The other night, as I began the expansive and continually growing routine of putting my 11-month-old son to bed, we sat together on the rocking chair in his room and read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr, and met a tiger who just would not stop eating. My son wasn’t yet ready for sleep and made that clear, so we read Chicken Soup With Rice, by Maurice Sendak. We encountered an elephant and a whale, and traveled through all the months of the year, braving the sliding ice of January and the gusty gales of November. Then we turned, as we always do, to Goodnight Moon, and met more bears, rabbits, a little mouse, a cow, some fresh air, and the stars.

As I slid the books back onto the shelf, they rejoined the long parade of animals around his bedroom: the moose and his muffin, Peter Rabbit, Elmer the patchwork elephant, Lars the polar bear, Lyle the crocodile, stuffed kangaroos and octopi and lions and turtles. Every night, I sing “Baby Beluga” to him as a lullaby: “Goodnight, little whale, goodnight.”

That evening, my mind jumped to a book I’d had when I was little that I recently bought for my son. It’s called Physty: The True Story of a Young Whale’s Rescue, by Richard Ellis. The book tells a slightly embellished but true tale of a sperm whale that ended up beached on the shore of Fire Island in 1981 and was nursed back to health by a group of scientists and vets. I loved learning that young whales gleefully dive and splash just like I did, and that they jump out of the water simply because it’s fun.

But lately, I have started to worry that I am populating my son’s imagination with species that could go extinct before he has a chance to understand that they’re real. We read about Physty the same way we do about Custard the dragon. To him, they are equally delightful and fantastical, neither real nor unreal. He sees fossils of dinosaurs, and I tell him that they disappeared millions of years ago. Even if whales or tigers don’t vanish entirely in the next several decades, in our age of accelerated environmental damage—climate change and what some scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction—I’m concerned that many of these books about the incredible, unlikely diversity of animal life on this planet will feel like fairy tales too.

I am a climate-change and environmental journalist, and thinking about whales now means considering the multiplying threats they face: warming waters, ocean noise, pollution, disappearing food sources, ship collisions, overfishing. Although many species’ populations have rebounded since the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, the outlook for others is not good: Of the 13 kinds of great whales, six are endangered or vulnerable.

[Read: How I talk to my daughter about climate change]

Whales aren’t the only threatened storybook animals. “We are going to lose Gorilla and Brown Bear, Brown Bear,”  says Hillary Young, a community ecologist and professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies our biodiversity crisis and is a mother of three. “But we’re also losing Frog and Toad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar, because our loss of animal life is so deep and pervasive.”

Scientists predict that as many as 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of going extinct, “many within decades,” according to the United Nations. This era of “biological annihilation” is already under way: In ecosystems spanning the globe, the average amount of plant and animal life has fallen by about a fifth—mostly since the beginning of the last century. Climate change is driving these dynamics by limiting or shifting species’ geographical ranges, which alters and removes the food, water, and habitat that they require.

In some ways, the current crisis is a new version of what has been happening from the age of colonization onward. It has become more intense in the centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity entered a new phase of exploitation and extraction of natural resources. The decline of animals and their habitats, and of the cultures that followed and relied on them, has long been colonialism’s destructive legacy, and Indigenous communities have warned for generations about its effects on their identity and survival. But given the quickening pace and severity of change, different forms of this phenomenon may come to pass in every community.

I’m relatively insulated from many of the worst effects of global warming thus far, but some parents don’t have the chance to worry about how to break the bad news about the planet to their kids, because their homes were destroyed in hurricanes or fires or floods. Despite having been born in 2022—one of the warmest recorded years in human history, which by October had marked 29 billion-dollar disasters, and which began with a North Atlantic right whale population of about 340, the lowest number in 20 years—my child is one of the lucky ones.

Plenty of difficult subjects lurk in the margins of children’s books but don’t evoke dread or guilt for me. When I read The Story of Ferdinand to my son, I don’t worry so deeply about the day he finds out from me, or elsewhere, what the banderilleros and picadors and matador want to do to the bull hero. But climate change feels different—it seems to foreclose the future. Scientists can study to what degree seas will rise and ice caps will melt and heat waves will bake the Earth. For the first time, we have a plausible model for what is to come, and we know that it will bring a diminished version of the world we were born into, a more chaotic and difficult one.

[Read: How extinction shaped the Australian outback]

Still, Young reminded me, for kids, this understanding is an example of a shifting baseline, a phenomenon that Daniel Pauly explored in 1995 in a paper about the attempt to establish sustainable commercial-catch levels for various fish species. Now the term is used to describe “new normals” more generally: Once we become aware of a set of conditions, we understand them as "normal," and they become the standard against which we compare any aberrance. Our books’ meanings have changed already, Young said. If Are You My Mother? were written today, the story might feel much more bleak, and the hatchling might not be able to find his mom: Since 1970, nearly 60 percent of the bird species in North America have seen population declines, a net loss of about 3 billion birds.

Perhaps it's a delusion to think that I will have much control over what my son learns about the natural world. I also don’t want to keep stories from him because they have become artifacts instead of portals to discovery. It seems possible, instead, to teach him about the world as it was while not shielding him from what is happening. Lauren Oakes, a conservation scientist and an author, also has a young son, and she says she is hesitant to introduce him to narratives of loss, though she also knows that she can’t shut out the reality of climate change entirely. Her son recently came home from a trip to the planetarium and barged into her office shouting, “The planet is changing!”

“Part of our job as parents is to foster wonder,” she told me. “I think our children are born into some innate reverence for nature, and that sometimes gets taken out of us.”

In a 1956 essay for Woman’s Home Companion, Rachel Carson, the marine biologist and author of Silent Spring, wrote about a child’s inborn sense of wonder. It can falter in adulthood, she warns, withered by disenchantment, preoccupation with the artificial, and “alienation from our sources of strength.” Carson urges her adult readers to encourage children’s capacity for exploration and connection.

She also suggests that the adults will get something out of it too, as we do with most acts of empathy. “Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you,” she wrote. “For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind … One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’”

[Read: Boston is losing its snow wicked fast]

We, or our children, may reach a day when there will be no more really snowy days in New York City, or no more monarch butterflies. I don’t entirely know what to do with Physty and Frog and Toad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar and Gorilla and the red fish and the blue fish. But abandoning these stories because the animals might go extinct feels like the worst kind of indulgence—it presumes that we can’t do anything to save the species we love. Of course we can, but it will mean changing our behavior and inhabiting this Earth in a way that is more compatible with different kinds of life. Addressing the climate and biodiversity crises requires collective action: voting; getting involved in civil society and advocating for environmental protection within our communities; asking questions and demanding transparency of the companies we work for and shop from; talking with our friends, families, and co-workers about the challenges we face together. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

If I knew that no one would ever see a sperm whale again, would I read my son the story of Physty at bedtime? I don’t know, but I’d rather teach him about the possibility of a world where people worked to make sure that cataclysmic future didn’t come to pass—one where he and I and his dad were part of that project. There is a flip side to the ability to imagine a future without these animals: imagining one with them.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a mortgage. I don’t know if you should buy a house. Nor am I inclined to give you personal financial advice. But I do think you should be wary of the mythos that accompanies the American institution of homeownership, and of a political environment that touts its advantages while ignoring its many drawbacks.

Renting is for the young or financially irresponsible—or so they say. Homeownership is a guarantee against a lost job, against rising rents, against a medical emergency. It is a promise to your children that you can pay for college or a wedding or that you can help them one day join you in the vaunted halls of the ownership society. In America, homeownership is not just owning a dwelling and the land it resides on; it is a piggy bank, where the bottom 50 percent of the country (by wealth distribution) stores most of its wealth. And it is not a natural market phenomenon. It is propped up by numerous government interventions, including the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. America has put a lot of weight on this one institution’s shoulders. Too much.

The consensus that homeownership is preferable to renting obscures quite a few rotten truths: about when homeownership doesn’t work out, about whom it doesn’t work out for, and that its gains for some are predicated on losses for others. Speaking in averages masks the heterogeneity of the homeownership experience. For many people, homeownership is a largely beneficial enterprise, but for others, particularly young, middle-income and low-income families as well as Black people, it can be risky. This critique isn’t new (not even at this magazine); in fact way back in 1945, the sociologist John Dean summed up many of my concerns in this quote from his book Homeownership: Is It Sound?: “For some families some houses represent wise buys, but a culture and real estate industry that give blanket endorsement to ownership fail to indicate which families and which houses.” This is my central critique: At the margin, pushing more people into homeownership actually undermines our ability to improve housing outcomes for all, and crucially, it doesn’t even consistently deliver on ownership’s core promise of providing financial security.

Luck Isn’t an Investment Strategy

As the economist Joe Cortright explained for the website City Observatory, housing is a good investment “if you buy at the right time, buy in the right place, get a fair deal on financing, and aren’t excessively vulnerable to market swings.” This latter point is particularly important. Although higher-income Americans may be able to weather job losses or other financial emergencies without selling their home, many other people don’t have that option. Wealth building through homeownership requires selling at the right time, and research indicates that longer tenures in a home translate to lower returns. But the right time to sell may not line up with the right time for you to move. “Buying low and selling high” when the asset we are talking about is where you live is pretty absurd advice. People want to live near family, near good schools, near parks, or in neighborhoods with the types of amenities they desire, not trade their location like penny stocks.

A home is bound to a specific geographic location, vulnerable to local economic and environmental shocks that could wipe out the value of the land or the structure itself right when you need it. The economic forces that have juiced demand to live in America’s coastal cities are extremely strong, but one of the pandemic’s enduring legacies may be a large-scale shift of many workers to remote environments, thereby reducing the value of living near the business districts of superstar cities. Making bets on real estate is tricky business. During the 1990s, Cleveland’s house prices outpaced both the national average and San Francisco’s. How confident are you that you can predict the ways in which urban geography will shift over your tenancy?

Timing isn’t the only external factor determining whether homeownership “works” for Americans. Paying off a mortgage is a form of “forced savings,” in which people save by paying for shelter rather than consciously putting money aside. According to a report by an economist at the National Association of Realtors looking at the housing market from 2011 to 2021, however, price appreciation accounts for roughly 86 percent of the wealth associated with owning a home. That means almost all of the gains come not from paying down a mortgage (money that you literally put into the home) but from rising price tags outside of any individual homeowner’s control.

This is a key, uncomfortable point: Home values, which purportedly built the middle class, are predicated not on sweat equity or hard work but on luck. Home values are mostly about the value of land, not the structure itself, and the value of the land is largely driven by labor markets. Is someone who bought a home in San Francisco in 1978 smarter or more hardworking than someone trying to do so 50 years later? More important, is this kind of random luck, which compounds over time, the best way to organize society? The obvious answer to both of these questions is no.

And for people for whom homeownership has paid off the most? Those living in cities or suburbs of thriving labor markets? For them, their home’s value is directly tied to the scarcity of housing for other people. This system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers.

Housing Policy Is Built on a Contradiction

At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight: Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.

What makes this rather obvious conclusion significant is just how common it is for policy makers to espouse both goals simultaneously. For instance, in a statement last year lamenting how “inflation hurts Americans pocketbooks,” President Joe Biden also noted that “home values are up” as a proof point that the economic recovery was well under way. So rising prices are bad, except when it comes to homes.

Policy makers aren’t unaware of the reality that quickly appreciating home prices come at the cost of housing affordability. In fact, they’ve repeatedly picked a side, despite pretending otherwise. The homeowner’s power in American politics is unmatched. Rich people tend to be homeowners and have an outsize voice in politics because they are more likely to vote, donate, and engage in the political process.

In a 2018 survey of a sample of America’s mayors—in which most registered serious concerns about housing affordability—less than 25 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “It would be better if housing prices in my city declined.” Three years later, after skyrocketing housing prices made a long-simmering housing crisis real for even high-income Americans, still just 40 percent of participating mayors “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with that statement. The authors note that they found “somewhat higher support for this position among mayors of Western cities and more expensive cities.”

Relying on a Single Asset Isn’t Smart

The core benefit that homeownership is meant to offer is financial security. Yet in numerous ways it actually exposes homeowners to more risk. By concentrating wealth in one asset, middle-class homeowners are particularly exposed to regional economic and environmental shocks, like if a large employer decides to relocate or a hurricane devastates downtown. Events outside your control can completely wipe you out. It’s no surprise then that the wealthiest Americans are the least likely to store their wealth in their homes. Certainly, they benefit from owning their homes, but the wealthier the American, the more likely they are to hold their assets in equities and mutual funds. (During the pandemic, this difference made the rich even richer, as the stock market outperformed the housing market.)

Policy makers in favor of pushing more people into homeownership often note that housing wealth is regularly used for socially desirable ends, such as starting a business, retiring, or helping finance higher education. But when I asked Zillow economists how people use their home equity, they painted a different picture. Over the past two years, they found that roughly 22 percent of people tapped into their home equity, and that 70 percent of those people used it for home improvements; 39 percent to pay off debt; 29 percent to pay for a car, a vacation, or another costly item; and just 12 percent for college. None of these decisions are bad, per se, but they don’t jive with common perceptions of how housing wealth is put to use. (Additionally, remodeling with that wealth instead of, say, making more diversified investments actually increases individuals’ exposure to the risks of homeownership.) LendingTree similarly found that home improvement was the top reason for homeowners applying for home-equity loans or lines of credit.

Granted, the past couple of years may have been an aberration; people went crazy for home remodeling during the pandemic. But even pre-pandemic research cuts against common understandings of how homeowners use their equity. In 2011, then University of Chicago economists Atif Mian and Amir Sufi looked at how homeowners responded to rising home values and discovered that newfound equity wasn’t used for further investment or even to pay down expensive credit-card balances but rather largely for home improvement or other consumption. A now-familiar trend emerged in this research as well: Borrowing against home equity is the domain of homeowners in relatively poor financial positions. They found that almost 40 percent of total defaults from 2006 to 2008 were from 1997 homeowners who borrowed aggressively against the rising value of their houses.

People also tend to underrate the hidden costs of owning a home, including property taxes, utilities, maintenance costs, and upkeep. In an interview with UC Berkeley professor Carolina Reid in 2013, a low-income first-time homebuyer explained:

“The three months after we bought the house, we tripled our credit card debt. We were so focused on affording the house, we didn’t think about the moving costs. And things like buying trash cans for the bathroom or curtains. I think I must have gone to Target every day and walked out with $300 worth of stuff.”

Inequality Is Inevitable

Home values do not increase uniformly, which means the gains to homeowners differ by income, by geography, and by race. From 2010 to 2020, 71 percent of the increase in the value of owner-occupied housing accumulated to high-income homeowners. The geographic distribution of housing values may not be predictable, and is sometimes surprising, but it isn’t necessarily random, either. Riskier areas tend to be more affordable areas because the people who can pay to live elsewhere will do so. That means that the riskiest investments, and thus the worst potential outcomes for homeowners, are concentrated among people with less wealth to begin with. These differences are inevitable; that’s precisely why our political  obsession with homeownership as an investment is so misguided.

A single-minded pro-homeownership agenda can lead policy makers to ignore massive potential costs. Last year, for instance, NPR found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had offloaded foreclosed houses in federally designated flood zones on unsuspecting buyers, many of whom were first-time homeowners. A HUD spokesperson justified the move by explaining that the agency wanted to ensure that “property values” were maintained in these areas, so leaving the homes vacant was therefore unacceptable. More so than selling people a vulnerable asset nearly certain to erode their financial stability?

Racial disparities in housing are well-known but worth stressing. In 2018, the Brookings Institute researchers Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger compared homes in majority-Black neighborhoods with communities that have very few or no Black residents and found that even when controlling for “similar amenities” (school quality, access to businesses, crime), homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are worth 23 percent less, roughly $48,000 a home on average and $156 billion in cumulative losses.

In his book Know Your Price, Perry explains that majority-Black neighborhoods have higher crime rates, longer commute times, and fewer good public amenities (such as high-scoring schools) and private ones (such as highly rated restaurants). Although these factors of course affect price, they explain only about half of the differential between Black and white neighborhoods. The rest Perry attributes to racism. “Value, by and large, is socially constructed, and much of the way we have created practices to value homes are rooted in racist belief systems,” Perry explained to me.

Better government policy can resolve some racial inequities, but not all. Home value is subjective. Obviously labor-market conditions and public investments play a large role, but so do aesthetics and so do sometimes inarticulable feelings of belonging that cannot be quantified or explained, sometimes even to ourselves. When a prospective buyer walks into a neighborhood and sees several Black neighbors, no amount of government legislation can stop them from consciously or subconsciously lowering their assessment of the neighborhood’s value. These subjective assessments create a Black tax on home-price appreciation: The average 2007 owner who sold in 2018 earned a .9 percent annual return while the average Black seller earned a .4 percent return, according to research by the economist Matthew Kahn.

Even when Black Americans do build wealth through homeownership, downturns in the economy wipe them out. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 2005 to 2009, a time period covering the foreclosure crisis, Black households saw their median net worth fall by 53 percent, while white households saw just a 17 percent decline. And on the flip side, when the housing market is doing well, Black households tend to benefit less than white ones. The Boston Fed estimated that from January to October 2020, as mortgage rates plummeted, 12 percent of white, 14 percent of Asian, and 9 percent of Hispanic borrowers refinanced their homes—whereas only 6 percent of Black borrowers did, likely because of risk factors such as lower credit scores. The researchers found that the savings from refinancing totaled $5.3 billion in payment reductions a year—of which only 3.7 percent went to Black households.

One final inequality that often flies under the radar is generational inequality. When Americans buy homes under the expectation that values always appreciate, that’s an expectation that someone else will pay that increased price. In 2018, writing for City Observatory, the author and housing expert Daniel Kay Hertz aptly described homeownership as a Ponzi scheme: “It is, in other words, a massive up-front transfer of wealth from younger people to older people, on the implicit promise that when those young people become old, there will be new young people willing to give them even more money. And of course, as prices rise, the only young people able to buy into this ponzi scheme are quite well-to-do themselves.”

Fundamentally, the U.S. needs to shift away from understanding housing as an investment and toward treating it as consumption. No one expects their TV or their car to be a store of value, let alone to appreciate. Instead, Americans recognize that expensive purchases should reflect their particular desires and that the cost should be worth the use they get out of them.

Just as higher-wealth households spread their assets among various equities and mutual funds, so should the government encourage and aid lower- and middle-income households in doing the same. Not only would this shift in emphasis help American families diversify risk, but it would help them avoid many of the unavoidably unequal features of the housing market. As the economist Nela Richardson told Marketplace: “A stock in Apple is the same for everybody.” It doesn’t know whether you are Black or white, rich or poor, and the fortunes of all investors are tied together if the stock market does poorly, meaning highly engaged shareholders will hold companies accountable for poor returns or bad management decisions—a benefit that accrues to all investors.

I should be explicit here: Policy makers should completely abandon trying to preserve or improve property values and instead make their focus a housing market abundant with cheap and diverse housing types able to satisfy the needs of people at every income level and stage of life. As such, people would move between homes as their circumstances necessitate. Housing would stop being scarce and thus its attractiveness as an investment would diminish greatly, for both homeowners and larger entities. The government should encourage and aid low-wealth households to save through diversified index funds as it eliminates the tax benefits that pull people into homeownership regardless of the consequences.

Right now, homeownership is the default option for most people with savings. That’s true in part because of the perceived benefits that I mentioned above but also because we make renting a nightmare in this country. In order for homeownership to be a meaningful choice, tenancy has to be one too. Part of what people are purchasing when they move from being a tenant to an owner-occupant is freedom from landlords.

If we are interested in helping low- and middle-income people live well, we need to fix renting. Some potential policies include increasing oversight of the rental market, providing tenants with a right to counsel in eviction court to reduce predatory filings, advancing rent-stabilization policies, public investment in rental-housing quality, and, most important, building tons of new housing so that power shifts in the rental market from landlords to tenants. Even if nothing changes and America’s love affair with homeownership continues, tens of millions of people will continue renting for the duration of their lives, and almost everyone will rent for at least part of their life. Financial security, reliable and reasonable housing payments, and freedom from exploitation should not be the domain of homeowners.  

Let housing be a home; let it provide shelter, access to good jobs, and safe and healthy communities. Just don’t let it be an investment.

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During the holidays, many of us look close to home as we remember the least fortunate among us. But don’t forget that millions of people around the world, including in Ukraine, are living not only with poverty and deprivation but under wartime conditions.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Justice is coming for Donald Trump. Boston is losing its snow wicked fast. The Trump abandonment has begun. A Violent Winter

This time of year, many of us dip some cash into a bell-ringer’s kettle or donate canned goods. We increase our giving to religious organizations or community associations. The better folks among us commit the most valuable commodity of all—time—to volunteer work. And so we should. (America is a wealthy nation and many of our pets have better health care than millions of human beings here and around the world.)

We should take a moment to remember that millions of people will not be wrapping presents or checking with the family to decide what to serve for dinner. Instead, they will be trying to stay alive. For many people around the world, survival is endangered by exposure or hunger or disease. The citizens of Ukraine will struggle with all of these challenges while also enduring a steady rain of Russian missiles whose sole purpose is murder. Ukrainians are going to sleep in shelters worried that they will find their children hungry or cold in the morning, or perhaps even blasted to pieces by criminals acting on the orders of a cowardly dictator.

This weekend, The New York Times published a detailed examination of the Russian war against Ukraine. It is a rebuke to every self-described “realist” and harrumphing geostrategist engaged in long chin-pulls about the weight of history, NATO expansion, the culpability of the West, and all of the other overintellectualized excuses for Russia’s campaign of brutality. This war is the product of a small circle of conspirators led by one man who is seized by nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, by the belief that he is the savior of a new Russian Empire, and by the conviction that he is a great historical figure.

Paranoid about COVID-19 and bunkered in his palace, Vladimir Putin hatched his plans for an invasion. “Mr. Putin’s isolation,” the Times reported, “deepened his radicalization, people who know him say. He went 16 months without meeting a single Western leader in person.” And the few people allowed into his presence have continuously fed his grandiosity and detachment from reality:

“If everyone around you is telling you for 22 years that you are a super-genius, then you will start to believe that this is who you are,” said Oleg Tinkov, a former Russian banking tycoon who turned against Mr. Putin this year. “Russian businesspeople, Russian officials, the Russian people—they saw a czar in him. He just went nuts.”

Instead of trying to talk Putin out of plunging into disaster, the Russian president’s circle of sycophants decided to indulge him. In the words of the Times report, they “had an incentive to cater to the boss’s rising self-regard—and to magnify the external threats and historical injustices that Mr. Putin saw himself as fighting against.”

We know what happened next. Perhaps Putin thought his troops would plant the imperial Russian eagle in Kyiv, maybe even in a ceremony drenched in the strains of the Russian national anthem (whose music Putin nostalgically recycled from the old Soviet national anthem). Instead, years of corruption and lies and decadence created a Russian army that couldn’t sprint a few hundred miles from Russia and Belarus to capture Kyiv, much less subjugate an entire nation of 44 million people spread out over an area larger than France. As the humiliations mounted in the field for Russia’s hapless military, they raped and tortured and murdered civilians. In Moscow, a bewildered and enraged Putin decided on a new strategy: The Ukrainians would be punished for their insolence, broken as a nation, starved and frozen until they begged the new emperor for mercy.

The Ukrainians, of course, have not been broken, and they have not surrendered. But the campaign of atrocities continues; over the weekend, Russia launched a barrage at crucial infrastructure in cities across Ukraine, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia. The holidays this year will be marked not only by shortages of power, heat, water, food, and medical care but by the constant fear that every night could end in carnage.

Russians who know Putin told the Times that the Kremlin dictator is willing to take untold numbers of casualties rather than abandon this war. (His butcher’s bill, according to Pentagon estimates, has already surpassed 100,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded.) There will likely be another offensive in the east and perhaps another attempt to take Kyiv itself. There is not much we can do in the short term to alleviate the individual suffering of Ukrainian families, but the West must continue to help Ukraine defend itself. Indeed, it’s possible that this latest missile salvo was in response to America’s decision to send a Patriot anti-missile battery to Ukraine, showing yet again that no one makes a better case for aiding the fight against the Russians than Putin himself.

One thing we can all do is remember the Ukrainians, who are celebrating Christmas (and Hanukkah and the coming new year) under the guns and missile batteries of their Slavic “brothers.” We must not forget them. Putin certainly won’t.

Related:

How we survived winter in wartime “I just wanted the whole thing to be over.” Today’s News The House January 6 committee held its final public meeting and referred evidence against Donald Trump to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. An arctic blast will hit parts of the country over the coming week. Christmas temperatures will likely be lower than they’ve been in almost 40 years. Elon Musk opened a Twitter poll last night asking his followers whether he should step down as CEO of the company (and pledging to adhere to the results). More than 17 million users responded; the majority voted that he should step down. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf compiles readers’ views on how to address the opioid crisis. The Great Game: In a world that fetishizes youth, Lionel Messi showed why late-career style is often the greatest, Franklin Foer writes. The Wonder Reader: Why are we awkward? Isabel Fattal explores the science behind our most graceless moments.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read (Erik Carter / The Atlantic; Getty)

Like Uber, but for Militias

By Antonia Hitchens

One problem with defining extremism in America today is how many people think the U.S. government is what’s extreme. In his 1995 essay “The Militia in Me,” Denis Johnson describes meeting two men campaigning for the 1992 presidential candidate Bo Gritz, a far-right former Special Forces officer. “Both men believed that somebody had shanghaied the United States, that pirates had seized the helm of the ship of state and now steered it toward some completely foreign berth where it could be plundered at leisure.”

This fall, I set out to meet today’s version of such alienated activists, who were looking for solace in a civilian defense group. On a street corner in West Covina, just outside Los Angeles, one of them, Vincent Tsai, told me: “We need to be armed and ready. We need to be our own self-defense.” After being suspended from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for refusing to comply with mask and vaccine mandates, he was running for State Senate in November’s elections. (He didn’t win.)

In Friday-afternoon traffic, wearing yellow shorts, he stood with his 7-year-old son at the intersection of two congested thoroughfares, handing out flyers. His wife, Gigi, who teaches a free weekly exercise class called Patriot Pilates, was with him, collecting signatures on a clipboard for his campaign.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

We can’t solve all the trouble in the world, but we needn’t feel overwhelmed. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, my father took me aside and showed me that he had joined one of the charities for children, an organization called Christian Children’s Fund at the time. CCF provided a photo and a biography of a particular kid and encouraged the donor to write to their “sponsored” child. My father was a sensible man and knew that his donations went to a large pool, but he liked the idea and told me that it was important for everyone who could do so to take responsibility for just one other person somewhere in the world. He kept a photo of his sponsored child near his desk. I knew my father donated to our church and to local charities, but I’d never seen this side of him.

In the mid-1980s, I got my first steady professional job. I, too, sponsored a child, and I have done so now for almost 40 years. CCF, in the early 2000s, joined a network of child-relief charities that all today go by the name ChildFund, and I have now seen at least four children grow to adulthood and leave the program. When my daughter was growing up, we sponsored a child together, and she wrote notes to another child (like her, an Orthodox Christian, but in Ethiopia); we still keep the picture of a sponsored child in our home. It’s a tiny thing, but somehow, I feel less helpless by doing it.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Frank Salemme was serving a life sentence for killing a Boston nightclub owner in 1993.

My first winter in Boston, the last patches of snow on my street didn’t melt until late June. It was 2015, the year the city broke its all-time record for annual snowfall: 110.3 inches, more than twice the average. Public transportation morphed into a hellscape. Schools racked up so many snow days that some had to extend the academic year. Dogs began to summit snowbanks to break out of fenced-in yards; a homegrown Yeti appeared to help locals shovel. The city eventually ran out of places to dump the piles of snow—prompting then-Mayor Marty Walsh to consider throwing it all into the harbor like so much British tea.

It was an epic winter, New England at its picturesque best. And I, a born-and-bred Californian, absolutely hated it. If you’d told me at the time that Boston winters would get only milder as the years wore on, I honestly might have said, “Great.”

The problem, of course, is that winters in Boston, and the rest of New England, have gotten decidedly too mild. The northeastern swath of the United States and the ocean waters around it have become two of the world’s fastest-warming places—a trend that’s “most pronounced during winter,” says Alix Contosta, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of New Hampshire. Studies from Contosta and others have shown that, over the past century, climate change has cleaved about three weeks off of snow’s typical tenure in the Northeast. Should that trend continue through the next hundred years, snow may someday cover New England’s landscape for only about six weeks a year, about half the norm of recent decades. In the American Northeast, an iconically winter-loving part of the world, the rapid loss of snow may deliver a particularly harsh blow—and serve as a bellwether for some of climate change’s most visible effects worldwide.

Growing frostlessness is hardly just a New England problem. Nowhere is warming faster than the Arctic, where sea ice continues to vanish at alarming rates, imperiling countless creatures that need it to survive. In the American West, typically snowcapped mountains are bare, depriving the drought-prone region of water. And northerly countries such as Iceland have begun to hold funerals for glaciers felled by the planet’s implacable heat.

[From the January 1995 issue: In praise of snow]

New England, though, is uniquely positioned to lose its frozen flakes. It sits at the nexus of several climate-change-driven forces that are colliding with increasing frequency. The Gulf Stream, a strong ocean current that lifts warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up and east into the North Atlantic, has been weakening under the influence of climate change, leaving toasty tides that should be in Europe instead lingering along America’s East Coast. (That’s also why winters in many parts of Europe are getting more extreme.) The resulting coastal heat curbs the amount of snow that falls and hastens the pace at which flakes on the ground melt. At the same time, hotter oceans leave more moisture in the air—so when it gets cold enough, more snow falls. And the Arctic, as it heats up, is doing a worse job of clinging to its chill, which now frequently dribbles down the sides of the globe like the whites of a cracked egg.

The result is that New England sees fewer snowstorms, and many of the ones that do still appear are harsher and more prolific than the historical average. “We’re seeing less of the little nickel-and-dime storms and more of the blockbuster storms,” says Judah Cohen, a Boston-based climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. The winter season has also become wetter and more volatile. More precipitation descends as rain; the season whipsaws between hot and cold, interspersing freak blizzards with bizarre heat waves.

As temperatures continue to climb, seasons—once cleanly separated from one another by quirks such as humidity and heat—“are starting to meld into each other,” says Jacqueline Hung, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Winters are beginning later and ending sooner; eventually, “we might start to see a loss of four seasons,” Hung told me.

[Read: What’s dangerous about an early spring]

That shift has become visible in the span of just decades. Chris Newell, a co-founder of the Akomawt Educational Initiative and a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, recalls the snowy seasons of his childhood in Indian Township, Maine, stretching from December through March. Powder would pile up so high on the side of his house that he could nearly clamber onto his roof. Now “it’s like a different world,” he told me—a change that threatens the identity of his community. Passamaquoddy history is interlaced with the land; the tribe’s very name is an homage to their love for spearing pollock. A warming world isn’t just about the climate, Newell said: “This is going to change our relationship to our own territory.”

Many New Englanders still consider frequent flurries a nuisance—something they have to shovel away or kick through. But snow’s seasonal tenure has long supported local livelihoods; its impending sabbatical threatens them. Ski resorts, stripped of their main source of commerce, have turned to synthetic snow or closed down. Loggers, best able to do their work when the ground is frozen or snow-covered, are now struggling to harvest timber without damaging the soil. Rising temperatures year-round may even make maple syrup in some parts of New England harder to collect and less sweet.

And it’s not just humans in climate change’s crosshairs. “I don’t think people appreciate everything that snow does for us,” the University of New Hampshire’s Contosta told me. Snow acts as an insulator for fragile soil, swaddling it like a fluffy down coat; its light, shiny surface reflects the sun’s rays so they don’t overtoast the earth. Plants and microbes thrive beneath it. Animals burrow inside of it to evade predators. When snow vanishes from habitats, frost is forced deeper into the soil, causing tree roots to die and rot. Lyme-disease-carrying ticks—normally killed off by winter frost—survive into spring at higher rates, which allows them to latch on to more mammals, such as moose and humans, as temperatures warm. Also worrying is the torrential rainfall replacing snow, which can leach nutrients out of soil and dump them into rivers, starving local forests and fields, says Carol Adair, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Vermont.

These changes are happening so quickly that local wildlife can’t keep up. Alexej Sirén, another University of Vermont ecologist, told me that many snowshoe hares, which have evolved over millennia to seasonally camouflage themselves, are now shedding their brown summer coats for white winter ones before snow blankets the ground. During the particularly snowless winter of 2015 to 2016, hunters told Sirén they felt guilty: The hares had just gotten too easy to catch.

Snow is woven into the cultural DNA of America’s Northeast as well. New England, so the saying goes, has “nine months of winter and three months of darned poor sledding”; the first photographs of snowflakes were snapped by a farmer in Vermont. And it should surprise exactly no one that The Atlantic—which used to be based in Boston—has published some lengthy odes to nature’s dandruff, including one that is titled, simply, “Snow.”

[From the February 1862 issue: Snow]

Of course, appreciation for snow was here long before there was a New England at all. Darren Ranco, an anthropologist at the University of Maine and a member of the Penobscot Nation (which won many an early winter battle against English colonizers because it was the only side wearing snowshoes), told me that his people’s notion of seasons is tied to the 13 moons that make up each year. Two of them, takwaskwayí-kisohs (“moon of crusts of ice on the snow”) and asəpáskwačess-kisohs (“moon when ice forms on the margins of lakes”), roughly correspond to March and December, respectively. Now “that doesn’t make as much sense,” Ranco said.

In the aftermath of gargantuan nor’easters, climatic trends are easy to forget—a possible risk this coming winter, which Cohen thinks may be snowier than the past two. It’s easy, Adair told me, to slip into the mindset of “Oh, it’s cold, so everything’s fine.” A sturdy storm or two might (like fresh snowfall, perhaps) erase worries about what the rest of the century could bring.

But many people need only look into their own past to recognize what has been lost. Contosta fell in love with the snowscapes of New England when she moved to Connecticut in the 1990s. While on a walk in the woods, she saw, for the first time, how crystals cloaked the ground and branches in gleaming veils of pearl. “The woods took on a totally different personality in the snow,” she told me. In the two-plus decades since, Contosta has watched much of that powdery wonderland literally melt away. The winter ground is barer; the trees are nuder. Even her two sons feel ambivalent at best these days about winter. The elder—who is adopted and spent his toddlerhood in Florida—“went berserk” when he moved to New England about 10 years ago. “He ran outside with bare feet in his pajamas and was eating snow off the trees,” Contosta told me. “He thought it was the most amazing thing.” Now, though, the start of the year brings mostly slush.

[Read: Why so many people hate winter]

On the precipice of my ninth New England winter, I’m still not a total convert. But I’ve been in this area long enough to get nostalgic for the snow I once loathed. I don’t know what the Northeast is without snowy winters. I wonder how I will describe snow to a generation that might only rarely get to see it—how I will explain to children of the future why Norman Rockwell paintings look so white. I don’t regret the horror I felt when I experienced my first big snowstorm. But the next one I’m in, I’ll try to enjoy while I still can.

Paul Sax is a Harvard epidemiologist who likes to play poker. Every few weeks, he plays with friends in Boston. Recently, when it was Sax’s turn to host, one of the game’s regulars came down with a cold. The player, Sax told me, tested negative for COVID—but offered to stay home anyway.

Sax took him up on it. “Why go through the hassle of getting a cold?” he told me, offering some practical advice: “If you’re going to the house of an infectious-disease doctor, don’t come with a cold.”

This fall, Americans have been sick. A “tripledemic” of COVID, the flu, and RSV is under way. COVID and flu hospitalizations are on the rise, while RSV cases may, thankfully, be peaking. And those are just three of the respiratory viruses currently circulating: Don’t forget about the rhinoviruses and coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Parents have been missing work in record numbers to take care of their children.

But of course, people want to hang—want to be with friends and family, especially after two years of holiday disruptions. In some ways, the question people face is the same one they have faced the whole pandemic: How can we spend time together safely? But the question is also different now, with so many more minor viruses circulating—people might be willing to take a chance on a runny nose or a sore throat. So should you stay home? How sick do you need to be to sit out the holidays a third year in a row?

For starters, pretty much everyone agrees that one symptom is an absolute no-go: fever. A temperature equals stay home, for at least 24 hours. (And no cheating with ibuprofen: You should be fever-free without pain meds.) Two other “red flag” symptoms some experts mentioned are vomiting and diarrhea.

Beyond that, it gets a bit trickier. One reason is that some of these viruses can feel the same, which means you might have to treat cold symptoms as if they could be a more severe illness. For example, RSV “feels just like a cold for everybody except those under 2 years old—particularly under six months—and those over 65,” Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, explained to me, speaking in general terms.

Tests can offer clarity here—Yep, it’s the flu, not a cold—but not all tests are available over the counter. Which is a bummer, because, besides being a useful diagnostic tool, tests may give us a sense of a person’s contagiousness. At-home COVID rapid tests are thought to be a good measure of infectiousness; some experts recommend that you can leave isolation by testing out. That’s not an option for the flu, RSV, or a cold.

I asked Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College who formerly worked for the CDC, if there are any symptoms a person just doesn’t want to mess with in terms of getting other people sick. He told me that if I had asked him about this pre-pandemic, he would’ve offered that standard guidance about being fever-free for 24 hours and making sure your symptoms are resolving. But mass repeated COVID testing taught us that symptoms and their severity aren’t linked as closely as we thought to whether you can spread the coronavirus. “Even having no symptoms at all, you could be more infectious than somebody with symptoms,” he said. “The challenge is that similar types of large-scale analysis have not previously been done before for RSV or influenza.”

Without at-home tests or better research for other viruses, people can use the length of the infection to estimate whether they are still spreading the virus, though that gets into a gray area. In general, experts told me that the initial phase—the first week in particular—is the most important for staying home, because that’s when you’re likely the most contagious. Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told me that, as a parent, she keeps track of her children’s illnesses, marking day one of symptoms. With the flu and RSV, people can be contagious for as many as seven or eight days.

But that’s not a perfect rule: For example, in the case of RSV, some infants and people with weakened immune systems can spread the virus for as long as four weeks, she said. “Your individual health status is going to have an impact on how long you’re contagious,” Donald Milton of the University of Maryland told me, citing flu data suggesting that children and people with obesity stay contagious for longer. That’s not everyone, but even so, many people underestimate how long they will be sick with just a run-of-the-mill virus. “On average, a bad cold lasts 10 to 14 days,” Sax said. “And yet people seem to have almost amnesia about that fact.”  

For that reason, Milton draws a hard line: “Basically, you need to ask people, ‘If you’ve got cold or flu symptoms, please stay home.’” If people who are recovering from a virus do come to the gathering, they should wear a mask, he said.

One symptom that makes things difficult is a lingering cough. Once a person is past the initial phase of being sick, some coughs will continue to be caused by the virus, while others will be from irritation to the airways—almost asthma-like. And sorting out which is which is impossible, Sax explained. Either way, “you’re not going to be very popular at a party if you're coughing a lot,” he said, laughing. Sell told me she would personally not be concerned about a cough after two weeks but suggested that a person could reach out to their primary-care physician for advice.

Beyond considering the length of time since symptoms started, people can also take into account whom they plan to see over the holidays. The youngest and the oldest Americans are particularly at risk in this tripledemic. If you’re visiting a new baby or an elderly relative, that might be time for extra caution.

The COVID tool kit we’ve all grown so familiar with—wearing masks, running HEPA filters, opening a door or window for ventilation—can also be used to mitigate risk. On top of that, people can take precautionary measures, like staying up-to-date on flu and COVID vaccines. They can also remember to wash their hands. (Even though COVID is accepted to be transmitted by aerosols—and the flu at least partially so—experts are still debating whether RSV and rhinovirus are, Milton told me.) Scrubbing your hands clean can help protect you from not-respiratory-but-still-absolutely-miserable viruses, such as norovirus.

Perhaps above all, be considerate. Sax said that, in general, people were probably too lax about exposing others to their sickness pre-pandemic. “The kinder thing to do, the more generous thing to do, is to err on the side of just being cautious.” Families of young kids—where it can feel like someone is always sick—may find this winter frustrating. “It’s really, really challenging to navigate as a parent,” Jetelina said.  

Sell recommended using the golden rule, and considering whether you would want someone as sick as you sitting next to you. “Just because it’s not going to kill them doesn’t mean you’re like, ‘Ahhh, here you go. Here’s your Christmas present,’” Sell told me. “That’s not a gift anyone wants.”

Lindsey Konchar has known her best friend, Caroline, since Caroline was born. Their mothers have been best friends since the seventh grade, so even though Konchar is two years older than Caroline, and the two attended different schools in their hometown of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, there was no escaping each other. “We were quite literally forced to be friends,” Konchar told me. But even after they moved out of their mothers’ homes, the friendship continued.

Konchar stayed in Minnesota for college, while Caroline attended school in Boston and then moved to New York City, where she started dating someone. (Caroline is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) At first, the new relationship seemed marvelous, “all butterflies and roses,” Konchar recalled. But over time, Caroline’s updates on the relationship grew less cheerful, and more vague. To Konchar, a social worker, something seemed off, and a visit to NYC only solidified her concerns that Caroline’s partner wasn’t treating her well. “She wasn’t her happy-go-lucky self,” Konchar recalled. On the final day of her visit, Konchar decided to express her concerns about the relationship. She chose her words carefully, making sure to cite specific examples, use “I” statements, and clarify that she was speaking up only because she was worried about her friend’s safety. But Konchar could tell that Caroline wasn’t having it. “Her walls went up,” Konchar told me. “We didn’t talk for a long time.”

The dilemma that Konchar faced—whether to say something or bite her tongue—gets at a long-running debate about what it means to be a good friend. Is it appropriate to tell a friend when you think they’re making a bad decision? Or is a friend’s role to offer steadfast and unconditional support, and leave the unsolicited advice to parents, spouses, or siblings? Those parties may feel more entitled or obligated to speak up, because their relationships are better defined and more formalized. But it’s difficult to speak about authority or obligation in friendship, which is to some extent defined by what it’s not: Friends are those who choose to be in one another’s lives although they don’t fulfill a specific role. Even between close friends, it can be tricky to pin down exactly what, if anything, two people owe each other.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

By one view, like that of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the willingness to be “scrupulously truthful” in such moments is the core of friendship. All humans have blind spots; none of us is immune to poor decision making. A true friend, by MacIntyre’s account, is one who cares enough about our welfare to help liberate us from those illusions. “Friendships survive and flourish only if each friend can rely on the other’s truthfulness,” he once said. Another view, by contrast, holds that it is precisely our willingness to keep our mouth shut in the face of a friend’s error that allows any of our friendships to survive. “Almost always, such human relationships rest on the fact that a certain few things are never said, indeed that they are never touched upon; and once these pebbles are set rolling, the friendship follows after, and falls apart,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote.

Social-psychology research underscores the tension between these perspectives. Honesty is something people both expect and appreciate from close friends. Asked what makes for intimacy in a friendship, people say things like “If I’m making a mistake, my friend will let me know” or “If I need advice, my friend will give it,” according to a study conducted by Beverley Fehr, a psychology professor at the University of Winnipeg. But truthfulness isn’t all that people expect from their friends, and it doesn’t always square with friendship’s other duties. The subjects of Fehr’s study also emphasized the importance of statements like “No matter who I am or what I do, my friend will accept me.” People want honesty from their friends, but also unconditional support and validation. “We have strong expectations for friendships, but that doesn’t mean they can’t conflict with one another,” Fehr told me.

And however important people proclaim honesty to be, research suggests that most of us are very reluctant to confront our friends when issues arise. In another study, Fehr and her fellow social psychologist Cheryl Harasymchuk asked participants how they would handle a variety of problems in romantic relationships. “Regardless of the issue, people say, with a romantic partner, you should discuss it, not just let it be,” Fehr said. When asked to consider similar problems in the context of friendship, however, respondents opted for more subdued approaches. These generally fell into one of two camps: loyalty, which involves waiting out the issue and hoping it improves on its own, or what the researchers called neglect. “You just sort of pull away from the situation and let the relationship die a slow death,” Fehr told me. Asked what would happen if a friend addressed a problem in a more direct way, respondents weren’t as confident that it would do much good. It may be true, as MacIntyre insists, that doing right by our friends sometimes means telling them things they don’t want to hear, but Nietzsche is right that most friends won’t.

The prevailing “culture of passivity,” as Harasymchuk called it, that characterizes most friendships makes some sense. Friendship is a voluntary relationship, unbound by blood or law, which makes it easier to dissolve. In fact, because friendship involves no formal agreement, it’s not even necessary to declare the relationship over—you can just subtly back away from it or allow it to “wither on the vine,” as Fehr put it. Friendships aren’t monogamous, Harasymchuk pointed out, so in the event that you aren’t getting what you want from one friend, it’s easy enough to turn to another. Generally, and perhaps foolishly, people regard friendship as somewhat expendable, unworthy of the hassle of a confrontation. And the fact is, Fehr noted, a lot of friendships seem to be able to survive just fine despite their tendency toward passivity. As far as the preservation of the relationship is concerned, the risks of calling a friend out are high; the risks of keeping quiet are low.

When Leah Goldman, a certified professional life coach from Massachusetts, ended a long-term relationship after discovering that her partner had been cheating on her the entire time, she was baffled by how many of her friends admitted to having reservations about her ex. From her perspective, she’d offered plenty of opportunities to raise such concerns—she had often brought up her own apprehensions about the relationship—but, with a lone exception, no one had done so. When she asked her friends why they had never spoken up, she says most of them told her they just didn’t feel like it was their place to do so. The friend who did speak up lived across the country and had never actually met her partner. But after Goldman shared some of her reservations, the friend said Goldman’s partner didn’t sound like a great guy, and that she should probably end it. The conversation left Goldman feeling more conflicted than upset. Goldman thinks the experience has made her more likely to tell someone if she were to have reservations about their partner, but she harbors no ill feelings toward those of her friends who didn’t. “I can understand their point of view,” Goldman told me. “At the end of the day, they were there for me after the breakup, and that’s all that mattered to me.”

Of course, not all friends are so passive. And some manage to survive even bitter confrontations. Long-standing friendships like Konchar and Caroline’s have an advantage in this regard. A strong foundation of mutual trust makes it easier for friends to speak plainly with one another—and trust takes time to build. Fehr explains this in terms of something she calls the “idiosyncrasy credits.” At the start of any relationship, people tend to conform to societal norms. “Basically, we want to show that we’re pretty normal,” Fehr said. “So we behave in pretty routine ways.” But as the relationship strengthens, we earn the ability to deviate from such norms. If we’ve built up enough credit with a friend, we might feel more comfortable spending it by telling them that there’s something off about the way their partner talks to them or that we’re concerned by how much they’re drinking, or by confronting them about any difficult topic.

[Read: The decline of etiquette and the rise of “boundaries”]

And while telling a friend something they don’t want to hear may indeed cause your relationship with them to suffer, it’s possible that your friend will come to appreciate your honesty down the line. After about six months of silence following her trip to New York, Konchar got a call from Caroline. She had broken up with her boyfriend, and admitted that, although she wasn’t ready to hear it at the time, Konchar had been right about him. When I asked how the incident had affected their relationship in the long run, Konchar said that the conflict had been strangely good for them; it drove a wedge between them initially, but ultimately deepened and solidified their bond. There is something of a paradox at play here: Difficult honesty is a privilege of very close friendships, but it is also part of what draws two friends close.

From a practical perspective, it’s hard to make the case for committing to unflinching honesty as MacIntyre says good friends ought to. Nietzsche was correct, in some sense, when he said that withholding our true thoughts from our friends can help preserve our relationships with them. Because friendship comes with no guarantees. It is a gift; nothing is owed, exactly, only offered. To extend honesty, or anything else, to a friend is to run the risk of its rejection. But if it’s friendship of the closest sort that you are after, it’s a risk you’ll have to take.

When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.

But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.

You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them.

Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.

In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.”

Why is this so? Because these “superstar cities,” as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machine—and they all need homes to live in. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructure—housing—necessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.

It’s not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway.

I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.

With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but it’s not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East Coast and the Midwest have a lot more shelter capacity than the West Coast, which keeps homeless people more out of view.)

America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluth—and yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it’s simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.

Homelessness is best understood as a “flow” problem, not a “stock” problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homeless—the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county—but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.

The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even “low income” housing is still very expensive. A study led by an economist at Zillow shows that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent, homelessness spikes.

Academics who study homelessness know this. So do policy wonks and advocacy groups. So do many elected officials. And polling shows that the general public recognizes that housing affordability plays a role in homelessness. Yet politicians and policy makers have generally failed to address the root cause of the crisis.

Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction—in 2022, just 17 percent of homeless people reported that they’d lived in San Francisco for less than one year, according to city officials. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundant other research indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness. Consider, too, that some people move to superstar cities in search of gainful employment and then find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of living—not a phenomenon that can be blamed on welfare policies.

But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.

This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.

[Annie Lowrey: The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine]

Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years, roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn’t want affordable housing in their communities.

Los Angeles isn’t alone. The Bay Area is notorious in this regard. In the spring of 2020, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay, “It’s Time to Build,” that excoriated policy makers’ deference to “the old, the entrenched.” Yet it turned out that Andreessen and his wife had vigorously opposed the building of a small number of multifamily units in the wealthy Bay Area town of Atherton, where they live.

The small-c conservative belief that people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its way into liberal ideology. This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take serious action to address it.

The worst harms of the homelessness crisis fall on the people who find themselves without housing. But it’s not their suffering that risks becoming a major political problem for liberal politicians in blue areas: If you trawl through Facebook comments, Nextdoor posts, and tweets, or just talk with people who live in cities with large unsheltered populations, you see that homelessness tends to be viewed as a problem of disorder, of public safety, of quality of life. And voters are losing patience with their Democratic elected officials over it.

In a 2021 poll conducted in Los Angeles County, 94 percent of respondents said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. (To put that near unanimity into perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic congestion—in Los Angeles!) When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how unsafe “having homeless individuals in your neighborhood makes you feel,” 37 percent of people responded with a rating of 8 or higher, and another 19 percent gave a rating of 6 or 7. In Seattle, 71 percent of respondents to a recent poll said they wouldn’t feel safe visiting downtown Seattle at night, and 91 percent said that downtown won’t recover until homelessness and public safety are addressed. There are a lot of polls like this.

As the situation has deteriorated, particularly in areas where homelessness overruns public parks or public transit, policy makers’ failure to respond to the crisis has transformed what could have been an opportunity for reducing homelessness into yet another cycle of support for criminalizing it. In Austin, Texas, 57 percent of voters backed reinstating criminal penalties for homeless encampments; in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll said they supported shutting down “homeless tent encampments” even without firm assurances that those displaced would have somewhere to go. Poll data from Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, reveal similarly punitive sentiments.

This voter exasperation spells trouble for politicians who take reducing homelessness seriously. Voters will tolerate disorder for only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and measures, even in very progressive areas. In places with large unsheltered populations, numerous candidates have materialized to run against mainstream Democrats on platforms of solving the homelessness crisis and restoring public order.

By and large, the candidates challenging the failed Democratic governance of high-homelessness regions are not proposing policies that would substantially increase the production of affordable housing or provide rental assistance to those at the bottom end of the market. Instead, these candidates—both Republicans and law-and-order-focused Democrats—are concentrating on draconian treatment of people experiencing homelessness. Even in Oakland, California, a famously progressive city, one of the 2022 candidates for mayor premised his campaign entirely on eradicating homeless encampments and returning order to the streets—and managed to finish third in a large field.

During the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race, neither the traditional Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, who won, nor her opponent, Rick Caruso, were willing to challenge the antidemocratic processes that have allowed small groups of people to block desperately needed housing. Caruso campaigned in part on empowering homeowners and honoring “their preferences more fully,” as Ezra Klein put it in The New York Times—which, if I can translate, means allowing residents to block new housing more easily. (After her victory, Bass nodded at the need to house more people in wealthier neighborhoods—a tepid commitment that reveals NIMBYism’s continuing hold on liberal politicians.)

“We’ve been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years, and it’s likely going to take us 40 years to get out,” Eric Tars, the legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told me.

Building the amount of affordable housing necessary to stanch the daily flow of new people becoming homeless is not the project of a single election cycle, or even several. What can be done in the meantime is a hard question, and one that will require investment in temporary housing. Better models for homeless shelters arose out of necessity during the pandemic. Using hotel space as shelter allowed the unhoused to have their own rooms; this meant families could usually stay together (many shelters are gender-segregated, ban pets, and lack privacy). Houston’s success in combatting homelessness—down 62 percent since 2011—suggests that a focus on moving people into permanent supportive housing provides a road map to success. (Houston is less encumbered by the sorts of regulations that make building housing so difficult elsewhere.)

The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear. But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political revolt—especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will lead to humane policy change.

Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.

This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “The Looming Revolt Over Homelessness.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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