration to continue ongoing military and economic support for Ukrainians while pursuing diplomatic support to Ukraine to ensure we are helpful partners on efforts to reach ‘a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.’ Let me be clear: we are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for their democracy and freedom in the face of the illegal and outrageous Russian invasion, and nothing in the letter advocates for a change in that support.”
She continued, “Diplomacy is an important tool that can save lives — but it is just one tool. As we also made explicitly clear in our letter and will continue to make clear, we support President Biden and his administration’s commitment to nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Indeed the follow-up statement does appear to be a walk-back, blunting the initial call urging negotiations or else escalation toward nuclear confrontation looms – as the message of the initial letter emphasized. As journalist Glenn Greenwald observes, while there are some good and rare points on diplomacy that were raised, it remains that“the Progressives’ letter postures as opposition but isn’t really.”
More than one million people have become victims of forced displacement and have not received adequate compensation as old neighborhoods are being demolished in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to make way for luxury hotels and entertainment venues, according to human rights groups.
On December 2021, the Saudi Public Investment Fund — chaired by Crown Prince and newly appointed Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) — announced the launch of a development project called ‘Jeddah Central,’ which would include a museum, an opera house, a stadium, an aquarium, hotels, and new residential neighborhoods.
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a US-based rights group, stated that “while the Riyadh regime is expected to spend more than $20 billion on the ambitious plan, very little of that amount has been allocated to compensate the 1.5 million people who have lost or will lose their homes and livelihoods,” according to PressTV.
A research conducted by DAWN concluded that “the Saudi forced displacements are in violation of international law since the measures are incompatible with internationally recognized legal principles to guarantee and protect the population’s rights.”
France 24 reported that Saudi authorities have carried out demolitions in some 60 different neighborhoods, mostly located in the southern part of the city. Demolitions are expected to continue and more neighborhoods are expected to be affected in the coming months.
The revelations come just days after it was revealed that Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Courtsentenced three members of the Howeitat tribe to death a few weeks ago, for resisting their forced eviction and displacement from the country’s northwestern Tabuk region.
Projected plan for MbS’ controversial NEOM project…
The three tribesmen, Shadli, Atallah, and Ibrahim al-Howeiti, were detained in 2020 for speaking out against the eviction of their tribe from the area, which was cleared by Saudi authorities in order to make way for the Neom project.
The Neom project, announced in 2017 by MbS, is a $500 billion megacity (some other estimates put it well over $1 trillion) being built in the Tabuk region, which plans to serve as a “technological hub and tourist destination.”
European Nat Gas Prices Briefly Turn Negative Amid Sudden Lack Of Storage
Last week we pointed out a bizarre development off the coast of the energy starved European continent: some 35 LNG carriers were idling off the coast of Spain (the country which has six LNG import and regasification terminals and is the biggest LNG importer in the EU).
As Reuters put it, the tanker pileup highlighted Europe’s problem with LNG import capacity that prompted Germany to urgently strike a deal for the construction of two floating facilities so it can receive LNG directly: the region has had to find alternative supplies, including LNG, but the arrival of multiple cargoes of the superchilled fuel has exposed Europe’s lack of “regasification” capacity, as plants that convert the seaborne fuel back to gas are operating at maximum limit.
If the backlog is not cleared soon those ships may start looking for alternative ports outside Europe to offload their cargo.
Meanwhile, there is more LNG floating off the European coast, Reuters reported, citing more sources, suggesting the 35-strong tanker crowd off Spain is only part of the actual pile-up.
“Floating storage levels in LNG shipping is at all time high levels with slightly more than 2.5 million tonnes tied up in floating storage,” Flex LNG Management chief executive Oystein Kalleklev told Reuters.
Add to the epic pileup of LNG tankers the fact that most of Europe’s storage facilities are almost full ahead of the winter (As of Sunday, EU storage facilities were 93.4% full, with the continent’s two biggest markets, Germany and Italy, recording even higher levels), and couple that with weather forecasts suggesting that temperatures in continental Europe will be between 4 and 8 degrees Celsius warmer than the seasonal average this week, implying lower demand, and the result was a sharp drop in European nat gas futures.
At one point in the morning, front-month Dutch TTF futures, which serve as a benchmark for northwest Europe, were down over 10% at 101.39 euros a megawatt-hour, having opened at a new four-month low of 100 EUR/MWh.
But what is more remarkable is that the lack of storage availability – similar to what happened in April 2020 when WTI briefly traded as far negative as -$40 – has forced ultra-short term spot prices to collapse as those assigned delivery (without a place to store the gas) were literally paying others to take the gas off their hands!
The risk of an unlikely April 2020 WTI moment in EU #gas spot month gas continues to linger amid strong imports, warm weather and demand destruction. So far, however, only the “next hour” price has gone negative. https://t.co/aSgXY1ks7d
And sure enough, early on Monday, the “next hour” TTF contract briefly dipped as far negative as -€15.78, the lowest on record as there was simply nowhere to park the nat gas.
Still, just like the negative WTI print in April 2020 was an historic outlier, so don’t expect today’s negative “next hour” gas print to become a frequent occurrence, especially since the more conventional (one month, etc) European winter prices remain very high amid continued uncertainty over the fate of European gas, because while the winter of 2022 may avoid the worst case scenario (which again will depend on just how cold the coming winter will be), it is the winter of 2023 where all bets are off.
A new study on the origins of the pandemic, “Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” published on the preprint server bioRxiv, concludes that it is highly likely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 originated in a laboratory. The odds of a natural origin, according to the study, are placed at less than 1 in 100 million.
Unlike previous studies that analyzed qualitative aspects such as virus features, the new study for the first time assesses the likelihood of a laboratory origin on a quantitative basis. This breakthrough methodology allowed the authors to present objective findings that appear to exceed any previous studies.
Significantly, the new study does not rely on any of the known evidence pointing toward a lab origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. For instance, it does not take into consideration the highly unusual Furin Cleavage Site that makes the virus particularly virulent and which it is widely thought to have been inserted into the virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Nor does it factor in the huge coincidence that the pandemic started on the door steps of the world’s premier coronavirus laboratory
Instead, the authors—Valentin Bruttel, a molecular immunologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany; Alex Washburne, a mathematical biologist at Selva Science; and Antonius VanDongen, a pharmacologist at Duke University—took a novel approach that assesses the genesis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from an entirely new angle. The authors examined tiny fingerprints left behind in the process in which viruses are assembled in laboratories. While use of seamless genetic engineering techniques in creating viruses in laboratories typically conceals evidence of manipulation, the new study developed a statistical process for uncovering such hidden evidence by comparing the distribution of certain strands of genetic code in wild viruses and lab-made viruses.
When viruses are constructed in a lab, they are typically assembled by piecing together various virus parts. According to a blog post from Washburne that accompanied the release of the study, it is like taking Mr. Potato Head from the movie Toy Story and replacing his arms with the arms of GI Joe to help “us study things like whether GI Joe arms provide any clear benefit for an important task in the virus life cycle like lifting weights.”
In other words, one of the main purposes of manipulating viruses is to better understand which parts of viruses make them particularly infectious, lethal, or transmissible. A related purpose is to develop bioweapons but the authors of the new study reject the idea that that is why SARS-CoV-2 was made. They believe that the virus “was assembled in a lab via common methods used to assemble infectious clones pre-COVID.”
A recent experiment at Boston University is an example of piecing together virus parts. Researchers created a COVID-19 variant that killed 80 percent of exposed mice using the backbone of the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 virus and replacing its spike gene with that from the Omicron variant. Put another way, the Boston lab created a COVID-19 version of Frankenstein’s monster by piecing together different parts from different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Piecing together viruses in labs is subject to limitations. The genetic information for SARS-CoV-2 is contained in 30,000 base pairs of RNA nucleotides. However, the 30,000 base pairs are not pieced together all at once. Instead, laboratory viruses are assembled from a collection of smaller strands of base pairs that are later “glued” back together as chimeras, or compounds. Enzymes are used to cut viruses apart at certain points along the DNA strand (laboratories use DNA instead of RNA as it is more stable; the assembled DNA is then added to bacteria that create RNA viruses).
Enzymes are proteins that cut through DNA strands at specific recognition sites. These recognition sites, or cutting sites, are the genetic sequences within DNA strands that are sought out by the enzymes. Enzymes are like biological scissors that cut only at particular cutting sites marked by sequences that are recognized by particular enzymes.
Since cutting sites look like normal sequences of nucleotides, they can be found on RNA strands of naturally occurring viruses as well as on lab-made viruses. This is why this form of genetic engineering leaves no seams or obvious fingerprints. However, there is an important difference between cutting sites on wild-type and lab-made viruses that the authors exploited. Naturally occurring cutting sites are not necessarily located where scientists want them to be. Laboratories therefore routinely insert cutting sites in favorable locations and remove them from unfavorable locations.
While naturally occurring cutting sites and cutting sites added in a lab are biologically indistinguishable, Bruttel, Washburne and VanDongen hypothesized that they could detect a “very subtle but identifiable fingerprint” by plotting the distribution of the cutting sites on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They would then compare this to the distribution of such sites on wild-type SARS viruses, as well as on other, pre-pandemic lab-made SARS viruses. They carried out their analyses for the most commonly used enzymes (biological “scissors”) which, according to a series of pre-pandemic publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were also used for experiments in the Wuhan lab.
The results of the new study are stark. While cutting sites on wild-type SARS viruses are randomly distributed, they tend to be regularly spaced on pre-pandemic lab-made viruses, as well as on SARS-CoV-2. So the authors found that regular spacing suggests that the location of the cutting sites was manipulated in a lab.
The new study also compared the length of the longest segments seen in wild-type viruses and lab-made viruses. The longest segments in wild-type viruses are far longer than any found in lab-made viruses, including in SARS-CoV-2. The findings again pointed to a lab origin for COVID-19.
The longest segments in lab-made viruses were found to be unusually short. As previously noted, the process of genetically engineering viruses requires scientists to use several shorter segments, which are then pieced together. Natural viruses are not pieced together and thus the length of segments is randomly determined and includes very short and very long segments.
Bruttel, Washburne, and VanDongen estimate that the odds that the SARS-CoV-2 virus arose naturally lie between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,400. However, this estimate only factors in the distribution of cutting sites. The authors also observed a concentration of mutations within the cutting sites that was “extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses.” The estimate drops to a 1 in 100 million chance that SARS-CoV-2 was a naturally-occurring virus if these mutations are factored in. When considering additional criteria, such as the fact that the “sticky ends” where the viruses are “glued” back together all happen to fit perfectly, the authors estimate the odds of a natural origin to be even lower.
The authors conclude that SARS-CoV-2 was assembled in a lab using common methods for assembling viruses. The authors do not speculate on which lab the virus escaped from.
In response to the new study, Kristian Andersen, the leading author of the Proximal Origin paper—the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led effort to dispel the lab leak theory—went on Twitter to slam the new study as “kindergarten molecular biology.” Andersen’s criticism is that cutting sites are common in naturally occurring SARS viruses. However, this criticism does not explain the very unusual placement of cutting sites in SARS-CoV-2.
