A new drug appears to slow Alzheimer’s. Here’s what to know
Hannah Critchfield, Tampa Bay Times – December 5, 2022
An experimental drug appears to slow cognitive decline in people with early onset Alzheimer’s.
New data on lecanemab, which is manufactured by Biogen and Esai, was published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed people who took the drug experienced “moderately less decline on measures of cognition and function.”
However, some patients also experienced negative side effects like brain swelling and bleeding — meaning people with early Alzheimer’s disease should be aware of the risks before seeking treatment.
How does it work?
Lecanemab decreases the amount of amyloid plaque in the brain. The protein deposits have long been hypothesized to be linked to the progression of Alzheimer’s.
The theory goes like this: Decrease the plaque and you’ll slow the effects of the memory disease.
The new data on lecanemab provides the strongest support for that theory to date.
“That is huge because it gives the person living with the disease an opportunity to be able to live at a higher level of functioning in their life,” said Keith Gibson, director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Florida Alzheimer’s Association. “It gives them a greater chance to be as normal as possible before the disease really runs its full course. We’re very, very excited about that.”
The 18-month study, which was funded by its manufacturers and involved people aged 50 to 90 with early Alzheimer’s, nevertheless concluded by noting that “longer trials are warranted to determine the efficacy and safety of lecanemab in early Alzheimer’s disease.”
Who can take it?
The drug is intended for people with early-onset Alzheimer’s or mild cognitive impairment.
People who have more advanced stages of Alzheimer’s will likely not be eligible for the treatment.
Given the negative side effects experienced by some patients involved in the study, patients should speak with their doctors when considering whether to seek out lecanemab.
Can I get it now?
People interested in the drug might not have to wait long.
The Food and Drug Administration is considering lecanemab for accelerated approval, and will make its decision on Jan. 6.
How much will it cost?
Esai has said lecanemab could cost between $9,249 and $35,605 a year, a broad estimate that has yet to be narrowed down.
It’s unclear if the drug will be covered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should it receive accelerated approval.
Currently, based on an agency decision made in April, Medicare and Medicaid has said it generally will not pay for Alzheimer’s treatments aimed at attacking amyloid plaque until they receive full approval by the Food and Drug Administration, except in clinical trial settings.
A spokesperson for Medicare and Medicaid said it is reviewing the publication in the New England Journal of Medicine and “has met with manufacturers to learn about their efforts” since the April criteria decision.
What if I’m already on another drug that attempts to slow Alzheimer’s?
There’s currently only one drug on the market that attempts to slow progression of Alzheimer’s by reducing the level of plaque in the brain.
Known as Aduhelm or aducanamab, the controversial treatment received federal approval last year, despite limited results that the drug helped patients.
It’s currently unclear how doctors will advise the limited number of patients who are already receiving Aduhelm treatments and want to switch over to lecanemab, which appears to have more conclusive data about its efficacy.
People who are currently taking Aduhelm and are interested in lecanemab should speak to their physicians about next steps.
Anavex’s (AVXL) Lead Alzheimer’s Drug Meets Study Goal
Zacks Equity Research – December 5, 2022
Shares of Anavex Life Sciences AVXL were up 35.9% on Dec 2 after management reported positive topline data from a phase IIb/III study which evaluated its lead pipeline candidate ANAVEX 2-73 (blarcamesine) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) indication.
The phase IIb/III study, or the ANANVEX 2-73-AD-004 study, evaluated ANAVEX 2-73 for the treatment of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD and mild AD (collectively known as early AD)
The ANAVEX 2-73-AD-004 study achieved its primary and key secondary endpoints. Treatment with ANAVEX 2-73 showed robust, statistically significant and clinically meaningful absolute improvement in cognitive functions as measured by ADAS-Cog and ADCS-ADL that were the study’s primary endpoints over a 48-week treatment period in the analysis of the intent-to-treat (ITT) population.
Data from the study showed that study participants who received ANAVEX 2-73 were 84% more likely to have improved cognition than those who were administered placebo. Patients treated with ANAVEX 2-73 were 167% more likely to improve function than those participants who were receiving a placebo. The treatment also showed a statistically significant reduction in cognitive decline at the end of treatment by 45%, when compared with placebo.
The study also met its secondary endpoint of reduction in clinical decline of cognition and function, as measured by CDR-SB score. Data from the study showed a 27% reduction in the ITT population when compared to placebo-administered participants.
The ANAVEX 2-73-AD-004 study randomized AD participants into three equal groups – one group which received a mid-dose of ANAVEX 2-73, a second group, which received a high-dose of the drug and a third group which received placebo.
Anavex continues to conduct a further analysis the above data and intends to submit the same for publication in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Management is also conducting an open-label extension study ATTENTION-AD to follow study participants over a 96-week treatment period.
Shares of Anavex have declined 30.5% this year compared with the industry’s 16.7% fall.
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The results of the ANAVEX 2-73-AD-004 study are also consistent with the phase IIa ANAVEX 2-73 study previously conducted by the company. Data from the phase IIa study had demonstrated a therapeutic effect on cognition and function.
Per management, AD is one of the leading causes of deaths in older adults aged above 65 years and is also the most common cause of dementia in this age group. Treatment with ANAVEX 2-73 demonstrated a reversal of cognitive decline.
Apart from AD, Anavex has also successfully completed clinical studies evaluating ANAVEX 2-73 in other indications. These include a phase II proof-of-concept study on Parkinson’s disease dementia and a phase III study in adult patients with Rett syndrome.
Anaex’s target market is highly competitive as several other pharma companies like Biogen BIIB and Eli Lilly LLY are also developing their candidates targeting the AD indication. The Alzheimer’s candidates of these companies — anti-amyloid beta antibodies — are in late-stage development or review and are expected to be launched in a few months.
Last week, Biogen along with partner Eisai presented detailed data from the phase III confirmatory study CLARITY AD, which evaluated its AD candidate lecanemab (BAN2401) to treat early AD. The data showed that Biogen’s candidate did reduce markers of amyloid in early Alzheimer’s disease and led to moderately less decline in measures of cognition and function than placebo at 18 months. However, treatment with lecanemab was associated with adverse events.
Biogen/Eisai have already filed their biologics license application (BLA) seeking accelerated approval for lecanemab with the FDA, supported by data from a phase II study (Study 201). A final BLA decision is expected by Jan 6, 2023.
Eli Lilly has developed donanemab, an investigational antibody therapy, for AD. Eli Lilly initiated a rolling submission with the FDA last year, seeking approval for donanemab under the accelerated pathway based on data from the phase II TRAILBLAZER-ALZ study. A final decision on the BLA is expected in early 2023. Eli Lilly also expects a data readout from the pivotal phase III TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2 by mid-2023. If positive, the data will form the basis of its application for traditional regulatory approval for donanemab.
Last month, Roche RHHBY announced the failure of the GRADUATE I and II studies, evaluating its monoclonal antibody gantenerumab in early AD. The studies failed to meet their primary endpoint of slowing clinical decline. Patients treated with Roche’s gantenerumab showed a slowdown of clinical decline in GRADUATE I and GRADUATE II, which was not statistically significant. Per Roche, the level of beta-amyloid removal was lower than expected.
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Corporate landlords are gobbling up mobile home parks and rapidly driving up rents — here’s why the space is so attractive to them
Vishesh Raisinghani – December 5, 2022
Corporate landlords are gobbling up mobile home parks and rapidly driving up rents — here’s why the space is so attractive to them
The hunt for yield has pushed private equity firms and professional investors into new segments of the real estate market.
In recent years, sophisticated investors have snapped up multi-family units and single-family homes. Now, corporate landlords are targeting the most cost-effective segment of the real estate market: mobile home parks
The most affordable U.S. housing option
Manufactured homes or mobile homes are considered the most affordable non-subsidized housing option in America. That’s because the owners own only the prefabricated unit and not the land under the home. The land is usually leased from the landlord of a trailer park.
The average monthly rent for a mobile home in 2021 was $593. That’s significantly lower than the average one-bedroom condo rental rate of $1,450. The mobile park rental also often includes utilities and insurance.
Rents typically rise 4% to 6% annually and renters have the flexibility to move their housing unit to another park. These factors make the manufactured home highly attractive to low-income households.
As of 2020, nearly 22 million Americans lived in mobile homes. That’s 6.7% of the total population or about one in 15 people across the country. However, the economic inefficiencies that make these manufactured homes affordable also make them attractive to professional investors.
Investing in mobile home parks
Factors such as below-market rents and disrepair make mobile home parks attractive for investors seeking to add value. The typical mobile home park lot costs $10,000, which means 80 lots would be worth $800,000 on average.
Put simply, the entry price for these parks is much lower than multi-family apartments and condo buildings across the country.
Professional investors can also raise rents significantly to improve the valuation of the property. Attracting tenants with higher incomes or improving the park’s amenities and infrastructure are other value-add strategies that make this asset class appealing.
The fact that moving a typical mobile home costs between $3,000 to $10,000 also means that most tenants are unable to afford the move. This gives landlords immense pricing power.
Meanwhile, the yield is much higher. The capitalization rate (the ratio of net operating income to market price) could be as high as 9%, according to real estate partners Dave Reynolds and Frank Rolfe, who together are the fifth-largest owner of mobile home parks in the U.S.
The largest mobile park landlord is real estate veteran Sam Zell. Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS) owns 165,000 units across the country and the asset is a key element of his $5.4 billion fortune.
In recent years, larger investors such as Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and private equity firms such as The Carlyle Group, Brookfield, Blackstone, and Apollo have also added exposure to this asset class.
Even Warren Buffett is involved. His firm’s subsidiary, Clayton Homes, is the largest manufacturer of mobile homes in the U.S., and also operates two of the biggest mobile home lenders, 21st Mortgage Corp. and Vanderbilt Mortgage.
You can invest too
Retail investors looking for exposure to mobile home parks have plenty of options. Acquiring a park is, perhaps, the most straightforward way to access this asset class. However, publicly-listed stocks and real estate investment trusts offer exposure too.
Sam Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ELS. Sun Communities Inc. (SUI) owns 146,000 units across the U.S. and some in Canada, while Legacy Housing Corp. (LEGH) builds, sells, and finances manufactured homes.
Retail and institutional investors could see more upside from this segment as the economic inefficiencies are ironed out.
How much do you need to earn annually to afford a house in Los Angeles?
Salvador Hernandez – December 1, 2022
A home for sale in the Mission Hills area of Los Angeles on Oct. 11. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The annual income needed to buy a home in Los Angeles skyrocketed past $220,000, a recent study found, with higher mortgage rates and inflation cutting deeper into household incomes.
That means the ability to own a home is a goal inching further and further away from more families and households in Los Angeles, where the median annual household income in 2020 was just over $65,000.
According to the residential real estate firm Redfin, the yearly salary needed now to buy a median-priced home in the city and comfortably make the mortgage payment is now $221,592, up nearly 41% from last year.
In Los Angeles, the high cost of housing has also played a role in making it the most overcrowded large U.S. county.
Across the U.S., home buyers need to earn $107,281 a year, or 45.6% more, in 2022 compared with the previous year to buy a typical home, the study conducted by Redfin found.
Rising mortgage rates are the leading factor for the higher housing cost, according to the study, which found that from February 2020 to October 2022, the monthly payment for a family buying a median-priced home increased about 70%.
Home prices have also remained relatively steady, meaning that those who can still afford a home need to readjust their budgets, while others have been priced out.
“High rates are making buyers rethink their priorities, as many of them can no longer afford the home they want in the location they want,” said Chelsea Traylor, a Redfin agent.
The biggest spike has been in Florida, where the average mortgage payment increased more than 73% in North Port, where an annual salary of $131,535 is now needed to afford a home. The salary needed to buy a median home increased to $128,892 in Miami as well, a rise of more than 63% in a single year.
In 93 metro areas analyzed by Redfin, the agency found all of them needed at least a 30% salary increase to buy a median-priced home. Prospective home buyers in at least half those areas needed to make a minimum of $100,000 a year.
Redfin’s study compared median monthly mortgage payments in October 2022 and October 2021, and considered an affordable monthly payment to be no more than 30% of the home buyer’s income.
The study also found that although some areas in California — like the Bay Area — had “smaller-than-average” increases in income requirements, the state is still home to five of the most expensive places to own a home.
In San Francisco, the salary needed to buy a median-priced home soared to more than $402,000 and, in San Jose, a salary of more than $363,000 was needed to make the monthly mortgage payments. In Anaheim, home buyers needed about $254,000 a year, followed by Oakland, with a required salary of $247,559, and Los Angeles.
Europe embarks on solar power ‘revolution’ to solve its energy crisis — and fight climate change
Melissa Rossi, Contributor – November 30, 2022
The Núñez de Balboa photovoltaic plant in Badajoz, Spain, is one of the largest in Europe. With an installed capacity of 500 megawatts, this facility can supply clean energy to 250,000 homes. (Iberdrola)
Spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine and its own pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, the European Union is aggressively ramping up its use of solar power, installing panels on everything from city rooftops to farmland.
In 2021, solar accounted for just 6% of electricity in the 27-country EU bloc, according to Ember, a climate and energy think tank. However, since Russia cut gas supplies in response to European sanctions over its war in Ukraine, solar has become the fastest-growing source of renewable energy on the continent this year. According to SolarPower Europe, a nonprofit association, new solar projects are “set to overshoot even our highest deployment projections for 2022.”
“The EU generated a record 12% of its electricity from solar this summer, helping to avoid a potential €29 billion in fossil gas imports,” Hannah Broadbent, head of communications for Ember, told Yahoo News. And solar’s remarkable growth shows no signs of stopping in the EU, where SolarPower Europe estimates at least 40 gigawatts of capacity will be installed this year, enough to potentially power upwards of 30 million homes.
By comparison, solar contributed less than 3% of U.S. electricity supplies in 2021, although new incentives are prompting more American utilities to follow in European footsteps.
“There’s a massive solar boom in Europe,” said Matthew Berwind, agrivoltaics project manager at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, the largest applied research institutefor solar energyin Europe. “It’s huge.”
Wind turbines at a solar energy park near Prenzlau, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
From Portugal to Poland, the Netherlands to Greece, mammothphotovoltaic plants are spreading across fields and gliding across lakes, each facility providing enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes. Buildings are being constructed with solar-powered water heaters, photovoltaic windows and photovoltaic roof tiles. Solar panels are appearing atop government buildings, grocery stores and schools, and even farms are embracing novel sun-powered technologies to shield crops from hail and scorching sun while producing energy.
Mario Sánchez-Herrero, founder of the nonprofit solar cooperative Ecooo Energía Ciudadana, who is based in Madrid, told Yahoo News that small-scale generation is also making a big difference. “We’re seeing a real revolution of solar in Spain,” he said, adding that small-scale energy production from panels installed at homes or from nearby buildings is generating “the extraordinary amount of two gigawatts per year.” And the numbers, he said, are shooting up.
Russia and China have everything to do with the explosion of solar. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided impetus to cut dependence on Russian gas for electricity, while China’s manufacturing of photovoltaic panels has dramatically brought down the price. “The cost of solar-powered electricity dropped 90% in a decade, making it one of the cheapest sources of electricity today,” Dries Acke, policy director at SolarPower Europe, told Yahoo News.
In fact, a new study conducted by the Oslo-based energy research firm Rystad Energy concluded that, since prices have fallen so low, it would be 10 times cheaper to build new solar capacity in Europe than to continue operating gas-fired power plants.
A woman walks through the village of Arkhanhelske on Nov. 3 in the Kherson region, which was formerly occupied by Russian forces. (Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images)
But Europe’s dependence on China for solar equipment is a potential vulnerability. “China controls a lot of the minerals needed for solar installations and a lot of the manufacturing, which shifted to China over the last 10 years,” said Thorfinn Stainforth, a policy analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy. “The price has gone down — it’s very cheap now to get Chinese solar panels. But it’s also not without some risks, as we’ve seen in terms of global supply chain disruption this year following COVID, and in terms of overreliance on individual countries for energy supplies.”
What’s more, solar has its limitations. “Solar on its own cannot be the solution,” Stainforth said, adding that it needs to be coupled with other renewable energies, like wind or hydropower, as part of an integrated electricity system. “When it’s very dark, when it’s winter and when it’s night, solar is much less usable,” he noted. Even though solar installations are skyrocketing, some EU countries, including Italy, are lagging behind in building enough renewable generation to meet the EU’s goal of slashing greenhouse gases 55% by 2030, according to Ember.
Meanwhile, not everybody is a fan of “solar farms,” with millions of panels spread over thousands of acres, such as the new Francisco Pizarro solar plant in western Spain, which is currently Europe’s biggest. Ecooo’s Sánchez-Herrero, for one, thinks massive installations defeat the purpose of solar — which can be used by individual homes and communities to give them some energy independence from utilities. At the rate small-scale production is growing in Spain, he believes that his country can meet its renewable energy goals without another large solar plant.
Photovoltaic power panels at Abaste’s El Bonillo Solar Plant in El Bonillo, Spain, in 2015. (Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)
“The big installations are owned by big companies, and they use investment funds,” often from foreign countries, he said. “People come in from other countries to make money in Spain, and we don’t want this. We want to see energy communities that want cheaper energy and clean energy, and want to be the owners of the way they obtain the energy.”
Some, including former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, are concerned about solar installations on land that could be farmed. This fall the government of the United Kingdom even briefly flirted with an effective ban on solar farms, based on concerns about arable lands and food security. However, the environment secretary who put the idea forward was fired after Truss’s fall from grace, and the initial signs from the new government suggest it will be more favorably disposed toward solar.
However, others are pleased about new megaplants, like the Pizarro solar field, which is capable of providing 590 megawatts of electricity to power 334,000 homes.
New plants are aiming to addressbiodiversity issues, said Acke of SolarPower Europe. He points to the planned Rezolv Energy solar plant in Romania — the first utility-scale solar project in Europe over one gigawatt. “What’s crucial, and what we see more and more, are the biodiversity and dual-land use benefits that this kind of project can support,” he said, adding that the Rezolv plant is planned to return poor-quality agricultural land to pasture, hosting sheep grazing and even beekeeping.
A technician installs a solar panel in a home in Glod, Romania, that is not connected to the electrical grid. (Andreea Campeanu/Getty Images)
But the biggest buzz in Europe concerns solar’s newest applications in agriculture — namely agri-solar. In pilot projects, solar panels cover crops such as berries and grapes, generating electricity to help meet a farm’s energy needs. They also shield crops from the scorching sun, hailstorms and torrential rains, and ultimately help farmers generate two sources of income from one tract of land.
“Instead of looking at a single parcel of land as having only a single usage, agri-solar combines the agricultural usage with power production,” said Berwind of the Fraunhofer Institute, noting that this can nearly double the land use efficiency.
“In the face of global climate change, as we start to see more extreme weather events that impact agricultural yield — droughts, storms, hail — the photovoltaic side gives these farmers a more diverse income source,” he noted. “So if their agricultural product falls through one year because a tornado blew through or hail damaged their crops, then they still have a safe financial baseline from one year to the next.”
Currently being tried out in Spanish, French and German vineyards as well as Dutch fruit farms, agri-solar projects provided an installed capacity of two gigawatts of electricity, Berwind estimates, a figure he expects will double in the next year because projects are getting bigger. “Standard photovoltaic developers are taking it seriously and starting to install multiple megawatts of systems,” he said.
The photovoltaic panels recently installed in a vineyard in Toledo, Spain, in a pilot agrivoltaic project can can shield grapes from scorching summer sun, helping to reduce evaporation and optimize use of rainwater. (Iberdrola)
Despite all the enthusiasm about solar’s big surge in the EU, outstanding challenges remain, among them Europe’s ability to bring more solar manufacturing back to the continent. Another is a shortage of workers able to install panels on roofs. Ecooo has had so many requests to add them to homes in Madrid that it has to turn away new customers. “We are telling everyone, ‘If you have kids who are unemployed, have them take a three-month course so they can make solar installations,’” said Sánchez-Herrero.
“In Spain, or Greece, in these countries where there’s a lot of sun and a lot of youth unemployment, that could be a really good match,” Stainforth added.
7 Florida Cities That Could Be Headed for a Housing Crisis
Jordan Rosenfeld – November 30, 2022
TraceRouda / Getty Images/iStockphoto
Florida seems to be a state that people are always flocking to and never leaving, with its temperate weather, great beaches and lots of excellent attractions. However, even Florida is feeling the results of market forces, which are increasing mortgage rates, driving up home prices, and thus driving out people. In fact, the Florida cities on this list are showing alarming signs that could be pointing toward a housing crisis.
In order to find the Florida cities showing cause for concern, GOBankingRates looked at the largest 200 cities in terms of total housing units and some crucial factors such as percentage of mortgages that are between 30 and 90+ days delinquent and homeowner and renter vacancy rates. Data was drawn from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Consumer Protection Bureau, and RealtyTrac. Here are seven most likely to end up with a housing crisis.
Dreaming of beachfront real estate? Much of Florida’s coast is at risk of storm erosion that can cause homes to collapse, as Daytona just saw
Zhong-Ren Peng, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning,
University of Florida November 23, 2022
Dozens of homes were left unstable in the Daytona Beach area after Hurricane Nicole’s erosion. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Back-to-back hurricanes left an unnerving scene on the Florida coast in November 2022: Several houses, and even swimming pools, were left dangling over the ocean as waves eroded the earth beneath them. Dozens of homes and condo buildings in the Daytona Beach area were deemed unsafe.
The destruction has raised a disturbing question: How much property along the rest of the Florida coast is at risk of collapse, and can it be saved?
As the director of iAdapt, the International Center for Adaptation Planning and Design at the University of Florida, I have been studying climate adaptation issues for the last two decades to help answer these questions.
Rising seas, aging buildings
Living by the sea has a strong appeal in Florida – beautiful beaches, ocean views, and often pleasant breezes. However, there are also risks, and they are exacerbated by climate change.
Sea level is forecast to rise on average 10 to 14 inches (25-35 cm) on the U.S. East Coast over the next 30 years, and 14 to 18 inches (35-45 cm) on the Gulf Coast, as the planet warms. Rising temperatures are also increasing the intensity of hurricanes.
With higher seas and larger storm surges, ocean waves more easily erode beaches, weaken sea walls, and submerge cement foundations in corrosive salt water. Together with subsidence, or sinking land, they make coastal living riskier.
The risk of erosion varies depending on the soil, geology and natural shoreline changes. But it is widespread in U.S. coastal areas, particularly Florida. Maps produced by engineers at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection show most of Florida’s coast faces critical erosion risk.
Aging or poorly maintained buildings and sea walls, and older or poor construction methods and materials, can dramatically aggravate the risk.
Designing better building codes
So, what can be done to minimize the damage?
The first step is to build sturdier buildings and fortify existing ones according to advanced building codes.
Building codes change over time as risks rise and construction techniques and materials improve. For example, design criteria in the Florida Building Code for South Florida changed from requiring some new buildings to be able to withstand 146 mph sustained winds in 2002 to 195 mph winds in 2021, meaning a powerful Category 5 hurricane.
The town of Punta Gorda, near where Hurricane Ian made landfall in October 2022, showed how homes constructed to the latest building codes have a much better chance of survival.
Many of Punta Gorda’s buildings has been rebuilt after Hurricane Charley in 2004, shortly after the state updated the Florida Building Code. When Ian hit, they survived with less damage than those in neighboring towns. The updated code had required new construction to be able to withstand hurricane-force winds, including having shutters or impact-resistant window glass.
Many homes in Punta Gorda fared better in Hurricane Ian’s winds because they had been rebuilt to higher standards after Hurricane Charley in 2002. Bryan R. Smith / AFP
However, even homes built to the latest codes can be vulnerable, because the codes don’t adequately address the environment that buildings sit on. A modern building in a low-lying coastal area could face damage in the future as sea level rises and the shoreline erodes, even if it meets the current flood zone elevation standards.
This is the problem coastal residents faced during Hurricanes Nicole and Ian. Flooding and erosion, exacerbated by sea-level rise, caused the most damage – not wind.
The dozens of beach houses and condo buildings that became unstable or collapsed in Volusia County during Hurricane Nicole might have seemed fine originally. But as the climate changes, the coastal environment changes, too, and one hurricane could render the building vulnerable. Hurricane Ian damaged sea walls in Volusia County, and some couldn’t be repaired before Nicole struck.
How to minimize the risk
The damage in the Daytona area in 2022 and the deadly collapse a year earlier of a condo tower in Surfside should be a wake-up call for all coastal communities.
Data and tools can show where coastal areas are most vulnerable. What is lacking are policies and enforcement.
Florida recently began requiring that state-financed constructors conduct a sea-level impact study before starting construction of a coastal structure. I believe it’s time to apply this new rule to any new construction, regardless of the funding source.
With Hurricane Nicole’s storm surge coinciding with high tide, the waves breached a condo tower’s sea walls in Daytona Beach in November 2022. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
A comprehensive sea-level impact study requirement should also allow for risk-based enforcement, including barring construction in high-risk areas.
Similarly, vulnerability audits – particularly for multistory buildings built before 2002 – can check the integrity of an existing structure and help spot new environmental risks from sea-level rise and beach erosion. Before 2002, the building standard was low and enforcement was lacking, so many of the materials and the structures used in those buildings aren’t up to the standards of today.
What property owners can do
There is a range of techniques homeowners can use to fortify homes from flood risks.
In some places, that may mean elevating the house or improving the lot grading so surface water runs away from the building. Installing a sump pump and remodeling with storm-resistant building materials can help.
FEMA suggests other measures to protect against coastal erosion, such as replenishing beach sand, strengthening sea walls and anchoring the home. Engineering can help communities, temporarily at least, through sea walls, ponds and increased drainage. But in the long term, communities will have to assess the vulnerability of coastal areas. Sometimes the answer is to relocate.
However, there’s a disturbing trend after hurricanes, and we’re seeing it with Ian: Many damaged areas see lots of money pouring in to rebuild in the same vulnerable locations. An important question communities should be asking is, if these are already in high-risk areas, why rebuild in the same place?
Accountant testifies Trump claimed decade of huge tax losses
Michael R. Sisak – November 22, 2022
Donald Bender, left, a former accountant for Donald Trump, arrives at Manhattan criminal court, Monday, Nov. 21, 2022, in New York. Prosecutors in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial rested their case Monday earlier than expected, pinning hopes for convicting Donald Trump’s company largely on the word of two top executives who cut deals before testifying they schemed to avoid taxes on company-paid perks. (AP Photo/Michael Sisak) Former President Donald Trump announces he is running for president for the third time at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Nov. 15, 2022. The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee after a three-year legal fight. The Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee had asked for six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses, from 2015 to 2020. The court’s order Tuesday, Nov. 22 leaves no legal obstacle in the way. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
Trump Legal Troubles
NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including nearly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010, his longtime accountant testified Tuesday, confirming long-held suspicions about the former president’s tax practices.
Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP who spent years preparing Trump’s personal tax returns, said Trump’s reported losses from 2009 to 2018 included net operating losses from some of the many businesses he owns through his Trump Organization.
“There are losses for all these years,” said Bender, who was granted immunity to testify at the company’s criminal tax fraud trial in Manhattan.
The short exchange amounted to a rare public discussion of Trump’s taxes — which the Republican has fought to keep secret — even if there was no obvious connection to the case at hand.
A prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, questioned Bender briefly about Trump’s taxes on cross examination, at one point showing him copies of Trump tax paperwork that the Manhattan district attorney’s office fought for three years to obtain, before moving on to other topics.
The Trump Organization, the holding company for Trump’s buildings, golf courses and other assets, is charged with helping some top executives avoid income taxes on compensation they got in addition to their salaries, including rent-free apartments and luxury cars. If convicted, the company could be fined more than $1 million.
Trump is not charged in the case and is not expected to testify or attend the trial. The company’s former finance chief testified that he came up with the scheme on his own, without Trump or the Trump family knowing. Allen Weisselberg, testifying as part of a plea deal, said the company also benefited because it didn’t have to pay him as much in salary.
Bender’s testimony came on a day full of Trump-related legal drama, including the U.S. Supreme Court clearing the way for Congress to get six years worth of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses.
Also Tuesday, the judge in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit against Trump and his company set an October 2023 trial date; a federal appeals court heard arguments in the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago documents investigation; and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, testified before a Georgia grand jury probing alleged 2020 election interference.
Bender’s tax loss testimony echoed what The New York Times reported in 2020, when it obtained a trove of Trump’s tax returns. Many of the records reflected massive losses and little or no taxes paid, the newspaper reported at the time.
The Times reported Trump paid no income tax in 11 of the 18 years whose records it reviewed, and that he paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2017, the year he became president. Citing other Trump tax records, The Times previously reported that in 1995 he claimed $915.7 million in losses, which he could have used to avoid future taxes under the law at the time.
Manhattan prosecutors subpoenaed Bender’s firm in 2019, seeking access to eight years of Trump’s tax returns and related documents, finally getting them after a protracted legal fight that included two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bender handled tax returns and other financial matters for Trump, the Trump Organization and hundreds of Trump entities starting in the 1980s. He also prepared taxes for members of Trump’s family and other company executives, including Weisselberg and Weisselberg’s son, who managed a company-run ice rink in Central Park.
Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty in August to dodging taxes on $1.7 million in extras in exchange for a five-month jail sentence, testified that he hid company-paid extras such as Manhattan apartments and Mercedes-Benz cars from his taxable income by having the company’s comptroller, Jeffrey McConney, reduce his salary by the cost of those perks.
Bender testified that Weisselberg kept him the dark on that arrangement — and that he only found out about it from prosecutors last year.
But emails shown in court Tuesday suggested that McConney tried to loop him in as early as 2013, with attached spreadsheets listing Weisselberg’s pay and reductions for extras, including Trump-paid tuition for his grandchildren’s private schooling.
Bender, who testified that he got numerous emails from Trump executives daily, said he didn’t recall seeing those messages. If he had, he said: “We would have had a serious conversation about continuing with the client.”
Mazars USA LLP has since dropped Trump as a client. In February, the firm said annual financial statements it prepared for him “should no longer be relied upon” after James’ office said the statements regularly misstated the value of assets — an allegation at the heart of her lawsuit.
Trump blamed Bender and Mazars for the company’s troubles, writing on his Truth Social platform last week: “The highly paid accounting firm should have routinely picked these things up – we relied on them. VERY UNFAIR!”
Bender testified that he put the onus on Weisselberg to fix any problems as scrutiny of the Trump Organization intensified after Trump’s election in 2016 and advised him to stop one dubious practice: the company’s longstanding, tax-saving habit of paying executive bonuses as freelance income.
The accountant said he told Weisselberg: “If there is anything bothering you, even if there’s the slightest chance, we have to set the highest standards so the company should be, effectively, squeaky clean.”
Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman – November 21, 2022
Former President Donald Trump during his election night party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on Nov. 8, 2022. (Josh Ritchie/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — When former President Donald Trump returned briefly last week to his office at Trump Tower in New York, he was joined by his son Eric Trump and the top executive of a Saudi Arabian real estate company to sign a deal that creates new conflict-of-interest questions for his just-launched presidential campaign.
The deal is with a Saudi real estate company that intends to build a Trump-branded hotel, villas and a golf course as part of a $4 billion real estate project in Oman. The agreement continues a practice that had been popular for the Trump family business until Trump was elected president — selling branding rights to an overseas project in exchange for a generous licensing fee.
But what makes this project unusual — and is sure to intensify the questions over this newest transaction — is that by teaming up with the Saudi company, Trump is also becoming part of a project backed by the government of Oman itself.
The deal leaves Trump, as a former president hoping to win the White House again, effectively with a foreign government partner that has complex relations with the United States, including its role in trying to end the war in Yemen and other important foreign policy agenda items for Washington.
The deal Trump signed was with Dar Al Arkan, the Saudi-based real estate company that is leading the project in collaboration with the government of Oman, which owns the land. It is the second deal signed recently between Trump and his family that has direct financial ties to a Middle East government.
The Trump Organization also hosted the Saudi-government-backed LIV Golf tournaments at family-owned golf clubs in New Jersey and Florida. The Saudi government’s $620 billion Public Investment Fund has financed the LIV Golf effort, which then paid venues like Trump National Doral in Miami and Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey to host two of its tournaments this year.
The Trump administration, including Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, had close ties with Saudi Arabia during Trump’s tenure in the White House. Kushner has also received financial support from the Saudi government, a $2 billion investment in his newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners.
Before being elected president, Trump and his family had signed deals to license the Trump name in locations including Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, Dubai, India, Panama and Canada, and it owns golf resorts in Scotland and Ireland. One planned skyscraper deal in Dubai, announced in 2005, involved Nakheel, a Dubai-government-controlled real estate company. But that project was eventually abandoned.
Eight months before Trump entered the presidential race in 2015, the family company announced plans to license its name for a 33-story hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the partner there was the son of a government minister. That project was also ultimately abandoned.
Elsewhere, the Trump Organization’s foreign deals generally did not directly involve a financial role by a foreign government, or at least any public acknowledgment of direct foreign government financing or a major land contribution, according to an examination of the transactions by The New York Times.
During Trump’s time in the White House, Trump International Hotel in Washington was frequently a destination for foreign government officials, including delegations in town for planned meetings with Trump. The governments of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China each spent money at the hotel, according to documents that his former accounting firm turned over to Congress. The hotel received more than $3.75 million from foreign governments from 2017 to 2020, the House investigators estimated.
The Trump Organization has asserted that it paid all profits from these hotel stays to the Treasury Department through annual voluntary payments.
But this new deal — in which the Trump Organization benefits from land or financial capital provided by foreign governments — only elevates the potential for a conflict of interest to emerge, as Trump continues his dual roles as a White House candidate and business executive, ethics lawyers said.
“This is yet another example of Trump getting a personal financial benefit in exchange for past or future political power,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “The Saudis and Oman government may believe that giving Trump this licensing deal will benefit them in the future, should Trump become president again. This deal could be a way to ensure that they will be in Trump’s good graces.”
The Aida project in Oman is slated to be built 20 minutes outside the capital city of Muscat, on a series of hills overlooking the Arabian Sea on land controlled by the Omani Company for Development and Tourism, an Oman-government-owned tourism agency. It will include 3,500 luxury villas, two hotels with a total of 450 rooms and a golf course, as well as various restaurants and stores.
The project is part of what the government there is calling Oman Vision 2040 to try to diversify the small nation’s economy by building new hotels and golf courses and other tourist attractions. Officials in Oman did not respond Sunday to a request for comment on the project, nor did representatives for Dar Al Arkan, which is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest real estate companies.
Relations between the United States and Oman were not nearly as warm during Trump’s tenure as they were with Saudi Arabia. Oman declined to sign the agreement, called the Abraham Accords, that normalized relations between other Middle East nations and Israel.
Executives at Riyadh-based Dar Al Arkan sent out a news release Sunday confirming the deal with Trump Organization for the new project in Oman, while also distributing photos of Donald and Eric Trump at Trump Tower in New York with executives from Dar Al Arkan.
It is one of the first times since Trump was elected president that he has publicized his role in a new family real estate deal. The Trump family stopped signing new international deals after Trump was elected. The real estate deal with the Saudi partner in Oman is the first since he left the White House.
Ziad El Chaar, CEO of Dar Al Arkan Global, who attended the deal-signing event, used to work at Damac Properties, the Trump family’s partner in Dubai, where the family has licensed its name to what is known as Trump International Golf Club Dubai and Trump Estates at DAMAC Hills, a gated community adjacent to the fairways.
“We are confident the relationship with Trump will further enhance the beauty of Aida and attract investors from around the world looking to be part of an exceptional project,” El Chaar said in the statement released on Sunday.
Eric Trump, in a statement, said that the family company did not believe the new deal represented a conflict, and since the time his father was in office, it has worked to avoid any such conflicts. “We are excited to expand our golf and hotel portfolio in this incredible location,” he said Sunday. “It is going to be an exceptional project.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Donald Trump’s campaign, responded to questions about the Oman deal, or whether the former president will be more involved with his business now, with a statement attacking the Biden administration.
The Oman deal was announced just as Trump was kicking off his third campaign for the White House, and while the Trump family, and Trump himself, are the target of a collection of civil and criminal investigations, including tax fraud charges against the Trump Organization and its long-serving chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.
If the company is convicted, it will face fines and potential blowback from lenders and business partners that might shy away from doing business with a felon; a conviction could also present new political challenges for Trump. But the maximum possible fine in the tax fraud case is only $1.62 million, a small amount for the company. In his most recent financial disclosure report, filed in early 2021 as Trump left the White House, Trump reported assets worth at least $1.3 billion.
What Will Russia Without Putin Look Like? Maybe This.
Guest Essay By Joy Neumeyer – November 21, 2022
Ms. Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Eastern Europe.
Credit…Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Russia’s current condition — militarized, isolated, corrupt, dominated by the security services and hemorrhaging talent as hundreds of thousands flee abroad to escape service in a horrific war — is bleak.
In hopes of an end to this grim reality, some wait expectantly for Vladimir Putin to leave office. To change the country, however, it is not enough for Mr. Putin to die or step down. Russia’s future leaders must dismantle and transform the structures over which he has presided for more than two decades. The challenge, to say the least, is daunting. But a group of politicians is devising a plan to meet it.
Composed of well-known opposition figures as well as younger representatives from local and regional governments, the First Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia met in Poland in early November. The location, Jablonna Palace outside Warsaw, was symbolic: It was the site of early negotiations in the round-table talks that led to the end of Communist rule in Poland. There, over three days of intense debate, participants laid out proposals for rebuilding their country. Taken together, they amount to a serious effort to imagine Russia without Mr. Putin.
The first and most pressing priority, of course, is the invasion of Ukraine. Everyone at the congress opposes the war, which they assume will be lost or lead to nuclear disaster. To deal with the consequences and to prevent a repeat tragedy, they propose an “act on peace” that would demobilize the army and end the occupation of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea; create a joint group for the investigation of war crimes; pay reparations for damaged infrastructure and the families of the dead; and reject future “wars of conquest.” In addition to offering a deterrent to future expansionism, this wide-ranging pledge would provide an essential reckoning with Russia’s history of imperialist invasion.
The officials responsible for the devastation will need to be rooted out, too — something that never happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Congress would bar from working in state and educational institutions those who belonged to “criminal” organizations — such as the Federal Security Services or state television channels — or publicly supported the war, as well as restricting their voting rights. It would also create a “de-Putinization” commission to consider the rehabilitation of certain groups, including those who publicly recant and did not commit especially serious crimes, and open the archives of the security services.
Then there’s the structure of Russia itself. The Russian Federation is highly centralized, with a patchwork of over 80 republics and regions that are strongly subordinate to the president, enabling the accumulation of enormous power. The Congress, drawing on decentralized visions from around the time of the Soviet collapse, proposes to dissolve the Russian Federation and replace it with a new parliamentary democracy. According to a broadly worded draft provision on “self-determination,” the future Russian state should be “joined on the basis of free choice by the peoples who populate it.”
This break with the present could correct the failed promises of the past. From Vladimir Lenin to Boris Yeltsin, modern Russian leaders have a history of offering decentralization to win support and then reneging once they consolidate power. Though all federal subjects are legally equal under Russia’s current Constitution, substantial inequalities persist — a fact that has been highlighted by the disproportionate deployment and death of ethnic minorities from poorer republics like Dagestan and Buryatia in the war in Ukraine.
Revisiting the issue of greater sovereignty could allow the breakaway republic of Chechnya, for example, to leave Russia after its brutal subjugation by Mr. Putin, while enabling regions and republics without strong secessionist movements to renegotiate the allocation of resources and balance of power with the center. It would create a fairer country while undermining Russian nationalism.
The congress is vaguest on its economic plans. One act promises to “review the results of privatization” carried out during the 1990s (which led to the rise of Russia’s oligarchs), while another aims to cancel Mr. Putin’s highly unpopular pension reform of 2020. Missing, however, is a commitment to a strong social safety net or any discussion of transitioning Russia’s economy away from its dependence on energy exports. This is a major oversight. Since the 1990s, when privatization and free elections were introduced simultaneously, wealth and power have been intertwined. Political and economic reform cannot be viewed in isolation from each other.
That’s not the only hitch. The congress’s main organizer and sponsor is Ilya Ponomarev, a leftist tech entrepreneur. The only member of the Russian parliament to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he left the country, obtained Ukrainian citizenship and now runs a Russian-language news channel in Kyiv. A controversial figure in opposition circles, in August he endorsed the assassination of Daria Dugina, the daughter of the Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and asserted it was the work of a secret partisan army inside Russia. This uncorroborated claim outraged fellow opposition figures. Mr. Ponomarev was subsequently disinvited from an event organized by the longtime Kremlin critics Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Despite their disagreements, Russia’s opposition has a loosely converging vision for the future. Mr. Khodorkovsky and Aleksei Navalny, the country’s most well-known dissident, who is currently languishing in a penal colony, have also issued calls to turn Russia into a parliamentary democracy with more power devolved to the local and regional levels. But associates of Mr. Navalny did not attend the congress, nor did Mr. Kasparov or Mr. Khodorkovsky. Its legitimacy — already challenged by a number of Russian antiwar organizations that said it does not represent them — was also questioned by some participants, several of whom left in protest over what they saw as a lack of equality and transparency in how it was being run.
Such feuding doesn’t help the proposals, which can seem far-fetched. Yet history shows that radical developments are often incubated abroad or underground. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, political émigrés in bickering communities around Europe plotted the downfall of the Russian empire. Among them was Vladimir Lenin, who was living in Poland at the outbreak of World War I.
For now, with most of Russia’s population forced into quiescence while others lose their jobs or freedom for expressing dissent, the possibility of the country’s transformation appears remote. Change, however, can come when it’s least expected. In early 1917, a pessimistic Lenin lamented that he probably wouldn’t live to see the revolution; a few weeks later, the czar was overthrown.
Russia is no more doomed to repeat the past than any other country. The time to reimagine its future is now.
