Luke Muir and his wife moved to Phoenix from Louisiana two years ago for a better-paying job. They prepared for higher temperatures and low housing costs. The weather has lived up to their expectations; housing prices have not.

Pretty much since they arrived, Mr. Muir and his family have been trying and failing to find a single-family house for no more than $500,000. The options have been too small, too remote or too much of a fixer-upper.

“I’m like, ‘Wow, I thought this would be a more affordable place to live,’” said Mr. Muir, who is 44 and works in financial services. “It’s not like it’s San Diego or L.A. or some other place that is just known for astronomical prices.”

Across the country, rising prices and rents have become a crisis — eroding family budgets and leading to doubled-up households and multiplying homeless camps. The root of this pain is a decades-old housing shortage.

The remedy proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris is contained in a housing plan that, among other things, calls for the construction of three million new housing units over the next four years — a 50 percent increase over the current pace of building.

Vastly expanding the supply of housing is the only thing economists believe will make a meaningful difference in an affordability crunch. They disagree, however, about whether Ms. Harris’s plan would actually do that. (Economists also agree that former President Donald J. Trump’s housing plan, which aims to free up housing by deporting immigrants, would probably make the housing crisis worse by devastating the construction work force).

Reduced to its essence, Ms. Harris’s plan aims to flood the system with money for builders and buyers in the hope that it will jolt the construction market. It calls on Congress to expand a federal tax credit for subsidized rental housing while creating a new tax credit for developers to build starter homes, and another credit for families looking to rehabilitate their own worn-down housing stock. It also creates a $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers.

Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, who has advised the Harris campaign, called it the most aggressive plan to increase the nation’s housing supply since modern suburbs were built after World War II. And if the numbers were to pencil out as neatly as they do in Ms. Harris’s 82-page economic plan, Mr. Zandi’s superlative would be accurate.

But that “if” creates pause.

Developers in Phoenix and elsewhere are naturally amenable to a federal plan that would reduce their taxes. Many developers said the idea of giving first-time home buyers money, which buyers would then give to them, sounded nice, too.

The question, as ever, is where and how they will build. This is why other economists, such as Ed Pinto at the market-oriented American Enterprise Institute, have said Ms. Harris’s plan would make shortages worse by inflating housing demand (because the home buyer credit would give families more to spend) without doing enough to increase supply.

Over the past half-century, Phoenix grew into one of America’s largest cities by building low-slung neighborhoods further and further outward. That playbook kept housing affordable for a long time, but no longer.

The average price of a home in Maricopa County, which surrounds Phoenix, is now $470,000, up about 50 percent since the pandemic. And that pattern of expansion is resulting in the same problems — congestion, smog, water shortages, sprawl — that many residents moved there from California to escape.

The Arizona Legislature recently passed several laws designed to speed construction and make neighborhoods denser — to build more housing per lot — but it will take more than a few years for that to translate into ramped-up building.

“We can turn 40 acres of cotton field into a subdivision in the blink of an eye,” said Jason Morris, a land use attorney at Withey Morris Baugh in Phoenix. “But that is much easier than trying to do 75 apartments in the middle of a neighborhood.”

Ms. Harris’s plan includes a $40 billion “Local Innovation Fund” that would, among other things, encourage cities to make building faster and easier by cutting the regulations that consume local zoning meetings. But for that to work, cities in Arizona and elsewhere have to want to change how they grow, which so far many are reluctant to do.

Even Mr. Muir, the frustrated home buyer, is leery of neighborhoods becoming too compact. Many of the new developments he sees when he is house-hunting are town-home projects or ones built so closely together that they might as well be apartments, he said.

“It’s baffling that people can reach out their window and touch the neighbor’s wall,” Mr. Muir said.

Would this housing, smaller and tighter, fulfill the American dream of people like Mr. Muir?

The solution to the country’s housing shortage will almost certainly require some sort of federal program — one that may be tough to get through Congress. But for a rush of money to work, cities and states also have to want it.

Ms. Harris’s main challenge will be convincing them to build. And then persuading Americans to be happy with it.

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Meta has fired about two dozen staff in Los Angeles for using their $25 meal credits to buy household items including acne pads, wine glasses and laundry detergent.

The terminations took place last week, just days before the $1.5tn social media company separately began restructuring certain teams across WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Labs, its augmented and virtual reality arm, on Tuesday.

The revamp has included cutting some staff and relocating others, several people familiar with the decisions said, in a sign that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efficiency drive is still under way.

Like most Big Tech companies, Meta offers free food to employees based out of its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters as a perk. Staff based in smaller offices without a cafeteria are offered Uber Eats or Grubhub credits, for example, for food to be delivered to the office.

Staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $25 for dinner, with meal credits issued in $25 increments.

Those who were fired were deemed to have abused the food credit system over a long period of time, said one person familiar with the matter. Some had been pooling their money together, they said, while others were getting meals sent home even though the credits are intended for the office.

Those who only violated the company rules on occasion were reprimanded but not terminated, the person added.

In one post on anonymous messaging platform Blind, seen by the Financial Times, one former Meta staffer wrote they had used $25 credits on items such as toothpaste and tea from the pharmacy Rite Aid, adding: “On days where I would not be eating at the office, like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit.”

The person, who indicated they had a salary of about $400,000 at Meta and worked “nights [and] weekends”, wrote they had admitted to the oversight when human resources investigated the practice, before later being unexpectedly fired. “It was almost surreal that this was happening,” the person wrote.

Meta declined to comment on the firings.

However, the company said of the wider lay-offs: “Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy.”

It added: “This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees.”

Zuckerberg announced about 21,000 job cuts in two rounds of lay-offs in 2022 and 2023, dubbing the latter a “year of efficiency”.

He also cancelled low-priority projects in an attempt to boost sluggish growth and alleviate investor concern over his costly bet on the metaverse.

Wall Street has welcomed the cuts together with a renewed focus on artificial intelligence. The company’s shares are now trading around all-time highs of $577 each.

– 824-
NEBRASKA SUPREME COURT ADVANCE SHEETS
317 NEBRASKA REPORTS
STATE EX REL. SPUNG v. EVNEN
Cite as 317 Neb. 800
reenfranchisement upon being “restored to civil rights.” But
unlike some state constitutions, the Nebraska Constitution does
not expressly grant the power to restore civil rights to any of
the three branches, nor does it specify the method or criteria by
which civil rights in general, or voting rights specifically, are
to be restored. 32 This is significant for two reasons.
First, because article VI, § 2, establishes the constitutional
policy that a felon’s right to vote can be restored, but does
so without prescribing the means or method to carry that
policy into effect, the reenfranchisement provision is not
self-executing. 33 And when a constitutional provision is not
self-executing, it is generally understood that the Legislature
32 Compare, e.g., N.J. Const. art. II, § 1, ¶ 7 (providing that felony conviction
deprives persons of right to vote but “[a]ny person so deprived, when
pardoned or otherwise restored by law to the right of suffrage, shall again
enjoy that right”); Ky. Const. § 145 (providing that felony conviction
operates to exclude suffrage rights but those excluded “may be restored
to their civil rights by executive pardon”); Utah Const. art. IV, § 6
(providing that any person convicted of felony may not be permitted to
vote until such right “is restored as provided by statute”); N.C. Const.
art. VI, § 2 (providing that no person adjudged guilty of a felony “shall
be permitted to vote unless that person shall be first restored to the rights
of citizenship in the manner prescribed by law”); Or. Const. art. II, § 3
(providing that “privilege of an elector, upon conviction of any crime
which is punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary, shall be forfeited,
unless otherwise provided by law”); Fla. Const. art. VI, § 4 (providing that
“any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall
terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms
of sentence including parole or probation”).
33 See, e.g., State ex rel. Lamm v. Nebraska Bd. of Pardons, 260 Neb.
1000, 620 N.W.2d 763 (2001); In re Applications A-16027 et al., 242
Neb. 315, 495 N.W.2d 23 (1993), modified on denial of rehearing 243
Neb. 419, 499 N.W.2d 548; Indian Hills Comm. Ch. v. County Bd. of
Equal., 226 Neb. 510, 412 N.W.2d 459 (1987); State, ex rel. Walker, v.
Board of Commissioners, 141 Neb. 172, 3 N.W.2d 196 (1942). See, also,
Davis v. Burke, 179 U.S. 399, 403, 21 S. Ct. 210, 45 L. Ed. 249 (1900)
(recognizing rule that constitutional provision “is not self-executing when
it merely indicates principles, without laying down rules by means of
which those principles may be given the force of law””).