The bipartisan Protect Student College Sports Act would give the NCAA more power to govern national rules and regulations in college sports.
© Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times
Vegan and vegetarian dining options might be more common than ever, but around the country, vegan restaurants are closing at a quicker rate than their non-vegan peers. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Marina Bolotnikova investigates what’s happening to those restaurants as her own favorite vegan establishment closes its doors. And she tries to answer the bigger questions about the closures: What’s lost for the vegan community as restaurants disappear, and what does it tell us about the future of the plant-based movement? Also in this issue: falling in love with friends. 20th-century affordable housing is staging a comeback. A free, lightly feral hobby to escape your phone. And why are doctors paid less to treat women?
By Rachel Cohen Booth
By Shayla Love
By Marina Bolotnikova
By Rachel Wilkerson Miller
By Dylan Scott
Coming October 1
By Anusha Subramanian
Coming October 2
To no small extent, Americans have grown accustomed to being watched.
For more than a decade, CCTV cameras have recorded a hefty portion of many people’s public movements, while ubiquitous smartphones have made us all perpetually vulnerable to unsolicited documentation (if not, social media notoriety).
Until recently, however, technical limitations constrained the reach of government surveillance (at least, in the physical realm). Police may have been swimming in CCTV footage. But using such videos to track any given person’s movements was an extremely time-intensive endeavor. To do so, an officer would need to sift through hours of footage captured on many different cameras.
Yet AI is now making it possible for the government to trace ordinary citizens’ movements with unprecedented ease and precision. Or at least, this is what the security firm Flock Safety has effectively promised — and the company’s critics have loudly warned.
Flock provides police departments with networks of surveillance cameras — primarily, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that photograph each vehicle that passes them.
The firm’s main selling point is also its chief political liability: Its ALPRs log not only license plate numbers, but also generate textual descriptions of all vehicles they detect and store this information in a nationally integrated, searchable database. This makes it technically feasible for police to monitor the travels of most any driver with a few keystrokes.
Alas, some cops cannot be trusted with that power. In August, the Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged or accused of using license-plate readers for illegitimate purposes, often to stalk their exes or romantic interests. Even more alarmingly, some police departments appear to have used ALPR data to surveil their own critics and protesters.
These revelations fortified an already growing movement against license plate readers. In August alone, more than 90 cities and counties canceled contracts with Flock. And this backlash has been remarkably bipartisan. Deep blue cities like Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have backed out of partnerships with Flock, while Republicans in Florida have barred local police from installing ALPRs on state highways, and the Texas GOP has paused funding for Flock cameras.
The anti-ALPR movement is responding to real problems with how that technology has been deployed. And yet, according to Flock and many police departments, these cameras are also helping to nab car thieves and locate missing persons.
All this raises the questions: Do ALPRs really have significant public safety benefits? And if so, is there a way to have our license plate surveillance and civil liberties too?
To find out, I reviewed the latest academic research, dug through the worst horror stories in the news, and reached out to criminologists about the risks and rewards of ALPRs. Although the available evidence is limited, the technology appears to have modest — but genuine — crime-fighting benefits. And while the ALPR databases have been badly misused, this is in part because the tech has gone largely unregulated. With stringent safeguards, there may be a way to make it much harder for creeps and authoritarians to monitor law-abiding citizens’ comings and goings without forfeiting a useful law-enforcement tool.
On a late summer day in Chamblee, Georgia, Leslie Barrera was pushing her 1-year-old son Mateo in a stroller when a car pulled up next to her. A man sprung out of the vehicle, pointed a gun at Barrera, and tried to grab the baby from his carriage. But he’d chosen his victim poorly: Barrera charged him, wrested away his gun, and tried to shoot the kidnapper, only for the firearm to jam. A woman (oddly, disguised as a man) then emerged from the car and snatched the child. The baby-nabbers proceeded to pile back into their vehicle and speed away.
With the aid of surveillance cameras, police quickly identified the car as a maroon Acura SUV. Unfortunately, the abductors had swapped out its valid license plate with a paper dealer tag. Decades earlier, that might have delayed, if not thwarted, the recovery effort. But this was 2020 — and Chamblee police had access to a Flock ALPR system. By searching through its database of vehicle photos, the cops discovered a shot of the same Acura with its registered metal license plate from days earlier. The plate led them to the suspect’s name and address — and thus, within just five hours of his abduction — to Mateo.
Flock has a lot of stories like this. The company boasts that their cameras “supported more than 1 million criminal investigations” and helped locate “more than 10,000 missing persons” last year.
“Every single day, law enforcement across this country is using FLOCK technology to solve crime and find missing people faster,” Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock, told me.
The limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped.
But Flock’s colorful anecdotes and raw tallies tell us only so much. A Flock camera can be used in an investigation without making a decisive difference in its outcome. Without ALPR photos, Chamblee police may still have been able to tie the maroon Acura to Mateo’s kidnappers.
To gauge Flock’s actual impact on public safety, we need (at a minimum) some quasi-experiments: When jurisdictions deploy advanced ALPR systems, do they see lower crime or higher clearance rates — both compared to their own past record and to simultaneous trends in Flock-less places?
There has been remarkably little research into these questions. But a recent study from the University of South Carolina’s Ian Adams and Scott Mourtgos sheds some light into them.
Drawing on Flock’s installation records, the criminologists identified the month that 216 law enforcement agencies activated their first camera. They found that during the first year after Flock deployment, these areas saw an 11 percent decline in motor vehicle theft, relative to similar places that remained un-Flocked. Jurisdictions that put up the ALPRs also saw the success rate of their car theft investigations rise by 16 percent.
These findings should be taken with a few grains of salt. For one thing, police departments will be more likely to invest in an ALPR system if they’ve got a serious stolen vehicle problem. And if car thefts in an area spike, they are liable to regress back toward historically typical levels, no matter what the local police department does.
What’s more, agencies will often install ALPRs as part of broader anti-vehicle theft efforts, which may include deploying more officers to high-crime areas, among other things. Adams and Mourtgos’s data suggests that such simultaneous actions may be responsible for a portion of their results: Although Flock adopters solved stolen car cases at a higher rate after putting up the cameras, this rise tended to begin before the ALPRs were installed.
Nevertheless, the working paper indicates that Flock cameras do make some difference. “We’re not talking huge numbers here,” Mourtgos told me, “but it’s not nothing either.”
And there is reason to think that ALPRs have greater potential to deter and solve crimes than existing results suggest, as police departments may be deploying them in suboptimal ways.
Consider a 2025 study of Atlantic City’s ALPR rollout. On paper, the municipality was an ideal candidate for the technology: As a barrier island, Atlantic City has only eight access points, so an ALPR network could easily capture every car entering and exiting the city.
As one would hope, the research found that car theft declined after the cameras were erected, although the authors could not rule out other explanations. Perhaps more significantly, however, they discovered that the cameras produced vastly more leads than the department was capable of logging or investigating. Between November 2022 and November 2024, the city’s ALPRs issued 12,384 stolen vehicle alerts, virtually all of which went unnoticed or ignored by department personnel; over the studied period, the ALPR system prompted only 72 vehicle stops, of which just 52 concerned stolen cars.
“In an ideal world, someone would be monitoring the alerts in real time and dispatching an officer, who would successfully make a traffic stop,” the paper’s co-author, Rowan University criminologist John Shjarback, told me. “But yeah, that kind of rarely happened.”
Shjarback concludes that the department lacked enough patrol officers to respond to a significant portion of alerts, while its civilian surveillance center monitors appeared to simply miss a large proportion of serious hits. “They have a lot to do in that real-time crime center,” Shjarback said. “There’s a relatively high amount of crime and gun violence and whatnot in Atlantic City. One or two retired officers on duty just weren’t enough to do the live monitoring.”
Similar operational flaws and resource constraints may have limited the efficacy of Flock systems in at least some of the areas analyzed by Adams and Mourtgos. Indeed, Mourtgos noted that many departments in his study lacked enough ALPRs to cover most significant thoroughfares. “Even in jurisdictions that are at the higher end on cameras, you’re still covering an extremely small minority of these roadway structures,” Mourtgos said. “So, that’s probably another reason why we see only modest effects.”
Taken together, the limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped; its ALPR networks do not appear to be the “single greatest change” in policing tech “since DNA,” as the company touts on its website. But, as common sense might suggest, automatically logging all license plates on major highways and intersections seems to make it at least a bit harder to get away with stealing cars (and perhaps, babies).
Of course, the fact that ALPRs offer some benefits to public safety does not mean that they’re necessarily worthwhile. Sewing a GPS chip into every American’s forearm would surely make crimes easier to solve and less tempting to commit. But most would regard such trackers as dystopian infringements on privacy and invitations to authoritarian control.
And Flock’s ALPRS are much the same, in the view of their staunchest critics.
The “DeFlock” movement’s fundamental argument is that the cameras give police departments more information than they can be trusted with. One danger is that wayward cops can exploit the data to stalk their exes. The more profound threat, however, is that police agencies will use ALPR systems to deter or punish lawful dissent.
And that hazard is not entirely hypothetical. After a writer named Canyen Ashworth published an op-ed criticizing local police in Lenexa, Kansas, that town’s police began tracking his movements with its ALPRs (apparently, because Ashworth’s column led the police chief to conclude, incorrectly, that he must have been the dastardly perp behind a recent spree of…unpermitted poster-hanging incidents).
More broadly, a 2025 investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies had run hundreds of searches related to protests or activist groups through Flock’s ALPR system. It’s not clear how many of these queries were motivated by an illiberal desire to monitor dissenters. In theory, a police officer could search for, say, “red sedan at No Kings protest” because a car of that description tried to run over protesters or committed some other criminal offense in the demonstration’s vicinity. And some of the searches tallied by EFF appear to fall into that category. But many others had no discernible purpose beyond the surveillance of activists.
All this is unquestionably alarming. And if widespread misuse of ALPR networks were inevitable, then their costs to civil liberties would likely outweigh their modest (and as yet, not wholly certain) benefits for public safety.
But this probably isn’t the case. Rather, governments can likely limit ALPR’s downsides — while preserving their utility to law enforcement — by more stringently regulating the technology.
“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation. Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation.”
Barry Friedman, founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project
Until recently, legislatures had placed scant guardrails on ALPRs. As the Congressional Research Service noted in 2024, there is “no specific federal legislative framework” governing law enforcement’s use of such cameras. And most states have no comprehensive ALPR regulations. Thus, if we’re failing to prevent police departments from misusing these cameras, it may be because most state and local governments haven’t actually tried.
“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation,” Barry Friedman, the founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project, told me. “Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation. The police decided to do this on their own. Them and their vendors made the decision and didn’t disclose what was happening.”
Fortunately, there is a long list of ways for policymakers to constrain abuse of ALPR data. To name just a few, governments could:
Virginia’s recently enacted ALPR law includes many of these provisions, while several other states have embraced a subset of these policies.
To be sure, for some, even heavily regulated ALPR systems will entail intolerable costs to privacy and unacceptable risks of authoritarian misuse. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supports efforts to regulate license plate readers, but only as a second-best alternative to banning the technology outright.
“No guardrails can completely address the chilling effect of mass surveillance,” Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said. “When people know that they are being surveilled all the time, they may not intellectually dig into the, ‘Well, what exactly is happening with this data? What’s it being collected for? How long is it being stored?’ The average person isn’t going to go through all those steps.”
Rather, Marlow argues, many will simply see cameras and fear that they’re being watched — and fearful of those doing the watching.
“Someone who is an alcoholic and wants to go to an AA meeting — but doesn’t want the public or any of their insurance companies or the government knowing they’re an alcoholic — and knows there’s a camera outside of the church that hosts the meeting may just say, ‘You know what? It’s really important for me to keep this struggle private. And so I can’t go to that AA meeting,’” he said.
These are legitimate concerns, although there is little hard evidence that license-plate readers have a chilling effect on protests or personal behavior. And given how much sensitive information people publicly share on social media — or willingly generate, through their internet activity — there’s some reason to doubt that many will refrain from lawful activity, merely because they spotted an ALPR by the side of the road. In fact, license plate readers have actually been in wide use for more than a decade and, until recently, few seemed to register their existence, much less, reorganize their lives around avoiding the cameras’ gaze.
Still, reasonable people can disagree about how to weigh ALPRs’ trade-offs. My point here is merely that governments may be able to secure modest but meaningful public safety benefits from the cameras — while greatly reducing their misuse — by giving regulation a chance. Using the ALPRs of 2026 probably doesn’t require accepting the authoritarian nightmares of 1984.
In a 2016 opinion, authored one year before he became a Supreme Court justice, then-Judge Neil Gorsuch warned against lawyers who tempt judges to reach conclusions that aren’t supported by the Constitution’s text. “Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution,” the future justice wrote. “And that document isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams for a new and perfected tort law, but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning.”
Gorsuch might have gazed into a crystal ball when he wrote this line, because it could have been written with a case that is now before Gorsuch’s new Court — Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County — in mind.
In Suncor, city and county officials in Boulder, Colorado sued the oil behemoth Exxon Mobil, along with a company named Suncor that operates two oil refineries in Colorado. They sued in Colorado state court, seeking, in their own words, to require the two companies “to share a portion of the costs [Boulder] taxpayers face in coping with a climate altered” by the oil industry.
That alone makes Suncor, which the justices will hear on October 5, a hugely important case, because it could be the first of many lawsuits ordering oil companies to compensate the public for the costs of climate change. But the stakes in this case are even higher because of the audacity of the oil companies’ argument to the justices.
Exxon and Suncor claim that their clients should be immune from this suit, not because any particular provision of the Constitution grants them immunity, but because state courts are forbidden from hearing climate change lawsuits under something called the “structure of the Constitution.” The oil companies claim that there’s a rule against many state environmental suits buried somewhere in this “structure,” even though it cannot be found in the Constitution’s text.
This argument exists in an entirely different universe than the Supreme Court’s precedents governing environmental suits, which explicitly permit — and even sometimes require — state courts to hear lawsuits alleging that a company in another state or country caused pollution that migrated across state or international lines.
But there’s a bigger issue at stake here, too. If you take seriously these justices’ pledged allegiance to textualism — and its close cousin, originalism, which, in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s words, claims that “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and that this original public meaning is authoritative” — then Suncor should be an easy case. The oil companies’ failure to even articulate an argument rooted in constitutional text should be disqualifying.
But Exxon and Suncor clearly believe they can win the case while thumbing their nose at many of the justices’ purported allegiance to textualism and originalism. It’s not hard to guess why they would believe this. Increasingly, the same justices who evangelize for textualism and originalism ignore the Constitution’s text when necessary to achieve their political goals.
There is no textual basis, for example, for the Republican justices’ claim that President Donald Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. Similarly, the Court’s Republican majority recently invented something called the “major questions doctrine,” which allows the justices to veto federal regulations that they deem too ambitious, even though the full Court has never even attempted to justify this doctrine by citing the text of the Constitution or any federal statute.
Now, Suncor will be a test of just how far they will go, with big ramifications not just for climate lawsuits, but potentially for any lawsuit that seeks to declare a state or federal law unconstitutional..
Many of Boulder’s claims against the oil companies arise out of a tort law theory known as “nuisance,” which often allows someone who uses their property in a way that harms someone else to be sued. If your neighbor lights a trash fire in their yard that fills your house with noxious fumes, they have created a nuisance and you may have a viable lawsuit against them.
Often, these nuisance suits involve major environmental claims, and they also often involve claims that cross state lines or even international borders. In Ohio v. Wyandotte Chemicals (1971), for example, the state of Ohio sued chemical companies located in Michigan and Canada, claiming that they “each dumped mercury into streams whose courses ultimately reach Lake Erie,” thus poisoning Ohio’s waters. The US Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s state courts should hear this lawsuit.
In Suncor, however, the oil companies claim that lawsuits arising out of climate change are special, and may not be heard by any state’s courts. Broadly speaking, these oil companies raise two arguments, one of which is easily refuted by quoting a statute; the other is their cockamamie claim that the “structure of the Constitution” prevents state courts from hearing Boulder’s lawsuit.
One of the oil companies’ claims is that Boulder’s lawsuit is “preempted” by the federal Clean Air Act. On the surface, this argument is at least plausible, as Congress does have the power to enact federal laws that effectively nullify a state law. The Constitution states that federal laws are “the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
But the oil companies’ claim that the Clean Air Act preempts climate change lawsuits in state courts is weak. That law states that “air pollution control at its source is the primary responsibility of States and local governments.” And it states that, at least with respect to stationary polluters like factories, power plants, or Suncor’s refineries, “nothing in this chapter shall preclude or deny the right of” states to adopt or enforce air pollution standards or laws, unless the state’s rule is less stringent than what federal law requires. (The Clean Air Act does sometimes preempt state suits involving pollution caused by mobile sources, such as airplanes.)
So it’s pretty clear that the Clean Air Act does not bar state nuisance suits such as Suncor.
Which brings us to the oil companies’ claim that the Constitution’s “structure” somehow bars this suit. Their brief makes the extraordinary claim that “the Court has long held that interstate pollution is an inherently federal area in which state law cannot govern,” a claim that is easily repudiated by the Wyandotte Chemicals decision, among others.
In the same brief, the oil companies claim that the structural principle that only federal courts can hear climate change lawsuits can somehow be derived from an unusual approach to environmental lawsuits that the Court invented more than 100 years ago, and that it abandoned many decades ago.
In Missouri v. Illinois (1906), the Supreme Court heard a claim that Chicago, Illinois was dumping sewage in a river that eventually flowed into Missouri. Despite the fact that there was no federal law governing water pollution at the time, the Court apparently concluded that there should be some process that states can use to sue other states that do what Illinois was accused of doing.
The Court’s opinion in Missouri weighed the evidence in the case before ruling in Illinois’s favor. So Missouri seemed to suggest that federal courts have some power to hear environmental suits even in the absence of an act of Congress permitting them to do so.
Based on this and similar older cases that reached similar conclusions, the oil companies claim that Missouri created a “federal common law” that governed interstate environmental lawsuits in the absence of a federal statute. And they also argue that this judicially created “common law” preempted certain state environmental lawsuits. They also argue that this preemption remains in place even though federal laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act have now displaced this federal common law.
Needless to say, that’s a lot of logical leaps. The oil companies’ argument is that an extra-statutory workaround that existed many decades ago still preempts state environmental lawsuits, even though that workaround no longer exists and has been replaced by an act of Congress. They also claim that this rule against state environmental suits can be found somewhere in the “structure” of the Constitution, despite the fact that it is nowhere in the Constitution’s text.
Among other things, this confusing argument is inconsistent with a case the Supreme Court decided as recently as April. As the Court said in Hencely v. Fluor Corp. (2026), “there is no federal pre-emption in vacuo,” a Latin term meaning “in isolation,” “without a constitutional text or a federal statute to assert it.”
So the oil companies’ claim that the “structure of the Constitution,” whatever the hell that means, somehow precludes climate change lawsuits in state courts should be easily dismissed. Further, as the Court said in Hencely, a litigant making a constitutional preemption claim must cite the text of the Constitution — and the oil companies have not done that here.
Setting aside the oil companies’ risible legal arguments, they actually make a decent argument that, as a matter of policy, it would be best if climate change cases were heard in one grand federal lawsuit rather than dozens of piecemeal suits brought in state courts.
Many different fossil fuel companies in both the United States and abroad have contributed to climate change. It may be impossible to determine which company is specifically responsible for any climate change-related problems that arise in Boulder, Colorado. And, because some of the responsibility for climate change falls on foreign actors, allowing a state court to adjudicate climate change-related suits raises difficult questions of international diplomacy.
Additionally, the fact that the Clean Air Act treats pollution from stationary and mobile sources differently complicates this case even further. How is a court supposed to determine to what extent climate change in Boulder was caused by pollution emitted from oil refineries or power plants, rather than cars or airplanes?
But these are arguments that the oil companies should present to Congress, not the Supreme Court. It is Congress’s job to decide when to preempt state law. And there’s no question that Congress could pass a law shutting down lawsuits like Suncor, while simultaneously creating a federal process that will allow Americans who are injured by climate change to seek compensation in federal court.
Passing a federal law, however, requires compromise. It requires lawmakers to weigh the concerns of voters who don’t want the same outcome that Exxon wants. And, especially given the likely outcome of the 2026 midterms, it would require the oil companies to work with Democrats to come up with a legal framework that would actually earn some bipartisan support.
Instead, the oil companies want to bypass all that by getting a Republican Supreme Court to declare lawsuits like Suncor unconstitutional. And they are apparently so confident that they can convince these justices to do so that they barely even managed to articulate a legal argument for their position.
This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.
Todd Waller wasn’t expecting to spend the latter half of his 30s living with roommates. But in late 2022, following a breakup with his girlfriend, he needed to find a new place to live, quickly.
A social worker based in the Atlanta metro, Waller started googling “efficiency apartments” and stumbled onto an ad for PadSplit, a company founded in 2017 that lets property owners rent out individual furnished bedrooms in single-family homes by the week. “It said I could get approved right away and move in tomorrow,” he recalled. There was no security deposit required.
All of a sudden, Waller found himself living with six other people and able to save a lot of money. His rent was just $180 per week, or less than $800 per month. Though he earned a decent salary, he never really had anything left over after all his bills were paid, and the new financial breathing room made the tradeoff of housemates feel worth it.
After a while, Waller decided he would be willing to upgrade to a nicer PadSplit unit, one with more amenities but still with roommates. Now he pays $1,250 a month to live on one side of a 2,000-square-foot home, with access to his own private bathroom, a private entrance, and a renovated kitchen. Three other people live on the other side of the house, and he rarely interacts with them.
“My house is awesome; I pay $500 less a month than I would if I were renting [a place of my own] without roommates, and I just was able to buy a new car,” he told me. He knows one day he’ll move somewhere else and perhaps even buy his own home, but he likes that he feels he can make that decision comfortably at his own pace.
With rents outpacing wages in most of the country, legislators are increasingly looking at co-living — sometimes called house-sharing or adult dorm rooms — as an overlooked piece of America’s housing stock. Zillow counts roughly 21 million “empty nest households” — or homes where older residents living with no children have at least two extra bedrooms. Some lawmakers want to make it easier for those homeowners to rent them out, which could put workers closer to their jobs and help seniors stay in houses they can no longer afford alone. Others are eyeing a different kind of vacancy: Post-pandemic remote work has left about a fifth of American office space empty, and there’s growing interest in turning some of it into apartments.
Many advocates for people experiencing homelessness also argue that co-living is a needed solution, something that could help people going through emergencies avoid the scary slide into shelter living, especially models where you can move in almost immediately and without a deposit. PadSplit surveyed its renters in December and found a population that mostly works (83 percent were employed) and mostly hadn’t been to college. The median income was $32,500.
That co-living needs advocates at all is a legacy of the last century. Renting a single room in a boarding house or residential hotel was once an ordinary way to live in an American city, but in the decades after World War II those rooms became shorthand for poverty and vice, and cities responded by banning new ones and paying landlords to get rid of the old. Half a century later, many people still see sharing space with strangers as a last resort, or feel embarrassed about having roommates past a certain age. And discriminatory zoning codes written in that era are still on the books in most communities, enforcing traditional nuclear family arrangements when it comes to single-family housing, by defining “family” as people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Those rules can be wielded against home-sharing, and against specific renters neighbors want to keep out.
But these longstanding barriers are starting to finally give. Doubling up with people you aren’t related to is less unusual than it used to be. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of households sharing space with nonrelatives grew by more than 500,000. Lawmakers desperate for anything that adds more housing supply also seem less picky about where it comes from. Companies like PadSplit are putting private capital behind the model, and a wave of new laws and litigation — much of it led by conservative legal groups arguing on property-rights grounds — is making it harder for cities to tell homeowners who can and cannot sleep in their spare rooms.
For the first time since cities banned cheap rooms, the people trying to bring them back have the momentum, and the next couple of years will go a long way toward deciding whether co-living stays a niche workaround for people like Waller or becomes something a lot more people are able to consider.
At the turn of the 20th century, as American cities swelled, immigrants, day laborers, and factory workers crowded into downtowns looking for somewhere cheap and temporary to sleep. A small room could be rented by the day, the week, or however long someone needed it. Some “boarded” in private homes while others took beds in bottom-rung hotels known as flophouses. These arrangements varied widely, but became broadly known as single-room occupancies (SROs).
The turn against them came after World War II, as middle-class white families decamped for roomy new houses in the suburbs, and SROs grew more closely associated with shoddy housing for the poor and the deviant. New York and other cities started banning SRO construction in the 1950s. By the 1970s, SROs were a regular media villain, even as they still housed hundreds of thousands of people, including the mentally ill who had been turned out by the closing of state asylums. Cities started to offer landlords incentives to convert their SROs into luxury rentals. Between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, roughly a million of these affordable market-rate units disappeared from the market across the country.
The idea that perhaps cities made a mistake in banning these lower-cost housing options has been simmering in urbanist policy circles for the last 15 years, particularly as the homelessness crisis has gotten worse. The Furman Center at NYU argued in 2018 that reintroducing SROs could help address the housing shortage. The architecture critic Karrie Jacobs argued in 2021 that cities had blamed a kind of housing for problems that belonged to the people living in it. “The notion took hold that if you eliminated the housing, the marginal people would simply vanish,” she wrote in Curbed.
Still, lawmakers have dragged their feet on actually making it easier to rent these kinds of units again, and until recently the people pushing for it had little to show beyond op-eds and white papers. What’s different now is that the fight has moved out of the world of policy papers and into places where it can produce actual results, including a lawsuit that could reach the Supreme Court.
In early 2022, a home-sharing startup called HomeRoom was renting out two houses in Shawnee, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. The company rented rooms one at a time to unrelated adults who wanted cheaper housing, and at a local city council meeting that year, Shawnee’s community development director asked whether the city should support such arrangements in single-family neighborhoods at all. Two months later, the council passed an ordinance banning “co-living groups,” which it defined as four or more unrelated adults sharing a home.
Under the ordinance, if even one adult in a house wasn’t related to the others by blood, marriage, or adoption, the whole household counted as unrelated.
While the new law forced HomeRoom to evict its tenants, it also put Val French, a Shawnee homeowner, in a bad situation. She lived with her husband, their two adult sons, and one son’s girlfriend. Because the girlfriend was related to no one, the house was now deemed in violation of the city’s occupancy rules. Her son and his girlfriend had to move out, and French couldn’t rent the empty room to anyone else.
French and HomeRoom sued in federal court in May 2023, with assistance from the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. They argued that their right to choose who they live with is protected under the 14th Amendment, but they ran into legal precedent from a 1974 Supreme Court case, Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, which upheld a Long Island village’s nearly identical rule against six college students sharing a house.
The decision came down in the same years cities were clearing out their SROs, and it has given local governments cover to decide who counts as a family ever since.
A federal judge dismissed the Shawnee suit in September 2023, citing Belle Terre, and this past April the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the dismissal. A few months later, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case and reconsider Belle Terre once and for all. The precedent has already frayed in places — state courts in California, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have struck down local “unrelated occupants” limits under their own laws — but it still governs everywhere else.
There is “a fundamental liberty right to choose household living companions — whether as an articulation of the right of intimate association or independently — that is deeply rooted in American history and tradition,” PLF’s lead attorney on the case, David Deerson, told me.
The Supreme Court hears only about 1 percent of the cases it’s asked to take, and even if it took this one, the plaintiffs would be asking a conservative majority to recognize a new constitutional right, which that majority has spent the past few years insisting courts should almost never do.
Deerson’s argument is aimed at that skepticism, though. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it held that an unwritten right counts only if it is “deeply rooted in history and tradition.” Deerson and his allies are arguing that living with people you aren’t related to qualifies as such because, for most of American history, boarding houses and lodgers were typical staples of family life. Belle Terre is also a short opinion written by William O. Douglas, a liberal justice whose legacy has little connection to today’s conservative justices.
A Supreme Court reversal would be the cleanest fix for co-living, but advocates aren’t waiting on it. State legislatures have already shown they’ll act: Iowa barred cities from enforcing relationship-based occupancy limits in 2017, Oregon and Washington followed in 2021, and in 2024, Colorado lawmakers passed a law prohibiting cities from restricting how many unrelated roommates can live under one roof absent a clear health or safety reason.
The Pacific Legal Foundation worked on that last bill too, and has since turned it into model legislation for other states. They colloquially call it the “Golden Girls bill” since occupancy caps like these would have prevented the four unrelated women of the hit 1980s sitcom from sharing a house.
This year Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced their own version, with supporters citing not private property rights but the potential to ease the state’s affordable housing shortage. As legislators considered the proposal, Pacific Legal Foundation published research showing that nine of the 10 most populous cities in Pennsylvania capped the number of unrelated adults who could live together. The state House passed the Golden Girls bill this summer, though the Pennsylvania Senate version has not yet received a vote.
The objection lawmakers hear most is the same one that animated Belle Terre — that lifting occupancy caps could turn quiet, orderly, neighborhood homes into de facto frat houses. That college partying concern killed Connecticut’s proposed Golden Girls bill this year. While the bill cleared the state Senate, it never got a vote in the House, amid reported concerns from the speaker about college students moving into wealthy neighborhoods. “What if a neighbor is unhappy about four unrelated people who are 19 years old or 22 years old living in the house?” state House Speaker Matt Ritter asked in an interview with the Connecticut Mirror.
Pennsylvania’s sponsors tried to head off those fears by amending the bill to exclude protections where someone is enrolled at a college or university. In other words, the law would have covered Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia from Golden Girls unless one of them signed up for a class at their community college.
Nevertheless, advocates are expanding their push. Jim Manley, state policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, told me he expects Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Utah to take up new versions of the legislation in 2027.
And occupancy caps aren’t the only co-living target. Sam Hooper, a lawyer who has been lobbying state legislatures to re-legalize SROs, and his former colleagues at the Institute for Justice are now focused on the ROOM Act, model legislation that would bar cities from restricting SROs and other co-living arrangements, including rules that make it hard to convert offices into apartments. A version was first introduced in Rhode Island earlier this year.
For Meagan Forbes, Institute for Justice’s director of legislation, the goal is for co-living to be treated like any other form of housing. “Other local laws can regulate things like noise and fire safety, but current regulations just go way too overboard in preventing this kind of housing,” she told me.
Hooper, who drafted the ROOM Act, says he wanted to “take a massive sledgehammer” to existing restrictions. The resistance he runs into isn’t only the frat-house worry, but older cultural fears that SROs would recreate the poor tenement conditions of the early 20th century. “I think there’s this real problem of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in housing policy,” he told me. “People accuse us of wanting people to live in undignified housing, but they just struggle to understand that it can be a perfectly fine option for many people at different points in their life.” Hooper credits his own London co-living experience in his 20s with introducing him to some of his best friends and his wife.
Even so, he cited a broad political coalition backing him up, from property rights champions in conservative states to Democrats and progressive YIMBYs drawn to the housing justice and homelessness angles. There are business leaders interested in workforce housing, he said, and he noted that the AARP testified for the ROOM Act in Rhode Island. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to keep this bipartisan coalition that hasn’t succumbed to the culture wars,” Hooper added.
Not every co-living proposal is about removing rules. DC’s Senior Co-Living Program Establishment Act, also nicknamed the Golden Girls bill, would pay senior homeowners $300 a month to rent a room to another senior, plus up to $2,500 for home modifications.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the federal housing package that became law in July, doesn’t touch occupancy rules. But it does fund a pilot program for converting vacant commercial buildings into housing, which could make adult dorm office conversions easier.
While momentum for co-living is real, demand is also complicated. Americans are doubling up more than they were before the pandemic — about 8.2 million households in 2024, up 4.3 percent since 2019, according to analysis shared by Zillow. Yet the share made up of unrelated adults living together actually fell slightly, by roughly 50,000 households, while homes shared with couples or families grew by nearly 400,000. In other words, when Americans need to save on rent, they still mostly turn to people they already know.
PadSplit is betting that changes. Atticus LeBlanc recently announced his company is expanding into New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, three of the most expensive rental markets in the country.
“Does that mean things have gotten more desperate, that it’s forcing this cultural acceptance?” he asked me in an interview. “I think there’s certainly an argument to be made there. But you could just as easily make the argument that, holy cow, we are really, really wasteful with space.”
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
My best friend confessed his love for me one year ago and I rejected him because I was unhappily in love with another man, and I was never really physically attracted to my best friend. He was devastated. I am happy our friendship survived.
Over a year later, I find myself thinking about how it would be like to be in a relationship with my best friend. He is the only man who ever showed me genuine love and support, and I wonder what if I try…maybe I will fall in love with him. However, I am concerned about hurting his feelings again. Is it selfish of me wanting to try this love out because it promises security and appreciation?
Dear Fanning the Flame,
I can’t blame you for being curious about the common “friends to lovers” storyline. It’s often portrayed as the best kind of pairing: Two people have the foundation of their friendship plus a newfound love; the romantic relationship is like a soaring addition to an existing sturdy house.
But real life is not always like the movies, and it sounds to me like you haven’t actually had an awakening of desire for your friend. In fact, it’s the opposite: He once expressed feelings for you, and you confronted a lack of physical attraction for this person. Now you’re wondering if it would be possible for you to fall in love if you tried. I think you’d agree that your timing is suspect. After a breakup, it’s common and understandable to seek out comfort and intimacy. Still, I detect a philosophical streak in your question beyond the issue of whether or not this would simply be a rebound.
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If your friend has always appreciated you, made you feel safe, and loves you — could that be a form of love that’s better than what you had in your last relationship? Maybe that is what love is.
Is it? Over a long night of drinking some 2,400 years ago, one group of thinkers allegedly debated the true nature of love, as Greek philosopher Plato describes in The Symposium.
Aristophanes, a playwright, tells a story that most closely aligns with the love we see in the rom-coms of today. He said that humans used to be larger creatures with four arms and four legs. After annoying the gods, Zeus cuts all the humans in half, creating the two-limbed bodies we have today. The result is that people wander the world looking for the one person who used to literally complete them. If you followed Aristophanes’s fable, you shouldn’t try to be with your friend unless you felt that deep longing that one has when meeting their other half.
The rest of the dinner party companions have more circumspect ideas. Phaedrus, a Greek aristocrat, thought that true love inspired people to become the best possible version of themselves. Pausanias, a military man, thought that love driven only by attraction to someone’s body was “vulgar love”, and that “noble love” was the love of someone’s values. Eryximachus, a doctor, asserts that love is also about moderation, and it needs order, much in the way the natural world does. Finally, Socrates says that even if you start out with physical infatuation, you can eventually transcend that and end up loving wisdom itself, the highest form of love. As I read it, the men are grappling with how to make love make sense, while acknowledging that it can make us lustful and impulsive. Shouldn’t its best manifestations instead be practical and virtuous?
You could easily justify trying to date your friend with these theories that try to wrangle and tame love. For example, if your friend inspires you to be the best version of yourself, you could decide that’s enough to go for it. You could also decide that because you admire your friend’s character, and not his body, that’s a noble love, and better than the vulgar love of attraction.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his 19th-century essay “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” that he distrusted the feeling of being desperately in love. He considered romantic love to be a biological drive disguised as a real emotion — one whose goal is to trick us into procreating. You could even see your lack of attraction as an indication that you’re able to act more rationally, and not be deceived by that cunning trickster, passion.
I know you’ve recently gone through a breakup, but I hope you can feel how bleak these views can become: to see love only as the window dressing for the propagation of a species, or as just a bridge to the love of wisdom.
This cynicism has other consequences. Wondering if you could redefine love in a relationship with your friend isn’t like a wine-fueled dinner party bouncing around thought experiments. It involves your best friend and his own feelings too, and could risk not only hurting him, but also robbing him of a better romantic partner.
For Simone de Beauvoir, the 20th-century existential philosopher, the most important aspect of life was freedom: We are technically free to do whatever we want, and it’s the choices we make with that freedom that determine our authenticity, or lack of it. De Beauvoir worried about forms of love that stole freedom from other people. In narcissistic love, she wrote in The Second Sex, a partner doesn’t love the other person, but loves the fact that the other loves them. It’s a relationship built on the self-interest of one of its members.
I want to gently point out that it sounds like there may be aspects of the narcissistic relationship in your dilemma. While it may be intriguing to consider what it’s like to date a friend, you don’t seem to be as romantically interested so much as you are interested in his interest in and support of you. Actually involving yourself in such a dynamic could take his freedom, as well as your own capacity to learn from your break-up, then find a partner you’re genuinely drawn to for their own merits.
I’m not saying friendship isn’t an important ingredient in love. Many of the most successful, very long-term partners I know have developed a deep friendship with one another. This friendship helps them stay kind to each other and have fun over many years when work, health, or stress can interrupt more passionate times of connection. But those same couples also had the undeniable spark of attraction at the start of their relationships too. They didn’t have to try. Sometimes they tried not to feel as strongly as they did, and still weren’t able to stop.
Even in cases when a relationship first launches platonically, if something more is there, the undeniable, reciprocal pull tends to emerge soon thereafter. In H.G. Wells’ 1911 novel, The New Machiavelli, which was largely based on a real-life affair Wells had, he writes about a college graduate called Richard who meets a young woman, Isabel. The two become friends and are entranced with each other’s minds. But they quickly start to notice more between them, despite trying to push such thoughts away.
They fail at this attempt. Richard has a moment of realization, when he turns to look at Isabel’s face one day. “And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me,” Wells wrote. “It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. …From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.” I think you owe it to yourself, and your friend, to pursue connections that have this quality, especially at the start.
You should also make room for and appreciate your friendship. If it never becomes romantic, that doesn’t make it a lesser relationship. The couples therapist, Esther Perel, calls friendships their own kind of love story. She once described a simple exercise to help appreciate that bond. Take a few minutes and think about a friend who isn’t a family member or romantic partner. “Recall a time when that friend reflected you back to yourself, created space for joy, or helped you remember who you are,” Perel suggests. Then, send a message to that friend about that moment, and thank them.
Having a good friend by your side in the aftermath of a breakup is a gift. Work on maintaining and nurturing that friendship, and make sure you spend some time helping him with his life too. Don’t fixate on whether you should attempt to fall in love. The truth is, for better or for worse, if you love him, you won’t have to try.
This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.
Donors pour more than $200 million into supporting and opposing the billionaire tax measures on the ballot, with more to come in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election.
In divisive races such as the Democratic primaries for U.S. Senate in Michigan and Minnesota, California donors have given large amounts to both progressive and moderate candidates.
Recently, while taking the metro to work, I encountered something that shocked me. The train was pulling up, just as the man in front of me tapped to pay to go through the gate, and a woman pushed past me to cut me in line. I still made the train (after I briefly considered acting in a way that would have made us both late for work), but as I passed each stop I got angrier and angrier. Why did she think her commute was more important than someone else’s? We learn to wait our turn when we’re children — why was that lesson lost all these years later?
I’m not the only one irritated by this kind of thing. Almost half of Americans say that they’ve noticed people are ruder in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Whether it’s poor behavior at the airport or blasting music from your phone with no headphones in public, it’s like people don’t know how to act anymore.
Kirsty Sedgman is a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of the book On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better. She argues that while people might not mind them as much anymore, manners are important.
“They encourage us to think about others and to behave in ways that are not antisocial and potentially even dangerous,” she told Vox. “How can we have these conversations so that we figure out what we all want social life and public space to be like in a way that benefits everybody and doesn’t accidentally exclude [anyone]?
While some etiquette rules are pretty self explanatory (let’s not cut in line!), others are more difficult to navigate. “I always try to make a point and I’m not perfect, believe me,” Sedgman said. “I’m not saying that I know how to behave in every single circumstance and I’m always right. I’m no Emily Post.”
Post was the socialite who literally wrote the book on the subject: Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home was first published in the 1920s. More than a century later, her family is still in the business of teaching us how to mind our manners.
Lizzie Post is Emily Post’s great-great granddaughter and co-president of the Emily Post Institute. That’s a title and pedigree that could come with a lot of pressure. But Post says it’s all about your audience. “A lot of times, as long as I don’t get the sense that they would prefer a very formalized version of me, I try to reassure people: laugh, joke, swear, it’s okay,” Post said.
Audience isn’t the only thing that’s changed — the times have too. How has etiquette shifted over the years? And how do we navigate newer things — like our phones? We find out that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Post, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
For a long time etiquette has just been something that’s agreed upon. You have to have certain manners to socialize in certain circles and within certain classes. But I think that’s changed. Why do you think that’s happened?
My great-great-grandmother wrote from 1922 to 1960. While she talked about the standards of the day, she also allowed those standards to change. Think about 1922 to 1960 — there were huge swings in how people behaved. Chaperones were gone from the book by her second edition. Life was changing and evolving and she changed and evolved with it.
Etiquette is a French word — it sounds fancy. I think that it can very easily have these connotations of being something that is about a secret society, or it’s only about formality, or it’s only for people who are very wealthy. It can also start to feel a lot like judgment.
One of the reasons etiquette can feel so out of sorts, particularly right now, is because times are changing and they’re just changing really quickly.
I think phone etiquette is really, really emblematic of that. One thing that is so common is people playing music or having their phone on speaker, no headphones. Do we just not know how to act when it comes to our phones?
There are definitely rules of courtesy and blaring anything out of your phone, whether it’s a phone call, it’s a FaceTime call, it’s your TikTok feed, or that movie that you’re watching, is all inappropriate when other people are a captive audience and haven’t asked to be.
It’s this mindful moment where people forget where they are. They’re so used to being in their own world with their phone six inches from their face that they forget that anyone can even hear what it is that they’re doing on their phone at that particular moment.
It’s really hard to correct this behavior because generally, we don’t correct other people’s behaviors.
I admit, especially in public spaces, I am Team Mind My Business. But at what point do you step in?
It’s a really tough judgment call, and it’s going to be different for every situation.
I think that when I am in a space that I’m only going to occupy for a short time, I am telling myself, “Mind my own business, don’t worry about it.” When it’s that train ride that we’re starting, or that four-hour flight that you’re on, I think we start to have to say something and to ask, “Hey, could you put some headphones on while you’re enjoying that or watching that or on your call?”
I say, “Could you,” because they might not have headphones with them, but even if they don’t, it’s a reminder. It’s like that check of awareness that, “Oh, this thing I’m doing is impacting people around me.”
Here’s the rub: You can’t control other people’s behavior. You cannot control if this person is going to get defensive. If you’re going to ask the question, be prepared for rudeness in return. And I hate saying that, but it is the reality. We can’t control other people’s behavior.
So there’s clearly a wrong way to use speakerphone and FaceTime. What’s the right way to use them?
We do a lot of talking on our speakerphones, even in our own homes. You might be moving from one room to another, passing through the living room where people are watching TV or you’re in the kitchen and all of a sudden a roommate has come into the room while you’re on a call that’s on speakerphone. You really want to let the person on the other end of the phone know that there’s other people present now.
My cousin is so good about this. He always tells his daughter when she gets into the car, “Hey, Aunt Lizzie is on the phone. Say hi to her.” Then I know to watch my language. She knows to say hi to her auntie. And that’s just so much nicer than all of a sudden having a voice pop up and realizing, “Oh my gosh, I was just telling a really personal story and I didn’t realize there was a bigger audience for it.”
What about having your phone on the table you’re at dinner? People feel very passionately about that one.
I am so bad about this one. I often have mine face down on the table. The funny thing is, I’m not looking for someone to call with an interruption, but it’s not good etiquette.
It is really best to have that phone put away, to make sure that it’s on silent and it’s not going to interrupt your time together. To have it there, especially face up where any message that comes in is now going to catch the attention of everyone at the table, that’s an unnecessary distraction.
Is there an obligation when you need to text someone back? Does it have to be within a certain time? You go about your day and the next thing you know, you look at your phone and you have 80 unread texts and it’s like, “Oh no, what do I do? My friends will all be mad at me.”
I wish there was, but it depends on the text itself.
The ones I don’t think you should wait on is when friends or potential romantic partners offer a time to get together. Don’t let that sit. If there’s a reason why you’re letting it sit, talk to someone about that. Say, “Oh, I’ve got to check with my partner about that. I know we had talked about doing something else Saturday at that time.”
Give them some kind of an understanding, because it’s a really beautiful thing to be invited to go spend time with someone. I think we want to treasure that a little more than we do in today’s age.
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk Collaboration.
At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where indoor temperatures hover around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius), atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth like the rings of a tree. These frozen rings — clear or cloudy, thick or thin — indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: A clear layer signals the water froze slowly, while a cloudy layer means it happened quickly, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala then analyzes the crystalline structures, particles, and isotopes preserved in these layers.
“All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.
Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of a historic effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from the stones that careen to Earth, battering roofs, pummeling crops, and pockmarking cars.
From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety — more than double the losses seen just a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60 percent to 80 percent of the damage.
In Colorado, one of the country’s most hail-prone states, hail — not wildfire — is the main factor driving up insurance premiums. And researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.
“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.
Even basic questions about hail have been notoriously hard to study. But a long-awaited resurgence in research, including the first major US field campaign to study hail in more than 40 years, could help change that.
ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise and help communities better prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before deep cuts hit the foundation in 2025.
For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, using radar trucks to track storms and drones to take aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a tool called a disdrometer, recorded hail’s distribution and size based on its imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels, and crushed it to test its strength.
Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also used balloons to release golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Once aloft, each hail-like probe collected data on how fast it was traveling and whether ice was growing on it; a microphone even recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.
“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group.
ICECHIP’s samples were packed into 26 cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR. This internationally renowned hub for weather and climate research has been used to study hail for decades. In one of its last major campaigns, in the 1970s, the US investigated Soviet claims that it could suppress hail.
Researchers say there’s no other US lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.
Now NCAR’s own future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration said it would dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging that it’s targeting NCAR to punish Colorado for retaining its mail-in voting system and because Gov. Jared Polis initially refused to release former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier imprisoned for breaching election security and undermining election integrity.
In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until Sept. 30 to respond to the lawsuit.
“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”
Previous research has predicted climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, keeping hailstones airborne longer and allowing them to grow bigger, enabling the most damaging hail to become more common.
A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.
Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a rapidly growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”
Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown explosively in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.
This is happening across the Western US, as previously rural or open areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.
“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.
In 2019, Fort Collins became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to all the shingles and roofing materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.
It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron said fewer permits were being issued for roof replacements and fewer shingles were going to the dump. However, Fort Collins also hasn’t experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one that hit in 2018.
A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.
ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how they can improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.
“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”
Republican and Democratic congressional candidates are wrestling with how to talk about immigration. They consistently call for a strong U.S.-Mexico border but then diverge, with some calling for ICE to be abolished while others support President Trump's immigration crackdown.
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