In this high-interest-rate environment, many prospective homebuyers are put off by high mortgage costs. Homes that might have been in your budget in the past might no longer be affordable when accounting for monthly interest payments.
But that doesn’t mean the situation is totally out of your control. While mortgage timing can be tricky, you might decide to wait to see if interest rates drop, as many experts predict will happen in the next year or so.
You can also take a number of steps to improve your financial situation and get a handle on the real estate market now as you’re figuring out when to buy a home.
See where today’s mortgage rates stand here.
What prospective homebuyers should do until interest rates drop
In particular, some action items to consider as you wait to see what happens with mortgage interest rates include the following expert-recommend tips:
Figure out what you want
If you’re waiting to see what happens with interest rates, use this time to do more research. That includes narrowing down what you want in a home and what you can realistically afford.
“Use this time to refine exactly what you’re looking for in your next home, including things like what your budget can buy you and what your ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ are,” says Merav Bloch, VP and GM of Opendoor Exclusives. “If you’re willing to trade a longer commute for your dream yard, but your partner wants to be within a 10-minute drive of their office, now is an opportune time to debate that trade-off.”
Even if you’re not necessarily ready to buy right away, you can still tour homes.
“I encourage buyers to see what’s out there and tour as many homes as possible to get a sense of what your budget will get you, what your non-negotiables are and what neighborhoods you’re open to,” Bloch says. “People typically don’t get married on the first date, and it’s usually better not to purchase the first home you tour.”
Start your mortgage search online now.
Talk to experts
As you figure out what you want in a home, it can help to talk to experts like mortgage consultants and real estate agents to narrow down what’s realistic for you.
Tanya Ball, home loans regional director at BOK Financial, suggests asking experts about down payment assistance options as well as “specialized loan programs if you are a veteran, Native American, first-time buyer or buying in a rural area.”
Plus, speaking with an expert like a mortgage professional “can let you know which items to focus on for better offers — for example, a higher down payment or paying off debt,” says Michael Merritt, mortgage servicing operations manager at BOK Financial. “The biggest benefit will vary based on your circumstances, so it is important to focus on the things that will help you the most.”
Improve your credit score
For some prospective homebuyers, improving your credit score can make a significant difference in the mortgage rate you qualify for.
“Lenders typically offer better interest rates and loan terms to borrowers with higher credit scores, so taking steps to improve your credit can help you get the best possible deal on your mortgage,” says Adie Kriegstein, licensed real estate salesperson at Compass Real Estate. “This might include paying down existing debt, making all of your payments on time and avoiding new credit inquiries or applications.”
Build up your down payment
Another way to take advantage of this time waiting for interest rates to stabilize or drop is to build up your down payment. The more you can put down, the less you have to borrow and therefore pay interest on. Plus, a higher down payment could potentially get you a lower interest rate.
“A strategy I recommend, especially for first-time home buyers, is to deposit the difference between your current housing payment and your projected payment into a high-yield account each month. This helps grow your down payment or the amount you can use to pay down debts and is a test for your expected budget to see if it is workable,” says Merritt.
Check out today’s mortgage offerings here.
Shop around
Don’t assume that what one lender offers you is the same as what all other banks and mortgage providers offer. Your borrowing limits, interest rates and terms can vary from lender to lender, so it pays to shop around.
You also might find that paying for mortgage points with some lenders (where you pay money upfront to lower your interest rate), or choosing adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate loans, works out in your favor.
“It’s an interesting quirk of human nature that many of us would drive across town to save 30% on a sofa but not necessarily compare rates and financing options on a house-sized purchase,” says Bloch.
“If you’re waiting to buy, this is a great time to shop lenders and financing options, including lesser-known options like rate buydowns. In this market, buyers are acutely aware of interest rates, but they’re less aware of options to reduce their monthly payments,” Bloch says.
Improve your current home
Lastly, if you already own a home, you can use this time to improve your current home to try to get more money when you eventually sell. That can help offset the cost of high interest rates.
One idea is to get a home inspection now, says Jonathan Rundlett, a real estate agent and regional owner at EXIT Mid-Atlantic.
“This will allow you to take the time that you are waiting for interest rates to fall to make any repairs or updates that the inspector finds in your home,” Rundlett says. “Making any necessary repairs and updating your home so that it shows in move-in ready condition will allow you to get top dollar for your home when you are ready to sell.”
The bottom line
These action items can help many prospective homebuyers better position themselves as they wait to see what happens with interest rates. But it’s important to remember that the specific ways to improve your situation depend on personal factors
like your credit history, savings and income. And while you might try to time mortgage purchasing, it’s difficult to know when to buy a home, as it can be both a financial and emotional decision. Some people might be comfortable paying more for their dream home, while others might want to wait to get a good deal on a mortgage interest rate. Weigh the pros and cons, and consider speaking with experts for personalized advice.
Solar for LOs; New Correspondent, Non-QM, Renovation Products; Freddie and Fannie News; Job Numbers Move Mortgage Rates
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Solar for LOs; New Correspondent, Non-QM, Renovation Products; Freddie and Fannie News; Job Numbers Move Mortgage Rates
By: Rob Chrisman
44 Min, 5 Secs ago
What’s our Federal Reserve concerned about? I was in a restaurant last night in Truckee, California, and was shown the table and handed the menu. When the waiter came back five minutes later, he said, “While you were deciding, we raised our prices.” Okay, a little inflation exaggeration humor there, but things are certainly always changing. Remember when everyone thought Amazon or Zillow were going to take over lending? Zillow is shuttering its closing and title services division. Something else that always changes is the population: 10,000 people a day turn 62, and many are eligible for a reverse mortgage, and so many lenders and LOs see reverse being a growth field. (Carol Ann Dujanovich, VP/Director of Reverse Mortgage Operations with University Bank, is featured on today’s 30 minute Rundown at 12PM PT on what’s made its Reverse Platform successful over the years.) (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s is sponsored by Gallus, the premier business intelligence tool for the mortgage industry. With hassle-free insights and user-friendly functionality, Gallus empowers you to make faster, data-driven decisions for enhanced profitability. Hear an interview with Michele Kryczkowski on business development in the mortgage industry and the best way to support sales teams.)
Lender and Broker Software, Services, and Products
Check out Quorum Federal Credit Union’s Sizzling Summer Limited-Time Special Offers. With turn times as fast as 24-hours and expanded guidelines, including up to 90% on a Primary Residence and 80% CLTV on Second Homes and Investment Properties, we’ll help clear any financial hurdles. In addition, Quorum partners with an executed agreement have the opportunity to earn up to 2.00% borrower-paid broker compensation on the entire line amount. There are no minimum draws and no early termination fees. Terms and conditions apply. Contact your Quorum Account Executive, visit Quorum’s Partner Portal or email for more information.
“AFR Wholesale® (AFR) is excited to announce the next session of our Why Wait Live Webinar Series with Freddie Mac on Wednesday, July 12th, at 1PM EST. Please join AFR and Freddie Mac to discuss Renovation, where we will primarily be highlighting CHOICERenovation® and CHOICEReno eXPress®. Over this series, AFR is emphasizing affordable financing solutions that provide homeownership opportunities to more families. The goal is to take the prospects in your portfolio and turn them into borrowers. Register today! This will be a live webinar and a recording and will not be provided, so sign up today and don’t miss it! If you are currently a partner of AFR you can start utilizing these programs right away! Contact AFR by going to afrwholesale.com, email or call 1-800-375-6071.
Serving the underserved community, Non-QM is an essential part of the mortgage ecosystem. With the number of borrowers served continuing to rise and the market share of Non-QM growing, now is the time to learn more about these products. To help this, we are proud to announce the National Mortgage Professional Non-QM Townhall Monthly Series, brought to you by industry-leading ACC Mortgage, Deephaven and NewFi Wholesale. Moderated by Steven Winokur, this impactful series will be conducted with such Non-QM experts as Tom Davis, Robert Senko, and John Wise. Each month a set of topics will be discussed, giving you the info you need to successfully implement and grow your Non-QM origination business. The first in the series will be held on Thursday, July 27th at 2:00 EST/11:00 PST. If you want to learn more about the current state of Non-QM, this is a series you do not want to miss. Register today!
Newfi, an industry-leading lender specializing in non-agency mortgage solutions, is proud to announce the launch of its correspondent lending channel! As an affiliate of Apollo Global Management, Newfi Correspondent stands ready to help mortgage bankers with the benefit of Apollo’s expansive resources and mortgage expertise. They offer a variety of Non-QM offerings including loan amounts up to $5M, alternative income (bank statement, 1099, asset depletion & more) and DSCR loans. Are you a mortgage banker ready to learn more? To support this expansion into correspondent lending Newfi is actively seeking to hire experienced Non-QM Correspondent Account Executives. If you are interested in learning more or applying, please contact Dan Bayer or Dean Reynolds for more information.
Conventional Conforming Program News
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is the conservator of not only Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but also oversees the Federal Home Loan Bank system. FHFA officials are considering imposing new limits on large banks’ use of the Federal Home Loan Bank system. The changes are reportedly being discussed as part of the agency’s review of the system, which is expected to conclude in September.
FHFA published its 2023 first quarter data for the Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) Aggregate Statistics. For the first time, FHFA’s UAD Aggregate Statistics include data on residential property sales comparisons (“comparables”).
Freddie Mac AIM Check API, gives you a preliminary view (as early as point of sale) of a borrower’s qualifying income for a Freddie Mac-eligible loan before submitting a full application to Loan Product Advisor® (LPASM). This Origination API allows users to access Freddie Mac AIM capabilities independent of an LPA submission.
Freddie Mac is committed to working with housing finance agencies (HFAs) to advance affordable homeownership. Its HFA Resource Center is comprised of products and resources to reinforce your efforts in promoting and sustaining homeownership.
Freddie Mac updated Loan Product Advisor® (LPASM) and the new Area Median Income and Property Eligibility Tool with new AMI limits. If you participate in an HFA program, consult the HFA’s website for income eligibility and associated pricing of their Freddie Mac HFA Advantage® offerings. AMI limits are also used to determine whether a loan is eligible for the credit fee cap for first-time homebuyers.
Freddie Mac’s quarterly housing outlook pulse survey, Housing Sentiment in Q1 ’23. COVID-19 led to an increase in migration away from larger, more expensive areas toward more affordable ones. Read Freddie Mac’s research brief for a deeper dive. Low-Income Homebuyers are Less Likely to Migrate from Cities, More Likely to Miss Potential Cost Savings.
The Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) and Forms Redesign team has released additional documentation to support ongoing implementation efforts. These resources supplement the initial documentation that was released in March 2023 to kick off industry development and preparation for the new appraisal dataset and report. This update includes additional Uniform Residential Appraisal Report (URAR) examples for various property types and more information on technical requirements. Read the joint GSE announcement and check out the resources to learn more.
Fannie Mae posted information on the Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) and Forms Redesign team release of additional documentation to support ongoing implementation efforts. These resources supplement the initial documentation that was released in March 2023 to kick off industry development and preparation for the new appraisal dataset and report. This update includes additional Uniform Residential Appraisal Report (URAR) examples for various property types and more information on technical requirements.
Fannie Mae issued a Fraud Alert involving income misrepresentation using fabricated/altered public records documenting alleged court-ordered child and spousal support payments. This alert addresses loans originated in Northern California.
Capital Markets
A third consecutive day of selling in the bond markets yesterday was the net balance between reaction to Wednesday’s release of the June Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes, strong job data, and anticipation of today’s June Nonfarm Payroll report. As was reported in this commentary yesterday, FOMC members at their meeting last month expressed a lot of concern toward “continued resilience in the economy” and “persistently elevated core inflation.” The Fed believes that to bring aggregate supply and aggregate demand into better balance and reduce inflationary pressures sufficiently to return inflation to 2 percent over time, a period of below-trend growth in real GDP and some softening in labor market conditions will be required.
Sure, inflation for most countries around the world doesn’t match Sudan at 340 percent, Lebanon at 201 percent, or Syria at 139 percent. Nor are people hauling around wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. The global fight against pandemic-era inflation has prompted projections ranging from recessions to soft landings. The labor market here in the U.S. is certainly strong.
We are seeing resilience rather than softening in the U.S. labor market, which helps those hoping for a soft-landing, but makes the Fed’s job more difficult and all but ensures more rate hikes. That resilience was evidenced yesterday, as private hiring surged (ADP employment number came in at 497k, the most in over a year, versus the expected 225k), layoffs slowed to an eight-month low (companies had a difficult time finding workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and are probably reluctant to let them go), and filings for unemployment benefits stayed relatively low. This “hardly believable” strength of the U.S. labor market should further push out any concept of a possible recession but should also push out of the market any hopes of a Fed rate cut during 2023.
Accordingly, the fed funds futures market is now a coin-toss when it comes to a November rate hike after a near-certain increase in July. Volatility dropped in June, if ever so slightly, and has been moving sideways of late, but could begin to trend downward once the Fed ends its current rate hiking cycle and investors come to terms with the fact that rates will likely stay elevated for much longer than is expected. Fed fund futures markets no longer see a rate cut by year-end.
Beyond the next few months, the inflation outlook (which is driving rate hike/cut predictions) largely depends on how resilient the economy proves in the second half of the year. The drastic tightening of monetary policy over the past 16 months means that the economy’s most likely path is a modest contraction of real GDP as businesses run down excess inventories. As activity slows in the sectors that are most sensitive to interest rates, like construction and manufacturing, the unemployment rate will likely tick higher over the next 12 months. This will further soften businesses’ pricing power, and slow inflation further.
Today brings the June employment report which could add further volatility to this week’s bond rout. Recent improvements in home affordability have been driven by wage growth. Headline payrolls in June increased 209k versus 230k expectations and 339k in May (revised down to 306k). The unemployment rate came in as expected at 3.6 percent when it was seen ticking down 0.1 percent to 3.6 percent, and hourly earnings were +.4 percent, +4.4 percent for the year. We begin the day with Agency MBS prices a few 32nds better, the 10-year yielding 4.01 after closing yesterday at 4.04 percent, and the 2-year at 4.94 percent. The 2-year/10-year curve sits at more than -100 basis points, within spitting distance of the largest inversion since the early 1980s. The inversion is being driven by concern over the chance of a recession and the fact traders have largely unwound bets for Federal Reserve rate cuts by year end.
Jobs
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With house prices rising in many markets across the country, millions of homeowners are choosing to stay in their current homes and go the home improvement route instead. Not only will that increase the value of your home, but it will also help you avoid the need to make a costly and disruptive move.
But home improvements can also be expensive, rising to the level of needing a loan to complete the work. For that reason, MU30 has created this home improvement loan calculator to help you determine the real cost of making home improvements.
What’s Ahead:
Home improvement loan calculator
Getting a home improvement loan
How the home improvement loan calculator works
The home improvement loan calculator allows you to calculate a new loan either by loan term or by monthly payments. That will give you a choice over how you want to handle repayment on the loan. You can either choose a shorter term to get the loan paid off as soon as possible, or you can select a monthly payment amount that fits neatly within your budget.
The calculator will ask you to supply three pieces of information:
Loan amount.
Loan APR (the approximate interest rate you expect to pay).
Your choice to either calculate my loan term or by monthly payment, as described above.
If you choose to calculate by loan term, you’ll also be given a choice of terms ranging from 12 to 84 months, as well as an option to make an extra monthly payment to reduce the loan term and the amount of interest you’ll pay. You’ll then hit the calculate button to get your results.
Those results will include:
Your estimated monthly payment.
The amount of interest you will pay over the course of the loan.
If you choose to calculate by monthly payment, you’ll then be asked to enter an expected monthly payment. For example, if you take a $25,000 loan at 7%, and you decide $300 will neatly within your budget, you’ll enter $300 and hit the calculate button.
The results will include the 1) months to pay off the loan, 2) the years to pay off the loan, and 3) the interest paid over the course of the loan.
An example using the home improvement calculator
Let’s say you determine that you need $50,000 to complete home improvements on your property. But you want to know what the monthly payment will be as well as any options that will affect the amount of that payment.
You can use the calculator choosing to both Calculate by Loan Term and by Monthly Payment.
You’ll start by entering the following:
Loan amount: $50,000.
Loan APR: 7%.
Select a choice: Calculate by loan term.
Loan term (months): 60.
Extra monthly payments (optional): $0.
Then hit calculate.
The calculator will reveal your estimated monthly payment will be $990.06, with $9,403.60 in interest paid over the 60-month term.
But let’s say you decide a $990 monthly payment is too high for your budget. You can go back to “Select a Choice” and click the calculate by monthly payment bubble. Another box will appear below, “Expected monthly payment”. If you decide a $600 monthly payment is a better fit for your budget, enter that in that box, then hit Calculate.
The calculator will show you three results:
Months to payoff: 114 months.
Years to payoff: 9.50 years.
Interest paid: $18,400.
Whether you use the calculate by loan term or calculate monthly payment method, you’ll be able to enter different numbers and run various scenarios to come up with a loan amount, rate, term, and monthly payment that will work for you.
When you find a combination that will work for you, you can then begin your search for a home improvement loan lender.
Where to get a home improvement loan
Fiona
Fiona stands out among aggregators (a place where you can shop for multiple loan rates from a variety of companies) because their application process is ridiculously easy. They partner with some of the most popular lenders, such as SoFi, Prosper, and Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and you’ll get your potential rates in seconds.
When you decide which lender is right for you, Fiona can help walk you through the often rigorous loan application process. The good news is, you’ll already know the rate you’ll likely get.
You can shop for personal loans through Fiona, which can easily be used for home improvement projects – in fact, it’s even one of the designated categories you can get rates for.
LendingTree
LendingTree is probably the biggest and best-known online loan marketplace on the web. It’s a source for all types of financing, including home loans, personal loans, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, and business loans. And because it includes participation by dozens of major lenders in each loan category, it’s an opportunity to get multiple loan quotes after completing a single application. That will give you an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison of the loan products that will work best for you and offer the most favorable pricing.
If you get a home improvement loan on LendingTree, you can certainly get a home loan, such as either a refinance or secondary financing, like a home equity loan or a home equity line of credit. But if you don’t want to pledge your home as security for a new loan, you should also consider investigating personal loans for your home improvement needs. You can borrow as much as $40,000 to $100,000, with no collateral whatsoever, and pay the loan off in installments with a fixed term, interest rate, and monthly payment. Since the funds from a personal loan can be used for any purpose, you can also use them for home improvement.
Credible
Credible is also an online lending marketplace, but one that specializes in personal loans, student loans, home financing, and credit cards. Once again, you can consider either direct home financing, like a home equity loan or line of credit, or a personal loan.
Like LendingTree, you can get quotes from several different lenders after completing a single application. Personal loan lenders on Credible include some of the top names in the industry, including Avant, Discover Personal Loans, Prosper, SoFi, Upgrade, and Upstart.
Credible Operations, Inc. NMLS# 1681276, “Credible.” Not available in all states. www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org.”
Credible Credit Disclosure – Requesting prequalified rates on Credible is free and doesn’t affect your credit score. However, applying for or closing a loan will involve a hard credit pull that impacts your credit score and closing a loan will result in costs to you.
What you should know about home improvement loans
Though there are loans specifically titled “home improvement loans”, it’s really a catchall phrase that describes several different loans that can be used for that purpose.
When shopping for a home improvement loan, it’s important to keep that fact in mind. While getting a home equity loan or a home equity line of credit may seem like the instinctive loan choice, it’s certainly not the only one. And it may not even be an option if you lack sufficient equity in your home. As well, you may find the restrictions on using a home equity loan for home improvement to be greater than it is with other loan types.
That’s why it’s mission-critical to consider all loan options when it comes to home improvement.
How to finance your home improvement project
Fortunately, there are several different financing options when it comes to home improvement. The one you select will depend on your financing needs and personal preferences. Let’s take a quick rundown of the options available.
0% introductory APR credit card
Many credit cards offer either introductory 0% APR on purchases or will make them available periodically on an existing credit line. The advantage of this type of financing is that it’s very simple to use. If you qualify for a card with the offer – which usually requires good or excellent credit – you’ll have access to several thousand dollars in borrowing power that you can use at your own pace.
Another advantage of this type of financing for home improvement is the flexibility you’ll get. You can borrow only as much as you need and repay on your own terms. However, be aware that the 0% introductory APR typically lasts only 12 to 18 months. The maximum loan amount will generally be no more than $10,000, so this method will only be suitable for smaller improvement jobs.
One of the best cards on the market right now is the Chase Freedom Flex℠ which offers a 0% Intro APR on Purchases for 15 months. But it also offers a TON of cash back opportunities, including 5% back on bonus categories that rotate each quarter, 5% back on travel purchases (booked through Chase Ultimate Rewards), 3% cash back on dining and drug store purchases, and finally, 1% cash back on all other purchases.
Personal loans
Available through LendingTree and Credible as described above, the major advantage of this type of loan is that it can be available in higher loan amounts – as high as $100,000 – and is totally unsecured. That makes them an especially good option if you don’t have sufficient equity in your home to complete the home improvements you want.
The major disadvantage is that the monthly payment on a large loan amount can be high since the loan term is typically no more than five years. However, some of the lenders participating in the above platforms will go out even farther on the term, from seven years to as long as 12.
Home equity loans and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs)
These are the most traditional sources of home improvement loans and may be the very best option if you have sufficient equity to cover your home improvement needs. Interest rates are low, and you’ll have more control over the term of the loan, and therefore the monthly payment. But once again, the major disadvantage is that if you don’t have sufficient home equity, this won’t be a viable route.
Cash-out refinance
Using this method, you’ll do a full-on refinance of your home, repaying any existing indebtedness, and taking out sufficient equity to cover your home improvement costs. It works especially well if you have a lot of equity in your home and prefer to handle all your home financing needs under a single loan and monthly payment.
But much like a home equity line of credit or a home equity loan, its success will depend on the amount of home equity you have. Also, be aware there are significant closing costs involved in doing a refinance, which can range between 2% and 4% of the new mortgage taken.
Summary
When you need to do a home improvement project, there’s a good chance you’ll need to find a loan in order to complete the process. Using Money Under 30’s calculator above, you’ll be able to tell how much you can borrow comfortably to fit the payment into your budget.
This is a guest post from Sierra Black, a long-time GRS reader and the author of ChildWild, a blog where she writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale. Previously at Get Rich Slowly, Black told us about sweating the big stuff and the pitfalls of buying in bulk.
My mother’s family is Catholic. They’re working class people from Buffalo: nurses, drugstore clerks, steel mill workers. Even though they never had a lot of dollars, they always gave 10% of what they had to the church. Like taxes, that 10% was just something they paid out before spending a dime on themselves.
As an adult I became the first college graduate in my family and adopted the position most of my educated, liberal peers seemed to hold toward charity: give a little, when you can, and feel guilty about not doing it most of the year.
For most of my 20s, I was living beyond my means. With every dollar being spent before it was earned, giving even a few dollars felt like a huge pinch in my messy budget. I was haphazard and frankly not very generous with my giving.
Overall, liberals tend to give less to charity than conservatives. Religious people like the ones I grew up with give more than my secular humanist friends. The working poor are, as a class, the most generous group in America, reliably giving away 4.5% of their income. The middle class are the least generous, giving just 2.5% on average.
In addition to making me and my friends look bad in the conservative press, statistics like that are, as George Will put it, “hostile witnesses” to the idea that “bleeding-heart liberals” actually care more about the poor and disadvantaged than our conservative counterparts.
According to the American Enterprise Institute, the single biggest predictor of a person’s charitable giving is religion. People who go to church every week give more money, more consistently.
I think it’s time to make secular tithing a middle-class trend. Those of us who don’t go to church every Sunday may not have the easy, deeply ingrained tradition of giving my great-grandmother had when she put her little envelope in the offering plate each week. That’s no excuse for not giving our share. It’s not right for the affluent and secure to let responsibility for maintaining the social safety net rest on the backs of those most likely to need it.
Last year, when I got serious about straightening out my spending habits, I wanted to make charitable giving, like saving, a key part of my financial future.
I adopted something akin to the “balanced money formula”. Instead of allocating 30% to wants, though, I drew up my formula like this: 50% for needs, 10% for charity, 20% for savings and 20% for wants.
My money is not balanced. I’m working hard to repay a pile of credit card debt and continuing to fine tune a frugal lifestyle. My needs and debts suck up most of our income. Because all the “extra” money goes into savings and debt repayment, I’m still living as if we were on the edge financially. Giving hurts. I do it anyway. Every week.
I’m not tithing yet, but I am moving towards it. Here’s how:
As our income increases, I spend the new money in a “balanced” way. A year ago, my husband and I were living on one salary — his. As I’ve added income to our household with my freelance work, I’ve allocated 10% of those dollars toward charitable giving, 20% to savings, 20% wants and 50% to needs.
As our debts decrease, I’m beginning to split our debt snowball. Snowballing debts is great. I’ve seen some people argue for splitting the money that’s freed up when a debt is paid off between paying down the next debt and adding to an emergency fund. I’m doing this with giving too. This month, I pay off a credit card that had a $35/month payment. I’ll put $3.50 into my charity fund, $7 into savings and the rest toward the next debt I’m attacking. I do this with frugal changes too: split the saved money between charity, savings and debt reduction.
I make the giving automatic. Remembering to do stuff is not my strong suit. To stay consistent with my giving, I’ve signed up for recurring automatic withdrawals from my bank account. There are organizations, like Just Give, that will help you coordinate automated or one time gifts to many different organizations.
I’m teaching my kids to give. My kids use jars to split their allowance into categories for giving, saving and spending. They’re too young to tell yet what lasting impact that might have, but I’m hoping it will get them into the habit of giving some of their money away every time they get paid. A habit it took me 30 years to grow into.
Giving small counts big. Charities can use their membership rolls and total numbers of donors to solicit large grants from individuals and foundations, and to earn matching grants. Because of this, the difference between giving $10 to a charity and giving them nothing is a lot bigger than the difference between $10 and $20. I make a lot of small donations to different organizations I like, to spread out my impact.
There are many good organizations doing vital work in the world that depend on charitable gifts to run their operations. These range from the Red Cross to the World Food Program to local groups.
The end of the year is often a time charities need dollars most. To encourage holiday season giving, many have created fun holiday gift programs. My favorite is Heifer International’s famous gift catalog, which lets you “give” a cow or a beehive or another livestock animal to a family in the developing world. In reality, of course, what you give them is the money to run their organization, which then distributes livestock to needy families at a local level. It’s fun to read their catalog though, and Heifer has one of the lowest overhead ratios of all the large charities.
In closing, a note: Expressing concern about what a charity is going to do with your money is a terrible excuse for not giving. Very few charities are outright frauds, and even the inefficient ones will put more of your dollars toward a good cause than your bank will. If you want to be sure you’re getting the most bang for your charitable buck, though, you can investigate organizations at a charity watchdog site before giving.
Note: Get Rich Slowly does not take a stand on religious or political issues. Respectful discussion of these topics is fine; please keep the comments up to their usual high-quality standards.
Of the $844 million in production volume in Q1 2023, refis accounted for $70 million and purchases loans accounted for $774 million. Better.com’s funded loan volume in Q1 2023 declined from $7 billion during the same period in 2022.
“We decreased our funded loan volume by approximately 80% year-over-year from $58 billion in the year ended December 31, 2021 to $11.4 billion in the year ended December 31, 2022,” according to the filing.
Better’s financial performance began to deteriorate in the second half of 2021 and continued through the first quarter of 2023 as a result of numerous factors, including elevated mortgage rates, damage to its reputation from negative media coverage and continued investments in its business, the disclosure states.
“Decreased productivity resulting from the reorganization of its sales and operations teams in the third quarter of 2021 and subsequent reversion in 2022 to accommodate Better’s reduced workforce and reduced demand for home loans in an elevated interest rate environment,” the filing states.
As of June 8, Better.com had about 950 team members, a 91% drop from its peak of about 10,400 employees in Q4 2021.
In June, the digital mortgage lender decided to shift its real estate strategy, pivoting to a partner agent model where Better.com will partner with outside agents as referral partners.
As part of the shift from its operating model of in-house licensed professionals, Better.com laid off the agents in its real estate brokerage subsidiary Better Real Estate LLC.
About 90 employees worked in Better Plus business lines as of June 8, primarily as real estate and insurance agents. This is a decline from 1,800 team members in Better Plus business lines during the fourth quarter of 2021.
Filings show Better.com has three different warehouse lines of credit with a combined amount of $1 billion. Two warehouse lines of credit – $250 million each – expire on June 6 and the other $500 million line has a maturity date of July 10.
Gain on sale margin was 1.89% for the three months ending on March 31, 2023, compared to a gain on sale margin of 1.11% and 2.88% for the first quarters in 2022 and 2021, respectively.
Better.com expects gain on sale margins to remain “compressed on substantially lower funded loan volume relative to the levels of 2020 and Q1 2021,” the filing states.
The mortgage lender’s total market share of 0.3% in Q1 2023 decreased by about 67% from 0.9% in Q1 2022. Better.com ranks as the 59th largest mortgage lender in the country, per Inside Mortgage Finance.
The company announced to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in May 2021, and the blank-check firm Aurora has since extended the deadline to complete its merger three times.
A handful of nonbank mortgage lenders went public via a SPAC during the pandemic years, but a combination of rising redemption rates – which point to how many investors are exchanging their shares for their money back – and sharp interest rate increases made it an unfavorable environment for SPACs.
If Aurora is unable to complete the merger by the deadline of September 30, 2023, and is unable to complete another business combination by that date, Aurora will dissolve and redeem public shares.
Jump to winners | Jump to methodology Women on their way The 2023 MPA Elite Women awards celebrate 50 of the top female leaders in the mortgage industry across the US. To determine the prestigious list, nominations were submitted for strong contenders, who were then reviewed before the final selection was made. MPA asked the nominees, “What do … [Read more…]
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Highlights
The Panic of 1907 was a major U.S. financial crisis in the fall of 1907.
It exposed deep weaknesses in the U.S. financial system and raised concerns about bankers’ economic influence.
In its aftermath, Congress created the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, the linchpin of the modern financial system.
In 1907, cars are unreliable luxury goods, electricity is still rare outside urban areas, and penicillin won’t be discovered for another 20 years. The world is a totally different place.
Yet 1907 turns out to be a critical year in the development of the modern American financial system. That fall, financial speculators set off a period of gut-wrenching stock market volatility that spurred numerous bank runs and failures that ruined many investors and countless ordinary folks.
But it would have been far worse had financier and industrialist J.P. Morgan and richest American John D. Rockefeller not come to the rescue.
What Was the Panic of 1907?
The Panic of 1907 was a major American financial crisis that occurred in the fall of 1907. Also known as the Bankers’ Panic or Knickerbocker Panic, it nearly ruined the New York Stock Exchange. In its aftermath, Congress created the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States.
The crisis began as a result of financial speculation on the New York Stock Exchange but quickly spread throughout the United States. Many banks failed as a direct result of the panic, wiping out thousands of savers and investors, and nearly drove New York City into municipal bankruptcy.
The crisis ended only after a coordinated effort by private financiers and U.S. Treasury officials to pump tens of millions of dollars into the teetering financial system.
The Panic of 1907 was the last major financial panic to occur before the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. Afterward, Congress investigated the causes of the crisis and recommended that a national bank be created to prevent similar panics in the future.
What Caused the Panic of 1907?
The immediate cause of the Panic of 1907 was a failed scheme by financial speculators to buy up a huge number of shares in a company called United Copper. However, at the time, the U.S. financial system had some underlying weaknesses that increased the risk that such a scheme would cause severe turmoil in financial markets.
Seasonal decline in bank reserves. In the early 1900s, many banks’ reserves were closely tied to the agricultural calendar. Banks typically had less cash on hand after the fall harvest, leaving them more vulnerable to bank runs.
San Francisco’s rebuilding effort. A devastating earthquake leveled much of San Francisco in 1906, and a capital-intensive rebuilding effort was in full swing by late 1907. New York banks were providing much of the financing, further depleting their reserves.
Ongoing economic recession in the U.S. The Panic of 1907 began in October 1907, by which time the U.S. economy had been in recession for months. Financial institutions and smaller investors were already stretched, laying the groundwork for a panic.
Widespread weakness at New York’s trust companies. Trust companies were a vital source of short-term loans for stock market investors. But they had much smaller cash reserves than banks and were even more vulnerable to runs and failures.
A failed attempt to corner United Copper’s stock. F. Augustus Heinze, a financier and part-owner of United Copper Company, joined forces with his brother Otto and his associate Charles Morse to buy as much United Copper stock as possible. The idea was to drive the price up and then sell the shares at a massive profit. The scheme failed, ruining the Heinzes and weakening several financial institutions associated with them.
Crisis of confidence in trust companies. As worry spread through New York’s investor community, customers began to pull cash from a trust company run by an associate of the Heinzes and a fellow speculator named Charles W. Morse. This led to a full-blown run that quickly spread to other trust companies.
Liquidity crisis on the New York Stock Exchange. As the panic grew, trust companies dramatically slowed lending to investors in an effort to preserve capital. Traditional banks followed suit. Stock prices fell sharply and concerns grew about the viability of the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE — the country’s most important financial exchange.
Within a matter of days, a seemingly isolated financial maneuver had consumed New York City’s financial industry, and about a dozen banks and trust companies in the city had already failed.
But what happens in New York’s financial industry doesn’t always stay in New York’s financial industry. Financial panic spread outward and numerous hinterland banks experienced runs of their own. A broader economic crisis loomed, demanding intervention at the highest levels of government and industry.
What Happened During the Panic of 1907?
The Panic of 1907 began as an isolated, ill-advised exercise in financial speculation and morphed into a widespread crisis of confidence in the American financial system.
Key Participants
Countless individuals and hundreds of financial institutions directly or indirectly participated in the Panic of 1907, but the number of central players was relatively small. They included individual financiers, financial institutions, and top-ranking U.S. government officials.
Financier F. Augustus Heinze and brother Otto Heinze. The Heinze brothers’ failed attempt to corner shares in United Copper set the panic in motion. It also bankrupted them and essentially ran them out of the banking industry.
Financier Charles W. Morse. A close associate of the Heinzes and fellow financial speculator, Morse was also ruined in the panic. His association with Knickerbocker Trust Company president Charles T. Barney sparked the first of many runs on New York trust companies.
Financier Charles T. Barney. Knickerbocker Trust Company was the third-largest trust company in New York before the panic. Though Barney refused to fund the United Copper scheme, his close ties to Morse proved too much for investors, which drained Knickerbocker’s cash reserves and forced it to suspend operations for five months.
Financier and industrialist J.P. Morgan. Reprising his role from the Panic of 1893, J.P. Morgan organized a group of bankers, industrialists, and U.S. government officials to stabilize the financial system as the crisis grew.
Industrialist John D. Rockefeller. Then the richest person in the United States, Rockefeller personally deposited $10 million in National City Bank (Citibank’s predecessor institution) at Morgan’s urging. The gesture temporarily increased investor confidence but wasn’t enough to resolve the crisis.
U.S. Treasury Secretary George B. Cortelyou. Cortelyou worked closely with Morgan on a bailout for Trust Company of America, the failure of which would have deepened the crisis. Cortelyou ultimately deposited more than $25 million in U.S. government funds in several key New York banks and trust companies.
NYSE President Ransom Thomas. As credit dried up and trading volumes plummeted at his institution, Thomas approached Morgan’s group for a bailout. Morgan and several other prominent bankers put up nearly $35 million to keep the exchange afloat.
New York City Mayor George McClellan. The market panic deepened New York City’s existing financial woes. Facing a looming loan payment deadline, McClellan asked Morgan for a $20 million loan. He obliged, averting municipal bankruptcy.
Industrialist Elbert Gary. Gary, Morgan, and other U.S. Steel co-founders organized U.S. Steel’s purchase of TC&I, a distressed industrial company. That helped avert bankruptcy at a major New York brokerage firm that borrowed against TC&I’s near-worthless shares.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. The TC&I deal needed Roosevelt’s blessing to go through. Forced to choose between compromising his anti-monopoly principles and worsening an already dire financial panic, Roosevelt went with the less-bad option.
Key Events & Impact
The Panic of 1907 lasted from Oct. 16 to Nov. 2. It began with the Heinzes’ failed effort to corner United Copper and ended with the forced merger of U.S. Steel and TC&I.
The Heinzes wash out. Otto Heinze started buying up United Copper shares on Monday, Oct. 14, and continued into the next day. But he underestimated the number of shares outstanding and ran out of money. The scheme unraveled on Oct. 16, with the stock dropping by more than 80%.
Concerns grow around Heinze- and Morse-affiliated institutions. Augustus Heinze and Charles Morse sat on the boards of more than two dozen financial institutions. One Heinze-controlled bank failed on Oct. 17 and several others experienced runs on Oct. 17 and 18.
Run on Knickerbocker Trust Company. Spooked by Knickerbocker president Charles Barney’s connection to the United Copper scheme, customers started pulling funds on Friday, Oct. 18. The run deepened the following Monday. By Tuesday, Oct. 22, Knickerbocker had suspended operations. It remained closed until March 1908.
Trust Company of America bailout. The Knickerbocker run spread to other New York trust companies, most notably the Trust Company of America. On the evening of Oct. 22, a group of bankers and government officials led by J.P. Morgan raised $8 million to keep it afloat.
New York Stock Exchange bailout. As panic grew, trust companies stopped providing the short-term loans that kept NYSE traders solvent — and the NYSE itself operational. Facing an unprecedented suspension of operations, the NYSE asked for and received about $25 million on Thursday, Oct. 24, and another $9 million on Oct. 25.
New York bank bailouts. By Oct. 24, more than a dozen New York banks and trust companies had failed. That evening, Treasury Secretary Cortelyou committed $25 million in U.S. government funds to shore up several others. John D. Rockefeller deposited $10 million in National City Bank.
Public relations blitz to restore confidence. Anticipating further panic when markets opened on Monday, Oct. 28, Morgan, Cortelyou, and others talked to every reporter they could over the weekend. They explained the steps they’d taken to avert the crisis and what more they’d be willing to do if need be.
New York Clearing House provides short-term credit. Also over the weekend, New York Clearing House — a critical player in the city’s financial markets — announced it would provide up to $100 million in credit for banks and trust companies. This stemmed cash outflows and calmed financial markets.
New York City municipal bailout. With a $20 million municipal loan repayment coming due on Nov. 1, Mayor McClellan reached out to Morgan in secret to ask for a bailout. Fearing renewed market panic if word got out, Morgan quietly bought city bonds worth $30 million.
Moore & Schley bailout and trust company crisis resolution. The market turmoil put intense pressure on the finances of brokerage firm Moore & Schley, which had borrowed heavily against nearly worthless TC&I stock. In marathon overnight negotiations on Nov. 2 and 3, Morgan brokered a grand bargain to bail out Moore & Schley and several trust companies that remained at risk of failure.
U.S. Steel-TC&I merger. The Moore & Schley bailout required U.S. Steel to purchase TC&I at a favorable price. Under normal circumstances, the merger would have violated antitrust law, but Morgan and high-ranking government officials persuaded President Roosevelt to approve it anyway.
The “panic” part of the Panic of 1907 peaked on Oct. 24 and 25. Although the early interventions led by Morgan and Cortelyou kept things from totally spiraling out of control, the real turning point was New York Clearing House’s massive credit extension over the weekend of the 25th. That gave Morgan and friends breathing room to shore up New York City’s finances and stabilize the troubled trust companies.
Response & Interventions
The Panic of 1907 unfolded over the course of about three weeks. A lot happened during that time, and the main participants in the response probably experienced it as a sleep-deprived blur of action and reaction.
In hindsight, the panic had several distinct phases. Each generated a specific response from the financiers, industrialists, and government officials who’d taken it upon themselves to limit the damage.
Initial fallout from the United Copper scheme. This phase preceded the full-blown panic. It consisted of largely unsuccessful efforts by bank owners and executives, most notably at Knickerbocker Trust Company, to quell runs on their own institutions.
Morgan-Cortelyou alliance. Morgan and Cortelyou got involved on Oct. 22, once it became clear that the trust companies couldn’t manage the crisis on their own. They collectively raised nearly $50 million to keep the industry afloat.
NYSE bailout. The NYSE got the single biggest bailout — nearly $35 million — because it was the single most important institution at risk of failure. Its collapse would have had devastating consequences for the U.S. financial system and economy.
Restoring confidence in the U.S. banking system. This was the most public phase of the crisis management effort. Morgan, Cortelyou, and his associates blitzed the press, assuring Americans that their money was safe in the bank. New York Clearing House’s massive credit line was critical to this effort as well.
New York City municipal bailout. Though they arose independently, New York City’s financial woes deepened during the Panic of 1907, and Morgan felt obligated to step in. He judged that the crisis would reignite if the city declared bankruptcy at such a sensitive time.
Grand bargain. This was the Panic of 1907’s final act. Both Morgan’s group of capitalists and the decidedly progressive Roosevelt administration agreed that all outstanding threats to the financial system had to be resolved as quickly as possible.
How the Panic of 1907 Affected the Future Economy
Though it’s barely remembered today, the Panic of 1907 had a deep and durable impact on the American financial system and economy. Its influence rivaled two much better-known financial panics: the Crash of 1929, which sparked the Great Depression, and the Great Financial Crisis of the late 2000s.
Establishment of the Federal Reserve System
The most significant outcome of the Panic of 1907 was the establishment of the Federal Reserve system.
Unlike other industrialized nations in Europe and Asia, the United States had been without a central bank since the 1830s. That mattered because other countries’ central banks could extend credit to private banks as needed to shore up cash reserves and maintain liquidity. They could do this not only during extraordinary financial crises but in response to costly disasters like an earthquake in San Francisco — or even in response to seasonal forces like the capital-intensive fall harvest.
Though many politicians and economists saw the lack of a U.S. central bank as a major economic vulnerability, key players in the financial industry were opposed to the idea of a government-run creditor of last resort. Resistance to the idea continued despite periodic financial panics in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Panic of 1907 was a turning point in part because it was the second time in less than 15 years that a single individual — J.P. Morgan — led a broad bailout of the American financial system. The idea that one man held such sway over the economy made even the most committed capitalists nervous.
So in May 1908, Congress established the National Monetary Commission to study the question of whether the U.S. should have a central bank. The commission reported its findings in 1911 — in short, arguing that the U.S. needed a central bank — and Congress created the Federal Reserve system two years later.
Antitrust Backlash
The Panic of 1907 sparked an intense political backlash against individual plutocrats like J.P. Morgan and the concept of concentrated wealth and influence in general.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Banking and Currency established a select committee to examine the “money trust” — the financial institutions controlled or influenced by Morgan and his associates.
Known as the Pujo Committee, it investigated questionable allegations that Morgan engineered the crisis to profit from the merger of U.S. Steel and TC&I while weakening the power of the trust companies. There was a fair bit of spectacle involved, and people close to Morgan blamed lawmakers’ aggressive questioning for hastening his death shortly after his testimony.
But the Pujo Committee’s final report was a comprehensive (if somewhat exaggerated) accounting of the U.S. economy’s vulnerabilities. Among other revelations, it found that Morgan had ownership in or influence over more than 100 companies worth more than $22 billion, a shocking sum at the time.
The Pujo Committee’s findings further increased support for a federal income tax, which was already on its way to being enacted via constitutional amendment. That officially happened in 1913. The following year saw the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened existing antitrust laws and — in a clear swipe at Morgan — prohibited people from serving as directors for competing companies under certain conditions.
Final Word
It’s tempting to dismiss the Panic of 1907 as a relic of a bygone era, like the telegraph or whale-oil lamps. It’s also tempting to downplay it in light of much more recent economic crises, like the financial crisis of the late 2000s or the brief but severe COVID-19 recession in 2020.
But the Panic of 1907 remains relevant today.
For starters, it was the final financial crisis before the U.S. government set up the Federal Reserve system in the hopes of averting future crises. New York Clearing House’s broad credit guarantees, which headed off further panic, inspired the Federal Reserve system’s discount lending window for troubled banks.
The Panic of 1907 was also an important inflection point for the American financial industry after the excesses of the Gilded Age, as the industry’s leaders realized the limits of self-regulation and gained newfound appreciation for (limited) government intervention.
That said, the reforms instituted in the wake of the Panic of 1907 couldn’t prevent the Great Depression or the late-2000s financial crisis. Those crises prompted their own reforms. Unfortunately, so will future financial panics.
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Brian Martucci writes about credit cards, banking, insurance, travel, and more. When he’s not investigating time- and money-saving strategies for Money Crashers readers, you can find him exploring his favorite trails or sampling a new cuisine. Reach him on Twitter @Brian_Martucci.
Creating a space that reflects your personal style and provides comfort is a rewarding endeavor. And when it comes to home decor, making the right design decisions can truly transform a living space. While certain pieces, such as sofas, appliances, and mattresses, are clear investment items, how do you decide when to save or splurge? Luckily, this Redfin article has expert-backed advice to help you make the best decision.
So, whether you live in a house in Duluth, MN, or a Wilmington, NC apartment, read on to learn about 12 priceless home decor items that are worth the investment.
1. A sturdy sofa
Investing in a quality living room sofa is critical when designing your home. “Sofas and couches get a significant amount of use and need to meet the demands of a busy home,” notes Cory Connor, owner of Cory Connor Designs. “When thinking about upholstery, consider using performance fabrics that can take the day-to-day wear of children and pets,” she says.
Additionally, selecting a neutral fabric allows you to switch out pillows, rugs, and window treatments as trends change.
2. Paint with personality
Paint is one of the most impactful parts of a home, so it’s essential to invest in it when renovating or redecorating. “While you can slowly invest in other decorations over time, paint is unique because it immediately adds personality and flair that makes a home yours,” comments Lily Zingman, owner of Lily Z Designs. “If you’re feeling bold, go for some accent wallpaper walls as well.”
3. Unique wallpaper
The team at Hygge & West believes that wallpaper can add a different dimension to a room. “We’re often asked for paint color matches for our wallpaper background colors, but we love the more recent trend of choosing an accent color from wallpaper to paint trim and accents,” they say. “We’ve been seeing this approach a lot more recently and think it’s a keeper.”
Don’t be afraid to play around with your wallpaper and paint colors to create a one-of-a-kind statement.
4. Long-lasting furniture
Invest in sturdy, long-lasting furniture. When selecting your furniture, look for durable items that will serve a function in your home. “Avoid filler items that don’t have a use in your layout,” says Talita Mathias, Design Manager with Basile Studio. “Opt for fewer items and more open floor space to accentuate the beautiful furniture you own.”
5. A beautiful rug
One of the most impactful investments you can make in a room is a rug that correctly fits the floor. “Make sure to leave between 8” and 18” of space from the walls,” suggests Adam Charlap Hyman, Principal at Charlap Hyman & Herrero. “Rugs give clarity and strength to a space and allow it to breathe,” he says. “While you don’t want everything symmetrical, a bit of balance goes a long way in making a room feel ordered and calm.”
Stephanie Dyer, Creative Director of Dyer Studio, agrees that rugs are an essential investment piece. “Make sure to choose the correct size for your space,” she says. “Undersized rugs can make a space feel imbalanced or unfinished, especially in open floor plans. Choose the right rug to enhance your room’s function and style.”
6. Quality lighting
A priceless home decor and design item that is worth the investment is quality room lighting. “Art, furniture, and other pieces of home decor require appropriate lighting in order to give off their intended impressions,” says Danny Evatt from Texas Real Estate Source. “Even the finest furnishings won’t look very good in dim, dank lighting, so invest in it to beautify your home.” Good lighting can also increase your home’s value, which is helpful if you’re planning to sell.
7. Gorgeous wall sconces
A great choice for homeowners and renters is timeless wall sconces. “Sconces are gorgeous and make a difference in any space,” advises Kim Hawkins, president of Gardella Design Group. “They come in black, silver, and gold, can last 50 hours on one charge, and are often fully dimmable with a remote,” she says. “You can also often control the quality of light and use rechargeable bulbs to help reduce your carbon footprint.”
8. Quality staging if you plan to sell
If you’re planning on selling your home, investing in quality staging can dramatically increase your home’s value. “With a little refresh or upgrade, a potential buyer can really see the potential of the home,” says Jenny Bittner Borden, Director of Showcase Operations at The San Francisco Decorator Showcase. “Staging helps people feel at home and gives them ideas on how to use the space in a functional way that works for them.”
9. Antiques with a story
Antique furniture and accessories are important because they add depth and dimension to your home. “These pieces literally have history and a story to tell,” says Mark Phelps, founder and principal of Mark Phelps Interiors. “Regardless of your choice, your space will be enhanced by the antiques you select because they have had a journey of their own.”
10 Unique artwork
Art and photography are worthwhile investments. “Art has the transformative power to pull a space together, reflect your unique personality, and add warmth,” says Natasha Hanan, Program Manager at These Fine Walls. “It’s what makes a space feel lived in, connects people, and tells a story,” she says. “Even if you move or decide to redecorate, art remains a constant you can easily move or rearrange to continue to make an impact.”
11. Natural and organic materials
The team at CT Exclusive Homes suggests investing in organic and sustainable materials. “The trends for 2023 are all about bringing organic, sustainable, and recycled materials into your home,” they say. “From natural stones, wood elements, and natural fabrics to blending antiques with modern furnishings. More than ever, we understand that our homes are our safe haven, and we love surrounding ourselves with the natural materials mother nature gifts to us-
12. Multifunctional spaces
Multifunctional spaces are worth the splurge. They are designed to be flexible, adaptable, and efficient, allowing people to maximize their living and working spaces. But how do you create them? Reiko Lewis, Principal Designer with Ventus Design, has a few suggestions to help:
In larger rooms, create zones within a space by considering how you arrange your furniture. Invest in rugs, mirrors, and different lighting in set areas to help establish zones.
If you’re short on space, invest in softer paint colors and remove anything that creates a partition. This way, your area will flow and feel more open and airier.
Invest in dual-function furniture designs that you can use in several ways to suit your interior needs, no matter the space.
United Airlines is offering passengers affected by the weeklong delays and cancellations 30,000 frequent flyer miles following a bumpy recovery and a string of bad publicity.
“I know this week was hard,” United wrote in an email from Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo on Saturday to impacted passengers, and obtained by TPG. “Really bad weather, air traffic control issues and some of our own operational challenges led to a rough experience for you and many of our customers.”
Severe thunderstorms spurred widespread travel disruptions last weekend, however, United fared far worse than the other U.S. airlines, as it led in cancellations and delays in the days following the inclement weather.
As a result of the thousands of cancellations and delays United reported within the week, thousands of travelers were left stranded in airports across the country, scrambling for backup flights ahead of July 4, reported to be one of the busiest travel weekends on record.
According to United, the email was sent to customers with trips between June 24-30, and who were delayed overnight or had their flights canceled.
United told TPG via email, “Customers will get a follow-up email later next week with simple steps to automatically add 30,000 miles to their account (existing MileagePlus members will have one path, non-MP members will be given instructions on how to sign up and receive their miles).”
United initially blamed the Federal Aviation Administration for the disruptions, but the carrier also faced staffing issues, with its chapter of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA reporting long wait times for scheduling.
To add fuel to the fire, Kirby also chartered a private jet from Teterboro Airport to Denver as the Chicago-based carrier struggled to restore its operations. United said it did not pay for Kirby’s flight.
Kirby apologized for flying on a private jet as United faced operational woes in a memo sent to staff.
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“Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers waiting to get home,” he wrote.
As of Saturday afternoon, United seemed to be on the road to recovery, tallying 523 delays and 56 cancellations, according to FlightAware. Still, 19% of its flights on Saturday were delayed as of 4:48 p.m. ET with most of those delays again coming from its Newark hub.
“Providing these miles is the right thing to do,” Kirby wrote in the email to passengers. “After all, you put your trust in us and expect more.” Customers will receive a follow-up email with how to claim the miles.
United told TPG, “This gesture is in addition to the many other ways we’ve been helping our customers whose travel has been impacted this week, including things like: providing vouchers for hotels and meals, offering amenity carts with snacks and beverages, and giving customers future travel credits and miles.”
Interestingly, United does not suggest it would reimburse all affected customers for costs incurred during the meltdown as Southwest did after a similar mess during Christmas.
“This has been one of the most operationally challenging weeks I’ve experienced in my entire career,” Kirby wrote to employees in a memo first reported by CNBC.
High above the Las Vegas Strip, solar panels blanketed the roof of Mandalay Bay Convention Center — 26,000 of them, rippling across an area larger than 20 football fields.
From this vantage point, the sun-dappled Mandalay Bay and Delano hotels dominated the horizon, emerging like comically large golden scepters from the glittering black panels.Snow-tipped mountains rose to the west.
It was a cold winter morning in the Mojave Desert. But there was plenty of sunlight to supply the solar array.
“This is really an ideal location,” said Michael Gulich, vice president of sustainability at MGM Resorts International.
The same goes for the rest of Las Vegas and its sprawling suburbs.
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Sin City already has more solar panels per person than any major U.S. metropolis outside Hawaii, according to one analysis. And the city is bursting with single-family homes, warehouses and parking lots untouched by solar.
L.A. Times energy reporter Sammy Roth heads to the Las Vegas Valley, where giant solar fields are beginning to carpet the desert. But what is the environmental cost? (Video by Jessica Q. Chen, Maggie Beidelman / Los Angeles Times)
There’s enormous opportunity to lower household utility bills and cut climate pollution — without damaging wildlife habitat or disrupting treasured landscapes.
But that hasn’t stopped corporations from making plans to carpet the desert surrounding Las Vegas with dozens of giant solar fields — some of them designed to supply power to California. The Biden administration has fueled that growth, taking steps to encourage solar and wind energy development across vast stretches of public lands in Nevada and other Western states.
Those energy generators could imperil rare plants and slow-footed tortoises already threatened by rising temperatures.
They could also lessen the death and suffering from the worsening heat waves, fires, droughts and storms of the climate crisis.
Researchers have found there’s not nearly enough space on rooftops to supply all U.S. electricity — especially as more people drive electric cars. Even an analysis funded by rooftop solar advocates and installers found that the most cost-effective route to phasing out fossil fuels involves six times more power from big solar and wind farms than from smaller local solar systems.
But the exact balance has yet to be determined. And Nevada is ground zero for figuring it out.
The outcome could be determined, in part, by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The so-called Oracle of Omaha owns NV Energy, the monopoly utility that supplies electricity to most Nevadans. NV Energy and its investor-owned utility brethren across the country can earn huge amounts of money paving over public lands with solar and wind farms and building long-distance transmission lines to cities.
But by regulatory design, those companies don’t profit off rooftop solar. And in many cases, they’ve fought to limit rooftop solar — which can reduce the need for large-scale infrastructure and result in lower returns for investors.
Mike Troncoso remembers the exact date of Nevada’s rooftop solar reckoning.
It was Dec. 23, 2015, and he was working for SolarCity. The rooftop installer abruptly ceased operations in the Silver State after NV Energy helped persuade officials to slash a program that pays solar customers for energy they send to the power grid.
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“I was out in the field working, and we got a call: ‘Stop everything you’re doing, don’t finish the project, come to the warehouse,’” Troncoso said. “It was right before Christmas, and they said, ‘Hey, guys, unfortunately we’re getting shut down.’”
After a public outcry, Nevada lawmakers partly reversed the reductions to rooftop solar incentives. Since then, NV Energy and the rooftop solar industry have maintained an uneasy political ceasefire. Installations now exceed pre-2015 levels.
Today, Troncoso is Nevada branch manager for Sunrun, the nation’s largest rooftop solar installer. The company has enough work in the state to support a dozen crews, each named for a different casino. On a chilly winter morning before sunrise, they prepared for the day ahead — laying out steel rails, hooking up microinverters and loading panels onto powder-blue trucks.
But even if Sunrun’s business continues to grow, it won’t eliminate the need for large solar farms in the desert.
Some habitat destruction is unavoidable — at least if we want to break our fossil fuel addiction. The key questions are: How many big solar farms are needed, and where should they be built? Can they be engineered to coexist with animals and plants?
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And if not, should Americans be willing to sacrifice a few endangered species in the name of tackling climate change?
To answer those questions, Los Angeles Times journalists spent a week in southern Nevada, touring solar construction sites, hiking up sand dunes and off-roading through the Mojave. We spoke with NV Energy executives, conservation activists battling Buffett’s company and desert rats who don’t want to see their favorite off-highway vehicle trails cut off by solar farms.
Odds are, no one will get everything they want.
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The tortoise in the coal mine
Biologist Bre Moyle easily spotted the small yellow flag affixed to a scraggly creosote bush — one of many hardy plants sprouting from the caliche soil, surrounded by rows of gleaming steel trusses that would soon hoist solar panels toward the sky.
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Moyle leaned down for a closer look, gently pulling aside branches to reveal a football-sized hole in the ground. It was the entrance to a desert tortoise burrow — one of thousands catalogued by her employer, Primergy Solar, during construction of one of the nation’s largest solar farms on public lands outside Las Vegas.
“I wouldn’t stand on this side of it,” Moyle advised us. “If you walk back there, you could collapse it, potentially.”
I’d seen plenty of solar construction sites in my decade reporting on energy. But none like this.
Instead of tearing out every cactus and other plant and leveling the land flat — the “blade and grade” method — Primergy had left much of the native vegetation in place and installed trusses of different heights to match the ground’s natural contours. The company had temporarily relocated more than 1,600 plants to an on-site nursery, with plans to put them back later.
The Oakland-based developer also went to great lengths to safeguard desert tortoises — an iconic reptile protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, and the biggest environmental roadblock to building solar in the Mojave.
Desert tortoises are sensitive to global warming, residential sprawl and other human encroachment on their habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has estimated tortoise populations fell by more than one-third between 2004 and 2014.
Scientists consider much of the Primergy site high-quality tortoise habitat. It also straddles a connectivity corridor that could help the reptiles seek safer haven as hotter weather and more extreme droughts make their current homes increasingly unlivable.
Before Primergy started building, the company scoured the site and removed 167 tortoises, with plans to let them return and live among the solar panels once the heavy lifting is over. Two-thirds of the project site will be repopulated with tortoises.
Workers removed more tortoises during construction. As of January, the company knew of just two tortoises killed — one that may have been hit by a car, and another that may have been entombed in its burrow by roadwork, then eaten by a kit fox.
Primergy Vice President Thomas Regenhard acknowledged the company can’t build solar here without doing any harm to the ecosystem — or spurring opposition from conservation activists. But as he watched union construction workers lift panels onto trusses, he said Primergy is “making the best of the worst-case situation” for solar opponents.
“What we’re trying to do is make it the least impactful on the environment and natural resources,” he said. “What we’re also doing is we’re sharing that knowledge, so that these projects can be built in a better way moving forward.”
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The company isn’t saving tortoises out of the goodness of its profit-seeking heart.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management conditioned its approval of the solar farm, called Gemini, on a long list of environmental protection measures — and only after some bureau staffers seemingly contemplated rejecting the project entirely.
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife show the bureau’s Las Vegas field office drafted several versions of a “record of decision” that would have denied the permit application for Gemini. The drafts listed several objections, including harm to desert tortoises, loss of space for off-road vehicle drivers and disturbance of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail, which runs through the project site.
Separately, Primergy reached a legal settlement with conservationists — who challenged the project’s federal approval in court — in which the company agreed to additional steps to protect tortoises and a plant known as the three-corner milkvetch.
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The company estimates just 2.5% of the project site will be permanently disturbed — far less than the 33% allowed by Primergy’s federal permit. Regenhard is hopeful the lessons learned here will inform future solar development on public lands.
“This is something new. So we’re refining a lot of the processes,” he said. “We’re not perfect. We’re still learning.”
By the time construction wraps this fall, 1.8 million panels will cover nearly 4,000 football fields’ worth of land, just off the 15 Freeway. They’ll be able to produce 690 megawatts of power — as much as 115,000 typical home solar systems. And they’ll be paired with batteries, to store energy and help NV Energy customers keep running their air conditioners after sundown.
Unlike many solar fields, Gemini is close to the population it will serve — just a few dozen miles from the Strip. And the affected landscape is far from visually stunning, with none of the red-rock majesty found at nearby Valley of Fire State Park.
But desert tortoises don’t care if a place looks cool to humans. They care if it’s good tortoise habitat.
Moyle, Primergy’s environmental services manager, pointed to a small black structure at the bottom of a fence along the site’s edge — a shade shelter for tortoises. Workers installed them every 800 feet, so that if any relocated reptiles try to return to the solar farm too early, they don’t die pacing along the fence in the heat.
“They have a really, really good sense of direction,” Moyle said. “They know where their homes are. They want to come back.”
Primergy will study what happens when tortoises do come back. Will they benefit from the shade of the solar panels? Or will they struggle to survive on the industrialized landscape?
And looming over those uncertainties, a more existential query: With global warming beginning to devastate human and animal life around the world, should we really be slowing or stopping solar development to save a single type of reptile?
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Moyle was ready with an answer: Tortoises are a keystone species. If they’re doing well, it’s a good sign of a healthy ecosystem in which other desert creatures — such as burrowing owls, kit foxes and American badgers — are positioned to thrive, too.
And as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, human survival is inextricably linked with a healthy natural world.
“We take one thing out, we don’t know what sort of disastrous effect it’s going to have on everything else,” Moyle said.
We do, however, know the consequences of relying on fossil fuels: entire towns burning to the ground, Lake Mead three-quarters empty, elderly Americans baking to death in their overheated homes. With worse to come.
The shifting sands of time
A few miles south, another solar project was rising in the desert. This one looked different.
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A fleet of bulldozers, scrapers, excavators and graders was nearly done flattening the land — a beige moonscape devoid of cacti and creosote. The solar panel support trusses were all the same height, forming an eerily rigid silver sea.
When I asked Carl Glass — construction manager for DEPCOM Power, the contractor building this project for Buffett’s NV Energy — why workers couldn’t leave vegetation in place like at Gemini, he offered a simple answer: drainage. Allowing the land to retain its natural contours, he said, would make it difficult to move stormwater off the site during summer monsoons.
Safety was another consideration, said Dani Strain, NV Energy’s senior manager for the project. Blading and grading the land meant workers wouldn’t have to carry solar panels and equipment across ground studded with tripping hazards.
“It’s nicer for the environment not to do it,” Strain said. “But it creates other problems. You can’t have everything.”
This kind of solar project has typified development in the Mojave Desert.
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And it helps explain why the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly has fought so hard to limit that development.
The morning after touring the solar construction sites, we joined Donnelly for a hike up Big Dune, a giant pile of sand covering five square miles and towering 500 feet above the desert floor, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The sun was just beginning its ascent over the Mojave, bathing the sand in a smooth umber glow beneath pockets of wispy cloud.
On weekends, Donnelly said, the dune can be overrun by thousands of off-road vehicles. But on this day, it was quiet.
Energy companies have proposed more than a dozen solar farms on public lands surrounding Big Dune — some with overlapping footprints. Donnelly doesn’t oppose all of them. But he thinks federal agencies should limit solar to the least ecologically sensitive parts of Nevada, instead of letting companies pitch projects almost anywhere they choose.
“Developers are looking at this as low-hanging fruit,” he said. “The idea is, this is where California can build all of its solar.”
We trekked slowly up the dune, our bodies casting long shadows in the early morning light. When we took a breather and looked back down, a trail of footprints marked our path. Donnelly assured us a windy day would wipe them away.
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“This is why I live here, man,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful place on Earth, in my mind.”
Donnelly broke his back in a rock-climbing accident, so he used a walking stick to scale the dune. He lives not far from here, at the edge of Death Valley National Park, and works as the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity’s Great Basin director.
As we resumed our journey, the wind blowing hard, I asked Donnelly to rank the top human threats to the Mojave. He was quick to answer: The climate crisis was No. 1, followed by housing sprawl, solar development and off-road vehicles.
“There’s no good solar project in the desert. But there’s less bad,” he said. “And we’re at a point now where we have to settle for less bad, because the alternatives are more bad: more coal, more gas, climate apocalypse.”
That hasn’t stopped Donnelly and his colleagues from fighting renewable energy projects they fear would wipe out entire species — even little-known plants and animals with tiny ranges, such as Tiehm’s buckwheat and the Dixie Valley toad.
“I’m not a religious guy,” Donnelly said. “But all God’s creatures great and small.”
After a steep stretch of sand, we stopped along a ridge with sweeping views. To our west were the Funeral Mountains, across the California state line in Death Valley National Park — and far beyond them Mt. Whitney, its snow-covered facade just barely visible. To our east was Highway 95, cutting across the Amargosa Valley en route from Las Vegas to Reno.
It’s along this highway that so many developers want to build.
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“We would be in a sea of solar right now,” Donnelly said.
Having heard plenty of rural residents say they don’t want to look at such a sea, I asked Donnelly if this was a bad spot for solar because it would ruin the glorious views. He told me he never makes that argument, “because honestly, views aren’t really the primary concern at this moment. The primary concern is stopping the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis.”
“There are certain places where we shouldn’t put solar because it’s a wild and undisturbed landscape,” he said.
As far as he’s concerned, though, the Amargosa Valley isn’t one of those landscapes, what with Highway 95 running through it. The same goes for Dry Lake Valley, where NV Energy’s solar construction site is already surrounded by energy infrastructure.
What Donnelly would like to see is better planning.
He pointed to California, where state and federal officials spent eight years crafting a desert conservation plan that allows solar and wind farms across a few hundred thousand acres while setting aside millions more for protection. He thinks a similar process is crucial in Nevada, where four-fifths of the land area is owned by the federal government — more than any other state.
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If Donnelly had his way, regulators would put the kibosh on solar farms immediately adjacent to Big Dune. He’s worried they could alter the movement of sand across the desert floor, affecting several rare beetles that call the dune home.
But if the feds want to allow solar projects along the highway to the south, near the Area 51 Alien Center?
“Might not be the end the world,” Donnelly said.
He shot me a grin.
“You know, one thing I like to do …”
Without warning, he took off racing down the dune, carried by momentum and love for the desert. He laughed as he reached a natural stopping point, calling for us to join him. His voice sounded free and full of possibility.
Some solar panels on the horizon wouldn’t have changed that.
Shout it from the rooftops
Laura Cunningham and Kevin Emmerich were a match made in Mojave Desert heaven.
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Cunningham was a wildlife biologist, Emmerich a park ranger when they met nearly 30 years ago at Death Valley. She studied tortoises for government agencies and later a private contractor. He worked with bighorn sheep and gave interpretive talks. They got married, bought property along the Amargosa River and started their own conservation group, Basin and Range Watch.
And they’ve been fighting solar development ever since.
That’s how we ended up in the back of their SUV, pulling open a rickety cattle gate off Highway 95 and driving past wild burros on a dirt road through Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
They had told us Sarcobatus Flat was stunning, but I was still surprised by how stunning. I got my first look as we crested a ridge. The gently sloping valley spilled down toward Death Valley National Park, whose snowy mountain peaks towered over a landscape dotted with thousands of Joshua trees.
“Everything we’re looking at is proposed for solar development,” Cunningham said.
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Most environmentalists agree we need at least some large solar farms. Cunningham and Emmerich are different. They’re at the vanguard of a harder-core desert protection movement that sees all large-scale solar farms on public lands as bad news.
Why had so many companies converged on Sarcobatus Flat?
The main answer is transmission. NV Energy is seeking federal approval to build the 358-mile Greenlink West electric line, which would carry thousands of megawatts of renewable power between Reno and Las Vegas along the Highway 95 corridor.
The dirt road curved around a small hill, and suddenly we found ourselves on the valley floor, surrounded by Joshua trees. Some looked healthy; others had bark that had been chewed by rodents seeking water, a sign of drought stress. Scientists estimate the Joshua tree’s western subspecies could lose 90% of its range as the world gets hotter and droughts get more intense.
But asked whether climate change or solar posed a bigger threat to Sarcobatus Flat, Cunningham didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, solar development hands down,” she said.
Nearly 20 years ago, she said, she helped relocate desert tortoises to make way for a test track in California. One of them tried to return home, walking 20 miles before hitting a fence. It paced back and forth and eventually died of heat exhaustion.
Solar farms, she said, pose a similar threat to tortoises. And at Sarcobatus Flat, they would cover a high-elevation area that could otherwise serve as a climate refuge for Joshua trees, giving them a relatively cool place to reproduce as the planet heats up.
“It makes no sense to me that we’re going to bulldoze them down and throw them into trash piles. It’s just crazy,” she said.
In Cunningham and Emmerich’s view, every sun-baked parking lot in L.A. and Vegas and Phoenix should have a solar canopy, every warehouse and single-family home a solar roof. It’s a common argument among desert defenders: Why sacrifice sensitive ecosystems when there’s an easy alternative for fighting climate change? Especially when rooftop solar can reduce strain on an overtaxed electric grid and — when paired with batteries — help people keep their lights on during blackouts?
The answer isn’t especially satisfying to conservationists.
For all the virtues of rooftop solar, it’s an expensive way to generate clean power — and keeping energy costs low is crucial to ensure that lower-income families can afford electric cars, another key climate solution. A recent report from investment bank Lazard pegged the cost of rooftop solar at 11.7 cents per kilowatt-hour on the low end, compared with 2.4 cents for utility solar.
Even when factoring in pricey long-distance electric lines, utility-scale solar is typically cheaper, several experts told me.
“It’s three to six times more expensive to put solar on your roof than to put it in a large-scale project,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University. “There may be some added value to having solar in the Los Angeles Basin instead of the middle of the Mojave Desert. But is it 300% to 600% more value? Probably not. It’s probably not even close.”
There’s a practical challenge, too.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated U.S. rooftops could generate 1,432 terawatt-hours of electricity per year — just 13% of the power America will need to replace most of its coal, oil and gas, according to research led by Jenkins.
Add in parking lots and other areas within cities, and urban solar systems might conceivably supply one-quarter or even one-third of U.S. power, several experts told The Times — in an unlikely scenario where they’re installed in every suitable spot.
Energy researcher Chris Clack’s consulting firm has found that dramatic growth in rooftop and other small-scale solar installations could reduce the costs of slashing climate pollution by half a trillion dollars. But even Clack said rooftops alone won’t cut it.
“Realistically, 80% is going to end up being utility grid no matter what,” he said.
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All those industrial renewable energy projects will have to go somewhere.
Sarcobatus Flat may not be the answer. Federal officials classified all three solar proposals there as “low priority,” citing their proximity to Death Valley and potential harm to tortoise habitat. One developer withdrew its application last year.
Before leaving the area, Cunningham pointed to a wooden marker, one of at least half a dozen stretching out in a line. I walked over to take a closer look and discovered it was a mining claim for lithium — a main ingredient in electric-car batteries.
If solar development didn’t upend this valley, lithium extraction might.
On the beaten track
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The four-wheeler jerked violently as Erica Muxlow pressed her foot to the gas, sending us flying down a rough dirt road with no end in sight but the distant mountains. Five-point safety straps were the only things stopping us from flying out of our seats, the vehicle leaping through the air as we reached speeds of 40 mph, then 50 mph, the wind whipping our faces.
It was like riding Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds — just without the Yeti.
Ahead of us, Muxlow’s neighbor Jimmy Lewis led the way on an electric blue motorcycle, kicking up a stream of sand. He wanted us to see thousands of acres of public lands outside his adopted hometown of Pahrump, in Nevada’s Nye County, that could soon be blocked by solar projects — cutting off access to off-highway vehicle enthusiasts such as himself.
“You could build an apartment complex or a shopping mall here, and it would be the same thing to me,” he said.
To progressive-minded Angelenos or San Franciscans, preserving large chunks of public land for gas-guzzling, environmentally destructive dirt bikes might sound like a terrible reason not to build solar farms that would lessen the climate crisis.
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But here’s the reality: Rural Westerners such as Lewis will play a key role in determining how much clean energy gets built.
Not long before our Nevada trip, Nye County placed a six-month pause on new renewable energy projects, citing local concerns about loss of off-road vehicle trails. Similar fears have stymied development across the U.S., with rural residents attacking solar and wind farms as industrial intrusions on their way of life — and local governments throwing up roadblocks.
For Lewis, the conflict is deeply personal.
He moved here from Southern California more than a decade ago, trading life by the beach for a five-acre plot where he runs an off-roading school and test-drives motorcycles for manufacturers. His warehouse was packed with dozens of dirt bikes.
“This is my life. Motorcycles, motorcycles, motorcycles,” he said, laughing.
Lewis has worked to stir up opposition to three local solar farm proposals. So far, his efforts have been in vain.
One project is already under construction. Peering through a fence, we saw row after row of trusses, waiting for their photovoltaic panels. It’s called Yellow Pine, and it’s being built by Florida-based NextEra Energy to supply power to California.
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Lewis learned about Yellow Pine when he was riding one of his favorite trails and was surprised to find it cut off. He compared the experience to riding the best roller-coaster at a theme park, only to have it grind to a halt three-quarters of the way through.
“I don’t want my playground taken away from me,” he said.
“Me neither!” a voice called out from behind us.
We turned and were greeted by Shannon Salter, an activist who had previously spent nine months camping near the Yellow Pine site to protest the habitat destruction. She and Lewis had never met, but they quickly realized they had common cause.
“It’s the opposite of green!” Salter said.
“On my roof, not my backyard,” Lewis agreed.
Never mind that conservationists have long decried the ecological damage from desert off-roading. Salter and Lewis both cared about these lands. Neither wanted to see the solar industry lay claim to them. They talked about staying in touch.
It’s easy to imagine similar alliances forming across the West, the clean energy transition bringing together environmentalists and rural residents in a battle to defend their lifestyles, their landscapes and animals that can’t fight for themselves.
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It’s also easy to imagine major cities that badly need lots of solar and wind power — Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix — brushing off those complaints as insignificant compared with the climate emergency, or as fueled by right-wing misinformation.
But many of concerns raised by critics are legitimate. And their voices are only getting louder.
As night fell over the Mojave, Lewis shared his idea that any city buying electricity from a desert solar farm should be required to install a certain amount of rooftop solar back home first — on government buildings, at least. It only seemed fair.
“Some people see the desert as just a wasteland,” Lewis said. “I think it’s beautiful.”
The view from Black Mountain
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So how do we build enough renewable energy to replace fossil fuels without destroying too many ecosystems, or stoking too much political opposition from rural towns, or moving too slowly to save the planet?
Few people could do more to ease those tensions than Buffett.
Our conversation kept returning to the legendary investor as we hiked Black Mountain, just outside Vegas, on our last morning in the Silver State. We were joined by Jaina Moan, director of external affairs for the Nature Conservancy’s Nevada chapter. She had promised a view of massive solar fields from the peak — but only after a 3.5-mile trek with 2,000 feet of elevation gain.
“It’ll be a little StairMaster at the end,” she warned us.
The homes and hotels and casinos of the Las Vegas Valley retreated behind us as we climbed, looking ever smaller and more insignificant against the vast open desert. It was an illusion that will prove increasingly difficult to maintain as Sin City and its suburbs continue their march into the Mojave. Nevada politicians from both parties are pushing for legislation that would let federal officials auction off additional public lands for residential and commercial development.
Vegas and other Western cities could limit the need for more suburbs — and sprawling solar farms — by growing smarter, Moan said. Urban areas could embrace density, to help people drive fewer miles and reduce the demand for new power supplies to fuel electric vehicles. They could invest in electric buses and trains — and use less water, which would save a lot of energy.
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“As our spaces become more crowded, we’re going to have to come up with more creative ideas,” Moan said.
That’s where Buffett could make things easier.
The billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway company owns electric utilities that serve millions of people, from California to Nevada to Illinois. Those utilities, Moan said, could buck the industry trend of urging policymakers to reduce financial incentives for rooftop solar and instead encourage the technology — along with other small-scale clean energy solutions, such as local microgrids.
That would limit the need for big solar farms — at least somewhat.
Berkshire and other energy giants could also build solar on lands already altered by humans, such as abandoned mines, toxic Superfund sites, reservoirs, landfills, agricultural areas, highway corridors and canals that carry water to farms and cities.
The costs are typically higher than building on undisturbed public lands. And in many cases there are technical challenges yet to be resolved. But those kinds of “creative solutions” could at least lessen the loss of biodiversity, Moan said.
“There’s money to be made there, and there’s good to be done,” she said.
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It’s hard to know what Buffett thinks. A Berkshire spokesperson declined my request to interview him.
Tony Sanchez, NV Energy’s executive vice president for business development and external relations, was more forthcoming.
“The problem for us with rooftop solar,” he said, is that it’s “not controlled at all by us.” As a result, NV Energy can’t decide when and how rooftop solar power is used — and can’t rely on that power to help balance supply and demand on the grid.
Over time, Sanchez predicted, a lot more rooftop solar will get built. But he couldn’t say how much.
Rooftop solar faces a similarly uncertain future in California, where state officials voted last year to slash incentive payments, calling them an unfair subsidy. Industry leaders have warned of a dramatic decline in installations.
As we neared the top of Black Mountain, the solar farms on the other side came into view. They stretched across the Eldorado Valley far below — black rectangles that could help save life on Earth while also destroying bits and pieces of it.
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Moan believes the key to balancing clean energy and conservation is “go slow to go fast.” Government agencies, she said, should work with conservation activists, small-town residents and Native American tribes to study and map out the best places for clean energy, then reward companies that agree to build in those areas with faster approvals. Solar and wind development would slow down in the short term but speed up in the long run, with quicker environmental reviews and less risk of lawsuits.
It’s a tantalizing concept — but I confessed to Moan that I worried it would backfire.
What if the sparring factions couldn’t agree on the best spots to build solar and wind farms, and instead wasted years arguing? Or what if they did manage to hammer out some compromises, only for a handful of unhappy people or groups to take them to court, gumming up the works? Couldn’t “go slow to go fast” end up becoming “go slow to go slow”?
In other words, should we really bet our collective future on human beings working together, rather than fighting?
Moan was sympathetic to my fears. She also didn’t see another way forward.
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“We really need to think holistically about saving everything,” she said.
The sad truth is, not everything can be saved. Not if we want to keep the world livable for people and animals alike.
Some beloved landscapes will be left unrecognizable. Some families will be stuck paying high energy bills to monopoly utilities, even as some utility investors make less money. Some tortoises will probably die, pacing along fences in the heat.
The alternative is worse.
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