This city famous for its water is now at risk of running out — here’s how things changed so quickly
Sara Klimek – August 15, 2023
The Florida city of Zephyrhills is known for its water — notably the bottled water company with the same name. But ironically the city, located northeast of Tampa, is setting off alarm bells for that exact reason. According to a state report, Zephyrhills is expected to run out of drinking water within the next two decades.
What’s happening?
Population growth in the Sunshine State has been one of the primary reasons for its water stress. According to the National Association of Realtors, Florida’s population increased by 1.9% in 2022 and is expected to continue to increase in the coming years.
“Visitors to Florida and new residents assume there is no problem with water,” Virginia Haley, president of the Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau, said. “There has always just been the assumption about the availability of drinking water that it is going to be there.”
However, this is proving not to be the case. Over 3 billion gallons of water are used in Central and South Florida every day, Southwest Florida TV station WGCU reports — and the strain on the water system is increasing with the new population booms.
Why is this problematic?
The major water use in South Florida is for landscape irrigation, meaning watering lawns and golf courses. Landscape irrigation diverts water that could be otherwise used for drinking, bathing, and indoor household use, and it leaches fertilizers, chemicals, and pesticides into local waterways.
As its water continues to dwindle, Zephyrhills is expected to funnel more funds into sourcing water from other sources in the region. So far, the city council approved placing a development moratorium to reduce the strain on its water supply.
This will allow the council the time to consider the future of development in the city as well as how to increase the “impact fees” to cover the pressure that development puts on city services — like the water supply. In turn, this can make development more expensive and potentially decrease the cost efficiency of development in the region.
What’s being done?
Governments in Southern Florida are having to assess current water stocks as well as search for alternative sources of drinking water, such as recycled water or aquifers.
Municipalities may have to be more strict about how much water residents can use for nonessential purposes, like watering lawns, or restrict the time window homeowners can water their lawns to help encourage water conservation.
People can also do their part to help decrease water use. “Wait for the dishwasher to be full before you run out. Do a full load of laundry, not a partial load, and take shorter showers,” said South Florida Water Management District section leader Tom Colios.
Middle class Americans are moving straight into fire and drought because they can’t afford to live in the cities that are safer from climate change
Eliza Relman – August 15, 2023
An aerial view of homes in the Phoenix suburbs on June 9, 2023 in Queen Creek, Arizona.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Rising housing costs have helped push Americans into parts of the country more vulnerable to climate change.
US counties that have the most at-risk homes are all growing in population.
The trend shows how the burden of climate change is falling disproportionately on less affluent people.
The skyrocketing cost of housing has pushed many Americans to trade their lives in big coastal cities like New York and San Francisco for more affordable ones in Sunbelt cities and Southern suburbs.
But that move could cost more in the long-run.
These more affordable regions of the country are also facing much more severe impacts of climate change, including extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and droughts. People are pouring into flood-prone Florida, moving into Houston not long after Hurricane Harvey devastated the city in 2017, and relocating to parts of the West and Southwest dealing with the worst droughts and wildfires in the country.
Rather than leaving areas at high risk of natural disasters and other climate issues, more Americans are moving into them. US counties that have the most at-risk homes are all growing in population, while those with the fewest at-risk homes are almost all losing residents, according to a 2021 Redfin analysis.
The pandemic exacerbated this trend. There’s been a recent spike in people moving from more expensive cities to lower-cost, smaller places farther from large metros and closer to natural amenities, in part due to the rise in remote work. These locations – like Bend, Oregon, which is vulnerable to wildfires — tend to be more at risk of natural disasters. The number of loan applications for homes in high-risk areas rose from 90,462 in February 2020 to 187,669 in February 2022, Freddie Mac reported.
In the longer-term, this trend will put many more Americans at risk of losing their homes to wildfires and floods, or being hurt or killed by extreme heat, or suffering from a lack of water. Rich people are already better able to protect themselves from natural disasters and other climate impacts, whether by fleeing, hiring private firefighters, or retrofitting their homes. But if lower-risk cities continue to price people out, the burden of climate change will fall even more disproportionately on less affluent communities.
Experts say there are ways that local, state, and federal governments can help to reverse this dangerous trend.
A recent Brookings Institution report recommended several ways that policymakers can encourage Americans to seek climate safety. First, the researchers say that Congress and the the Federal Housing Finance Agency should work with mortgage lenders and property insurers to factor climate risk into their rates, charging homeowners more based on how much risk they’re taking on.
Often, homebuyers don’t know what kinds of climate risks their property faces, so state and local governments should develop rules about what information needs to be disclosed to a potential homebuyer and then impose higher taxes on riskier property.
“Higher fees in risky areas serve two purposes: they encourage price-sensitive households to choose safer locations, and they also provide local governments with more revenue to upgrade the climate resilience of infrastructure,” Jenny Schuetz and Julia Gill of Brookings write.
Zoning and other land-use regulations, they argue, should be reformed to encourage more dense development in safer places and less sprawl into particularly climate-impacted areas.
Homeowners and landlords in riskier places also need to do more to retrofit homes to make them more fire and wind proof and more energy efficient. The researchers recommend that local policymakers think more carefully about where to invest infrastructure — including roads, schools, and water and sewage capacity — in climate-impacted areas to either discourage or encourage people to move to certain areas.
Vivek Ramaswamy says US ‘climate change agenda’ is a ‘hoax’
Nick Robertson – August 12, 2023
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy railed against climate-conscious business policy at an Iowa State Fair appearance Saturday.
In an fireside chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Ramaswamy said that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) business policies are among the “grave threats to liberty,” and said “the climate change agenda” is a “hoax.”
“They’re using our money… to implement social and environmental agendas through the backdoor. Through corporate America,” Ramaswamy said. “Using your retirement funds and your investment accounts to vote for racial equity audits or Scope 3 emissions caps that you didn’t know they were using your money to do, and that Congress would have never passed through the front door.”
ESG has become a political punching bag for conservatives, who view it as corporations overreaching into the political space. The policies increase diverse hiring, reduce carbon emissions and manage how they invest their money with climate in mind.
“This is actually one of the grave threats to liberty today. Wherever you stand on climate change — I think most of the climate change agenda is, I’m just going to say it, is a hoax,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m going to call that for what it is.”
The entrepreneur also claimed ESG is comparable to the “back-rooms deals” of Old World Europe, and called for more public debate on the topic.
“Wherever you stand on that, we should settle that through free space and open debate in the public square in a constitutional republic,” he said. “That’s the way we do things, post-1776, on this side of the Atlantic.”
Conservatives’ crusade against ESG has drawn ire from Democrats, who have called many of the follies a waste of time. Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) called a House hearing over the issue the “stupidest hearing I’ve ever been to.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign has gained steam in recent months, rising from an unknown political figure to third in national polling averages — passing former Vice President Mike Pence last month. A biotech entrepreneur from Ohio, Ramaswamy has garnered about 7 percent support in recent polls.
Rising flood risks threaten many water and sewage treatment plants across the US
Suman Naishadham, Brittany Peterson and Camille Fassett – August 10, 2023
A sewer pipe is exposed due to eroded land at the wastewater treatment plant following July flooding, Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023, in Ludlow, Vt. Across the U.S., municipal water systems and sewage treatment plants are at increasing risk of damage from floods and sea-level rise brought on in part or even wholly by climate change. The storm that wallopedA sewer pipe is exposed due to eroded land at the wastewater treatment plant following July flooding, Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023, in Ludlow, Vt. Across the U.S., municipal water systems and sewage treatment plants are at increasing risk of damage from floods and sea-level rise brought on in part or even wholly by climate change. The storm that
LUDLOW, Vermont (AP) — The crack of a summer thunderstorm once comforted people in Ludlow, Vermont. But that was before a storm dropped eight inches of rain on the village of 2,200 in two days last month. And it was before the devastation of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. Now a coming rainstorm can stir panic.
“We could lose everything again,” said Brendan McNamara, Ludlow’s municipal manager.
The rainfall that walloped Vermont last month hit Ludlow so hard that floodwaters carried away cars and wiped out roads. It sent mud and debris into homes and businesses and forced officials to close a main road for days.
Thankfully, the facility that keeps the village’s drinking water safe was built at elevation and survived. But its sewage plant fared less well. Flooding tore through it, uprooting chunks of road, damaging buildings and sweeping sewage from treatment tanks into the river. Even now the plant can only handle half its normal load.
It’s not just Ludlow. Water infrastructure across the country is vulnerable as climate change makes storms more unpredictable and destructive, flooding low-lying drinking water treatment plants and overwhelming coastal sewage systems.
“Wastewater systems are not designed for this changing climate,” said Sri Vedachalam, director for water equity and climate resilience at Corvius Infrastructure Solutions LLC. “They were designed for an older climate that probably doesn’t exist anymore.”
A big reason is geography. Wastewater systems — which deal with sewage or stormwater runoff — are often near water bodies because that is where they discharge. But this makes them vulnerable.
Wastewater systems typically are at the lowest point in the community,” Vedachalam said, noting they often flow by gravity. “In many cases, if you have a really large storm, those are the ones that do get flooded first.”
When storms drop inches of rain onto lakes and rivers over a short period of time, water and debris can clog wastewater systems, power can be knocked out, and service disrupted.
Government flood maps are not up to date; they don’t reflect the risk of flooding in a changing climate. So the risk analysis firm First Street Foundation took a respected climate model and applied it to 5,500 wastewater treatment plants. Then it looked at the possibility of those flooding today and 30 years from now.
The Associated Press then determined the 25% of plants most at risk currently, and where the situation will worsen the most over time, mapping both.
Some metro areas have an especially large proportion of sewage treatment centers at risk if a mega flood occurred today, AP found. They include: South Bend-Elkhart-Mishawaka, bridging Indiana and Michigan; Charleston-Huntington-Ashland, bridging West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky; Madison-Janesville-Beloit in Wisconsin and Syracuse-Auburn, New York.
Drinking water treatment plants are also at risk. Most U.S. cities and towns get drinking water from rivers and lakes, and water treatment plants tend to be near the water bodies from which they draw.
“Simply by having water purification plants close to where we are getting the water from, that water source is affected by climate change,” said Darren Olson, a Chicago-based water resources engineer and member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The fact that the nation’s water pipes are aging adds to the risk. The engineering society estimates that a water main breaks in the U.S. every two minutes, leading to six billion gallons of lost water each day, or enough to fill 9,000 swimming pools.
Recent federal spending packages commit billions of dollars to upgrading the nation’s water systems, but the roughly $55 billion for upgrades in the Biden administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure law represent a fraction of what’s needed to address climate-related risks to water and sewage systems. Part of the reason is that other problems — such as lead pipes — need urgent attention. Often, they have little to do with a changing climate, said Olson.
And while larger cities such as Boston and Chicago can fund new projects in part by raising rates on customers, smaller cities and towns have to find other funding sources — often through state or federal grants — to avoid driving up bills, according to Adam Carpenter, manager of energy and environmental policy at the American Water Works Association.
“Wastewater treatment facilities are not cheap,” said Vedachalam. The hundreds of millions of dollars needed to rebuilt one, he said, can equal several times a town’s annual budget.
When Tropical Storm Irene battered Vermont twelve years ago, it cut off power — including to Ludlow’s wastewater plant. Officials rebuilt it according to stricter guidelines from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Joe Gaudiana, the village’s chief water and sewer operator.
They put the plant’s backup generator up on a block of concrete the height of a professional basketball player.
But July’s deluge knocked the whole block askew and wiped out the generator’s controls, rendering it useless. Municipal manager McNamara still isn’t sure how that much concrete got moved, or what Ludlow will do next.
“In a town such as ours, sometimes your options are limited because of geography, because of the terrain,” McNamara said.
Gaudiana would like the town to build a V-shaped wall to steer floodwaters away from the critical place where he works protecting people and the river from raw sewage. He called it “simple insurance that would definitely prevent all this.”
“Unless the wall failed,” he added.
Naishadham reported from Washington, D.C. Fassett reported from Seattle.
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit
Some of the ways extreme heat will change life as we know it
Julia Jacobo – August 10, 2023
Some of the ways extreme heat will change life as we know it
Life as we know it could soon change if extreme, dangerous heat continues to inundate regions for longer stretches of time and at higher temperatures, according to experts.
A large part of the U.S., including much of the southern portion stretching from the West Coast, across Texas and to the Southeast, has been experiencing triple-digit temperatures and heat indexes for weeks on end.
Record-breaking temperatures have been the norm in several cities in recent weeks, including Phoenix, which has now seen more than 40 consecutive days at about 110 degrees.
Hotter-than-ever temperatures, and longer periods of time when they occur, will become the norm unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically curbed, mitigating further global warming, according to climate scientists. Americans could see an average of 53 more days of extreme heat by 2050, if emissions aren’t reduced, according to climate modeling data released by the ICF Climate Center in June.
The increased heat is guaranteed to alter how society operates, experts told ABC News.
Summer is synonymous with time spent outdoors for school-aged children all over the world.
But parents may be cautious about letting their kids spend prolonged periods of time outdoors when temperatures are nearing triple digits, especially if air quality is poor or UV indexes high, experts told ABC News.
“The great outdoors go from being a magical place of exploration to a threatening place, full of fear,” Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected the psychological health of young people, told ABC News.
PHOTO: A World Youth Day volunteer uses a small fan to cool off from the intense heat, just outside Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 6, 2023. (Armando Franca/AP)
Less time outdoors could also be detrimental for children’s development. Research shows outdoor time is linked with improved motor development and lower obesity rates and nearsightedness in children. Outdoor play also promotes curiosity, creativity and critical thinking and is linked with behavior displaying less anger and aggression, studies have shown.
Few things could be more injurious to a child’s development than to be cooped up inside year-round, Van Susteren said, adding that humans have evolved to find the sounds and sights of nature meaningful and necessary for a healthy outlook.
“Yeah, you could always build something artificial. But don’t expect it to do for us mentally, which includes our ability to empathize and be generous, and to feel a sense of adventure,” she said.
Evidence that being holed up indoors is detrimental to kids’ mental health surmounted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which added more to the preexisting psychological distress among young people, according to the U.S. Surgeon General.
Athletes of all ages and levels will likely need to alter their training to stay safe during extreme heat, but those training for intense competitions that take place in a scorching climate need to be especially careful, said Brian Maiorano, coach liason for Core, a wearable tech that allows athletes to measure their core body temperature on the go.
Those training for competitions and races will need to adapt to the higher temperatures in order to participate safely, said Maiorano, who has coached athletes for running competitions and triathlons for 15 years.
“The human body is extremely adaptable, if given the right training,” he said.
Rather than training indoors in a climate-controlled setting, athletes will need to train outside and get their core body temperature to a level that will cause physiological adaptions, Maiorano said. Otherwise, athletes will suffer on race day.
Temperatures in the 90s are considered extreme for endurance athletes, while temperatures in the 80s would be considered extreme for those training for an event with even more difficulty and physical exertion, like the Ironman Triathlon, Maiorano said. About 80% of the heat in the body is generated by the power in the muscles, he said.
“It’s like literally having a space heater inside of you,” he said.
PHOTO: Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews gets relief from the heat next to a water mister during the team’s NFL football training camp, July 29, 2023, in Baltimore. (Nick Wass/AP)
Up until a few years ago, heat training was an “imprecise practice,” Maiorano said.
People training for events in warm climates — like the Hawaii Ironman and the Western States Endurance Run, which is a 100-mile race through the desert in California — were likely told by their coaches to go out during the hottest part of the day while wearing multiple layers of clothes.
“Cook yourself, but don’t overcook yourself, which is some really vague guidance,” Maiorano said. “It’s guidance you can give to a top athlete and hope that they don’t cause themselves heatstroke, but it’s not something that you can tell an age group athlete to do.”
Extreme heat will affect travel decisions people make in the summer, the peak travel season while kids are out of school, Erika Richter, spokesperson for the American Society of Travel Advisers, told ABC News.
“The climate crisis will impact where we go, when we go, and, in some cases, if we go,” Richter said.
The travel industry is already seeing shifts for travel to Greece, France and Spain, Richter said. While the peak tourist season is typically around July, Europe has been reaching record temperatures in recent years during that time. Combined with wildfires, the climate is causing people to travel to those destinations in the spring or early summer instead, Richter said.
People are also starting to choose cooler places for the summer travel season, such as Northern Europe, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, Richter said.
PHOTO: Tourists refresh with water near the Parthenon temple at the Acropolis hill during a heat wave on July 20, 2023 in Athens, Greece. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)
Extreme heat is also heavily affecting air travel.
It is difficult for planes to take off in hot temperatures because as the air warms, it expands, so the number of molecules available to push the plane up is reduced. In June, Richter experienced a six-hour delay on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Portland because the plane could not take off with the number of passengers, she said.
While some passengers took the $1,000 credit offered to give up their seat, the originally nonstop flight had to stop in Missouri to refuel, because the plane could not handle the fuel load needed for the transcontinental flight, Richter said.
Extreme heat can also increase the amount of turbulence passengers experience. A 2017 study found that climate change may cause nearly three times as much clear-air turbulence as current conditions by the period between 2050 and 2080. Clear-air turbulence, which occurs without a visual warning like clouds or thunderstorms and is usually at high altitudes, is currently on the rise worldwide and at varying altitudes, the study found.
There have been several reports of heavy turbulence this summer, including a Hawaiian airlines flight in July that injured several flight attendants and passengers.
The wildfires in Canada, which have been so severe this season in part due to higher temperatures and drought, have impacted travel in the U.S., Richter said.
With more heat and humidity comes the possibility of thunderstorms grounding flights, as well, Richter said.
“We’re used to the thunderstorms for summer travel season,” she said. “But they are becoming much more violent, and they are grounding many more flights.”
As climate change continues to worsen, regions that traditionally did not need air conditioning may need to brace for more heat waves by installing equipment to keep their homes cool.
In places like the Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Bay Area, the majority of households are not equipped with central air conditioning. In 2021, when a historic heat wave struck the region, window and portable air conditioners were flying off the shelves, Jennifer Amann, senior fellow of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s building program, told ABC News.
Incorporating efficient cooling methods, like using the same pumps that heat homes to cool them, as well, and using efficient window air-conditioning units, will help households keep temperatures bearable in their homes, Amann said,
PHOTO: Ben Gallegos sits on the porch of his family’s home with his dog as the daytime high temperature soars toward triple digits, July 27, 2023, in north Denver. (David Zalubowski/AP)
Heat is the No.1 weather-related killer, with more than 600 people dying from heat-related illnesses every year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When temperatures do not cool down overnight, it exacerbates the risk to human health.
Buying an air conditioner is the short-term solution, but people will also need to adapt their homes to better deal with extreme heat, and builders will need to design new homes with more passive mechanisms to navigate the changing climate, Amann said.
MORE: Dangerous temperatures have been recorded in the US for weeks. Is the extreme heat coming to an end soon?
Countries in Europe like France, Italy, Spain, Romania and Germany have been the most affected by climate-related disasters over the past 20 years, an analysis by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found.
Domestically, Texas loses an average of $30 billion a year due to its climate and the large number of people working outdoors, according to a 2021 report by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
PHOTO: A tour guide fans herself while working in Times Square as temperatures rise, July 27, 2023, in New York City. (John Minchillo/AP)
The cumulative global economic loss between 1992 and 2013 reached between $5 trillion and $29.3 trillion due to the impact of human-caused heat waves, according to a study published in 2022 in Science Advances.
The poorest countries in the hottest climates suffered the most, researchers found.
Heat also affects people’s moods, which is essentially survival mode kicking in, Van Susteren said.
“If we’re in a bad mood, we’re not buying,” she said.
In one image from the company Maxar Technologies, the historic area of Banyan Court — home to the island’s oldest living banyan tree, at 150 years old — appears to have mostly been reduced to ash.
Other images showed similar devastation in and around Lahaina Square, a shopping area, and a neighborhood on the southern end of the town of roughly 12,700.
“I still don’t know where my little brother is,” she said. “I don’t know where my stepdad is.”
The fires, which have also hit the island of Hawaii, have been fueled by strong, erratic winds from a Category 4 hurricane.
“This is not going to be a short journey,” said Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who is acting governor until the governor returns early from a trip. “It’s going to take weeks and maybe months to assess the full damage.”
Americans are pulling money out of their 401(k) plans at an alarming rate
Alicia Wallace, CNN – August 8, 2023
More Americans are tapping their 401(k) accounts because of financial distress, according to Bank of America data released Tuesday.
The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants.
It’s a “pretty troubling” development if more people are resorting to making hardship withdrawals, Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, told CNN.
“You understand why people do that in the heat of the moment, but the opportunity costs on that are really, really high over time,” he said.
Bank of America’s latest Participant Pulse report also found that a greater percentage of participants borrowed from their workplace plans from the first quarter, and average contributions trailed off as well.
However, overall employee contributions continued to hold steady for the first half of the year, and a greater share of participants upped their contribution rate than decreased it.
“The data from our report tells two stories — one of balance growth, optimism from younger employees and maintaining contributions, contrasted with a trend of increased plan withdrawals,” Lorna Sabbia, head of retirement and personal wealth solutions at Bank of America, said in a statement. “This year, more employees are understandably prioritizing short-term expenses over long-term saving.”
While the labor market remains strong, the economy is growing and consumers are spending, the global pandemic followed by two years of persistently high inflation have taken their toll on household finances.
Since 2019, household debt balances have increased by nearly $3 trillion, according to New York Federal Reserve data through the first quarter of 2023.
Separately on Tuesday, the New York Fed reported that US households’ credit card debt surpassed the $1 trillion mark for the first time ever. The $45 billion increase in credit card debt helped to drive overall household debt levels to $17.06 trillion at the end of the second quarter.
“There’s only so much hard debt that people can handle before delinquencies really spike,” Schulz said. “Ultimately, you just have a lot of people who are doing OK now, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot for them to find themselves in a pretty sticky situation financially, whether that is a medical emergency, job loss, or even just student loan payments restarting.”
Federal student loan payments are set to resume in October following a more than three-year pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Biden Administration’s push to forgive debt.
Clarence Thomas’s $267,230 R.V. and the Friend Who Financed It
By Jo Becker and Julie Tate – August 5, 2023
The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.
Justice Clarence Thomas, circa 2000, with his great-nephew and his Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon motor coach.
Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.
With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.
There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with “60 Minutes,” talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.
His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
A circa 1991 advertisement for Marathon coaches. Credit…Marathon
He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.
He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.
“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”
Justice Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman.
The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.
Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.
Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that when it comes to questions of disclosure, the ethics treatment of gifts and income often parallels the tax treatment. But those intricacies aside, he said, “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “you have to ask, why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”
The Times’s unearthing of the loan arrangement is the latest in a series of revelations showing how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of benefits on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition, steering business to Mrs. Thomas’s consulting firm, buying and renovating the house where his mother lives and inviting the Thomases on trips both domestic and foreign that included travel aboard private jets and a yacht.
Ethical Issues Inside the Supreme Court
A Crisis of Ethics: A debate over ethical standards for Supreme Court justices has intensified after a series of revelations about lavish gifts and financial largess. Our reporter explains the allegations of misconduct and the growing calls for tighter rules.
Scalia Law: George Mason University’s law school cultivated ties to some of the court’s conservative justices with generous pay and unusual perks. In turn, the school gained prestige, donations and influence.
Justice Thomas has pointed to interpretations of the disclosure rules to defend his failure to report much of the largess he has received. He has said he was advised that the trips fell under an exemption for gifts involving “personal hospitality” from close friends, for instance, and a lawyer close to the Thomases contended in a statement that the justice did not need to disclose the tuition because it was a gift to his great-nephew, over whom he had legal custody, rather than to him.
The Thomases’ known benefactors include wealthy men like the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and several members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honors people who succeed despite adversity. Among them: the longtime Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who flew the justice around on his jet.
Mr. Welters, while also a Horatio Alger member, stands apart. For one thing, the two men’s friendship predates Justice Thomas’s time on the federal bench. They met around 1980, when both were members of a small, informal club of Black congressional aides to Republican lawmakers — Mr. Welters worked for Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York and Justice Thomas for Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri.
Anthony Welters, shown with his wife Beatrice in 2016, was a close friend of Justice Thomas’s from their time working as congressional aides. Credit…Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for NYU Langone Medical Center
“It wasn’t exactly fashionable to be a Black person working for a Republican, and it was comforting to meet others in the same boat,” the justice wrote in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
They had much in common. Like Justice Thomas, Mr. Welters was raised in poverty, sharing a cramped tenement in Harlem with his parents and three brothers and, after his mother’s death when he was 8, shining shoes under an elevated subway to help make ends meet.
As both men climbed the ladder as political appointees in the Reagan administration, their friendship grew. They stayed close after Justice Thomas joined the federal appeals court in Washington in 1990 and Mr. Welters left government to found AmeriChoice, a Medicaid services provider that he sold to UnitedHealthcare for $530 million in stock in 2002 and continued to lead until retiring in 2016. Mr. Welters and his wife, Beatrice, named Justice Thomas the godfather of one of their two boys, according to The Village Voice.
When Justice Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination ran into trouble after a former subordinate, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, Mr. Welters stood by his friend, providing behind-the-scenes advice, according to a book on the hearings written by Mr. Danforth.
And in 1998, the year before the motor coach purchase, Justice Thomas returned the favor. That is when Mr. Welters and his wife, through their foundation, started the AnBryce scholarship program, which gives underprivileged students a full ride to New York University’s law school, along with networking opportunities and career support. Justice Thomas lent his considerable imprimatur to the program, interviewing applicants in his Supreme Court chambers, mentoring scholars and later hiring one graduate as a clerk.
By that point, the justice had become fixated on owning an R.V., and not just any R.V., but the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches: a custom Prevost Marathon, or as he once put it, a “condo on wheels.”
A Toy for the Rich
Justice Thomas was turned on to the luxury brand by Bernie Little, a fellow Horatio Alger member and the flamboyantly wealthy owner of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing boat. Mr. Little had owned 20 to 25 custom motor coaches over the years, Mr. Thomas told C-SPAN in 2001.
Back in those days, a basic Prevost Marathon sold for about a million dollars, and could fetch far more depending on the bells and whistles. It was a rich man’s toy, and the company marketed it that way.
“You drive through a neighborhood in South Florida and you see these $10 million homes,” Bob Phebus, Marathon’s vice president, told The South Florida Business Journal in 2006. “You condense that down, put it on wheels and that’s what we have. It’s the same guy that will have a 100-foot yacht and a private aircraft. They’re accustomed to the finer things in life.”Got a news tip about the courts?If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please send us a secure tip at nytimes.com/tips.
At the time, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of between $15,000 and $50,000.
So, in Justice Thomas’s telling, he began searching for a used Prevost at Mr. Little’s suggestion, one with enough miles on it to depreciate the value. “The depreciation curve — it’s very steep,” he made a point of saying in the 2001 C-SPAN interview.
All these years later, he still hasn’t told some of his closest friends how he was really able to swing the purchase.
“He told me he saved up all his money to buy it,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend who worked closely with Justice Thomas in the Reagan administration.
The title history documents reviewed by The Times show that when the motor coach was sold for $267,230 to the Thomases in 1999, it had only 93,618 miles on it, relatively few for a vehicle that experts say can easily log a million miles in its lifetime. It came equipped with plush leather seating, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom in the back. In addition to its orange flame motif, it had a large Pegasus painted on the back, according to Jason Mang, the step-grandson of the previous owner, Bonnie Owenby.
“It was superluxury, really bougie,” he recalled.
On Nov. 19, 1999, after spotting the motor coach on the lot of Desert West Coach in Phoenix and putting a hold on it, Justice Thomas attended a dinner at the conservative Goldwater Institute. In a speech that night, he said he had never yearned to be a federal judge. “Pure and simple, I wanted to be rich,” he said.
Wayne Mullis, the owner of the now-defunct Desert West, said in an interview that Justice Thomas never discussed obtaining traditional financing with him, and that “as far as I know, he paid for it.”
Indeed, Justice Thomas would have been hard-pressed to get a loan from a traditional lender. Banks, and even finance companies that specialize in R.V. loans, are particularly reluctant to lend money on used Prevost Marathons because the customized features are hard to value, according to three leading industry executives interviewed by The Times.
“As a rule, the majority of buyers are cash buyers — they don’t finance the Prevost, generally,” said Chad Stevens, owner of an Arizona-based dealership specializing in high-end motor coaches, whose clients include celebrities and politicians. “In 1999, you would need a very strong down payment and a strong financial portfolio to finance one. It is a luxury item.”
While the terms of Mr. Welters’s loan to Justice Thomas are unclear, rules governing loans of more than $10,000 between friends and family are not.
Loans can be reclassified as gifts or income to the borrower, either of which would have to be reported by the justice under court disclosure rules, if any portion of the debt is forgiven or discharged as uncollectable. But even if a lender does not take those steps, a loan can still be considered a reportable gift or income if it doesn’t meet certain standards.
Loan terms should be spelled out in a written agreement, with a clearly defined, regular repayment schedule, tax experts said. Lenders must charge at least the applicable federal interest rate, which was a little over 6 percent in December 1999, when the deal to buy the motor coach closed. And if a borrower is in arrears, lenders must make a good-faith effort to collect, even to the point of going to court.
“Absent that, it’s more of a gift,” said Rich Lahijani, tax director of Edelman Financial Engines, an independent wealth planning and investment advisory firm.
The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on R.V.s stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.
Mr. Welters said he released the lien on the vehicle in 2008, and provided this photo of the original title to The Times as evidence. (Addresses and vehicle identification number have been redacted.) Credit…via Anthony Welters
And as of late last month, when The Times reviewed the records, they still listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Justice Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.
Mr. Welters said he could not explain why he was still listed as the holder of the lien. After he gave Justice Thomas the paperwork, he said, “I don’t know what process the borrower should have followed.” (To clear the title, the paperwork should have been brought to the D.M.V., where the lien release would have been recorded and a replacement title issued.) As for Justice Thomas, that was among the matters he declined to discuss with The Times.
‘A Warm, Safe Place’
As details about Justice and Mrs. Thomas’s subsidized trips to vacation homes and resorts have become public in recent months, his professed preference for traveling by motor coach has become something of a “yeah, right” punchline.
But by all accounts, he loves the anonymity, the freedom and the community it affords. He has hosted at least one event at the Supreme Court for a Marathon owners’ club.
Members of the Marathon Coach Club International on the steps of the Supreme Court.Credit…via Marathon Coach
When he hits the road, he often goes unrecognized, which at times has allowed him to travel without a U.S. Marshals’ security detail. Chris Weaver, who worked at Desert West Coach, said the justice had frequently gotten his motor coach serviced there before it closed. “Nine out of 10 times, he was just wearing sweats and a T-shirt,” he said.
Traveling largely through red-state America has also meant that when he is recognized, more often than not it is by fans. Juan Williams, a Fox News commentator who has known Justice Thomas since the Reagan administration, said the motor coach was both the fulfillment of a boyish fantasy and a metaphorical “womb.”
“He talked about the R.V. a lot,” he said. “It was a warm, safe place where he didn’t have to be attacked by liberals and Blacks on the left. What he liked about it was not being pilloried.”
In a 2007 interview, Justice Thomas told Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” that the motor coach enabled him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” Credit…CBS News
In a 2019 Q. and A. at the court, Justice Thomas said he had made it to nearly two dozen states, and declared himself the proud owner of a KOA campground discount card.
But the Thomases’ road trips have hardly been limited to sleeping at campsites and Walmart parking lots.
In a 2009 call-in to a morning radio talk show, for instance, Mrs. Thomas said they were driving their motor coach through the Adirondacks, on their way to “meet some families from Texas.” ProPublica has reported that the Thomases have spent part of nearly every summer for the past two decades in the Adirondacks as a guest of Mr. Crow, who owns a lakeside resort there with more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses and a painting of the justice, his host and other guests smoking cigars.
The boathouse at Harlan Crow’s Adirondack resort, where Justice Thomas and his wife have vacationed. Credit…Nancie Battaglia for The New York Times
When the Thomases aren’t houseguests, they have stayed at upscale Marathon-endorsed destinations like the Mountain Falls Luxury Motorcoach Resort in Lake Toxaway, N.C.
There, the justice met Larry Fields, who owns a motor-coach-cleaning business. Mr. Fields said that for several days he had had no idea who Justice Thomas was, telling him he would have to wait in line to have his Prevost washed, which he patiently did.
“He was a great guy,” Mr. Fields recalled. “I think we talked about how great Reagan was. He was low-key. It was just him and his wife and a dog.”
Justice and Mrs. Thomas have traveled to Mountain Falls, a luxury motor coach resort in North Carolina. Credit…Greg Eastman
Upkeep on a motor coach like the justice’s is an expensive constant, and other friends have chipped in to help. While he did not disclose Mr. Welters’s assistance in buying the motor coach, he did report that some former clerks got together and bought him deep-cycle batteries for $1,200 the year after he acquired it. He also reported that in 2002, Greg Werner, who ran a large, family-owned, Nebraska-based trucking company, gave him tires worth $1,200.
And over time, Justice Thomas made the motor coach his own. In a photo The Times obtained that appears to date back to the early 2000s, picturing his great-nephew as a child, the motor coach no longer sported the sizzling orange flames and Pegasus logo. Instead, it was painted in an elegant black-and-gold geometric pattern.
But if the custom coach changed, the justice’s friendship with Mr. Welters endured.
While Mr. Welters was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, Justice Thomas twice recused himself from cases involving the company, in 2003 and 2005. As is the general custom of the court, he did not explain why.
In 2010, Justice Thomas traveled to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, at the invitation of the Welterses. By then, the couple had become major Democratic fund-raisers and President Obama had named Ms. Welters ambassador to the island nation. Local newspapers captured the justice and Mr. Welters talking to students at a school.
Justice Thomas at a school in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 with Mr. Welters, left, whose wife was the ambassador. Flight records show that the Welterses’ private plane flew to and from Dulles Airport on the days Justice Thomas traveled. Credit…U.S. Embassy Trinidad and Tobago
In disclosures, Justice Thomas wrote that the “U.S. Embassy Port of Spain” had paid for his flight. But flight records obtained through the plane-tracking services of MyRadar show that the Welterses’ private Gulfstream G-6 flew from Washington Dulles International Airport and back on the days that Justice Thomas arrived on and departed the Caribbean island.
And Matthew Cassetta, a retired embassy official who helped arrange the visit, said Ms. Welters customarily “offered the plane to people who came down,” always at her own expense to save the taxpayers money.
(Ms. Welters declined to comment on the flights or the loan, except to say, “I just want to tell you that friendships come and go, and that’s what I want to say.”)
The same year, in a speech accepting an award from the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas singled out Mr. Welters as one of his “friends for the whole journey.”
“And for Tony, a special thank you, who understood relationships and who was always there as a friend in the worst times of my life,” he said. “It is a friendship I will treasure forever.”
Reporting was contributed by Steve Eder, Riley Mellen, Robin Stein and Abbie VanSickle.
Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” More about Jo Becker
And as concerning as these developments are, scientists have long worried about even more dramatic, looming and irreversible changes to the planet that could happen quickly. Even in the past year, there’s evidence some of these scenarios are becoming more likely.
A paper in the journal Science in 2022 looked at several climate “tipping points” – conditions beyond which changes become self-perpetuating and difficult or impossible to undo. While the concept raised the hackles of some scientists, who suggested it was overly simplistic, the paper suggested even the possibility of such no-going-back points provided compelling reasons to limit warming as much as possible.
But the news isn’t all bad: There’s some good news in the Amazon. And scientists continue to say that if humanity takes climate threats seriously and quickly moves to end carbon emissions, the scenarios below become less likely or at least less extreme.
Here are five tipping points scientists say could start to teeter sooner rather than later:
A July 2022 photo of melting summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland.
As of July 18, Antarctic sea ice was more than 1 million square miles below the 1981-2010 average. That’s an area larger than the seven southwestern states, including Utah and Texas, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It is also more than half a million square miles lower than last year, which had also been the previous record low.
In Greenland, temperatures over the country’s central-north ice sheet between 2001 and 2011 were the warmest in the past 1,000 years, said Maria Hörhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and author of a study published this year.
Critical Atlantic ocean currents could stall, reshape climate in US and Europe
What could happen: Massive ocean currents that move hot and cold water around could grind to a halt. Some studies have called it an “irreversible transition.”
When could it happen: New research suggests it could occur this century.
What would the effect on Earth be: Scientists aren’t sure, but some say a stoppage could trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. It could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.
What changed since last year? Recent analysis shows the current appears to be weakening or slowing down.
It’s far from certain and many scientists say there’s not enough data yet to tell if there’s a trend that could mean a sudden collapse is in the offing.
FILE – Smoke rises from a fire near a logging area in the Transamazonica highway region, in the municipality of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil, Sept. 17, 2022. Brazil has a major role to play in addressing climate change as home to the world’s largest rainforest, but after the Sunday, Oct. 2, election, the subject is less likely to come up than ever. (AP Photo/Edmar Barros, File) ORG XMIT: CLI301More
What could the effect on Earth be? The Amazon’s 2.5 million square mile rainforest, sometimes called “the lungs of the plant,” is so vast it creates half of its own rainfall and is home to 10% of the world’s species. It also stores a substantial amount of the world’s carbon.
As temperatures rise and droughts become more common, the ability of the forest to grow back after fires or logging is of concern. That’s especially a problem in the Amazon where the trees themselves capture water through their roots and then release moisture back through their leaves. It’s estimated a single tree can emit 265 gallons of water a day.
If drought or logging kills trees there may not be enough left to bring water to the area, meaning what grows back in their place would instead be grassland.
July 2, 2023 : Flames from the Donnie Creek wildfire burn along a ridge top north of Fort St. John, British Columbia.
Wildfires could reshape Alaska and Canada, turning forests into grassland
What could happen: Massive wildfires could mean North America’s vast northern forests – sometimes called “snow forests” – could face a future as mostly treeless grasslands.
What would the effect on Earth be: These cold-weather forests run across Alaska and Canada and are estimated to store more than 30% of all forest carbon on the planet. Without them, huge amounts of greenhouse gases would be released into the atmosphere, worsening global warming.
Forests have always burned but what’s happening now is on a different scale, in every part of the country, said Marc-André Parisien, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
This summer has been a historically bad fire season in Canada. As of August 4, a remarkable 1,054 active fires were burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
While boreal forests are highly adapted to wildfires, the climate in the forested areas is now hotter and windier than before, making it harder for the seedlings to reestablish themselves. The concern is that in some areas what grows back after these megafires might not be today’s endless forests but instead grassland and shrubland, interspersed with smaller areas of trees.
“The climate in the northern forests has always been changing since the end of the Ice Age,” Parisien said. “But just the sheer speed at which things are happening now is surprising.”
Underwater photo of coral bleaching and hard coral Acropora sp turns white due to high sea surface temperature and climate change
World’s coral reefs could be cooked by the ocean
What could happen: Rising ocean temperatures are literally cooking coral to death. If localized die-offs happened across the world’s oceans, it would fundamentally change and diminish undersea life.
When could it happen: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 1.5°C of global warming would result in between 70 and 90% of the world’s coral reefs disappearing – which could happen in the early 2030s.
What would the effect on Earth be: Corals are vital to the health of the oceans. Although they cover only 0.2% of the ocean floor, they are home to at least a quarter of all marine species. They provide safety for juvenile fish and are home to small organisms and fish that provide food for larger fish. A report released last year showed that almost 15% of the planet’s reefs have vanished since 2009.
Coral reefs can survive within only a relatively narrow temperature band. The coral that build the reefs get much of their food from algae living in their tissues. When the seawater is too warm, the coral’s stress response is to expel algae, causing the coral to turn white. The process is called coral bleaching, and if it lasts too long, the coral can starve – turning a thriving ecosystem into a cemetery of dead, white shells.
The Coral Restoration Foundation, a group centered around restoring and protecting Florida’s coral reefs, said it visited the Sombrero Reef off the Florida Keys on July 20 and found “100% coral mortality.” The discovery means all corals on the Sombrero Reef, a popular snorkeling area, have died and the reef will not recover on its own without active restoration, the foundation said.
Students from the Urban Homeschoolers in Atwater Village march through the neighborhood chanting and carrying signs on their way to the Los Angeles River and then an overpass on Interstate-5. Photo by Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY staff
Action, not despair
Even though it appears humanity is on track to miss the United Nations’ hoped-for limit of a temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, giving up is not the answer, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
No specific number signifies that all hope is lost. Instead, it’s a call for action.
“It’s not like we fall off the edge of the world,” he said. “We can still make a big difference and every single tenth of a degree is enormously important.”
With interest rates climbing, a new form of one-upmanship is making the rounds: the mortgage-rate humble brag. (Getty Images)
At a rooftop party on a steamy July night in Philadelphia, the margarita machine was churning, the seafood boil was hearty, and the conversation turned to the default of the upwardly mobile: real estate.
Almost anyone shopping for a home in the 2020s knows the script by now: Someone mentions their recent home purchase, a tale undoubtedly rich with drama, stress and suspense. Guests, well schooled in the volatility of the housing market, lean in for the follow-up: When did you buy?
The response to that key question “is normally followed by an ‘Oooh,’” said Evan Barker, 36, a lawyer who attended the party and has participated in enough of these exchanges to know that the “Oooh” means one of two things: You either got the interest rate of a lifetime, or you squarely did not.
Fortunately for Barker, he falls into the former category. He and his wife, Laura Gallagher, 36, bought their first house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in the early spring of 2020, weeks before home prices began their fastest ascent in U.S. history, as mortgage rates plummeted to historic lows. In January 2021, the 30-year mortgage rate bottomed out at 2.65%, a few months before Barker and Gallagher refinanced, besting the national average with a rate of 2.375%.
So it’s no wonder that Barker spent the evening enjoying the banter almost as much as the stunning City Center rooftop views. He knew his lines for this dialogue. He had spent months fine-tuning his delivery, usually waiting for someone else to toss out an enviable interest rate before he topped it.
“I throw the humblebrag in,” he said. “Hey! Best financial decision of my life was pure luck. It’s just that simple.”
While most of the guests spent the conversation one-upping each other, the person who stood out to Barker was the one who had bought recently, at a substantially higher interest rate than everyone else. “They shocked us with some of their payment info,” he said.
American homeowners now stand on two sides of a divide. On one side are those who had the good fortune to buy or refinance between 2020 and early 2022, and now enjoy notably low monthly interest payments on their principal. On the other side: everyone else.
These prospective and recent homebuyers are watching their purchasing power diminish as home prices hold steady amid rising rates. In mid July, the 30-year mortgage rate hovered just under 7%, after reaching a high of 7.08% in October. The last time rates exceeded 7% was in 2002 — more than 20 years ago.
The contrast creates ideal conditions for ribbing from the winners and resentment from the losers. Homeowners and buyers say the sparring has been happening among friends at parties, with colleagues at the office, and on social media, where it plays out as memes that are smug, shocked or hopeless, depending on where you fall on the spectrum.
“There is almost a cross-generational envy,” said Övül Sezer, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Cornell University, who studies humblebragging.
Flaunting wealth and good fortune is nothing new. But Americans, for the most part, avoid sharing specifics about money. Sure, you’ll plaster news about your promotion on Facebook and on the platform formerly known as Twitter, but you’ll probably keep mum about the salary package that comes with it. When it comes to real estate, the attitude is no different. A gleeful homeowner may gloat about vanquishing the competition in a bidding war, but they won’t mention the sale price, or their monthly payments.
In comes the interest rate, serving as the ideal proxy. Share your mortgage rate and you can showcase your financial prowess without revealing how much money you spent (or how much you have). It almost feels humble. Almost.
“When we brag, we signal our competence,” Sezer said — telling the world, in this case, that we’re savvy consumers. “Yet we also know that bragging is kind of bad, so humblebragging is this seemingly sweet spot. It allows us to both brag, but also look humble.”
Few people are fooled.
“It’s like a talking point. We get it, we know, yes, yes — everybody has 2.6%, you’re all so smart, thanks for informing me,” said Ike Wachuku, 34, a software engineer in Baltimore, who will not be getting a 2.6% interest rate if he and his wife ever manage to find a new house. “People are rubbing your face in it.”
Consumers have little control over what mortgage rate they get, aside from maintaining a solid credit rating. Mortgage rates have been rising in response to the Federal Reserve’s continued efforts to wrestle inflation under control. So timing, not skill, dictates the rate — and timing is a byproduct of luck.
As it happens, luck isn’t entirely random. The pandemic exacerbated inequalities that existed before 2020. For many wealthier Americans, the pandemic was a financial boon. They kept their jobs, were able to work remotely, enjoyed bonuses and raises, and had cash on hand when interest rates plummeted to keep the economy afloat. They were the ones best positioned to pluck up homes, driving up prices. The people who spent 2020 and 2021 struggling through job losses, illnesses or other financial hardships likely missed out on the moment, and are now the ones enduring the hard consequences of rampant inflation.
The interest rate cut “was this free handout to people who didn’t really need it,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin. For everyone else, “that door closed as soon as people started to get back on their feet.”
Or as Sharon Reshef, who last month bought a $400,000 one-bedroom apartment in Washington D.C., put it: “It’s really hard to plan your life around macroeconomics.”
That hasn’t stopped some of her slightly older colleagues in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office from teasing her about her 6.625% interest rate.
“It’s just a gentle ribbing,” said Reshef, 30, the research director for the senator from New York, who now spends half of her take-home pay on her mortgage. “But as long as we’re here, I will say that not a lot of people in my cohort own property, especially as a single person. Regardless of the interest rate, I have that one up on them. I can definitely brag.”
In hindsight, Scott Decker, 35, wishes he had been ready to leave Brooklyn for the suburbs in 2021, when many of his friends were leaving. Instead, he and his wife, Maureen Decker, bought a home in Montclair, New Jersey, the following year. Now, when he drives his son to preschool, passing the stately homes on picturesque, tree-lined streets, he plays a tortured game.
“I’m like, ‘I wonder what this house sold for?’ And, ‘We could have gotten this house two years ago if we had wanted it,’” he said. “I’m definitely always thinking about that and always a little jealous.”
Decker, who leads strategic media planning for a tech company, “definitely overpaid” for the four-bedroom house that he and Decker bought for $1.1 million, 40% over the list price. They also took out an adjustable-rate mortgage, with a rate that is fixed at 4.15% until 2030, when it adjusts based on the current rates. “I’m terrified at what I may be forced to change to in the future,” he said.
The Deckers are friendly with another Montclair couple who own a bigger house, but because their interest rate is lower, their monthly payments are about the same. “Every time we go to their house, I’m like, ‘Man, this is unfair,’” Decker said.
Talk to anyone who managed to buy a home in 2020 or 2021, and they will probably tell you the competition was fierce and the experience miserable. But buyers today face similar, if not tougher, conditions. Inventory is anemic, partly because homeowners do not want to part with their low interest rates. So far, a scant 1% of American homes have traded hands this year, the lowest rate in a decade, according to a July report from Redfin.
Of course, things could be worse. In 1981, mortgage rates peaked at a jaw-dropping 18.53%. Still, the average home price in the second quarter of 1981 was $84,300 — even adjusted for inflation, that’s about $287,020, which is far less than the average price of $495,100 in the second quarter of 2023.
But people who remember the days of double-digit interest rates are often quick to remind younger generations that they, too, walked to school uphill both ways in the snow.
“The fate, the gods, determine when you enter that phase of your life and what is happening in the market,” said Allen J. Palmer, 85, who is retired from IBM and bought his house in what is now Silicon Valley, in California, in 1977 for $95,000 (or $480,686 in today’s dollars), with an 8.5% mortgage interest rate. The first year he and his wife spent in that house, they couldn’t afford to fly home to Milwaukee for the holidays.
Young buyers “don’t understand that this is the way it is,” he said. “They probably don’t remember that their parents struggled to pay” the mortgage, too.
On a recent TikTok video, Barbara Corcoran, the 74-year-old real estate mogul, arranged fresh flowers as she chided hesitant buyers for their reluctance to get back into the market — a common refrain among real estate agents, who insist that there is no time like the present to buy a house.
“Pick your poison: high interest rates now, which aren’t so high, or super-high prices once they come down,” Corcoran said, her hand grazing a fern frond. “Your choice.”
Decker, in Montclair, knows which choice he thinks buyers should make. Recently, he was standing at the bar of a local barbecue restaurant and overheard another patron who seemed overconfident about a recent lowball offer he had made on a house in town. Decker had lost enough bidding wars to know how this story would end, and considered schooling him on his grim prospects. Maybe he would lean across the bar, he thought, and say, “Don’t even bother, man, cool your heels somewhere else.” But he hesitated.
“It did make me feel a little good,” he said, “and certainly thankful that I have a place to live and I’m not dealing with that right now.”
Instead of offering unsolicited advice, he ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and a shot of Jameson, and walked back to the patio to sit down and enjoy the evening with his family in their new town.
