LOS ANGELES (AP) — The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate slipped after climbing for five consecutive weeks to a more than 20-year high, a modest relief for would-be homebuyers challenged by rising home prices and a thin inventory of homes on the market.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — California officials are expected to vote Thursday on a proposal to increase storage capacity at the site of the nation's largest known methane leak that sickened thousands of families and forced them from their Los Angeles homes in 2015.

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has brought its first enforcement action against a company for a non-fungible token (NFT) project. The violator in question is a Los Angeles-based media company called Impact Theory, which the federal securities regulator alleged sold NFTs that were actually unregistered…

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Abortion access. Gun safety. The treatment of immigrants. The size of the safety net. Ease of voting. LGBTQ rights. On any number of policy issues, red states and blue states have drifted apart from each other over the past three decades, widening the gaps between what families in different parts of the country pay in taxes, receive in benefits, and experience when interacting with the government. At the same time, the cost of housing in these states has diverged, too. Blue states have throttled their housing supply, leading to dramatic price increases and spurring millions of families to relocate to red states in the Sunbelt.

These trends have intensified in the past few years, as conservative legislatures have passed a raft of laws restricting abortion access and targeting LGBTQ Americans and as housing shortages have spread. Now many Americans find themselves stuck in states that are enacting conservative policies they do not support, but where real estate is cheap.

That is one takeaway from a new Redfin survey of people who rent their home, are thinking about moving, or recently moved. Respondents were much more likely to say that they wanted to live in a state where abortion and gender-affirming care were legal than not. But compared to those issues, they were twice as likely to cite housing costs as a major determinant of where they would live.

The report focused on two red states, Texas and Florida. They are among the 20 states that have restricted access to the medical termination of a pregnancy or banned abortion outright since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. And they are among the two dozen states that have implemented statutes affecting trans people: banning gender-affirming care, requiring trans youth to be identified by the gender they were assigned at birth, restricting trans kids’ participation in sports, or barring teachers from discussing what it means to be gay or trans.

Yet such states remain a draw for families from blue, coastal areas. “There’s this trade-off between living somewhere that you can afford and where you have access to jobs,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin, told me, versus living “where the laws are the way that you want them to be.”

In the survey, not everyone professed a policy preference, but roughly a third of Texans and Floridians who had recently moved or were likely to move said that they would like to live somewhere with legal gender-affirming care for kids. That is eight to 16 percentage points higher than the share who said they do not want to live somewhere where such gender-affirming care is legal. About 40 percent of respondents in those states said they would like to live somewhere with legal abortion access, twice as many as said they would prefer to live somewhere without it.

But folks were still much more likely to say that financial considerations played a primary role in where they had settled or would settle down. The cost of living, access to jobs, the size of available homes, and proximity to family were more commonly cited factors.

Over the past two decades, the country’s growing housing shortage has prevented Americans from moving as often as they used to, and as often as would make sense given the country’s wage trends. Jobs pay much more in Boston and Oakland than they do in small towns in Alabama or exurbs in Utah, a differential that has grown over time. But housing costs in those places rose so much due to supply restrictions that they became unaffordable and inaccessible for many would-be residents.

People who are moving tend to be moving to cheaper places. Differences in housing affordability have pulled Americans to the Sunbelt and the Mountain West, and pushed them from expensive megalopolises to smaller cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Redfin’s data, for instance, show that the average home in Miami is selling for $515,000 versus $705,000 in New York, the most common origin of out-of-state movers. Homes in Dallas are half the price of homes in Los Angeles.

“Even if people would want, in a perfect world, to move to a different place that didn’t have whatever-it-might-be laws, they’re kept in place by these bigger, more salient forces for them,” Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. (Frost did not work on the Redfin project.) “Even though there are abortion restrictions, people move because of affordability. Even though there are wildfires and more natural disasters in a place, people move because of affordability.”

Those migration trends have increased red states’ political influence. Texas and Florida alone have added more than 15 million residents over the past two decades, translating into a dozen additional congressional seats. Blue states, in contrast, have throttled their population growth. “It’s a policy choice on both fronts: California has chosen to protect abortion rights, and they’ve chosen to have policies that restrict housing,” Fairweather told me. “I don’t even know if policy makers understand this yet. But California’s housing policies have made the citizens of the United States have less access to those rights.”

In interviews, people personally affected by anti-LGBTQ laws described them as a strong motivator to leave the red states they call home. Jay Bates Domenech, a young trans person from suburban Utah, told me that the state’s political climate had pushed them to spend roughly $10,000 more a semester to go to college out-of-state: Domenech is moving to Colorado this week.

Domenech told me that they had been harassed and bullied for their gender in high school. “A few months ago, a kid followed me down the hallway calling me a pedophile. He took out his phone to take a picture of me,” they told me. “From the moment I came out, there was an underlying anxiety that something was going to happen to me.” Concerns about their physical safety and ability to access health care pushed them to move, they said, adding that they felt targeted by the state’s anti-LGBTQ politicians. “The increase in suicide rates and mental-health diagnoses—it’s something I am seeing at a personal, individual level,” they told me.

But many other queer and trans people don’t have the money or flexibility to uproot their lives. Anthony, who asked me to withhold his last name to avoid any threats to his family, moved from Maryland to Florida five years ago, purchasing a fixer-upper for $220,000. “I’m scared about what the Florida legislature is going to do,” he told me. He and his husband would like to move back to the D.C. area. But high interest rates and the higher cost of living would make it unaffordable to do so.

Redfin’s finding that people would prefer to live in places with legal access to abortion mirrors that of many other polls. States barring or tightening access to abortion have seen an 11 or 12 percentage-point increase in the share of people who say the medical procedure should be easier to obtain.

In the long term, the loss of abortion access is expected to intensify the country’s already intense geographic inequality. The hundreds of thousands of people forced to continue unwanted pregnancies will end up sicker and poorer for it: Not being able to terminate a pregnancy makes a person more likely to become impoverished, unemployed, in debt, and subject to eviction, and an abortion is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. Many companies are avoiding adding employees or doing business in states with strict bans.

Yet the Redfin data suggest that relatively few people will move because of changing health-care statutes. Abortion access is already heavily predicated on a person’s physical location and socioeconomic status: Wealthy Texans fly to Illinois for abortions; poor Tennessee residents find themselves stuck. “There are states that were destinations for people seeking abortions where clinics have closed post-Dobbs, forming abortion deserts, particularly in the southeastern and central United States,” Betsy Pleasants, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Wallace Center for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health, told me. Those deserts are simply too formidable and expensive for many people to cross.

Sam Dickman is one person who did leave Texas as a result of the state’s changing legal abortion landscape. He is a physician and an abortion provider. He and his partner moved to Montana so that he could continue to do his life’s work.

“I see patients traveling in from Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, all these states surrounding Montana, to get abortion care,” he told me. “The median abortion patient is a young, low-income person of color. These are populations who are struggling to afford rent.” He added: “If I asked a patient, Have you ever thought about moving to a place with better abortion access? It would be item No. 15 on their radar. They would look at me like, What are you talking about? I can’t afford to have a kid right now. Obviously, I can’t afford to move.”

This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.

Conservationists seeking to restore shark populations off the Atlantic coast of Panama were facing a problem all too familiar to biologists: No records existed to document what pristine shark communities looked like before overfishing decimated the animals over the past few decades. Without that information, how could the restoration workers know what they should be aiming for?

Erin Dillon, a paleoecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, thought she had the solution. By sampling microfossils—dermal denticles, the “little teeth on the shark’s skin,” as she describes them—deposited on the ocean floor, Dillon was able to reconstruct a picture of shark communities in the region before human disturbance. Shark abundance in the Caribbean reefs has declined by more than 70 percent, she found, with fast-swimming, open-water sharks hit the hardest.

Dillon is one of the rising stars in the new field of conservation paleobiology, which uses the fossil record to inform and assist present-day conservation efforts. “We often need some sense of the way things used to be before there was extensive human impact,” says Karl Flessa, a paleobiologist at the University of Arizona who coined the term conservation paleobiology two decades ago and co-authored an early look at the field in the 2015 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Conservation paleobiologists are using the past to establish pre-disturbance baselines, as Dillon has done. They are also documenting long-term patterns of habitat use and revealing previously unsuspected changes in ecosystems as a result of human activity. By uncovering how species have responded as past climates changed, they are helping researchers understand how the same species may respond to climate change today. And their results are guiding management plans for some of the world’s most endangered ecosystems.

[Read: How to tell if a dinosaur is fake]

Often, paleontological data offer the only practical way to understand the long-term ecological patterns that are so crucial to conservation decisions. That’s the case for caribou herds on the Arctic coastal plain of Alaska, which have proved difficult to study in real time. The animals migrate extensively, and they use different parts of their home range each year, so ecologists have a hard time knowing which areas are essential to maintaining caribou populations.

“There’s so much year-to-year variability,” says Joshua Miller, a paleoecologist at the University of Cincinnati. “It can be challenging to make conservation decisions when you don’t know the long-term value of a place.”

So Miller turned to the paleontological record—specifically, accumulations of the antlers the animals shed each year. Unusually for members of the deer family, females as well as males have antlers, which they shed shortly after calving. In the Arctic climate, these antlers remain intact for hundreds or thousands of years, providing a long-term record of where calving occurs. “You really can walk on the landscape today and get some essence of what caribou were doing thousands of years ago,” Miller says.

By counting and radiocarbon-dating these antlers, Miller was able to document that caribou have relied for thousands of years on the same calving grounds along the Arctic coast that a well-known major herd, the Porcupine herd, still uses—including a period 3,100 years ago when summer temperatures were even warmer than today. “That gives us some confidence that the patterns we see today should be maintained over the next period of climatic change,” Miller says.

And that’s not all the information to be gleaned from shed antlers. Miller also measured the ratio of two stable isotopes of the element strontium, which gets deposited in the animals’ antlers each summer because it’s chemically similar to the calcium that builds antler bone. Different habitats contain different ratios of the two strontium isotopes, so the ratio provides a way to track the animals’ summer range.

As with the calving grounds, the summer range of the Porcupine herd has remained stable over time, Miller found. But that’s not the case for the Central Arctic herd, which lives farther to the west. Before there was a lot of human activity, the strontium isotope ratio shows that the caribou spent much of their summer along the coast. But starting about 1980—roughly when oil development began along there—they began avoiding the coast and summering farther inland. While that is not conclusive proof that oil development caused the shift, Miller notes, it does point to the coastal region’s importance for the caribou—a key consideration for conservation.

[Read: Apparently this is what a swimming dinosaur looks like]

Occasionally, the fossil record completely changes the way conservationists think about an ecosystem. For example, ecologists had assumed that the muddy seafloor off the coast of Los Angeles had always been that way. But when the sedimentary geologist and paleoecologist Susan Kidwell of the University of Chicago and her colleague Adam Tomašových of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava began studying seafloor samples as part of a wastewater-monitoring program, they were surprised to find remains of shelly creatures called brachiopods. These don’t live on muddy seafloors but on hard, sandy, or gravelly bottoms.

Chemical dating of the shells revealed that the youngest remains dated from the late 19th century—about the time when the Los Angeles area was heavily grazed by cattle. Runoff from overgrazed, eroding soil, Kidwell and her colleagues concluded, most likely smothered the hard surfaces the brachiopods needed, resulting in the local extinction of an entire ecosystem. “Despite 50 years of close monitoring on one of the best-known continental shelves in the world, it was utterly unsuspected,” Kidwell says.

The discovery gives local conservationists a new target for their restoration efforts, though it could take years for the mud to wash away. In the meantime, Kidwell notes, it becomes more important to protect gravelly or sandy seafloors that still remain farther offshore, near the Channel Islands.

Fossils aren’t only useful for learning about the past, however. They can also suggest how plants and animals might respond to future events—most pressingly, climate change. For example, Jenny McGuire, a conservation paleobiologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and her colleagues studied fossilized pollen grains to see how 16 important plant taxa from North America responded to climate change over the past 18,000 years. Did the plants shift their ranges to follow their preferred climate, the researchers wondered, or did they stay put and make the best of things as the climate changed around them?

Twelve of the 16 taxa changed their geographic distribution to maintain similar climate niches, the researchers found—even in periods when the climate was changing rapidly. But such shifts may not be as easy today because of loss and fragmentation of their habitats. The lesson, McGuire says, is that plants that shifted instead of adapting locally could be at the greatest risk today and require extra conservation aid. “It tells you which plant taxa you have to worry about,” she says.

Conservation paleobiology is new enough that its insights are only starting to percolate through to the government agencies that make conservation decisions on the ground. That’s largely because institutional change takes time. “Any of us who actually work with agencies—as well as people who work for agencies—can tell you just how slowly and carefully and thoughtfully agencies change anything about what they do,” Kidwell says.

It is happening in a few places, though, most notably in the Florida Everglades, where decades of water diversions and drainage have significantly altered the natural flows of fresh water that maintain the ecosystem. Federal, state, and local governments are working to return the region’s water regimen closer to its natural state—but no records exist of what flow rates were before drainage began.

So Lynn Wingard, a paleoecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, turned to the fossil record. Wingard knew that each species of mollusk living in the Everglades has its own preferred level of salinity. By making a census of the relative abundance of shells of 68 kinds of mollusks in sediment cores and comparing it with data from living communities, she could estimate the average salinity at each point in time in the past.

Then one day she found herself in a meeting room with a hydrologist who knew how to predict salinity from water flow rates—and they and others in the room realized that they could turn his equations around and use salinity to figure out historic flow rates. “We all had this massive brainstorm: Yes, we can do this, and it would allow us to calculate flow before there was any flow monitoring,” Wingard says. Wingard’s salinity numbers are now the official targets for Florida Bay restoration.

[Read: The second life of Mongolian fossils]

In theory, paleobiologists could apply their techniques to explore ecosystems millions, or tens of millions, of years in the past. By doing so, they could treat the history of life as an enormous experiment—examining, for instance, repeated known periods of rapid climate change to see what characteristics put species at greatest risk of extinction.

But looking into deep time this way brings risks, experts say. Ecosystems do change, so ones indicated by fossil assemblages may differ from modern ones in important ways. “The farther back you go in time, the more difficult it is to predict things directly, because the species are different; the ecosystems function differently,” says Michal Kowalewski, a conservation paleobiologist at the University of Florida who heads a research network of practitioners in the field. “So the last few hundred years give us the most information.”

A further limitation of fossil data is that historic time periods get somewhat blurred. “However carefully you take a sample, it’s going to be a mixture of organisms that lived at different times,” Kowalewski says. That can make it difficult to use the fossil record to track changes that were rapid, especially as you go deeper into the past, where the blurring is often greater.

And practitioners note one more concern: Even if we can correctly identify the way ecosystems were in the past, it may be impractical to try to restore them to that state today. “It’s not as easy as, ‘This is what it used to be; we should bring it back to that,’” says Jonathan Cybulski, a historical ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Rhode Island. Sometimes—as is the case for the ocean floor off Los Angeles—conditions have changed so much that restoration is impractical. But even so, he notes, paleoecological data can help conservationists refine their targets.

Other times, restoration may even be undesirable. Grizzly bears, for example, used to thrive in coastal California, now among the most heavily settled parts of the state. Few would endorse returning grizzlies there.

Despite these concerns, conservation paleobiologists see a bright future in digging into the past to guide the future, because so many plants and animals leave fossils of some sort: pollen, teeth, shells, or other traces, especially from relatively recent times. “These archives are pretty much everywhere, both in terrestrial habitats and marine habitats. We can pretty much go to any region of the world and look at the young fossil record,” Kowalewski says. “In many ways, it’s even easier to do this than to inventory living biodiversity.”

The month I moved to Los Angeles felt apocalyptic, even by the standards of a city forever being destroyed in film. It was the end of the summer of 2020; stores were closed, streets empty, and wildfires had enveloped the region in smoke, turning the sky orange. Yet after I parked the U-Haul, things got even bleaker.

Walking to my new apartment, I passed a car where a 20-something had passed out with the engine running. Folks, I noticed, were sleeping in nearly every car on the street—a mix, I would later learn, of UCLA students and construction workers.

I had never encountered vehicular homelessness before moving out West. Indeed, it hadn’t even registered to me as a possibility, as a thing one might do to avoid sleeping on the street. In New York City, most homeless people don’t own cars, and in any case, the city has a legal obligation to provide shelter. This is not true in California.

Nearly 20,000 Angelenos live in RVs, vans, or cars, a 55 percent increase over when the count first started, in 2016. As the housing shortage deepens, thousands more will likely be forced into this lifestyle. Many of these people do not have the mental-health or substance-abuse issues eagerly trotted out to dismiss the homelessness crisis. A significant minority have jobs—they’re people who stock shelves or install drywall but simply can’t afford a home.

Like most Angelenos, I was repulsed by the homelessness crisis, vehicular or otherwise. Early in the summer of 2021, I temporarily joined the 20,000. Amid COVID-19 lockdowns, I was paying half of my income for a bedroom in a shared student apartment furnished like a doctor's office waiting room. My lease was set to expire, and I had to travel for work, anyway. Moving into my Prius seemed like the best bad option.

Angelenos love their cars, the stereotype goes. Our city’s distinctive natural wonder is, after all, the tar pits: Los Angeles wants to be paved over. And many see a certain American romance in a stretch of living, free and unencumbered, on the road.

Search YouTube for living out of a Prius and the first thing you’ll find is a former Bachelor contestant and NFL cheerleader who has pulled in millions of views for her travels in a mint-green 2006 Prius. Hundreds of social-media accounts offer similar adventures. Their styles vary, but the pitch is consistent: Save money; see the country; live your best life.

Why the Prius in particular? Unlike vans or RVs, the Toyota hybrid offers escape at rock-bottom prices. A 10-year-old beat-up Prius can run as low as $7,500. The car enjoys minimal maintenance and high gas mileage, and thanks to the hybrid battery, you can leave it running overnight for heat or AC.

Online communities such as the r/priusdwellers Subreddit celebrate novel builds—lifted Priuses, Priuses with solar panels, Priuses with more storage than an IKEA showroom. But my build was basic: Drop the rear seats, stack a 28-quart container on a 54-quart container on the floor, and put a pillow on top to create a flat, six-foot-long clearing. Lay down a yoga mat, a mattress topper, and a sleeping pad, and you have a bed more comfortable than any hotel mattress. You can add rods for hanging curtains and clothes, a sunscreen and rain guards for privacy.

On my first day living out of my Prius, I whizzed up the Pacific Coast Highway before hopping over to the 101, which runs through the sleepy Salinas Valley of Steinbeck fame. As the sun started to set, I realized that I hadn’t planned out where I was going to camp for the night and was forced to make my first rookie mistake: sleeping at a highway rest area.

The parking lot was packed with people living out of vehicles—truckers in semis, middle-class retirees in RVs, Millennials in tricked-out vans, and quite a few people in cars poorly suited to vehicle living, with stacks of luggage filling passenger seats and shirts pinched into closed windows to serve as curtains.

As I lay in the back of my Prius, reading by headlamp, I looked over to see a family of four sleeping in an old Honda Accord. A man slept in a reclined driver’s seat. A child stretched across the back seat. In the front passenger seat, a woman cradled a sleeping toddler. I hoped it was only for the night—some mix-up or scheduling mistake—but I suspected otherwise.

At stops like this, I often talked with fellow travelers, quickly finding a surprising degree of camaraderie among vehicle dwellers. Of course, many just want to be left alone, but others share food, jump one another’s stalled-out vehicles, and—most important of all—swap notes on where it’s safe to park.

The next day, I drove through San Francisco up to southern Oregon. Using Free Campsites, a peer-to-peer platform for finding and reviewing camping locations, I picked a patch of Bureau of Land Management property just off I-5. For people living out of vehicles on the cheap, BLM land is the gold standard of campgrounds—parking is free for up to 14 days, and the sites are quiet, safe, and at least vaguely scenic.

After spending a few days with relatives in the Willamette Valley, I broke east toward Boise along Route 20, driving through a dust storm in the eastern Oregon Badlands. I stopped off in the foothills of the Boise National Forest, then beelined to a BLM campsite north of Yellowstone, where I spent a few days working off a mobile hotspot, free of distraction.

My experiment in vehicle dwelling was supposed to wrap up around this time. I had to get back to Los Angeles to help teach classes at UCLA. But the vacancy rate for apartments in the city was low, my Ph.D. stipend was paltry, and I was facing some unexpected debt. I realized I wouldn’t be moving out of the Prius anytime soon.

Sleeping in a car in the city is much grimmer than in remote areas. Many cities ban vehicle living entirely, though often a de facto ban is enforced through parking policies, such as permit requirements or limited hours.

Los Angeles deploys a zone system, dividing the city into a patchwork of areas where vehicle living isn’t and is tolerated. Places where it’s not tolerated tend to be nice and well lit—residential neighborhoods and parking lots. Streets where it is tolerated tend to be dark and isolated, the kinds of places where you risk being the victim of a break-in. Sleep on the wrong street at the wrong time, and you could be ticketed, towed, or woken by police officers knocking on the window in the middle of the night.  

When I didn’t need to be close to campus, I often slept in the Angeles National Forest, just northeast of La Cañada Flintridge. Forest rangers there turn a mercifully blind eye to the dozens of families who sleep each night in dirt pullouts along Angeles Crest Highway. When I did need to be close to school, I slept among other UCLA students and construction workers a few blocks from campus—the exact scene that had so repulsed me when I first moved to Los Angeles.

There are three categories of vehicle living in Los Angeles. And thanks to citywide counts, we know exactly where each group clusters. Slightly more than half of the people living out of vehicles are in RVs. Large and conspicuous, RVs are typically tolerated only in industrial areas, where they line many streets. Roughly one in six live in vans. Thanks to the popularity of “van life” culture, they tend to concentrate in hip, beachside neighborhoods like Venice.

And then there are cars. By the official count, they house nearly a quarter of people who live out of vehicles, but this is almost certainly an undercount, because cars and their residents blend in. Relative to other people struggling with homelessness, they are more likely to be white, women, parents, and only temporarily homeless.

Of course, vehicle living can pose sanitation and public-health concerns. But criminalizing it, as so many cities effectively do, does nothing to address the obvious underlying cause of vehicular homelessness—a lack of housing. It just makes people’s already hard lives harder.

The good news is that some cities are reforming these policies. Starting with Santa Barbara in 2004, many cities have implemented “safe parking” programs, setting aside parking lots where people who live out of cars can park overnight free of harassment. The facilities are often hosted by faith groups, and the best ones provide security, bathrooms and showers, and access to case workers who can connect residents with social services.

But by one estimate, Los Angeles provides fewer than 500 such parking spots. Even if the city converted all 11,400 public parking spaces into safe parking, it still wouldn’t be enough.

Here at UCLA, where one in 20 students will at some point struggle with homelessness, administrators have rejected student-led requests for on-campus safe parking—a campaign organized in part by one of my former students who spent a few months living out of his car on the same Westwood street where I would occasionally sleep. Perhaps it would be embarrassing for the university to admit that many students live out of vehicles. But is the alternative any less embarrassing?

If the student-homelessness crisis has a silver lining, it’s that it seems to have created a generation of activists committed to reform. You can throw a rock at pro-housing YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) gatherings and hit someone who has been forced to live out of a car. That includes Muhammad Alameldin, a researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. He was a student at Berkley when a snafu with roommates and a brutal Bay Area housing shortage pushed him into his Prius for three months.

Like Alameldin, I moved back into an apartment after three months of living in my Prius, a period made manageable by the occasional stay in a cheap hotel or with friends and family.

Ask anyone living out of a car how they fell into this life, and they will likely say: “I wanted to live free”; “I wanted to see the country”; “I wanted to go on an adventure.” But let the conversation carry on for more than a few minutes, and you will inevitably bump into a sadder origin story: a layoff, a divorce, a death, a foreclosure, an eviction.

The urge to roam is human. But roaming is a lot more romantic when it isn’t done out of desperation.