As rents and homelessness climbed in San Diego over the last decade, leaders watched in frustration as affordable housing projects took months to get approved. The longer a project dragged on, the more expensive it became.  

Housing in America is notoriously slow and complicated to build, so San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria decided to use one lever he had available. In January 2023, he signed an executive order to speed up project approvals, so every fully affordable project now had to be reviewed in 30 business days or less.

To meet this new goal, San Diego had to overhaul how it had been handling permitting. The city streamlined work that had been spread across multiple departments and filled positions it had budgeted for but left vacant. Within a year, fully affordable projects were clearing review in nine days on average. Citywide, 2023 marked San Diego’s biggest year for housing permits since at least 2005, with 9,691 homes approved, or an 82 percent jump from the year before.

Austin, Texas embraced a different approach to tackling its housing shortage. After years of local zoning reform, the city legalized up to three homes on most single-family lots in late 2023, then cut the minimum lot size from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 in 2024. Those changes made it easier to add homes, including backyard accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and followed a broader construction boom that has helped bring rents down. Austin, which was becoming increasingly unaffordable, is now one of the few major American cities where asking rents have fallen since the pandemic.

Atlanta adopted a third housing strategy that didn’t require changing any laws at all. Mayor Andre Dickens rallied the heads of every public agency that affects housing, from the city’s housing authority and school system to the transit agency and land bank, and convened them in one room on a regular basis. He called it a “housing strike force” and it has helped advance the city’s broader effort to build or preserve 20,000 affordable homes by 2030. Every housing deal now comes to the mayor’s office, Dickens told me, and “I just start pushing buttons to push them out the door.” 

Seen as a nationwide issue, the housing shortage is an enormously difficult problem, sitting at the nexus of the economy, the financial system, and decades of local zoning decisions. But the fixes don’t all have to be complex. A mayor can do all three of these — faster permitting, ADUs, a housing strike team — without waiting on Congress or their state legislature to act. And now one major nonprofit is betting that other cities could adopt them too.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg Philanthropies is announcing that it will fund up to 30 cities to adopt one of those three housing ideas. Each will get between $450,000 and $750,000 directly and two years of help from Accelerator for America and the digital consultancy Public Digital, also funded by Bloomberg. The philanthropy has already selected the first 15 cities, including Albuquerque, Chattanooga, Cleveland, Durham, Louisville, Miami, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and San Jose.

By housing construction standards, the money doesn’t go very far. The grants are geared toward hiring city staff, buying new software, and helping cities quickly develop the expertise that let San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta do what they did.

“You don’t need everyone to be innovating everything all the time when there are good ideas in the world that are working,” said James Anderson, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ government innovation program. “They need help adapting those ideas to local contexts.”

According to Anderson, the cities were chosen because their mayors had already taken hard political votes on zoning, and wanted help now to do more. Their timing is also intentional. On the federal level, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law in July, and it creates competitive grants for cities that modernize their permitting, for preapproved housing plans, and that open up their public land. These are the same reforms Bloomberg is now funding, and cities that can show they’ve already done work around it will be better positioned to tap into new federal dollars.

Mayors say they’ve seen big federal programs pass before and then found that actually leveraging those new funding streams in practice can be quite difficult. “We saw that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told me. “Even some of the aspects of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there was a lot of red tape to get some of that stuff across the finish line.”

The Bloomberg bet is that figuring out what to do isn’t as hard as organizing the knowledge of how to do it. The philanthropy thinks that with enough money and hand-holding, good ideas can spread.

It’s an experiment worth testing, but even at the outset there are real limits to what kind of help a short-term infusion of cash can do in practice. San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta all had substantial housing staff in place before they started, and many cities don’t have the same depth to draw on. A two-year grant covers a few staff roles, but doesn’t guarantee they’ll stay long-term in a city where most of the local budget is already committed.

What a “housing strike force” actually is

Dickens had campaigned for office in Atlanta on building 20,000 affordable units in eight years. When he became mayor in 2022, his staff told him the city was on pace to fall 4,000 to 5,000 units short of this goal, and that the main federal subsidy for affordable housing, which gets rationed out by the state in fixed amounts each year, wasn’t going to make up the difference.

What Atlanta did have was land, spread across more than a dozen public entities, each with its own board and its own ideas about what the land was for. One 10-acre city site just northwest of downtown was being used to store trash cans before delivery to residents. “It’s not the highest and best use of the land, but we’ve been doing it for decades,” Josh Humphries, then Dickens’ senior housing adviser, told The Guardian.

So Dickens pulled the heads of those agencies into one body reporting through his chief housing officer. The transit system and school district both answer to their own boards, so his pitch was that they weren’t giving anything up by getting involved. “You are still in charge of your organization, these are your deals, but we are an accelerator,” Dickens told me.

They spent nothing setting it up and hired no new staff for the strike force itself — though when Dickens advises other mayors, he’s blunter about the pressure a mayor would need to exert in convening such a team. An agency that opts out of participating, he said, is “outside of the scope of the mayor’s vision” and “that’s not a safe place to be.”

“I didn’t need another task force,” Dickens added. “Task forces are good, but we know what we’re doing. We don’t have to describe the task. No, this is a strike force. We know the deals, we have the land, we know where the money is for most of these deals, and we have the political will.”

What Dickens did was create “a horizontal way of organizing otherwise vertical players,” as Anderson of Bloomberg Philanthropies put it.

As part of the strike force, agency leaders meet monthly, and quarterly with the mayor. Each one reports what they will produce in the next 30 days, whether that’s a signed agreement, bank financing, or a permit, in front of everyone else. The goal is to move everything as fast as possible to keep down costs.

“You’re in a meeting with 20 colleagues talking about your four or five projects, and everybody is aware of everybody’s projects,” Dickens said. “You don’t want to come back to that meeting saying nothing happened over the last 30 days.”

The limits of the model

Dickens was fairly blunt about where the model stops working. “It works best in cities that have a sizable amount of competent housing development people,” he told me. “A strike force is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You all are capable.” A city still standing up its housing program, he added, should just focus on collaboration, because it would be hard for a small city without “the knowledgeable skills, the capacity” to operate like this.

Most cities can’t easily build that internal bench. Local governments pay less than state or federal employers for the same specialized work, and between half and three-quarters of a typical city’s operating budget is already locked up in salaries, pensions, debt payments, and basic services before the mayor makes a single discretionary call.

In Cleveland, they’re hoping to use the Bloomberg funding to bring in some new support. “Right now it’s a capacity game for us,” Bibb told me. “IT staff, planning staff, development staff, the list goes on. Policy staff as well.”

Cleveland also faces different challenges than Atlanta, which built its strike force for a growth market that already had projects lined up. Cleveland is an older, industrial city with an aging housing stock and a population that has only recently stopped shrinking, so Bibb needs code enforcement and rehab as well as new units. He plans to point the strike force first at a housing innovation district he launched earlier this year, an area spanning parts of three East Side neighborhoods where the city has concentrated its financing and permitting reforms.

Two-year grants can generally be a challenge for cities. Philanthropy often pays for staff long enough to prove a policy works, but when the foundation money goes away, cities can struggle to find the dollars to keep the positions going. While Atlanta’s strike force was organizing around people the city already employed, Cleveland’s will require new ongoing resources for a growing payroll.

Asked what happens when the money runs out, Bibb maintained he’s concentrating on the near term. “Right now we’re just focused on securing the grant, getting the team in place, and really seeing some positive results with the strike force team in our housing innovation district,” he said.

Can a good idea be scaled?

The 30 cities won’t be working alone. Bloomberg is running them as a cohort, meaning each city will pair with the city that pioneered the idea. The goal is to trade advice, mentorship, and opportunities for city leaders to visit and tour. Cleveland is one of roughly 10 cities that will take up the strike force model, meaning Bibb’s team will work with Dickens and his staff.

“One of the major reasons that good ideas do not spread is a lack of clarity around what it took in the original city to get the hard work done,” Anderson said. Adopting cities need to hear from the originals on both a political and a technical level, he told me, to understand “the trade-offs, the costs, the errors, and lessons learned” before they start.

Bloomberg has been testing a version of this model since 2024 through its Idea Exchange, which now includes more than 1,000 cities across 95 countries and has nearly 200 policy replications completed or underway.

Within two years, cities pursuing permitting reform are expected to cut their housing approval timelines in half, those pursuing ADUs to double their pipelines, and participants ultimately to post gains in citywide housing supply.

The housing shortage runs into millions of homes, and these proposed strategies don’t touch challenges like interest rates or the price of lumber. But across the country, they could show how quickly a good idea can spread.

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.

The return of SROs

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.

Suing over who counts as family

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. 

The legislative front

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.

The demand question

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.”

Six months ago, first lady Melania Trump walked into a White House education summit next to a faceless robot powered by artificial intelligence, which she said could one day give children personalized instruction.

“Imagine a humanoid educator named ‘Plato,’” she said. “Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous…humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home.” 

Weeks earlier, her guest at the State of the Union had been a 10-year-old from Alpha School, a fast-growing private school network where children learn reading and math from AI software for two hours a day, and spend the rest of their time on workshops and projects overseen by adults the school calls “guides” rather than teachers.

The Trump administration had chosen AI as the future of American schooling, and wanted everyone to know it. But they picked a bad year to ask Americans to trust the technology with their kids.

Earlier this month, top leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind publicly urged for an AI development slowdown, warning that companies racing to build ever more powerful systems could lose control of them, threatening not only large swaths of infrastructure but even humanity itself. Trump responded by calling the panic a “hoax” and said the US would not “hinder or stifle” the industry, because “whoever wins AI wins.” This “let them cook” mantra has met nearly every AI fear this year, from job loss to data center construction.

Yet the public is not convinced, and parents perhaps least of all. Efforts to bring AI into classrooms have run into organized opposition, and much of it is coming from inside Trump’s own coalition, setting up a fight between the administration’s pro-tech allies and conservatives who think screens have already done enough damage to kids.

In the nation’s two largest school districts, New York City has recently pulled student-facing generative AI from classrooms through eighth grade and Los Angeles blocked it on all student devices. But it’s not just Democratic-run cities that are pushing back. Earlier this year Utah barred students from using generative AI on assignments without a teacher’s say-so, and required schools to notify parents when it’s used in class. Oklahoma followed suit with a law, passed without a single “no” vote, that requires districts to tell parents which AI tools they use and what data they collect, and lets families opt out. Florida went further last week, when its Board of Education adopted rules for parents to opt their children in before they use AI at school, guaranteeing non-AI alternatives, and banning “companion” chatbots outright. 

Even at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to Trump, leaders are warning about the risks of AI in the classroom. In a March report, Heritage officials cautioned that AI tools built with addictive design features can harm children’s attention, mental health, and learning, and said schools should set limits rather than assume the technology will regulate itself. In July, the Manhattan Institute, another conservative think tank, recommended New York State bar students from using AI until third grade and keep it out of tests at every grade.

All the while, the Trump administration continues to push in the opposite direction, casting the wider AI race as one the US cannot afford to lose to China. Last year, Trump signed an executive order creating a White House task force to bring AI into K-12 classrooms, train teachers to use it, and build an “AI-ready workforce” to keep America as the global leader.

Polling data released in August found voters across the political spectrum concerned about AI in classrooms, with 85 percent worried about students using it to finish assignments without learning anything. Republicans were, if anything, slightly more eager than Democrats for government guardrails, 80 percent to 76 percent. Put differently, Republican voters appear closer to the Heritage Foundation than to the White House, which points to a coming clash inside the GOP over parental rights, innovation, and whether schools that take public money should have to prove their tactics work.

Up to this point much of the AI backlash has focused on regulating the tech in public schools, while some of its most ambitious boosters have concentrated on building private schools and developing new tools. A state can cap screen time in its elementary classrooms and let another family down the road pay thousands of dollars for Alpha, and everyone can call it a win for parent choice.

That peace may start to fray though as more public money comes on the table. Texas recently expanded vouchers to Alpha network schools and the company has also sought to open publicly funded charter schools. Other states are likely to confront these issues as well, meaning the AI education fight on the right may soon be unavoidable — and would land before an electorate whose patience for the tech, in schools and increasingly everywhere else, has been running thin all year. 

The Trump administration’s AI bet

The AI-in-schools executive order came just three months into Trump’s second term, and called for AI education to begin as early as kindergarten. Within five months, Education Secretary Linda McMahon was touring Alpha School’s Austin campus, describing it as “the most exciting thing” she’d seen in education in a long time. 

Alpha is hardly the first education company to promise a shiny new school model, but it has quickly become an influential player in the growing national debate around AI in schools. Its story so far reflects many of the big questions around AI in the classroom, including how to determine if the tech is helping or hurting kids, who is profiting, and what role governments should play in facilitating its adoption.

Alpha had been a small operation for most of its existence. MacKenzie Price, a Stanford graduate, co-founded it in 2014 after her second-grade daughter complained that school was boring. The tech billionaire Joe Liemandt became Price’s partner and the school’s principal financial backer. As recently as 2024 it served about 300 students across three campuses. 

Growth exploded in summer 2025, when Alpha took over campuses from a shuttered Montessori chain and announced plans for 10 new schools. This August it announced plans for 27 more.

Behind the school’s growth is its claim that students enrolled can cover a full day’s worth of academics in just two hours with AI, learning twice as fast as they would at a traditional school. Alpha can “enable the increase in human intelligence,” Price declared on a panel in Washington, DC, earlier this month, because “our academics can be delivered so much more efficiently and effectively.” 

Alpha says results from MAP tests, a widely used measure of academic growth, show its students learning 2.6 times faster on average than similar students at other schools. But no outside researcher has audited or independently verified those results.

That may soon change. MIT’s Blueprint Labs, the group behind some of the most rigorous charter school research in the country, told Vox it is designing pilot studies to measure the effects of the school’s programs on achievement and engagement, using experimental designs. Alpha is paying for the research; the lab says its own researchers will set the questions and methods. Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program is separately planning to study students’ life skills and well-being via a longitudinal study during the next academic year, Christina Hinton, who is involved with the research, told me. For now, Alpha’s academic claims remain its own.

Meanwhile, scrutiny of Alpha has grown. A Wired investigation last year described the school’s surveillance system as capable of recording students’ screens, keystrokes, and mouse activity and potentially tracking their eye movements. A 404 Media report published this winter claimed Alpha’s own internal documents said its AI-generated lessons sometimes did “more harm than good.” Alpha has disputed both reports, saying they relied on cherry-picked examples and accounts from fired employees, and provided me with an open letter it says every current family at the Brownsville campus signed, stating that the school Wired described doesn’t resemble theirs.

But education officials are still wary. This month, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported that at least nine states, Texas among them, had turned down Alpha’s bids to open publicly funded charter schools, with officials repeatedly pointing out that the model had only been tested on affluent students. (Tuition varies based on location, ranging from $10,000 a year at its Brownsville campus to $75,000 at its most expensive California schools.) Where Alpha had worked with lower-income students, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found, it either hadn’t released enough data to back its claims of student growth or state test scores fell well short of what its leaders had predicted. 

After the Texas State Board of Education rejected Alpha’s charter bid in the summer of 2025, Alpha didn’t reapply. While policy advocacy was “frustratingly slow,” Price wrote, Alpha’s goal was “for students everywhere at every income level to be able to use this model of learning.” They turned instead to Texas’s new voucher program, which lets families spend public money at private schools. Unlike a charter, a private school in the program doesn’t have to give state tests or show anyone how its students perform. The comptroller, which runs the Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA), approved most of Alpha’s Texas schools, which, counting virtual programs and specialty academies, now number more than 30.

None of the concerns that Texas’s State Board of Education had raised about Alpha’s test scores, missing data, or AI applied. “That wasn’t relevant,” Travis Pillow, a spokesperson for the TEFA voucher program, told ProPublica. “Our role is to make sure that a school meets the requirements in the law.” 

The five most expensive Alpha schools in Texas opted to leave the voucher program earlier this month, but many Alpha network schools are still participating, including Texas Sports Academy, Montessorium, NextGen Academy, Nova Academy, and Waypoint Academy. TEFA confirmed to me that students are attending Alpha affiliates via vouchers this year. 

Anna Davlantes, a spokesperson for Alpha, told me that in lieu of vouchers for their most expensive campuses, her network is offering families financial aid. 

The conservative revolt

Despite Alpha’s enthusiastic embrace in the White House, the introduction of AI in schools is increasingly challenged by forces on the right, from grassroots MAGA parents to social conservatives and technocrats.

The new AI rules in Florida, Oklahoma, and Utah, for example, grew out of a broader conservative push against screens in classrooms that predated the rise of chatbots and was turbocharged by parents’ frustrations with virtual learning during the pandemic.

Earlier this year Iowa capped elementary school screen time at an hour a day in a bill Gov. Kim Reynolds signed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at her side. Tennessee passed a weakened version of a bill that would have banned devices in elementary schools outright, while similar bills in Missouri and Kansas died after school districts and teachers unions objected.

Uniting these efforts is a growing conviction that the last 15 years of education technology has failed most kids. The sponsor of Kansas’s bill used to sit on his state’s board of education and remembers thinking that ed tech held such promise. “What we found out is that not only is it not the education of the future, but it is destroying the education of the past,” he told Education Week. A growing number of lawmakers and parents have been citing The Digital Delusion, a book self-published in 2025 by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, that blames the proliferation of screens for declining student achievement. In January Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who is otherwise one of the Senate’s leading opponents of AI regulation, invited Horvath to testify about the harms of AI on student learning and mental health.

The screen skeptics overlap with a more traditionalist wing of the GOP that objects to classroom technology on principle. Missouri’s original bill would have required cursive and kept 70 percent of student work on paper. The classical education movement, which holds up teachers as a moral example, has grown fast on the right. (Of the 895 identified classical schools nationwide, roughly one-third opened or converted to the model between 2020 and 2024, according to a Heritage Foundation tracker.)

The strand of conservatism that cuts closest to Alpha School comes from a third group, the school choice advocates. On paper, Alpha sounds like what the school reformers have wanted for years: It can offer an alternative to underperforming local public schools, its AI programs can theoretically compensate for inconsistent teacher quality, it provides personalized instruction, and it checks mastery on every lesson, so families can easily know whether their child is learning. Those are problems the education reform movement was launched to solve, and Alpha claims to fix them all.

The reformers, though, want proof. Mike Petrilli, who runs the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute think tank and has spent decades advocating for charter schools, wrote recently on his Substack that parents who want to pay for Alpha out-of-pocket should be able to, but “that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t be skeptical, or that we shouldn’t worry about fraud, or that we should allow public funding to flow to these school.”

This split was on display in DC this month at the education conference where Price appeared. Molly Hart, who runs Utah’s public schools and calls herself a school choice supporter, argued that once a school takes taxpayer money, “the game changes,” and parents can’t make a real choice without data about how it performs. Erika Donalds, who chairs the education center at the America First Policy Institute and is one of the Trump administration’s closest allies on schools, said parents, not the government, should decide which results matter. Donalds compared the choice to picking a restaurant on Yelp. 

The evidence has started to catch up with parental concern. In a randomized trial involving nearly 1,000 students at a Turkish high school, those given access to a GPT-based math tutor that readily supplied answers scored 17 percent lower on a subsequent exam taken without it. A version designed to withhold answers eliminated that penalty but produced no statistically significant learning gain. A newer working paper tracking nearly 27,000 Chinese students found that adopting AI raised homework scores by 18 percent but lowered monthly exam scores by 20 percent within six months.

Alpha School is working to add more detail to that pile, and other studies will surely follow. It’s at least possible that some aspects of AI in education prove more promising with further study. But public skepticism will remain a major barrier, either way. On an issue where parties are still sorting themselves out, the White House and its allies are swimming against a growing anti-tech tide that extends far beyond just AI or even schools. That’s unlikely to change before 2028, and whoever wants the Republican nomination will have to say which parents they’re listening to.

Nationally, abortion has faded as a campaign issue. Four years after it helped Democrats stave off a red wave, candidates in battleground races are focusing their attention on cost-of-living issues, immigration, and policing. As of mid-August, abortion was mentioned in less than 5 percent of Democratic Senate ads, a key difference from the past two cycles, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.

Maine is different. As of September 16, Democratic advertisers had spent roughly 15 percent of their $40.8 million broadcast TV and streaming dollars on ads focused on abortion rights, according to Nate Schwartz from AdImpact. It’s one of the biggest topics there, he told me, after ads about President Donald Trump and healthcare. Planned Parenthood’s political arm is also making its biggest ad buy of 2026 against Susan Collins, at $600,000, and WinSenate, a super PAC aligned with Senate Democratic leadership, has spent 70 percent of its TV, streaming, and digital money in Maine on abortion-focused ads.

The target is Collins, the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state Trump lost in 2024, and one of Democrats’ best chances to flip a seat. Seeking her sixth term, Collins is running in a year when Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by about 9 points. It’s also the first time she will face voters since Roe v. Wade was overturned — a decision Justice Brett Kavanaugh helped deliver after Collins, who has long described herself as “pro-choice,” cast the pivotal vote to confirm him in 2018. 

For the abortion rights movement, this is the race that has to work. Groups are pouring their biggest investments of the cycle into a state where fewer than half a percent of voters call abortion their top issue, in a year when Democrats have opportunities to win nearly everywhere. If a blue wave arrives and lifts every Democrat except the one running to avenge Roe v. Wade and remove the senator who famously sealed its fate, the organizations will have a harder time telling donors the issue still moves voters, and a harder time arguing that Republicans will pay a political price — even in blue states — for votes that restrict access to abortion.

“We know that abortion is the number one negative in Maine voters’ mind,” Lisa Margulies, a Maine spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes, told me. “It’s really the No. 1 dealbreaker.”

The first job for Democrats and abortion rights advocates is convincing Mainers the issue is still a pressing one. Seventy-two percent of Maine adults say abortion should be legal “in all or most” circumstances, and since Democrats took control of Maine’s government in 2018, the state has expanded who can provide abortions, required and subsidized insurance coverage for the procedure, eliminated most patient cost-sharing, loosened restrictions on care after viability, and shielded patients and providers from prosecution and lawsuits.

Collins has made that her defense. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision, she said in June, “has not had an impact on the state of Maine in that Maine actually expanded its law.” Advocates call that the central misunderstanding. 

“There’s this perception — and Sen. Collins herself has said it — that somehow Maine is immune, and that’s just not true,” Margulies said, pointing to their state-level efforts to keep access intact and to federal Medicaid cuts that have already hit Maine providers.

Also muddying the waters is the senator’s Democratic opponent. Collins is facing off against Troy Jackson, a longtime fixture in Maine politics who rose from the state House to the Senate presidency but fell short in bids for Congress in 2014 and governor this year. Early in his career, Jackson said that abortion “should never be legal” and that women should be required to view an ultrasound if they want to end a pregnancy. He has since renounced those positions and has earned 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood since 2017. (Jackson replaced Graham Platner, the original Democratic Party nominee, who quit the race after being accused of rape, an allegation he denies.)

While Collins prevailed for reelection in 2020 despite voting to confirm Kavanaugh, Democrats say her decision is much more salient for voters now that Americans live in a post-Roe world, one where more than 15 states have near-total abortion bans. 

If Collins loses, Democrats and abortion rights groups will say her Kavanaugh vote is no doubt partly why. A win for Collins would be harder to read, though the explanations that leave out abortion are already being prepared, including a messy nomination process that produced a candidate fewer voters were excited about, and a “unicorn” incumbent with decades of personal relationships across a small state and a long record of bringing federal money back home.

The abortion rights bet hinges on two things: that the Kavanaugh vote cost Collins something on top of what an unpopular president and rising gas prices already have, and that voters will judge Jackson by the positions he’s renounced rather than the ones he once held. 

The vote Collins won’t apologize for

When Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, she said she believed his assurances that he considered Roe v. Wade settled precedent. She had previously said that she would not vote for any nominee who expressed “hostility” toward the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion.

As many observed at the time, Kavanaugh’s record gave strong signals that he would in fact vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. In her floor speech announcing her vote, Collins dismissed those warnings, suggesting opponents had been whipped into a “frenzy” by advocacy groups. When he ultimately did side with the conservative majority in Dobbs, Collins issued a statement calling the ruling “ill-considered.”

Four years later, though, Collins is doubling down on her vote for Kavanaugh, telling local media this summer that she does “not regret” it. “Given what subsequently happened to Roe, I don’t think that simply fades into the background,” Robert Glover, a political scientist at the University of Maine, told me.

Democrats are zeroing in on the fact that Collins has continued to confirm anti-abortion federal judges, even as recently as this month. Last fall she voted to confirm Joshua Dunlap, a Maine attorney, to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit over objections from 20 Maine organizations citing his record on abortion and marriage equality. 

“Susan Collins says she has no regrets about confirming the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, and has proved it by continuing to vote for Trump’s right-wing judges,” Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan told me in an emailed statement. “Now, her approvals are underwater, and she’s trailing with women voters because Maine women have had enough of being betrayed.” 

George Hill, the president and CEO of Maine Family Planning, told me Collins “defied” them with her vote for Kavanaugh, causing “irreparable harm” across the country. He emphasized how vulnerable Mainers are if Republicans retake control of state government.

Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for Collins’s campaign, dismissed the criticism about anti-abortion judges, emphasizing that her pro-choice boss also voted for 188 judges nominated by President Joe Biden, including Julie Rikelman, who served as litigation director of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Collins, she noted, is the only Republican who voted to confirm all three of the court’s liberal justices, and she voted against Amy Coney Barrett.

Margulies rejects this accounting. “We deserve better than, ‘Well, she’s not as bad,’” she said. “When it comes to reproductive rights, she’s not a moderate anymore.”

While her judicial votes are facing scrutiny, Collins has also spent decades building up a brand as a Republican willing to buck her party on abortion when the issue comes up in the Senate. 

In May 2025, Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund published a memo online titled, “Senator Susan Collins’ long history of supporting Planned Parenthood and access to essential health care.” Among other things, the memo highlighted Collins for speaking out against proposed Medicaid cuts, for co-sponsoring a bill in 2022 to codify Roe v. Wade, and for opposing a 20-week abortion ban bill in the Senate. This past summer, the memo was quietly taken down from their website.

Asked about the removed page, Margulies didn’t say when or why it was taken down, but pointed to what she described as a sharp shift in Collins’s record over the past year, particularly on judicial confirmations. “There are times when she’s been true to her word and put Mainers ahead of politics, but she closed that chapter this year,” she told me.

“Because she is a Republican, the national groups continue to twist themselves into a pretzel to support these male candidates with terrible records,” Kernen said, referring to Platner and Jackson. 

So far, Mainers appear to have split Collins in two in their minds: There’s the dedicated public servant who puts her state first on one side, and the partisan Republican who sometimes disappoints them on the other. A University of New Hampshire poll over the summer found Collins rated far better on bringing federal dollars home to Maine than on her Supreme Court confirmation votes. Maine voters, Glover said, “have historically been willing to separate Collins from the national Republican Party and evaluate her through a broader lens of incumbency, independence, and constituent service.” 

The turnout math

Even if Democrats can win the argument on abortion around Collins, it’s an open question how much it will move votes. “Right now, I feel quite confident that affordability, healthcare, and good jobs trump abortion access by a long shot,” Dan Shea, a political scientist at Colby College, told me.

But abortion rights advocates believe the ranking obscures how the issue actually works. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said her group has spent years testing how to talk to voters about abortion, consistently finding that it overperforms as an attack. “If you go to a voter in Maine and you say, what are your top three or five issues, they may not name abortion,” she told me. “But if you say to them, Susan Collins took the following vote — and one of them is Brett Kavanaugh, which led to overturning Roe — it is extremely salient, and it moves that voter.”

The Kavanaugh vote works, she argued, as a character verdict — “an indicator that you’re willing to side with extremism over your own constituents.” That, she said, is the piece that’s missing in the analysis of what voters say they care about. “It is one of the most salient attacks in Maine and in a lot of other parts of the country.”

Ashley Kirzinger, a pollster at KFF based in Maine, said priority rankings are a weak guide anyway, noting “the economy” means different things to different voters, and issues compete with candidate dynamics and party loyalty. What has changed since Roe’s overturn, she told me, is who the single-issue abortion voter is.

“Before the Dobbs decision, abortion was a motivating issue for Republican conservative voters,” Kirzinger said. “Now what we’ve seen is a complete shift.” Those voters are more likely to be Democrats, younger women and women of color, and include more people who don’t reliably show up in midterms.

Abortion messaging, therefore, is doing two jobs. The first is turnout. Kirzinger said the Kavanaugh vote is aimed at Democratic women “who are not as enthusiastic about Jackson as a candidate” and who “may be more motivated to turn out as a vote against Collins’ record on abortion rather than for Jackson.” In a tight race inside the margin of error, a couple of points of turnout could make the difference.

The second job is persuasion, and the target is older women, who reliably vote. Women made up nearly 60 percent of Maine’s turnout in 2020, and Collins won them by 3 points. What Democrats need from them is a switch, which is why many of the abortion ads are built around regret. One Planned Parenthood ad features a woman who voted for Collins and “will not make the same mistake twice”; WinSenate’s features a voter who “felt [Collins] was the better choice” and doesn’t anymore. 

Jackson’s change of heart

Complicating the race is Collins’ opponent, Troy Jackson, who is in some ways a mirror image of her own political persona: a Democrat with a history of culturally right-leaning positions to appeal to voters in the other party.

Jackson, who started his political career in the rural and fairly conservative county of Aroostook, used to earn 100 percent ratings from Maine Right to Life. In 2010, as CNN’s KFILE reported, when he filled out the group’s candidate questionnaire saying he thought abortion should never be legal, he declined to say whether there should be exceptions even to protect the life of the mother, for rape or incest, or because of fetal disability. Maine Right to Life, which has not issued an endorsement in the Senate race, did not return requests for comment.

Jackson told MS NOW he evolved on the issue thanks to “a lot of conversations over time” with women, doctors, and community members. “It became more and more clear to me that abortion access was healthcare,” he said.

In 2023, while serving as Senate president, he co-sponsored a bill allowing abortions after fetal viability when a physician deems them necessary, one of the most expansive such laws in the country. In 2024, he shepherded through the Senate a shield law protecting Maine providers and patients of reproductive and gender-affirming care from other states’ bans, despite bomb threats that emptied the statehouse and a letter from 16 Republican attorneys general threatening to sue. “Troy stood up for and never wavered in his commitment to reproductive rights during some really harrowing moments,” Margulies said, “when it would have been a lot easier to step down.”

“I’m rock solid on this now, and Susan has been the opposite,” Jackson said in an interview with Maine Public Radio this summer. Kernan, Collins’s spokesperson, has charged Jackson with flip-flopping for “political convenience.”

The national environment is looking strong for Democrats, and Jackson has been narrowly ahead in recent polls, though all have been within the margin of error. A CNN poll released this month found nearly two-thirds of Mainers feel negatively about the Dobbs decision, including about half saying it makes them angry. A Fox News poll in August found 55 percent worried Collins votes with Trump too often. 

Whatever happens, the explanations are ready. If Collins loses, abortion rights groups will cast it as proof that the issue still moves voters even where it doesn’t top their lists, and as a warning to all Republicans running in 2028. Timmaraju previewed the argument in our conversation: A loss would signal “a crack in the armor” of so-called moderates, and show that voters “are not going to tolerate” incumbents complicit with an extremist administration. 

If Collins wins, the groups that spent millions on abortion ads are unlikely to conclude that doing so was a mistake. Kirzinger pointed to the turmoil that followed the Democratic primary and the late swap of Platner for Jackson, which she said benefited Collins “in a way that is hard to capture in polls.” Glover, the political scientist, noted the things Mainers have always weighed alongside her votes, including decades of relationships, the Senate Appropriations gavel, and federal money. Even Timmaraju, the abortion rights leader, offered the same hedge in advance: A Collins win, she told me, “says more about Susan Collins and Maine than it does about 2028.”

A win wouldn’t show that judicial votes carry no consequences, Glover added. But if Collins holds substantial support among voters who support abortion rights despite the Kavanaugh vote and the fall of Roe, “that would certainly suggest limits” for retrospective accountability for downstream consequences of Supreme Court confirmations.

Though the race is supposed to clarify whether voters will punish elected officials for taking actions that restrict abortion access, it probably can’t — at least not definitively. It will decide, though, who holds the seat, and reproductive rights leaders have been clear that without a Democratic Senate, nothing they want gets a vote.