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conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests

Realtors had big incentives for maintaining segregation. Having invented it in the early 1900s as a marketing tool for selling homes, they had made segregation central to their business practices. They created racial covenants to exclude members of minority groups from new developments, existing neighborhoods, and entire cities and shaped federal redlining maps, all premised on the idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors.

Despite the Supreme Court outlawing court enforcement of racial covenants in 1948, Realtors used racial steering—such as lying to minority prospective buyers that a home had just been sold and controlling newspaper real-estate listings—so effectively that by the early ’60s, Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.

in asking voters to constitutionally authorize residential discrimination in Proposition 14, Realtors had a fundamental problem. How, at the height of the civil-rights movement, could they publicly campaign for sanctioning discrimination in California?

The right to be treated equally, to not be discriminated against, to choose where to live, was not part of American freedom but a special privilege.

Realtors would need to secretly and systematically redefine American freedom as the freedom to discriminate—to challenge the idea at the heart of the civil-rights movement itself.

the national Realtors’ organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere.

The kit’s detailed scripts instructed Realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.”

Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owner’s right to discriminate, and Realtors were in favor of “freedom for all”: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.

Wilson drafted a Property Owners’ Bill of Rights that Realtors advertised in newspapers nationwide, emphasizing owners’ absolute right to dispose of their property—never mentioning anyone’s right to buy or rent a home in the first place

This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.

Realtors thus made government the enemy, not minority groups

Thus, the more disparate the issues on which this idea of freedom was invoked—abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, climate change—the more powerful the message became.

By making state bureaucrats the enemy, Realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Proposition 14, Realtors claimed, was not about race but about “the rights of the individual.”

To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.

To be in favor of Proposition 14, to limit where millions of fellow Americans could live, did not mean that you were prejudiced but that you believed in individual freedom.

Wilson cited Abraham Lincoln: “We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.”

King’s terms evoked his speech at the March on Washington, but he was now defending shared freedom not against southern diehards but against northern salesmen promoting color-blind “freedom of choice.”

Proposition 14’s sweeping passage stunned politicians in both parties. The Realtors’ victory was overwhelming, with 65 percent of the total votes in favor, including 75 percent of the white vote and 80 percent of the white union vote.

Reagan, running for governor, adopted the Realtors’ cause and their message as his own: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”

Reagan and other conservatives saw that the Realtors had zeroed in on something extremely powerful—something whose full force would not be limited to housing segregation but could be used on virtually any issue.

Realtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.

though Realtors have disavowed their past arguments, the vision of freedom they created has had lasting effects on American politics as a whole.

This vision of freedom proved so enduring because it solved three structural problems for American conservatism.

First, Realtors used the language of individual freedom, of libertarianism, to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity.

Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in defense of American freedom—and create the way many, if not most, Americans understand freedom today.

Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.

a unifying idea: freedom of choice.

Second, by defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from “ordinary Americans,” Realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in our politics

This picture of government taking away your rights would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white Americans who had long been part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.

Timeliest of all, the Realtors’ redefinition of freedom offered a common ideology for something new in modern America: a national conservative political party

The Realtors’ color-blind freedom, which had proved so successful in California, could unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party—one very different from the Republican Party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Over time, the internal dynamics of a national conservative party would only push it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced the Realtors’ vision of freedom as the only meaning of American freedom. This dynamic has produced today’s Republican Party.

Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing one’s own absolute rights over those of others.

To go against that credo, to view freedom as belonging to the country itself and, as such, to everyone equally, threatens the party’s most basic tenet.

This idea of freedom is based on a technique that the Realtors perfected. They identified a single, narrow, obscure right, an owner’s right to choose a buyer—which Realtors themselves had restricted for decades with racial covenants—as American freedom itself.

Elevating as absolute a right rarely mentioned before, so government cannot limit it or protect the rights of others, became the model for the conservative movement

The concept can be and has been used regarding virtually any issue.

Everything that is not one of these carefully selected rights becomes, by definition, a privilege that government cannot protect, no matter how fundamental.

Since January 6, two-thirds of Republicans—more than 40 percent of all Americans—now see voting not as a basic right, an essential part of our freedom, but as a privilege for those who deserve it.

This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so

Also on Friday, N.A.R.’s chief legal officer, Katie Johnson, sent an internal message to staff that clarified the group’s own interpretation of the rules for agent commissions. In that message, which was obtained by The New York Times, she said that while N.A.R.’s policy does require listing agents to offer compensation to a buyer’s broker, that offer can be $0.

An attorney for plaintiffs in the antitrust case told Inman, the real estate news site, which first reported the shift, that the change amounted to “a stunning admission of guilt.

N.A.R. has said it has no intention of joining Anywhere and Re/Max in a settlement, and instead will head to federal court on Oct. 16 in Kansas City

The departures from N.A.R. come just a few days after Redfin, the Seattle-based online real estate broker, announced it would require many of its own agents to sever their ties with the organization.

“The trial and the sexual harassment are inextricably linked because they expose flaws within N.A.R. Anyone in real estate knows, a house is only as strong as its foundation. The house of N.A.R., after years of neglect, had too many cracks and now those cracks have been exposed,” he said in an interview. “The only way to save it is to rebuild it from the ground up.”

“N.A.R. is bloated, and its staff is arrogant. And at the same time, its membership is trying to figure out if they can function without N.A.R., and we’re defending whether or not our business model works for the average consumer.”

Mr. Yun predicts sales will remain flat for all of 2018, due to inventory shortages and eroding affordability, as both prices and mortgage rates rise.

A homeowner with a median-priced home in the San Francisco area will receive $4,500 less in housing-related tax benefits in the first year of a 30-year mortgage this year, according to real-estate data company Apartment List. A homeowner in the same position in the New York metro area would receive $1,500 less annually.

Weakness at the high end is being driven by stock market volatility and the $10,000 cap the tax bill placed on deducting state and local property taxes

“People are being a little more cautious than they were before,” Mr. Glazer said. “Buyers have a number in mind, and they’re willing to stick their ground more than in the past.”

Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in Silicon Valley, said she has seen a pickup in activity in recent weeks as buyers and sellers have digested the implications of the tax bill. Buyers are putting down larger down payments to bring the size of their mortgages below the new $750,000 cap. But that could be a challenge if the stock market continues to fluctuate, because buyers might want to hold on to more of their cash

s. Masching said she is also hearing more from older buyers who are thinking about selling their homes and using the proceeds to retire out of state, prompted in part by the changes to the tax law

“I’m hoping it’s going to be better. We never got any inventory last year,” said Ms. Masching. “The big concern for our sellers is: Where are they going to go?”

Rhian Daniel, a 50 year old who works for a medical startup, and his wife have been looking for a home for about four years, both in the Bay Area and further afield. The couple have largely given up for the moment, and are considering eventually moving to a place like Dallas, with lower home prices and property taxes.

Mr. Daniel’s wife is a therapist, and they both have student debt that limits the size of the mortgage they can get.

What awaits at the end of this frenetic period is not likely to resemble the 2008 housing bubble, which brought on a drawn-out crash when it finally burst, they said.

Nationwide, housing inventory was at a record-low 1.03 million units at the end of February, down 29.5 percent from a year earlier, a record decline, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“It gives the feel of a bubble,” Mr. Yun said, recalling the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis that cratered prices after 2008. “But the fundamental factors are different.”

“We don’t have the reckless lending that we had before,” said Mr. Miller, and so even as market conditions get frothy, some may find that they overpaid for their property, but the ebb and flow will be more in line with regular economic cycles.

He also expects home prices to keep rising in the short term, because of more than a decade of sluggish housing construction, hobbled by restrictive zoning and high labor costs.

“The rate at which homes are selling nationally is not sustainable, but in New York, the uptick is just getting started,” said Nancy Wu, an economist for StreetEasy, a listing website.

In the week ending April 11, there were 783 new signed contracts citywide, the highest since the company began tracking weekly pending sales in 2019, when the peak was 491 contracts, she said.

Unlike much of the country, New York had a glut of luxury inventory before the pandemic, and prices had been softening since around 2017. From 2018 to the end of 2019, Manhattan saw a roughly 15 percent drop in sale prices, Mr. Miller said.

The price cuts have been a boon to a broader range of people. First-time buyers made up 41.9 percent of sales in Manhattan last quarter, the highest share in at least seven years, Mr. Miller said.

“It does have the potential to last for a while, because the results are only based on a half-tank of gas,” Ms. Olshan said, referring to the fact that most of these signings were from domestic and local buyers, as international buyers remain mostly on the sidelines with travel restrictions.

New York’s revival also challenges one of the early assumptions during the pandemic — that the suburbs would benefit at the expense of big cities, where buyers, untethered from office commutes, could choose to live farther from work.

So far, thanks to limited supply, many suburbs remain in high demand. Fairfield County, Conn., for instance, recorded 3,045 sales last quarter, the most in that period in more than 16 years, along with the lowest inventory in 25 years, according to a report from the brokerage Douglas Elliman.

“Manhattan finally joined the party,” he said, referring to the city’s sales turnaround. “But we’re not sure if this is the party we want to be in — because there’s uncertainty about how this plays out.”

New listings this week were up 4% from the previous year, a factor that may tip the balance of what has recently been a white hot seller’s market.

Presumably Mr. Trump would have experts to assist him. Despite her record of poor judgment, Secretary Clinton may believe Sen. Nunn and a fawning media’s assessment of her capabilities and rely on herself to make these critical judgments.

Nuclear proliferation has increased, not decreased, on Mrs. Clinton’s watch. She’s done nothing to stop a nuclear buildup by North Korea or aggression by China. Equally important, Hillary’s untrustworthiness is far more likely to lead to nuclear war. Her duplicity will frustrate our allies and embolden our enemies. All will know where they stand with Mr. Trump.

For Mr. Xi, the moment reflected how China’s wait-and-see approach to the new U.S. president paid off. Beijing had made clear to the Trump administration that U.S. adherence to the “One China” policy was an inviolable precondition for relations.

After his Oval Office meeting with Mr. Abe, Mr. Trump at a news conference reassured Japan and other Asia-Pacific nations that he wouldn’t unravel decades of American foreign policy by scaling back the U.S. military presence in region. Allies feared he would do so after he questioned the buildup and suggested during his campaign that countries like Japan and South Korea may need to acquire nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump’s agreement to uphold the One China policy marks one in a series of stances toward Asia that he’s tempered since taking office. He had brushed off his call to Ms. Tsai as of little consequence, and vowed to use the One China policy as leverage in negotiations with China on contentious security and economic issues.

Similarly, prior to his confirmation as Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson walked back previous statements that the U.S. might block China’s access to islands it has built in the South China Sea, saying that the U.S. should be “capable” of limiting such access, should a contingency occur.

201 to 250: “Very Unhealthy.” Throat-clearing brings up a lot of phlegm. The sun looks dim through the haze, like a 30-watt bulb. This must be the way sun looks from Mars, you figure. 251 to 500: “Hazardous.” You can taste the air the moment you wake up, even though you are inside your apartment and the windows are closed. Your cat’s fur smells funny. Outside, the world seems muffled, and the tickle in your throat extends down into your lungs and rests there like a tiny gremlin. You plan a trip to Tokyo or any city outside China.

Above 500: Yes, it actually goes beyond the scale. In Beijing, these are called “crazy bad” days

In the U.S., on the worst day in the worst city—usually somewhere in California—the AQI is typically about 125.

Expats and increasingly Chinese often wouldn’t let their small children outside if the AQI was more than 150. Schools called off games at around 200. I wouldn’t jog above 165, and Deb thought I was crazy for running at that level. When you breathe more deeply, the tiniest particles,─the ones that can do the most damage,─can lodge more deeply in your lungs.

On a day when the AQI reached 746, as it did in January 2013, I couldn’t decide whether the sky over Beijing looked more like it was filled with the smoke from an encroaching forest fire or like the residue of a giant cigarette butt.

Some people left Beijing, which tied for 21st out of 199 Chinese cities for bad air, for Shanghai, which was tied for 121st in the bad-air rankings

According to the World Health Organization, “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

The Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.

The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency. “The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement. 1 of 11 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × fa fa

The mayor — elected after her predecessor, Dayne Walling, experienced fallout from his administration’s handling of the water problems — said in the statement that she was seeking support from the federal government to deal with the “irreversible” effects of lead exposure on the city’s children. Weaver thinks that these health consequences will lead to a greater need for special education and mental health services, as well as developments in the juvenile justice system.

To those living in Flint, the announcement may feel as if it has been a long time coming. Almost immediately after the city started drawing from the Flint River in April 2014, residents began complaining about the water, which they said was cloudy in appearance and emitted a foul odor.

Since then, complications from the water coming from the Flint River have only piled up. Although city and state officials initially denied that the water was unsafe, the state issued a notice informing Flint residents that their water contained unlawful levels of trihalomethanes, a chlorine byproduct linked to cancer and other diseases.

Protesters marched to City Hall in the fierce Michigan cold, calling for officials to reconnect Flint’s water to the Detroit system. The use of the Flint River was supposed to be temporary, set to end in 2016 after a pipeline to Lake Huron’s Karegnondi Water Authority is finished.

Through continued demonstrations by Flint residents and mounting scientific evidence of the water’s toxins, city and state officials offered various solutions — from asking residents to boil their water to providing them with water filters — in an attempt to work around the need to reconnect to the Detroit system.

That call was finally made by Snyder (R) on Oct. 8. He announced that he had a plan for coming up with the $12 million to switch Flint back to the Detroit system. On Oct. 16, water started flowing again from Detroit to Flint.

Still, other drivers said the job wasn’t overly difficult. “It’s about being alert, if you can’t be alert for a few straight hours then you’re not a very good driver,” a former Waymo test operator said. Video taken from inside the Uber vehicle, released by Tempe police, appears to show the vehicle heading straight into the pedestrian without slo

It is the second time in a year that Uber has ​temporarily halted testing following an accident involving one of its autonomous cars.

Uber began making the transition to using single test operators nearly three years after embarking on self-driving vehicle development. General Motors Co.’s Cruise Automation self-driving unit, which was founded in 2013, still has two test drivers in every car. Waymo—which has logged more than five million testing miles, by far the most of any company—began using one safety operator in many of its cars in 2015, about six years after its program began. Waymo now runs most vehicles without humans behind the wheel in the Phoenix area and plans to launch a commercial robot service later this year.

d under stress. California, where a lot of testing occurs, requires companies to disclose such “disengagements” of the autonomous technology, and unnecessary disengagements can interfere with learning and improving the technology.

The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.

Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.

is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.

There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.

A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.

Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.

WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.

Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.

Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information

Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.

A new study by finance professors Aleksandar Andonov of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Joshua Rauh of Stanford University looks at expected returns among more than 230 public pension plans with more than $2.8 trillion in combined assets.

For their portfolios, generally consisting of cash, U.S. and international bonds and stocks, real estate, hedge funds and private-equity or buyout funds, these pension plans report that they will earn an average of 7.6% annually over the long term. (That’s 4.8% after their estimates of inflation.) These funds often define “long term” as between 10 and 30 years.

Based on how they divvy up their money, how much are these pension funds assuming specific assets will earn?

They expect cash to return an average of 3.2% annually over the long run; bonds, 4.9%; such “real assets” as commodities and real estate, 7.7%; hedge funds, 6.9%; publicly traded stocks, 8.7%; private-equity funds, 10.3%.

consider bonds. The simplest reliable indicator of how much you will earn from a portfolio of bonds in the future is their yield to maturity in the present. With 10-year Treasurys yielding 2.6% and investment-grade corporate bonds averaging under 3.7%, it would take a near-miracle today to get anything close to 4% out of a high-quality fixed-income portfolio.

That’s below the U.S. average of 10.2% annually over the past 90 years. But stocks were far cheaper over most of that period than they are today, so their returns were naturally higher.

stocks aren’t likely to earn more than an average of 5.9% annually over the long run from today’s lofty prices.

Among those, the least implausible scenario is higher inflation. So the pension funds could hit their 8.7% stock return that way — but such a surge in the cost of living would crimp their bond returns. What they would gain on their stocks they would lose on their bonds.

the new study of estimated returns finds that the older a pension fund’s holdings of private equity are, the more likely its officials are to extrapolate those returns — as if the good times of the early 2000s, when deals abounded and buyouts were cheaper, were still rolling.

Why do expectations among pension plans run so high? Because they have to, the chief investment officer of a large public pension plan tells me. State laws guarantee generous retirement benefits for millions of current and former government employees. To appear as if they can meet those obligations, the pension plans have no choice but to set their expected returns higher than reality is likely to deliver.

That’s the exact opposite of what the rest of us should do. Sooner or later, investors who build their expectations on hope rather than on arithmetic end up sorry.

There are 12.3 million Hispanic people aged 38-to-53 living in the U.S. who have worked and saved their way to establish home buying power, and these are precisely the people who need help navigating the process in their own language. But the issues they face once they enter the market include not having real estate professionals who can guide them and cater to their unique needs. 

The need to have a translator (whether a family member, friend or colleague) complicates the process, and NAHREP reports that the number of Spanish-speaking real estate professionals needs to double in order to keep up with the demand.

The question remains: If realtors cannot help with translations and the needs of this community, how can home buyers truly understand the details around the process?

Many of these questions revolve around where to get started, how to apply for a mortgage loan, what is the required credit score and more. Mortgage lender Rocket Mortgage has created a Spanish language-based learning center to help first-time home buyers navigate the process.

Some of the most important terms that require translation that those in the Latinx/Hispanic communities don’t often see or hear translated are mortgage (“hipoteca”), interest rate (“tasa de interés”) appraisal (“evaluación” or “tasación”), and escrow (“fideicomiso”).

This opens up new opportunities for families to become better informed and further benefit from using loans to buy their first home in order to build wealth.