“We’re just going to bottled water in a couple days,” Mendoza told a couple as they found a seat at her New Orleans-style restaurant.

Corpus Christi’s city leaders have called for declaring a “Level 1” water emergency at the end of the summer, cutting the amount of water residents, small businesses and big industry can use by 25%. And Mendoza isn’t one to wait for an emergency to hit her. So she’s preparing. 

“No more free water,” she said. “We’re trying to get ahead of it.” 

What’s behind the water crisis in Corpus Christi?

She is moving to paper plates for certain dishes and throwaway cups for anything but cocktails, so there will be less to clean in the kitchen. 

Perrin’s just opened about two months ago, and Mendoza hopes the summer regulars still decide to vacation in town. The next few months, she said, is their best time. 

“Something has got to be done,” Mendoza said. “And it’s got to be done soon.” 

Mendoza is just one of Corpus Christi’s roughly 318,000 residents squaring off with a water crisis after several dry and rainless years. Now the city is at an impasse: Demand for water has reached a limit as its dedicated lakes, reservoirs and groundwater wither away.

In the past few months, the local shortage has gained state and national attention, sparking concerns for the global oil and gas industry  — in which Corpus Christi is a vital player  — and threats of a state takeover by Gov. Greg Abbott. It has also laid bare the ongoing rift between leadership, residents and industry on how the city should move forward, whether through conservation, new sources of water or a mix of both. 

Residents and leaders alike dig in on opposite sides of the debate over removing salt from the Gulf’s waters to aid the city. 

Is desalination the best solution for the Texas coast?

The city has for years considered constructing desalination plants — costly facilities that convert saltwater to fresh drinking water. The project is controversial among residents who remain divided on whether desalination is the right move. Critics point to the environmental impact, the location and concerns over industrial water consumption, while proponents assert it's the best decision for the community, the economy and the growing industrial market despite a $1 billion price tag.

Meanwhile, Corpus Christi is far from the first Texas city drying up. Lake Medina west of San Antonio has for years barely reached 5% of its total capacity, causing residents to buy water and dig deeper wells. And across Texas, communities are raising concerns over water shortages due to a rise in data centers, all the while there is a concerted effort from some to ship East Texas water to drier regions. 

READ MORE: A data center is moving into a small town. Residents say it will ruin their history

“Corpus Christi is just one canary in the coal mine,” said Jennifer Walker, director of the Texas Coast and Water Program at the National Wildlife Federation. “Corpus is certainly a very acute example that everyone is watching, but there are other parts of the state dealing with water scarcity.” 

However, this year, all eyes are on Corpus. City Council rejected the first desalination plant contract last fall, but is currently in the stage of considering a new contract in the same location. That decision could arrive as soon as this summer, pending final environmental research and a city council vote. 

In the meantime, residents are preparing for tighter restrictions this summer. 

“You know, it’s on us to be aware of what’s happening, the choice that our city or water utility is making around water supply decisions,” Walker said. “Going forward in a water-constrained era, communities will need to be making the decisions about where the next iteration of water comes from.” 

An industrial debate

Monna Lytle’s neighbors have been moving away, one after another since long before anyone mentioned a water emergency in Corpus Christi. They cleaned out their homes in the city’s Hillcrest neighborhood, packed up their lives and settled across town. Eventually, their houses were bulldozed and debris removed, leaving behind empty, grassy lots to make room for the city’s booming oil and gas industry. 

Lytle stayed. 

She remained unswayed by a city buyout, which promised a fresh start away from the growing industrial corridor reshaping Hillcrest’s historically Black and Brown community in the city’s northeast end. Today, over a decade later, Lytle is still fighting for her family home. This time, she is taking on a desalination plant just a few blocks from her house. 

“No one is realizing this plant is inside a neighborhood,” said Lytle, 71. “It’s not adjacent, it’s not nearby, they want to put a desalination plant inside a neighborhood." 

While this summer’s water concerns have hit a parched and fevered pitch, this is far from the first time Corpus Christi has fallen into dry times. In 2011, the city recorded one of the worst droughts in history. It shriveled up the water supply and pushed the city to implement severe water restrictions for residents and surrounding communities. 

The dried-up lakes and scorched lawns shocked leadership into looking at the issue of water seriously. This included the possibility of desalination, said Jim Klein, a history professor at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. Klein was on the city council from 2023 to 2024, where he voiced concerns over industry, desalination plants and finding other solutions to the water crisis. 

How much water does the oil and gas industry use?

“It’s been like a slow train coming and now it’s at the station,” Klein told Straight Arrow. “There's been a standard practice here in Corpus Christi to sell water to anybody who wants it, to kind of treat water as an unlimited resource, and we're finding out now it's not unlimited.”

Corpus Christi normally pumps its water supply from Lake Corpus Christi and Choke Canyon to the west, and Lake Texana and the Colorado River to the east. As of May 3, Lake Corpus Christi is at 8.3% capacity and Choke Canyon is at 7.3% capacity. Lake Texana is at 67.8%, but shrinking with use. 

For years, leadership considered desalination as the best solution for residents and the growing industrial sector. This push accelerated in 2015 after the Obama administration increased exports from the United States in liquified natural gas. Since then, the industry has grown substantially — launching what some consider an “industrial renaissance.” Today, Corpus Christi is the largest liquefied natural gas export in the United States. 

However, not every resident is thrilled about the industrial boom — especially when it comes to water usage. Industrial facilities, such as refineries and petrochemical plants, use about 50 to 60% of Corpus Christi’s total water supply, according to local officials. The city uses about 100 million gallons a day. 

READ MORE: Low snowpack, early melt triggers alarm bells for farmers, drought managers

Klein pointed to the city promising 25 million gallons a day to ExxonMobil in 2017 as an example of an overextension of water demands. 

“The city is going to oversell our water supply and we already did,” Klein said. “That’s why we’re here now because they oversold the supply. If we plan on building a desalination plant, well then Exxon should pay for, not 70%, not 80 — 100%.” 

Klein’s frustrations grew when Corpus Christi City Council approved a voluntary exemption in 2018 that would allow industry to opt into a surcharge rather than restrict their water usage during certain drought stages. The surcharge sets
aside funds every month to aid the city in finding a solution to the water shortages. 

But for some, like Dan Herrington, a Padre Island resident running for a city council spot this November, industry and Corpus Christi are so interconnected that he believes curtailing water supply from facilities could spur citywide consequences. Herrington told Straight Arrow he worries if the city stops providing water to these companies, they could leave town.

“I think we have been very quick to vilify industry when industry literally affects all of us in Corpus,” Herrington said. “Our port is one of the leading LNG exporters in the world so literally the world needs Corpus Christi to have water. We have to solve this problem in a way that makes sense.”

Herrington supports desalination plants, including the one in Hillcrest, for which, he noted, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has already approved permits. 

“We’ve spent so much time arguing and kicking the can down the road, which is exactly what we’ve done with this desalination project,” Herrington said. “If we don’t have enough water, industry is not going to come.” 

Concerns for the harbor

Desalination is out of the question for Claudia Rush, the pastor at Brooks AME Worship Center, the last remaining church in Hillcrest. From its front windows, Rush can see Citgo Refinery. 

While the other community churches have left due to industrial development, Rush does not plan to go anywhere anytime soon. She knows, as much as the residents know, that the church is a gathering place for the community. 

This community includes the Hillcrest Residents Association — an organization that has historically raised alarm bells over industry in the area. On a recent Wednesday morning, Rush met with community advocate Armon Alex and Lytle, who wore a shirt that said, in part, “Pray for Hillcrest. Don’t Prey on Hillcrest.” 

“A good amount of young people are leaving the area because this is all they see around them,” Alex told Rush. “What happens if we further put an additional nail in the coffin if they approve something like desalination?”

Alex is a member of the Corpus Christi City Council’s Watershore and Beach Advisory Committee and despite the TCEQ permits, has advocated for another study looking at the wide-range impact desalination discharge will have on the ecosystem. The facility will pump a highly salinic liquid called brine back into the bay. 

In a statement to Straight Arrow, Corpus Christi public information manager Robert Gonzales said the city "has actively engaged with Hillcrest neighborhood leaders and residents,” and “while the Inner Harbor site has previously received necessary permits, the City Council is actively exploring and negotiating with private-sector partners for additional desalination solutions”

How do cities find new water sources, besides desalination?

“We’ve had scientists and experts, including myself, who have said this is going to be a bad case if we put it back into the bay, which we call the inner harbor.” Alex said. “You could do it safely if there is enough mixing going around, but there aren’t strong enough currents in the inner harbor or Corpus Christi Bay.” 

The final study — called a far field report — should be published by June. 

Desalination isn’t the lone solution to the city’s water crisis, said Alex. Water conservation and pulling from other sources could prove better options, Alex told Straight Arrow. 

Alex is pushing to place the exemption fee program for industry on the election ballot this November. The measure needs 11,000 signatures by July 1 to be approved and they have about 5,000 as of late April. From there, Alex hopes residents will vote to reverse the exemption fee program and drive industry to cut back during drought. 

On this, the city is firm. Gonzales said “the funds, approximately $6 million annually, are restricted for use in developing new, long-term water supply projects” and if removed “the immediate revenue used to fund new water sources would need to be replaced by other funding mechanisms.” 

Klein and Herrington both separately pointed to the Mary Rhodes Pipeline as one possible short-term and long-term solution. The pipeline pulls water from Lake Texana, which fills from the Colorado River, but has been under-utilized, said Klein. As of April, the pipeline provides 70% of the city’s water supply. 

Klein also highlighted evaporation as a concern worth addressing. The reservoirs that Corpus pulls from lose 50% of their capacity in a year due to water evaporating in the heat and sun. Floating solar panels  — a relatively new technology used in California and New Jersey  — can cut evaporation by 50 to 70%. However, the technology is new and didn't get traction at the city, Klein said. 

The city is also considering pulling water from the nearby Evangeline Aquifer, but has received pushback from residents and farmers in Sinton, Texas who are concerned about their own water levels. City leaders are also developing water along the Nueces River with one area already supplying 4.5 million gallons a day of water from eight wells. Another well is expected to produce 17 million gallons per day by May. 

However, no matter what, Alex said, the main issue isn’t necessarily finding new water or conservation strategies. It’s how to direct the water toward residents and small businesses who need it.

“If the solution doesn’t include curtailments of the largest water users in our area, then those solutions are null and void,” Alex said. “You’re only putting tape on the cracks then.” 

And the future of Corpus Christi’s cracks will serve as a national lesson. One way or another.

Round out your reading

• First, it was the schools. Now they’re coming for your cellphone at work.
• Why one of America’s top economic forecasters is worried about a recession.
• AI companies may not be adhering to their own guidelines — with potentially deadly outcomes.
• Data centers are a thorny issue for Democrats. Maine shows us why.
• We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.

Maybe, maybe not. Even as companies of all sizes, from national retailer Lowe’s to local contractors, are pitching subscriptions, some contractors who waded in early have tempered their enthusiasm, finding that consumers are wary of hidden costs and conflicts.

Can a monthly subscription actually fix your house?

“I love the concept, but the bulk of my customers, who own houses worth $350,000 to $750,000, want the services on their own terms and on their own time,” John Gelfusa told Straight Arrow. He is president of HomeWorks CGO Inc., a Michigan remodeling firm.

Five years ago, Gelfusa piloted a home maintenance subscription for time-pressed professionals, figuring they had better things to do on Saturday mornings than replace furnace filters. Meanwhile, he thought, when his technicians showed up to fulfill subscription maintenance for middle-income clients, their presence might open the door to more substantial projects.

It hasn’t worked out as expected. A few homeowners signed up and stuck with amenity-laden subscriptions, but most mid-tier homeowners “‘said ‘thanks, we’ll call when we need you,’“ said Gelfusa.

Still, the logic of a home maintenance subscription is so compelling that companies keep jiggling the lock, trying to figure out the magic combination.

Lowe’s just introduced a subscription it is positioning as a way to avoid ladders. For $99 annually, Lowe’s will send a technician twice a year to address seven tasks, such as replacing light bulbs in ceiling fixtures. Lowe’s declined to comment on specifics.

Will automation and drones change how you maintain a home?

Meanwhile, tech startup Casa claims to merge the surveillance, scheduling and sourcing of home maintenance and management into a dashboard powered by AI.

The subscription model is irresistible because it looks like it ought to be in sync with the seasonal rhythms of home maintenance, said Jackie Swanson, a managing partner with Gartner Consulting, a strategy and technology consulting firm.

Each season is ushered in by predictable chores, from clearing gutters of autumn leaves to confirming the air conditioner is ready to cool the house in summer. Anything that recurs invites a subscription model, she said.

Long-term demographic trends buoy ambitions for home subscriptions: the help that aging Americans need to continue living in their homes; the fact that 40% of houses are more than 50 years old; and, especially, the overlap between those two.

Swanson predicts the home maintenance subscription market could reach $9.1 billion by 2033. Local firms that build subscription revenue now will be well positioned when the industry inevitably consolidates, Swanson said.

“The winners will be platforms that combine smart home integration, AI-driven diagnostics and trusted local labor networks,” she said.

Drones for homes: That’s the formula that Aleks Krylov has discovered. He launched Stern Gutters in New Jersey and subsequently learned the category was even more glamour-deficient than he’d assumed.

Homeowners usually ignore gutters, Krylov told Straight Arrow.

“But the negative ramification of failed gutters is expensive,” he said, citing basement flooding, yard erosion and falling shingles.

As part of regularly scheduled gutter clean-outs, his workers — and, when needed, drones — document the condition of a customer’s roof with photos and videos. Building a record of roof status is especially appealing to homeowners who intend to stay in their houses long-term and who want to stay a step ahead of problems that might erupt overhead. Krylov has found consumers are most interested in a monitoring subscription that catches emerging issues they can’t see or fix on their own.

How do you avoid the risks of home service contracts?

But consumers are wary of subscriptions that end up causing more problems than they solve.

As CEO of Butter Payments, which works with subscription services on customer retention, Charles Rosenblatt has become conversant with some of the problems consumers run into.

Because a home maintenance subscription needs to prove its worth over the full span of seasons, many require an annual contract, Rosenblatt said. That means it’s important that consumers understand the cancellation terms, lest they find they can’t drop the rest of the year if they aren’t happy with the first few months of service.

If part of a homeowner’s intent is to build a maintenance record that validates their stewardship of the house, they must retain the actual reports, photos and video, and not count on obtaining them when needed from the service. Finally, homeowners need to be sure the cost of the subscription doesn’t undermine their ability to save for the inevitable big bills, like replacing a roof or taking down a tree, Rosenblatt said.

Gelfusa thinks he has found the sweet spot: getting to know clients’ houses well enough that he can suggest appropriate maintenance checks on a rolling basis. What homeowners really want, he said, is not to be locked into a subscription but to feel that a pro is looking out for their houses in ways they can’t.

And the personal touch works both ways. “Clients have already met our employees,” he said. “It is a comfort to have someone coming into the house that they already know.”

“That creates about a 5% yield bump every year,” said Uphoff, whose farm sits near Decatur.

Uphoff developed these techniques with help from researchers, agricultural businesses and other farmers. Such innovations are the reason, experts told Straight Arrow, that the United States grew a record amount of corn last year, even as farmers navigated severe weather and financial headwinds.

In the past several years, American farmers have faced prolonged drought, extreme rain, skyrocketing costs, plummeting revenue and an uneven economy.

And through it all, production keeps growing.

How do farmers hit record yields as weather turns extreme?

USDA figures show that annual yields — the total amount of a specific crop grown in a given year — grew in 2025 compared with 2024, continuing a decade-long trend. Agriculture researchers and experts attribute the rise to innovations made possible by exhaustive study and shrewd adaptation.

“There are corn varieties that will pollinate at temperatures well into the 90s,” said Doug Gucker, a commercial agriculture educator for the University of Illinois Extension. “Forty years ago, that would have been a crop failure.”

And, he added, “we’ve seen the yield increase from planting soybeans in mid-April as compared to early to mid-May.”

But not all farmers benefit from these advances.

Wealthier growers are better able to leverage those innovations. And greater yields do little for farmers who can’t fetch high enough prices to cover production costs.

While higher yields mean Americans don’t generally need to worry about food shortages, experts told Straight Arrow that could change if a warming planet outruns farmers’ ability to adapt.

According to the National Weather Service, 2025 had the highest average annual temperature on record at 57.8 degrees, barely edging out the previous year’s record. For comparison, the average annual temperature between 1991 and 2020 was 54.7 degrees. Both years followed a warming trend that increases the likelihood of prolonged drought and extreme rain, experts told Straight Arrow.

“With precipitation trends, we’re seeing wetter springs,” said Ohio’s state climatologist Aaron Wilson. In the spring “it can be too wet to get into the fields, and wet fields with heavy equipment leads to soil compaction that can impact how the crop emerges from the ground.” 

Drought often arrives in the summer when crops need moisture, Wilson said.

What new science helps crops survive as the planet warms?

“Rainfall tends to come in more intense bursts and the dry spells tend to last longer,” said Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, a Cornell economist who studies how climate change affects agriculture.

And to further compound the challenges vexing farmers, costs of the products they depend on, such as fertilizer, farming equipment and diesel fuel are constantly on the rise.

The price per acre for farm machinery — a key metric the USDA uses to assess farmers’ costs — spiked from roughly $135 per acre in 2021 to $160 per acre at the start of 2022 and peaked at just over $170 per acre last year, according to the department’s figures.

In spite of these challenges, crop yields also follow a consistent upward trajectory.

Corn yields hit an all-time record last year at 17 billion bushels — compared with 14.9 billion bushels in 2024, and 13.6 billion bushels 10 years prior — and other crops such as wheat and sorghum, a small grain that is a key ingredient in flatbreads and tortillas, saw their highest yields in years. 

Farmers produced 437 million bushels of sorghum last year, the highest figure since 2021, and a 27% increase from the previous year. While the 4.3 billion bushels of soybeans produced by American farmers in 2025 was a 3% decrease from 2024, soybean yields followed a gradual incline in recent years. In 2019, before COVID-era price shocks, the U.S. produced 3.6 billion bushels of soybeans.

The 1,600 acres of corn, soybeans and small grains grown on a plot of land overseen by the University of Illinois just outside of Champaign conform almost seamlessly to a landscape blanketed by crop fields, dotted with the occasional farmhouse. 

The research conducted there sets it apart.

It's one of several plots where researchers at the land grant university look for better ways to grow crops, and one of hundreds at land grant universities across the nation forming a vast research apparatus.

Those experimental fields are one of the reasons farmers like Uphoff have adapted their planting and growing techniques.

“Farmers like science and technology,” he said. “That’s making higher yields possible.”

Why do record harvests fail to protect farm profits?

Soybean yields have been trending upward since the 1970s, said Taylor Dill, research director for the Ohio Soybean Council.

“We can have a high-yield variety [of soybeans] mixed with disease resistance that can capture that yield even if you have environmental conditions conducive to disease,” she said.

“We can't outrun climate change, but farmers can stress proof their crops,” said Laura Lindsey, a soybean and small grain agronomist at the Ohio State University.

Research shows that farms “are more likely to be profitable with timely planting,” she added.

The upward trend in crop yields does not mean climate change had no impact on production, said Ortiz-Bobea. He noted that a 2021 Cornell study concluded that agricultural productivity was 21% lower than it would have been over the past 60 years in the absence of climate change.

And innovations can only go so far. 

Whether farmers make money on higher yields depends entirely on the commodity markets that set what farmers are paid for their crops. 

"We're paying tremendous input prices, and grain markets are moving sideways,” said Jay Sullivan, who grows corn in North Carolina’s coastal plains.

The price of corn, for example, peaked at just over $7 per bushel in 2023, but fell under $4 per bushel late last year.

“Prices are below the cost of production right now,” said Kevin Matthews, who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on 5,000 acres near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Farmers can only be so efficient.”

Williams said he is skeptical of USDA yield data, citing budget cuts at the agency along with widespread drought threatening crop production throughout the country.

Geography also plays a role. In some parts of the United States, no amount of research or planning can keep seeds in the ground during intense rain storms or provide precious water during a drought.

Last year “we had to do three replantings of soybeans because of the amount of rain we got,” said Stephanie Cornell, who also grows corn and small grains on a farm in Prince William County, Virginia. “But once we got it in the soil we didn't get any rain.”

The year was “horrific” for crop yields in her section of the commonwealth, she said.

“Isolated areas in Ohio have had pretty big problems because of the weather,” said Lindsey.

Some farmers, for example, had nothing left to harvest after the remnants of Hurricane Helene rampaged through parts of the state, she added.

Drainage practices can counter intense rains, but “controlled drainage structures haven’t been widely adopted because of the cost,” said Wilson, who is also the climate field specialist for the Ohio State University Agricultural Extension.

Whether yields will continue to trod along their gradual incline remains an open question as towering obstacles such as climate change and high input costs stand in American farmers’ paths.

Scientists continue to warn that rising carbons emissions are warming the planet, forcing producers to constantly modify their growing techniques. Adding to their problems, diesel fuel and fertilizer — some of which is produced in the Middle East — ballooned in price after the United States and Israel invaded Iran. It’s not clear when those costs will drop.

“It could be a pretty dismal financial picture going into 2027 if current high prices continue,” Gucker said.

As this ritual moved online, the paper became a homepage that’s refreshed constantly, but still holds the same structure. While you rarely read everything, you knew where to start. There was always a sense of what mattered, at least according to someone. 

That starting point is harder to find now, and many readers don’t realize what’s been lost in the process.

Most mornings, the news now arrives in fragments — an email here, another a few minutes later, subject lines that pull your attention and others you ignore. For many Americans, there is no single kitchen-table destination anymore, no shared entry point quietly telling you what leads. In its place is something more personal. More scattered.

Your inbox.

Each morning, millions of readers open emails sent from individuals, rather than institutions — writers and analysts delivering the news directly to your inbox. These newsletters can feel more intimate than the traditional homepage ever did. For many readers, they have even become part of the daily rhythm. But as they take on a larger role, they are also reshaping something less visible but more fundamental: The idea of a shared beginning to the news.

From a shared front page to private entry points

The homepage once worked as a kind of public map. Editors made decisions about what mattered most and what sat below. Even when readers disagreed with those choices, the structure itself was visible. You could see how the day was framed.

Newsletters don’t replicate that structure. They begin with the reader, not the public. Most are shaped around a specific topic or voice, though some, like broad daily digests such as Yahoo! News Digest, aim to recreate a broader overview. Instead of a single front page, there are now thousands of parallel starting points, each offering a different version of the day’s news. Which means two people can both “follow the news” and walk away with entirely different understandings of what mattered.

READ MORE: This startup wants AI to police the media. But who gets to judge the truth?

That shift reflects how people are actually consuming information. 

Three in 10 Americans say they “get news from newsletters” sometimes or often, according to the Pew Research Center. Still, Kristen Eddy, a senior researcher of news and information at Pew, told Straight Arrow that most users do not read the majority of what they receive. Newsletters exist alongside other media, not in place of them. What they do restore is habit. You can feel informed without ever seeing the full picture.

The rise of the individual publisher

Beyond habit, newsletters have reintroduced the meaning of voice.

For Ismael Nafría, author of La reinvención de The New York Times, the shift began when newsletters stopped imitating traditional news formats. Early versions often felt like recycled headlines without personality or presence, Nafría told Straight Arrow. But over time, that changed. Writers began treating newsletters less like broadcasts and more like a direct line of communication. 

“People liked having a direct relationship with the author,” said Nafria, “a kind of conversation if you will.” 

At their best, they feel conversational — written as if someone is speaking to a specific reader rather than a mass audience. That tone creates a sense of familiarity that institutional news rarely replicates.

Newsletters have also changed the role of the journalist. Writers are increasingly operating as individual media brands, building relationships with readers rather than relying solely on institutional identity. That shifts how success is measured. It is no longer only about reach, but about whether readers return. 

Jeff Sonderman, founder of GlueLetter newsletter analytics, describes it simply: “They have to see it as something that they are using, not just that they like,” he told Straight Arrow.

What people actually read

There is a tendency to assume newsletters deepen engagement with news. The reality is more uneven. Readers open selectively, skim when something stands out and ignore much of everything else. 

Eddy’s research shows most newsletter users — 62% — do not read most of what they receive. But that’s not failure, it’s the feature. For readers, newsletters offer a frictionless way to keep tabs on the world, engaging only when something cuts through. The value for news organizations is not in total attention, but in sustained presence within the reader’s routine.

That presence also explains the business model. While traditional media relies on scale, newsletters rely on loyalty. They are designed to move readers from casual exposure to consistent engagement and, eventually, subscription. 

“It’s a great way to take people who just bounce by once in a while and turn them into a more loyal group,” Sonderman said.

The system is built on choice. Readers decide what enters their inbox, which creates a stronger sense of control than algorithm-driven feeds. But that same control narrows exposure. Most people subscribe to only a small number of newsletters, which gradually shape the range of voices they encounter.

A fragmented system

As newsletters grow, the information landscape becomes more segmented. Most successful newsletters are built around specificity. That clarity makes them effective, but it also contributes to fragmentation. 

“You have to be very clear about what value you’re delivering and who it’s for,” said Sonderman. 

Readers are no longer regularly encountering a broad, shared feed. Rather, they see pre-selected streams of information.

The concern is not simply that people are consuming different content; it’s that they’re increasingly only seeing what has already been filtered for them. When news is organized around personal interest or niche topics, people are less likely to come across stories they didn’t choose or weren't expecting. In older media environments, even if people didn’t agree with everything they saw, they were still exposed to many of the same headlines. That created a shared baseline of information. As that shared baseline weakens, it becomes harder to assume others are working with the same understanding of current events.

There is hardly any partisan divide in newsletter usage. According to Eddy, 29% of people who identify as right-leaning get their news from newsletters, along with 34% of people who identify as left-leaning. And since this data only includes people who at least sometimes use newsletters, that 5-point gap is even less significant than it might seem. 

READ MORE: The resurgence of religion in mainstream media, and why it’s happening

Where the differences do show up more clearly are in income and education. Higher-income and more highly educated Americans are more likely to read news regularly, engage with it and even pay for it. Newsletter use fits into that same pattern. The people who are most likely to benefit from well-curated, in-depth newsletters are also the ones who are already more active news consumers overall.

Newsletters lower barriers for individuals to publish and build trust without institutional backing. This can be seen as an expansion of access. But that expansion complicates what “access” actually means in practice. 

“It’s not just about the size of the audience, but the quality of that audience,” Nafria said. 

Access to news is not the same as exposure to it. The supply of voices is broader, while what any one reader sees remains narrow. Most readers do not see everything available. They see what they have selected.

What the inbox changes about the news

Access to news has never been higher than it is in 2026. Perspectives are easier to find. Voices are easier to follow. And yet, many readers are navigating a narrower slice of that information than ever before.

Newsletters are not replacing the broader media ecosystem. People still move between platforms and websites. But the structure of how news is distributed has changed. For many publishers, newsletters are no longer secondary; they are central and vital. That shift has completely reshaped editorial priorities, from chasing traffic to sustaining attention, rewarding consistency and voice over scale. The result is a more personalized experience of news — one defined less by shared front pages and more by individual inboxes.

And voice, more than anything else, defines that experience. In a media environment increasingly shaped by automation and algorithms, that human presence becomes more valuable, not less.

“Email lets readers override the algorithms and say, ‘I want this, and I want it regularly,’” Sonderman said.

"Nuclear verdicts,” legal and insurance shorthand for jury awards exceeding $10 million, have become more frequent and ever larger. What was once remarkable is now everyday news. That relentless climb is fundamentally reshaping the economics of trucking and, by extension, the cost of goods for ordinary Americans.

A forensic analysis of federal and trucking industry litigation data sources published by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) in late 2025 found that truck-tractor tort case filings grew at an average annual rate of 3.7% between 2014 and 2023. The upswing in verdict size is even more striking: The median nuclear verdict reached $36 million in 2022 — roughly 50% higher than the median in 2013 — and the share of verdicts exceeding $50 million jumped by 6.4% over that span.

An ATRI 2020 foundational report found that verdicts over $1 million jumped from 79 cases in the first half of a 14-year study window to 265 in the second half — a 235% increase — with awards over $10 million nearly doubling in the same period.

Over the eight years from 2010 to 2018, the average verdict in cases exceeding $1 million shot up from $2.3 million to $22.3 million. That 967% increase far outstrips inflation, which averaged 1.7% per year during that same time period.

What’s fueling the rise of ‘thermonuclear’ verdicts?

As jury awards skyrocket, terminology strains to keep up. Hence, now the worst cases are “thermonuclear verdicts,” defined as awards exceeding $100 million. The trucking industry has incurred some of the most staggering hits.

In 2024, a St. Louis jury awarded $462 million — including $450 million in punitive damages — against trailer manufacturer Wabash National in a fatal underride tractor-trailer crash. A judge reduced the award, and later the case was settled — yet the initial verdict sent tremors through the industry.

The forces pushing litigation costs beyond the rate of general inflation share a name among insurers: "social inflation." These include a more litigious public, the rise of third-party investors who fund lawsuits in exchange for a cut of the award, growing anti-corporate sentiment in jury pools and increasingly aggressive tactics by plaintiff attorneys. The latter includes the “reptile theory.” This slippery courtroom technique frames cases in terms of public safety and corporate danger, prompting jurors to render outsized verdicts as a broad social message.

The use of outside investors who bankroll lawsuits in exchange for a cut of any settlement removes financial pressure on plaintiffs to settle early. ATRI’s 2025 report flags this as a “developing legal threat,” warning it pushes investors to maximize payouts.

The financial shock is felt first in the insurance market. Swiss Re, the global reinsurance giant, in a 2024 Sigma report, was blunt about trucking’s exposure. It scored the sector as “one of the most affected by mega verdicts,” with excess coverage “seeing rate increases of more than 75%.” The upshot is that trucking companies are “finding it increasingly difficult to secure adequate insurance cover and are being forced to assume more risk than they have in the past.”

Marsh, the global insurance broker, warned in a 2024 advisory that the dynamic is leaving many organizations "unable to purchase sufficient limits to fully transfer the risk.” Some insurers, including Zurich and AIG’s Lexington unit, have significantly reduced their participation or exited the commercial trucking market entirely.

Who ultimately pays the bill?

The colossal costs generated inside the courtroom chug right through the supply chain, eventually hammering consumers.

Over the next decade, commercial vehicle litigation will contribute 15% to the inflation of food prices, according to research by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, modeled with The Brattle Group.

What’s more, every $1 million increase in tort costs is associated with a $2 million reduction in U.S. gross domestic product. The same model projected that meaningful tort reform could add an average of $52.3 billion per year to GDP over a decade, create 5.7 million jobs and reduce food-at-home costs by 15%.

It’s simple math: As verdicts surge, insurance costs soar. This squeezes margins and pushes some motor carriers out of the market or off high-risk routes. As this capacity tightens, freight rates increase. And as freight rates mount, so does the price of goods, everywhere from the grocery store and pharmacy to the home-improvement center.

Swiss Re’s 2025 Behavioral Social Inflation Study adds a sobering long-term dimension: 76% of U.S. consumers now believe jury damage awards are too low, up from 58% in 2016. Among adults under 40, that figure rises to 83%. As younger cohorts make up a larger share of jury pools, the litigation environment for commercial defendants is only becoming more hostile.

What’s being done to stop it?

Reform advocates have pushed for action at both the state and federal level. In September 2025, three Republican members of Congress introduced the Forum Accountability & Integrity in Roadway (FAIR) Trucking Act. If passed, it would route large interstate trucking cases into federal courts, removing them from state venues that plaintiff attorneys select for favorable outcomes. American Trucking Associations President & CEO Chris Spear endorsed the bill. He said it would close loopholes “that the plaintiffs’ bar exploits to move cases to judicial hellholes and engineer these lopsided verdicts.”

Opponents of reform argue that nuclear verdicts serve a necessary function — holding large companies accountable when safety failures cause death or catastrophic injury, and that damage caps could effectively shield negligent operators from full accountability. That debate is ongoing, and any federal legislation faces a difficult path through Congress.

Nuclear verdicts are no longer rare. And thermonuclear verdicts — once almost unthinkable — are now a known and priced category of high risk.

The resulting cost impact does not magically dissolve. No, it rolls, steadily and virtually invisibly, through the supply chain — until it hits consumers smack in the wallet.

“Things haven’t been the same since,” nurse Trinity Walker told Straight Arrow. “I do sometimes wonder where I would be in my life if it weren’t for the trauma I went through during that time.”

For Walker and many others, something fundamental broke during those years. And it never quite reassembled. Millions of Americans continue to live in “survival mode,” a state in which a person’s nervous system remains activated, awaiting the next crisis. According to a recent report, 43% of adults say they feel more anxious than they did the year before — a steady climb from 37% in 2023 and 32% in 2022. 

“I’m still struggling to put myself back to where I was,” said Jessina Allen, an Atlanta-based personal trainer. During lockdown, the 39-year-old faced the inability to work since gyms were closed. 

“It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I grieve who I might’ve been if all this hadn’t happened,” Allen said.

The shift from crisis to chronic survival mode

“Stress feels more chronic now and less episodic,” said Chloë Bean, a licensed marriage and family therapist.  “Before the pandemic, people often came in around one acute stress issue. Now, many clients describe feeling constantly ‘on,’ mentally overloaded, emotionally depleted and unable to ever recover from this state.”

Dr. Ash Bhatt, chief medical director at Legacy Healing Center, described it as “less about one acute crisis and more about chronic overload.” Bhatt said his patients claim they feel as though their nervous system never fully powers down. 

“I can’t sleep,” they tell him. “I can’t focus. I’m snapping at people. I feel exhausted, but I can’t relax.”

That “ongoing hypervigilance," as Bhatt described it to Straight Arrow, is a key, post-pandemic shift. 

And now another major crisis looms, affecting a large swath of the population in ways that echo COVID-19. 

The financial toll of survival mode

For the first time since COVID, there are reportedly more unemployed workers than available jobs. As of April, in the tech industry alone, layoffs average roughly 889 job losses per day. 

And that’s stressful. 

“Patients are dealing with financial pressure, job uncertainty, family responsibilities and a constant stream of information all at once,” Bhatt said. “When people feel like there’s no clear endpoint to the stress, their system stays in a kind of survival mode, and that’s when burnout starts to build.”

After being laid off two years ago, tech account executive Ralph Reid has submitted over 400 job applications. He said his life savings are now depleted.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” he said. “I’m basically being forced out of the job market, and the mental health toll is absolutely ridiculous.” 

For many, the instability is disorienting. 

“I’m so tired of all these mass layoffs happening almost every week now,” said Reid, who is 46.  “Every week, it’s another corporation letting hundreds of hard-working people go. The search for a permanent role in this climate just feels impossible.”

And the job market doesn’t seem to be improving. Job openings fell to 6.5 million in December 2025, the lowest outside the pandemic since 2017. 

“Nobody talks about the stress of trying to rebuild financially after being underemployed or unemployed for an extensive amount of time,” Reid told SAN.

But in fact, more people are talking about their mental health. Mental health experts who spoke with Straight Arrow said the pandemic did bring about (at least) one positive cultural change: Seeking professional help has lost a lot of its stigma. And many are finding relief through telehealth.

Remnant of COVID: mental health became accessible

What started as an emergency solution has become a sustained pathway to mental health care — one that’s breaking down barriers for people living in survival mode.

By December 2025, mental health held the highest telehealth utilization rate of any medical specialty, according to data from the American Hospital Association. Studies show 62.3% of patients with a telehealth claim had a diagnosis of mental health conditions last year. The digital mental health market, valued at $7.46 billion in 2025, is projected to reach nearly $47 billion by 2035. 

“Telehealth is very effective for structured work around stress and anxiety,” said Dr. Darren O’Reilly, a psychologist and clinical director of AuDHD Psychiatry. “The main advantage is reduced friction. People are more likely to attend consistently.”

It has worked for Walker, who still feels she is carrying considerable stress from her time working at a hospital during COVID-19. 

“I’ve only done therapy online, but I had such a positive experience,” she said. “Once you build the rapport, it feels more natural; it got to where I was even crying at the screen.”

Still, it’s not for everyone.

“I tried it once and felt uncomfortable like I was on a Zoom call at work,” Reid said. “I need that person to feel my energy, and I need to feel theirs. Especially after all I’ve experienced, that’s a little too cold for me,” he adds.

With the growing accessibility of help, it means people aren’t facing it alone. 

“There has been a clear increase in people seeking support,” said O’Reilly. “People are accessing help earlier, without needing to reach a crisis point.”

The woman, who asked not to be named due to legal concerns, is a certified professional midwife, or CPM, a type of midwife trained to help women give birth at home.

Although home births remain relatively rare in the U.S., they have become increasingly popular over the past two decades. The share of women giving birth at home more than doubled — from about 0.6% in 2004 to roughly 1.5% in 2023 — and rose sharply during the pandemic, increasing by nearly 40% between 2019 and 2021. 

Home birth itself is not outlawed. But in North Carolina and 10 other states, the CPMs who attend more than 90% of those births cannot legally care for patients, largely because physicians and medical groups have long argued that giving birth at home is more dangerous than in a hospital.

Neither the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists nor the American Academy of Pediatrics endorses home births for that reason. 

Despite these warnings, a change is brewing. In the past six years, at least five states have moved to legalize CPMs as the U.S. confronts a worsening maternal health crisis. The renewed interest in midwifery is driven in part by growing gaps in access to care: More than 2 million women live in maternity care deserts where they lack access to hospitals, birth centers and physicians trained in obstetrics.

In North Carolina, roughly a dozen hospitals, many in rural areas, have shut down completely or closed obstetrics units in the past decade. More than 20 of the state’s 100 counties are now considered maternity care deserts, and it’s far from the hardest hit state. North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arkansas rank among the worst for maternity care access, where at least half of all counties lack hospitals and specialty physicians.

Maternal mortality rates have more than doubled since the late 1980s and are roughly three to five times higher than in other high-income countries. Moreover, as public trust in doctors and health officials has weakened, a growing number of women seek alternatives to hospital births, often citing a desire for fewer medical interventions or more control over the birth experience. 

Midwives say they can help fill critical gaps. But as calls to expand the midwifery workforce grow, questions about safety — and resistance from some physicians and lawmakers — linger.

Straight Arrow interviewed physicians, midwives and policy analysts across the country and reviewed dozens of studies to examine whether health providers and state legislators can strike a balance between autonomy and safety as home births become more mainstream.

Midwifery in the US

Midwifery is often misunderstood and sometimes stigmatized in the U.S.

Critics portray home birth as a fringe, “back-to-nature” practice: Women laboring by candlelight in inflatable pools in their living rooms. 

“In the United States, those who support home birth as safe are propagating junk science,” Amos Grünebaum, an obstetrics and gynecology professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Cornell, wrote in a 2015 New York Times opinion piece. 

But midwives and researchers say that image overlooks the training and structure behind modern midwifery care.

CPMs undergo a roughly two- to three-year apprenticeship-style training that includes supervised clinical work such as prenatal, postpartum and newborn exams, Cassaundra Jah, a CPM and executive director of the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives, said. Trainees must also participate in 55 deliveries in home or birth center settings, including at least five where they serve as the primary midwife.

Jah said the CPM model is designed for low-risk pregnancies — about 70% of all pregnancies — and prioritizes individualized, patient-first care. 

Women who opt for a home birth want a more hands-off, less medicalized experience. Studies in the U.S. and around the world consistently find that home births are associated with significantly fewer medical interventions, such as induced labor, cesarean sections and instrumental deliveries — where tools like forceps or a vacuum are used.

While medical interventions may be necessary in some situations and are not inherently associated with poor outcomes, they can prolong recovery and, depending on the procedure, increase the risk of infection, blood loss, and blood clots.  Maternal mortality is twice as high following C-sections; however, some analyses find that this risk diminishes with planned procedures, suggesting much of the difference reflects the higher-risk pregnancies in which surgery is often performed. Planned or unplanned, C-sections increase the odds of cardiac arrest, hemorrhage and hysterectomies. 

CPMs are not the only type of midwives in the U.S. Certified nurse-midwives, or CNMs, are the most widely recognized. They are licensed in all 50 states and typically work alongside physicians in hospitals. CNMs first train as registered nurses — earning either an associate or bachelor’s degree and passing a national nurse licensing exam — then complete graduate-level education in midwifery and pass a second certification exam. By contrast, only a high school diploma is required for CPMs.

Clinical requirements for CNMs vary slightly by program, but are roughly the same as for CPMs: 35 deliveries plus 25 labor encounters, 50 postpartum and 20 newborn exams. 

While nurse-midwives and home-birth midwives share the same underlying principles, their practice is shaped by their work settings and the communities they serve.

Critics, however, argue that nurse-midwives and CPMs are entirely different.

While Grünebaum strongly advocates for nurse midwives, he does not consider CPMs professionals.

“They’re called CPMs, but they’re not midwives, because they’re not trained enough in deliveries,” he told SAN.

Grünebaum said he delivered more than 1,000 babies during his training to become a physician. Even then, he said, he did not feel fully prepared to deal with some of the complications that can arise.

“I don’t think there are many professional jobs in this country you can have without finishing college. But you can become a CPM without that,” he said. “It’s like trying to run a marathon after running a few hundred feet a day. I would not recommend that.”

Grünebaum has published several studies comparing the safety of home and hospital births, consistently finding higher risks of adverse outcomes at home. But other, more recent research suggests outcomes may improve in states where CPMs are more clearly regulated and integrated into the health system.

The safety debate

The evidence on home birth safety is limited, and comparing outcomes between home and hospital births is inherently challenging. There is only one randomized controlled trial — the gold standard for comparing medical interventions — because pregnant women are generally unwilling to be randomly assigned to give birth at home or in a hospital.

Instead, researchers rely on observational data. These studies cannot control who chooses to give birth at home versus in a hospital, meaning differences in outcomes may reflect underlying differences in the patients themselves — such as health status, prior birth experience or access to care — rather than the birth setting alone. Researchers attempt to adjust for these factors, but important variables can be difficult to measure or fully account for, leaving the possibility that some of the observed differences are due to study bias.

Observational studies generally report higher rates of rare but serious adverse outcomes in home births compared with hospital births.

Stillbirths and deaths in an infant’s first month were about twice as high in home births, though the overall rate was low: 3.9 deaths per 1,000 home births versus 1.8 per 1,000 in hospitals, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Neonatal seizures and other serious neurologic dysfunction, while also rare, were three times more common at home, occurring in about 0.4 to 0.6 per 1,000 births, compared with 0.2 to 0.3 per 1,000 in hospitals.

A separate study found that about 3.7 babies per 1,000 born at home had very low Apgar scores — an assessment of a newborn’s heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes and color performed one and five minutes after birth  — compared with 2.4 per 1,000 in hospitals.

Comparing safety outcomes between home births and hospitals is not apples-to-apples. Home birth is typically recommended only for women with healthy, low-risk pregnancies, while hospitals care for a broader and often higher-risk group. In addition, women who choose home birth are more likely to have given birth before, and second or later births generally carry lower risks of complications. 

One other challenge in studying home versus hospital births is how births are classified. Some datasets conflate planned and unplanned home births, which can obscure differences in risk. On the flip side, about 20% to 25% of women who intend to have a home birth are transferred to the hospital during labor; those numbers are routinely wrapped up into hospital birth outcomes and complicate comparisons. 

In 2011, Oregon became the first state to record planned place of birth on birth certificates, allowing researchers to more accurately track outcomes. Several studies and state reports analyzed birth outcomes following this law and still found the odds of stillbirth, neonatal death and low Apgar scores were significantly higher in planned home births versus hospital births.

Proponents say home births in the U.S. could be safer with more regulation and integration. Some point to countries like the Netherlands where roughly 10% to 15% of births take place at home as evidence that home birth can be safe: One Dutch study of more than 800,000 births found no significant difference in outcomes between planned home and hospital births. Another reported that serious maternal complications were similarly low — or lower — in home births, particularly among women who had given birth before.

But home births in the U.S. and the Netherlands are fundamentally different. 

In the U.S., CPMs and physicians operate in completely separate systems with very little coordination. There is no formal consensus for what constitutes a low-risk pregnancy.  In contrast, in the Netherlands, midwives are fully integrated into the national health system, home births are tightly regulated, with clear standards and a built-in process for quickly transferring patients to a hospital if something goes wrong.

This lack of integration, experts told Straight Arrow, has real-world safety consequences. 

A tale of two systems

In the U.S., the relationship between CPMs and the broader health care system varies by state, but is often fragmented. While a handful of states have made efforts to better integrate CPMs, most practice outside hospital systems, with limited formal collaboration with physicians or other maternal health specialists. 

If a pregnancy becomes higher risk, CPMs typically refer patients to hospital-based care. Because they cannot continue providing care in that setting, continuity is often disrupted.

In North Carolina, where CPMs cannot legally practice, those gaps are especially pronounced. Without licensure, midwives generally cannot order lab work or directly arrange services such as newborn hearing screenings or standard blood tests, leaving patients to either coordinate parts of their own care or forgo certain testing. In an emergency, when a CPM must transfer a patient to a hospital, a midwife may hesitate to accompany the patient or communicate directly with hospital staff for fear of legal consequences, limiting the flow of critical information.

The CPM who spoke with SAN said midwives are often criticized for poor handoffs during these situations. Part of hospitals’ criticism of CPMs, she said she has been told, is “that they just drop off a mess at our door, and we don't know anything about them.”

But that is not how any CPM wants to provide care, she said. 

“It's because they're afraid and criminalized for practicing that it's forced them into making a decision other than what they'd like.”

In North Carolina, CPMs who provide care without a license typically face a Class 1 misdemeanor, punishable by up to 120 days in jail, though the charge can be elevated to a Class I felony, with potential prison time, in certain circumstances.

There is no definitive count, but a review of local reporting and law firm blogs suggests that fewer than a dozen North Carolina midwives have been arrested or charged since 2000. At least five midwives were arrested between 2011 and 2014, including one after a child’s death during a home birth. Nationwide, only a small number of CPMs or similar midwives have been criminally charged over the past two decades. Most cases have been tied to practicing without a license in restrictive states; some due to adverse outcomes where patients or physicians alleged a midwife was negligent.

“If we had a license and an integrated transfer plan, then this would improve outcomes and situations for everyone involved,” the CPM said. 

Some states, including Washington and Oregon — where CPMs can obtain a license — have taken steps to better integrate CPMs into the broader health care system.

Since the 1990s, Oregon’s state health agency has convened a board of physicians and midwives to develop and review guidelines for CPM practice. Today, those include criteria for determining which pregnancies are appropriate for home birth, according to Wendy Smith, an obstetrician who served on the board from 2013 to 2024. The state also requires midwives to develop transfer plans that outline how a midwife will move a patient to the hospital if complications arise, Smith said. Those efforts have helped midwives and physicians build relationships, fostering trust and better communication. 

Limited research,  including a 2018 study, has found that states that better integrated midwives into the health care system had better outcomes, including lower rates of preterm birth and neonatal death. (This study also ranked states based on integration; North Carolina was last; Washington, New Mexico and Oregon were top three.) 

But Smith said even Oregon’s efforts fall short.

“When we talk about integrated care, it's basically that we have created these initiatives and some guidelines that help to create safe transports,” she said. Oregon’s system is “nothing like countries that integrate midwifery care and certified professional midwives,” she said. (In most other developed countries, midwives fall somewhere between CNMs and CPMs; they typically hold college degrees in midwifery but are not required to be nurses.)

Even when CPMs follow state guidelines — identifying a hospital and creating a transfer plan in case of emergency — it does not guarantee a seamless handoff, or even that a physician will accept the patient. Smith said CPMs may also face financial pressure to avoid transferring patients, since they may not be paid in full if care is handed off.

Another major challenge: The lack of a clear, consistent definition of what qualifies as “low-risk” — a key factor in determining who may be an appropriate candidate for home birth. Doctors generally consider a pregnancy “low-risk” when there are no complications, there’s only one baby and the baby is positioned head-down, which is the safest position for delivery. 

And yet, in Oregon, state guidelines allow women with breech pregnancies — when the baby is not positioned head-down — to deliver at home. Because breech home deliveries are permitted under state guidelines, some patients assume they are broadly considered safe, Smith said, even though many physicians, including herself, consider it a complication. Studies have shown breech delivery — particularly outside hospital settings — is associated with higher risks for both mothers and babies.

In contrast, the Netherlands has strict regulations over who can deliver at home and a clear national definition of a low-risk pregnancy.

Grünebaum, Smith and the North Carolina CPM all said home births could be safer if CPMs had a clear pathway to licensure in every state and if there was stronger regulation and better integration into the broader health care system.

Nearly every year for the past 15 years, the CPM who spoke with Straight Arrow has helped introduce a bill to the state legislature that would formally legalize her profession.  Last March, a pair of bipartisan politicians introduced yet another one: the Accessing Certified Professional Midwives Act. The proposed legislation is still pending a vote. 

Several prominent medical groups still oppose such efforts. But the state’s department of health seems to be taking the matter more seriously. The Division of Public Health set up a maternal and infant health taskforce to explore what CPM licensure might look like. 

As the tide turns in favor of CPMs nationwide and the number of maternal health deserts grows, North Carolina legislators may finally be ready to allow CPMs to do their work. After a nearly 40-year push, the state seems to be at the “tipping point of making that change,” the CPM who spoke with Straight Arrow said.

Round out your reading

• First, it was the schools. Now they’re coming for your cellphone at work.
• Why one of America’s top economic forecasters is worried about a recession.
• AI companies may not be adhering to their own guidelines — with potentially deadly outcomes.
• Data centers are a thorny issue for Democrats. Maine shows us why.
• We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.

Layoffs in gaming development are hitting a breaking point, even as video game adaptations like The Last of Us and Super Mario Bros. become major hits and sales hit a reported $195.6 billion last year, according to a State of Video Games report. One in three video game workers have lost their jobs in the last two years, and nearly half have still not found a new position, according to a GDC State of the Games Industry Report.

Experts say a perfect storm of high development costs, post-pandemic shifts in player retention, pre-existing toxic work environments and years of aggressive investment from private equity and venture capitalists have spurred instability, even for successful releases.

Why do video game studios cut jobs during record years?

Now, workers are unionizing. Last year, video game employees across the U.S. and Canada launched United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433, a union with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). It joins the global network of other unions such as Game Workers Unite, formed in 2018.

“The video game industry is one with many nightmare stories,” UWV-CWA’s president Auriela Augusta told Straight Arrow. “My personal philosophy is that I work to make sure no one else experiences that. I reflect on my admiration for video game developers to ensure they all have a good quality of life.”

Hostile work conditions have been well recorded across the industry: In 2021, the state of California sued Activision Blizzard for running a “toxic frat boy culture” for years due to its treatment of female employees.

Todd Yarbough, a video game video effects designer with more than 20 years of experience, told Straight Arrow he cannot even recommend students take a job in the industry.

“I'd like to believe that we'll start seeing growth again soon, but I'm not sure at all at this point,” he said. “AI is looming on the horizon, and those same investors will see how cheap AI development can be, and think they've found the new gold rush.”

Augusta and Yarbough told SAN the industry is notorious for bad working conditions, including “crunch culture,” where developers can work 70 to 80 hours for weeks to finish a game before release. Yarbough said the added financial pressure from investors during the pandemic made game development longer, more precarious and pushed developers out of gaming to work in other fields.

“Crunch has always been a big problem in the game industry,” he said. “When you're young, you can afford the physical tolls crunch can have on your mental and physical health. But studios are still expecting crunch, so it's difficult to stand up for yourself and insist that you won't crunch.”

How did pandemic investments change the video game market?

Over the past two decades, gaming has transformed from a console-driven business into a global, multi-platform ecosystem spanning mobile devices, PC and online services. But that growth has come with increasing risk, said Robin Boyar, a consultant and researcher with three decades of gaming industry experience.

As gaming became more accessible to new audiences during the pandemic, new investors made massive bets on gaming’s growth with venture capitalists investing $4.7 billion in video game startups in 2020. With people stuck at home, gaming hit new, unsustainable waves of popularity.

“After the pandemic, the big spike of people playing during the pandemic declined,” Boyar told Straight Arrow. “A lot of the investment from private equity and venture capitalists didn’t pay off.”

The first few weeks of the pandemic laid a foundation for a boom. The “cozy game,” Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 11 million in its first two weeks and 48 million copies overall. Call of Duty released its free-to-play Warzone mode that attained 30 million players in the first 10 days of release.

Microsoft — whose Xbox brand has struggled over the past decade in comparison to its main competitors Sony and Nintendo — made a bold gamble to close the hardware sales gap by purchasing video game publishing giants Bethesda and Activision Blizzard for a combined $80 billion. 

It hasn’t paid off, as 9,000 workers last year alone lost their jobs after the record acquisition, and Xbox executives Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond stepped down in February amid declining sales.

What do developers suggest will improve job security?

Even when companies hit impressive figures, job security isn’t guaranteed. Epic Games, creators of the hugely popular Fortnite, has laid off 1,000 workers this year, despite the company’s $3.5 billion in annual revenue. Battlefield Studios laid off a number of workers after Battlefield 6 was the best selling game in the U.S. last year and after a whopping $400 million in development costs.

Boyar and Augusta both told Straight Arrow that companies overinvested during the pandemic and are scaling back to recoup their losses. Rather than venture into single-purchase releases, players are sticking to a few established, long-running "live service" free titles such as Fortnite, Roblox and Overwatch, reducing revenue for new releases. 

As live-service games rake in massive profits, companies search for their own hit that will bring in a continuous revenue stream. According to Eurogamer, games such as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto Online bring in roughly $1.4 million per day to the company and nearly $500 million annually.

But Augusta said chasing these hits is unrealistic, and could lead to massive financial failures like Sony’s Concord, which reportedly cost $400 million to develop before its collapse. She compared the investments into these titles to similar Silicon Valley tech startups, where dozens can go bust, but one will be a massive hit despite the human cost.

“You’re risking seven to eight years of development time on games that can only succeed when they are world beaters. Not everything can be the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel,” she said. “There’s a lot of money in games, but not a lot of smart money and people are feeling the consequences.”

Chrissy Fellmeth, an animator and union organizer with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), said video game workers are ready to combat the industry’s job instability. 

“I’ve talked to workers who get blindsided by layoffs at AAA studios then they get nothing despite working for 10-plus years,” Fellmeth said. “When we talk about layoffs, it’s making sure they’ll be OK when they get laid off.”

Fellmeth said developers and animators both share similar career stability in terms of workers leaving studios after large projects, but game developers lack the job security. 

As part of her new career, she is negotiating to guarantee severance pay and health insurance after contracts are completed or employees are laid off. 

Though the experiences are difficult, Boyar and Augusta told SAN that improvements are possible. Boyar said smarter investment strategies, focusing on sustainable development and combating toxic workplace culture rather than chasing trends of live-service games could bring stability.

While Augusta feels there is a lot of tough work ahead, she looks to other media unions to inspire her to keep going.

“A big thing we want to do at the union is show that devs are people too, and we want games to come out well,” she said. “The current ecosystem doesn’t allow us to do our best work.”

Round out your reading

• First, it was the schools. Now they’re coming for your cellphone at work.
• Why one of America’s top economic forecasters is worried about a recession.
• AI companies may not be adhering to their own guidelines — with potentially deadly outcomes.
• Data centers are a thorny issue for Democrats. Maine shows us why.
• We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.

The two frequently traveled the country and state of Florida, traversing various state and national parks to hike and go birding. But when Joy’s back problems began hampering her mobility, the couple worried they’d never take another joint hike.

That was until the two heard about an all-terrain wheelchair program at Blue Spring State Park, about 45 minutes outside of Orlando, which allowed them to hit the trails. 

“Hiking had been part of our routine for years, but it became inaccessible,” Richard Fox told Straight Arrow. “Now, it looks like that door is open again.”

The program is the brainchild of Friends of Blue Spring State Park, a volunteer-run nonprofit that provides support for the park. It’s part of a growing national movement to make parks and trails more accessible, shifting the practice from infrastructure-based Americans with Disabilities Act standards — like a paved trail or accessible restroom — to treating accessibility as a necessary inclusive program.

By intentionally making outdoor spaces accessible, it allows people who may have never been in nature — or lost the ability to do so — to experience it. 

The network of people working to make these moments happen is growing, despite federal pressure to curtail diversity equity and inclusion efforts across the country. While much of the debate centers around race and gender, disability access is often folded into the same bucket. 

Where are all-terrain wheelchairs available?

Dan McNeal, director of the quality of life grants program at the Reeve Foundation, said the organization has seen applications for accessibility funds jump from 200 to about 350 in the past year. These requests often come from nonprofit organizations working in tandem with states or local jurisdictions to fund these efforts.

Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources partners with a non-profit to bring all terrain wheelchairs to nearly two dozen different parks across the state. In Texas, nine battery-operated track chairs are available at 10 state parks. And in Wisconsin, not only are all-terrain wheelchairs available at several parks, but they also have additional adaptive equipment for kayaking and cross-country skiing. 

At Blue Spring State Park, the wheelchair is free, with park admission, for anyone to use — no questions asked. Participants do have to book in advance online. Once at the park, a volunteer accompanies guests on the hike for safety purposes, occasionally pointing out big clumps of tree roots or uneven ground. The guest can control their own chair or a volunteer can remotely control it. Guests can choose the length and duration of their hike and there are multiple trails, including one that is four miles long. While the chairs can reach a speed of 3 mph, this trail typically takes about three hours to complete. 

The volunteer group offers regular hikes but also plans specialty ones, like during a full moon. Most recently, they schedule hikes during firefly season to make it accessible for all to see the park light up with flashes of yellow.

“We say this is your hike,” Kathleen Hallum told Straight Arrow. “If you want us to tell you about nature, we’ll tell you about nature and the plants or birds you’re seeing. If you want us to be quiet, we’ll be quiet.”

But Hallum and another volunteer, Nancy Jeffreys, have found most hikes build new connections.

“It’s so rewarding,” Jeffreys said. “Every time we go out, we say that was the best hike; and then the next time we hike, we say that was the best one.”

The program is personal for both women. 

For Jeffreys, it allowed her and her husband to share hikes together again. 

The couple always enjoyed the outdoors, she said, but a hiking accident left her husband with a spinal cord injury that only allows him to walk short distances. It had been almost eight years since they had been on the trails together. The all-terrain wheelchairs made it possible.

Jeffreys joked that since that hike, her husband, who was one of the first to try the wheelchairs, is the unofficial spokesperson for the program.

“Just for me to be out in the woods with him and to talk and be in the environment of the trees,” Jeffreys said. “He was very emotional and I was crying.”

About two years ago, Hallum was inspired by a friend with mobility issues and became determined to bring more accessibility to the park. She worked furiously on an in-depth analysis about why it would benefit the park. Little did she know the park was also working on it. Two days after turning in her report, a chair was donated. 

That, she said, was the first of many lessons: It wasn’t the right chair for a proper hike. The balloon wheels made it lack stability on the rough terrain. 

So, for several months Hallum said the park would borrow an all-terrain wheelchair from a friend at another state park. Eventually, Friends of Blue Spring learned of a grant that could fund the purchase of two wheelchairs at $16,000 each. Three weeks after submitting the grant, they secured the funds.

The program boomed. 

Why is outdoor accessibility important for people with disabilities?

It went from the occasional user to once a month. Then, a few times a month and then once a week. Now, the group hosts at least three hikes a week. 

It has become so popular, Hallum said, that the nonprofit recently purchased two additional chairs with the help of a large donation. 

“So many of these people have been in a wheelchair for a long time and so when we tell them, ‘this is your hike,’ they get their independence back,” Hallum said. 

One woman started crying over seeing pine cones — she was used to only seeing them in hobby stores.

Another married couple could not stop holding hands during their spin on the chairs — their final of countless hikes together as the husband faces the end stage of his life.

Kristen Laney O'Toole, 52, has multiple sclerosis and has been using a wheelchair for about 12 years.

Throughout that time, she never went off road or on a trail. She had tried adaptive kayaking, surfing and recumbent biking. But never a hike. 

That is until last month, after a friend of hers found Blue Spring’s program. The two packed up in the car with her friend’s dog for the hourlong drive from Flagler Beach. 

“You get so used to learning that you can’t do something because of the accessibility of the place,” O’Toole said. “Then, I was able to go on a very normal hike with my friend. It wasn’t a big event. It was just a Saturday morning hike.”

O’Toole had so much fun that she said she hopes to bring a similar program to one of the parks where she lives. That way, she said, she can access it on a more regular basis — and so can others. 

It’s exactly what Hallum and Jeffreys would love to see, too. 

“We have a formula here, but it takes a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of work so, maybe our success here can be heard someplace else,” Jeffreys said. “I’d like to see this in every park.”

The public funds, which taxpayers often expect to go toward fixing potholes and hiring new teachers, have covered the cost of court battles over zoning rules, federal contracts and access to information about detention plans in local communities.

In some cases, those disputes escalated quickly, pulling cities into months-long litigation with little clarity on how far the costs could climb. In Leavenworth, Kansas, that fight turned into a year-long legal battle over local control. In Newport, Oregon, officials went as far as seeking outside fundraising to pay for legal fees. And in Merrimack, New Hampshire, preliminary steps to prepare for a potential facility came with legal costs.

Leavenworth, Kansas

Leavenworth, Kansas, racked up more than $1 million in taxpayer-funded legal fees during its court battle with CoreCivic, the country’s largest private owner and operator of correctional and detention facilities.

The fight centered on a former prison building operated by CoreCivic, which closed in 2021 due to a history of documented safety failures and jurisdictional disputes.

To prevent a repeat, the city passed an ordinance in 2012 requiring any prison or detention facility to obtain a special use permit — the same requirement applied to day cares, bars near schools and casinos. When CoreCivic tried to reopen the site for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees without seeking the permit, the city sued.

Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder told Straight Arrow News she was concerned during the litigation about potential expenses being passed along to the taxpayers.

“We didn’t know if we were [going to win], but if they can come in and roll over us and say ‘I don’t need a permit’ then anyone can come in and do that,” Bauder said. “That’s not right. It’s our law and they need to follow our law.”

After a year-long battle, and with city funds running out, CoreCivic agreed to obtain a special use permit. As part of the agreement, the company will reimburse the city for legal fees.

“We could not continue to fight it,” Bauder told SAN.

READ MORE: How ‘no detrimental effect’ became the basis for new ICE detention centers

“We wanted to work collaboratively with city staff to address concerns raised by the community as part of the special use permit process, and we are grateful for that collaboration,” a spokesperson for CoreCivic told SAN in an email. “This collaboration has resulted in both a staff recommendation for approval of our special use permit application, as well as an affirmative vote from the Planning Commission and City Commission.”

Bauder, who personally opposed reopening the facility, ultimately supported approving the special use permit with 17 strict conditions designed to give the city real local control and ongoing oversight.

“If they don’t do one of those things that we have on that list, we pull the permit and it’s done — they’re closed,” Bauder said.

Under its new name, the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC), the facility began housing ICE immigrant detainees in March 2026. As of April 10, 2026 – the most recent date for which data is available – seven people were detained at the facility, which has a capacity for 1,002 detainees, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University.

Leavenworth is far from the only city that has put up a fight against an incoming detention center. 

Newport, Oregon

A similar legal and financial strain is unfolding in Newport, Oregon. Last fall, federal contractors began quietly evaluating the city's municipal airport — home to a critical U.S. Coast Guard rescue helicopter — as a potential site for an immigration detention center.

In October, concerns erupted publicly after the helicopter was abruptly relocated by the U.S. Coast Guard to North Bend, roughly 100 miles south of Newport, with no explanation. Hundreds of people packed into town hall meetings demanding the helicopter’s return.

The helicopter is personal for the city. Taunette Dorsey, a member of Newport Fisherman’s Wives posted a video to Facebook about a time her father, a fisherman, issued a mayday that his boat was going down when she was little.

“And if it wasn’t for a rescue helicopter, I would’ve lost him,” she said.

Within weeks of the helicopter’s relocation, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken found its removal both endangered fisherman and broke procedural rules. She ordered the Coast Guard to immediately return it.

In December, the state of Oregon sued to block any construction of the detention facility. Newport, Lincoln County and the Newport Fishermen’s Wives all became involved in litigation against the Department of Homeland Security.

The city has spent approximately $368,000 in legal fees, according to records obtained by SAN. The records show that at one point, city council became so concerned by the legal costs that the council asked the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce to facilitate private contributions to fund the ongoing legal fees via GoFundMe. 

That fundraising never came to fruition, a spokesperson for the chamber told SAN.

While the attorney general, Lincoln County and Newport Fishermen’s Wives have also filed suit, the records detailing those costs have not yet been received.

Newport Mayor Jan Kaplan and members of the city council have not responded to SAN’s repeated interview requests.

In February, Oregon Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, wrote to DHS to “express deep concern and strong opposition to any plans to open or expand (ICE) detention facilities in Oregon.” 

The group demanded detailed information about ICE’s plans, citing concerns over safety, transparency, humanitarian standards and lack of notice to local communities.

In late March, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons responded directly to Salinas, stating the agency has “no intentions of putting up a facility in Oregon” and is “not currently planning to expand current detention facilities or open any new long or short-term detention facilities in Oregon.”

Despite the written assurance, both Salinas and local leaders remain skeptical. 

READ MORE: Salt Lake City is in a drought. Can it spare water for an ICE detention center?

“I didn’t trust they were serious and that they were gone for good,” said Salinas, whose district does not include Newport. 

“In addition to the costs that it takes to file a lawsuit, a little town doesn’t have the capacity to add… God knows how big they were planning to make this facility,” she told SAN. “It would’ve been catastrophic for a small town.”

Salinas said the state shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of legal costs, either. 

“They too have to go through all these fights and spend all this money.”

Kaplan isn’t convinced the legal battle is over. 

“The meter is still running … it will be over when it’s over,” he said during an April 6 city council meeting. “I think we need to be very cautious in understanding that we’re holding them off. But there’s a court process and they could end the court processes by choosing to settle… but that’s not happening.”

ICE did not respond to SAN’s questions about why the agency is no longer moving forward with plans for a detention facility in the area.

Salinas told SAN the money spent has been well-spent so far, adding the helicopter is necessary for saving lives.

“You cannot put a price tag on human life and safety.”

Even in towns where plans are eventually scrapped, the mere proposition of a facility can trigger thousands in legal fees.

Merrimack, New Hampshire

In Merrimack, New Hampshire, where records obtained by SAN show the town spent roughly $8,000 on outside counsel, Town Manager Paul Micali told SAN the fees were necessary due to the lack of communication and transparency the town received from DHS.

“We were trying to get ready to see what we could and couldn’t do [if a detention center was established],” Micali said. “It allowed us to start with how to proceed if need be.”

In February, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced DHS would not be moving forward with plans for the detention center.

Unlike Leavenworth, Merrimack and Newport are not being reimbursed for the money spent on legal fees. 

This direct transfer of local funds from public infrastructure into federal litigation spans the country – from the Northeast to the Midwest and West Coast. 

But the fight between local control and federal action pushes even deeper into the nation’s fabric. 

In January, city leaders in Kansas City, Missouri told SAN they were blindsided to learn DHS and ICE had quietly toured a warehouse, pegged for one of ICE’s “mega” detention sites — a 900,000 square foot building. The tour came amid a push from the White House to increase capacity for detainees. 

Within hours of DHS ’s visit, Kansas City’s city council passed an ordinance to block applications to expand detention facilities not owned or operated by the city through Jan. 15, 2031.

As the cost of due diligence is passed onto local governments, leaders must decide whether it’s worth spending taxpayer money to push back against plans for federal detention centers. 

Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder said the year-long legal battle was incredibly stressful. 

“But,” she said. “It was worth it. We gotta get reimbursed. This is tax money.”

Round out your reading

• First, it was the schools. Now they’re coming for your cellphone at work.
• Why one of America’s top economic forecasters is worried about a recession.
• AI companies may not be adhering to their own guidelines — with potentially deadly outcomes.
• Data centers are a thorny issue for Democrats. Maine shows us why.
• We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.

While refining, distribution and taxes all factor into the price of gasoline, the majority of what Americans pay at the pump is determined by the price of oil. When adjusted for inflation, global events that disrupt oil markets have caused gasoline prices to surge past $5 and even $6 per gallon at various points in recent history. In the video above, Straight Arrow News walks through 50 years of gasoline prices.

Experts told SAN the 2026 attacks on Iran and Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz have created the biggest disruption in the past 50 years. 

“It is without a doubt the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil markets,” said Christiane Baumeister, an economist at the University of Notre Dame focused on energy markets. “The severity of this event is not fully reflected in prices yet. Oil supplies are much tighter than what the market price currently suggests.” 

The 1970s

A turning point for gas prices came in 1973, when OPEC nations declared an oil embargo against the United States in response to American support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The Nixon administration capped gas prices, which suppressed the sticker price but created severe shortages and long lines at stations.

“The gasoline lines, the supply shock that we had in the ‘70s, was self-inflicted by federal policy,” Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, told SAN. 

The decade’s price spike came in 1979, when the Iranian Revolution took roughly 7% of global oil supply offline. By early 1980, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices topped $5 per gallon.

The 1980s and ‘90s

Gasoline prices remained elevated for several years in the early 1980s as tension continued in the Middle East. But the high prices also triggered energy conservation efforts and encouraged more oil production. That led to a sharp decrease in gasoline prices by 1986. 

“There was a relative abundance of crude oil supplies in the world relative to oil demand,” Baumeister told SAN. 

With the exception of brief spikes such as Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, gasoline prices remained stable in the $2 and low $3 inflation-adjusted range through the turn of the century. 

The 2000s

As emerging economies such as China industrialized rapidly, global oil demand began outpacing supply, which remained relatively stagnant. Hurricane Katrina worsened the picture in 2005 by knocking out refining capacity along the Gulf Coast. And as China prepared for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the price of a barrel of oil hit $147, sending gasoline above $6 per gallon, when adjusted for inflation. But prices tumbled only a few months later.

“There was a steep drop in oil consumption in anticipation of a major global recession,” Baumeister told SAN. 

But the underlying market dynamic did not change, and by the summer of 2009, gas prices were back on an upswing. 

The 2010s

From 2011 to 2014, inflation-adjusted gasoline stayed above $4 per gallon — the longest sustained period in available data. Continued growth in Asia, the Arab Spring and renewed tensions with Iran kept markets tight. While U.S. shale production grew on high oil prices that made a new drilling method hydraulic fracturing — also known as fracking — profitable, OPEC cut its oil production, which kept prices high. 

But in late 2014, OPEC, which feared losing market share to the growing U.S. industry, reversed course. Suddenly, the world was awash with oil supply and prices at the pump plummeted. 

“As we say in the oil patch: The cure for high prices is high prices,” Hirs said.

The 2020s

COVID-19 lockdowns sent gasoline to its lowest inflation-adjusted price in two decades, as crude oil prices briefly traded in negative territory, meaning companies holding oil in maxed-out storage facilities had to pay others to take it from them. This caused a string of bankruptcies in the oil industry, and the companies that survived are now less bullish on expanding production and more focused on shareholder returns. 

Oil supply did not keep up with the pace at which the economy re-opened in 2021 and 2022. Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions response from the U.S. and European countries that caused gasoline prices to reach more than $5 per gallon.

They aren’t all for him. Once Glenn returns home, he reserves some of the produce and nonperishables for himself and sets aside the rest for an elderly neighbor. He continues to help his neighbor by cooking fresh meals and cleaning the man’s house. In Glenn’s words, it’s “what I can give to him.”

But Glenn’s ability to help could soon change as new requirements for the benefits he receives from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program took effect on March 1.

“It’s been a little difficult for me,” he told Straight Arrow News.

Federal spending bill institutes changes in SNAP

The One Big Beautiful Bill that President Donald Trump signed last July changed how the federal food stamps program operates. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which manages the food assistance program, about 39.5 million people receive benefits. 

The spending law mandated people like Glenn work 80 hours a month to receive benefits. It also increased Michigan’s share of administrative costs by 50%, beginning this July. It’s a significant increase: Michigan will pay $95.7 million more in 2026 than in 2024. 

Glenn is considered an “able-bodied adult without dependents,” since he is single, does not care for a child under the age of 14 and lives in an area with an unemployment rate below 10%. This group of able-bodied adults, sometimes referred to as ABAWD, is larger now than it was pre-July. The age of dependents has been lowered from 18 to 14, and new regulations have been added about how to measure unemployment for waivers. 

The USDA said that, as of Nov. 2, the category of single adults must work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. Otherwise, they can receive benefits for three months, then not again for another three years, for failing to meet the guidelines.

Implementing the new work requirements is a measured process, with some states complying on Nov. 1, while others, like Michigan, started on March 1. The state’s Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to SAN’s interview requests. 

"We know that people have lots of great skills and talents," Matthew Dickerson, director of budget policy at the Economic Policy Innovation Center, told SAN. "The whole point of the welfare system should be to be able to transition people back into self-sufficiency and not permanent dependency on government."

Eisha Branner runs E-Community Outreach Services, a Pontiac-based nonprofit focused on helping women and their families access communal support, food, diapers and other essentials. She told SAN that her staff has offered budgeting workshops, apprenticeship programs and other opportunities to help families transition off food stamps. 

Anyone in the U.S. can seek an ABAWD waiver, but prior to the July bill, several states were granted geographical waivers, meaning single adults did not have to meet work requirements in certain areas to receive SNAP benefits. 

A USDA spokesperson told SAN that the changes instituted from the spending bill took effect on July 4, and states must enforce the new three-month time limit rule. The spokesperson added the department is providing technical assistance to states on enforcing new time limit and work requirement rules, and transitioning residents off welfare.

“So Michigan — really for the first time because waivers are no longer as broadly an option for Michigan counties and cities — more people than ever are suddenly going to be experiencing lower food assistance budgets for their families or losing their SNAP benefits if they're completely single altogether,” Elinor “Elly” Jordan, public benefits law attorney at the Michigan Poverty Law Program, told SAN.

Those changes mean Glenn could have less food to share with his neighbor. He uses his food stamps to make some purchases at Meijer, a Midwestern grocery store, and supplements that with items from the Pontiac pantry. 

“I try to help others, I’m just by myself,” he said. 

Thousands likely lost benefits

Work waivers aren’t a foreign concept. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act carved out a path for waivers, which Dickerson said allows states to inform the USDA that certain residents cannot meet work rules.

The law allowed for a USDA secretary to approve geographic waivers based on whether a state, county or city “does not have a sufficient number of jobs to provide employment for the individuals.” The law did not have provisions on how long a waiver could last or the procedures a secretary must follow to terminate waivers. 

“The problem with the law was that it never defined what the term ‘area’ meant and what the term ‘lack of sufficient jobs’ meant,” Dickerson said. 

The 2025 changes make those waivers a temporary tool, allowing the USDA to review unemployment rates over three-month and 12-month periods and judge the rates based on historical numbers. Under the new law, waivers cannot exceed 12 months. 

“These reforms reinforce SNAP’s work expectations and encourage able-bodied adults to move toward employment and self-sufficiency, consistent with the program’s statutory goals,” Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told SAN in an email. 

It is unclear exactly how many food stamp recipients will be affected by the new rules. After ending its waiver on Sept. 1, 2025, Pennsylvania reported 161,000 fewer people received benefits in December 2025 compared with December 2024, according to the state’s Independent Fiscal Office. South Carolina said that 3% of its enrollees fall into the same category as Glenn. The Congressional Budget Office estimated provisions will reduce enrollment by about 2.4 million in an average month from 2025 to 2034.

Tabulating how many households are affected by the change is tricky as states do not report SNAP data in a uniform format. Some states release the total number of individual recipients, while others report the number of households, each of which could represent several recipients. Some states report both. 

An SAN analysis of data from 10 states that instituted work requirements found that the number of households receiving benefits dropped by 408,869 in the first month of the requirement – a 12.6% decline. 

In two states, Massachusetts and New Mexico, the number of households grew by 10,559 and 64, respectively. 

Jordan said that SNAP benefits aren’t meant to help people stock their kitchens, rather to keep people above food-insecurity levels. In some cases, she said people could receive around $100 per person a month. Michigan averaged $184.75 per month for individuals and $343.88 for households so far in fiscal year 2026. 

Unemployment rates force states to apply for exemptions

Counties, states and reservations across the nation are requesting waivers. 

The entire state of Alaska, with the exception of Anchorage, has received such a waiver. The new rules exempt citizens of any federally-recognized tribe and Alaskan Natives from the work requirements. Alaska and Hawaii are automatically granted waivers if unemployment is 150% above the national rate, which was 4.1% in December, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Michigan’s Mackinac County received a waiver due to its 13.3% unemployment rate, the 10th highest in the nation, according to the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget. The city of Pontiac, where Glenn lives, is below the threshold at 8.6%.

Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research and Action Center, told SAN that work requirements weren’t feasible as people are being “punished” for things out of their control, such as a “weak economy, insufficient jobs, lack of transportation and ways for them to be able to have access to resources.” 

Glenn said the 80 hours a month requirement will be difficult for him, as jobs around Pontiac force people to “meet certain standards” to work. He noted there are jobs for people who are willing to take anything to make ends meet, but the time requirement feels high to him. 

“I do more than 80 hours walking around, inquiring about work, than actually getting to work,” he told SAN. 

Dickerson noted that the work requirements equate to being roughly 20 hours a week, which is a part-time job. 

“It’s an incredibly modest requirement that can be easily met simply by going out and contributing to your community,” he said. 

Glenn said in Pontiac, jobs are all around him, but may not always pay well enough. Michigan’s minimum wage is $13.73 per hour and Pontiac’s median income in 2024 was $44,329, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The city is marked by blighted, abandoned buildings as it faced a harsh economic downturn in the early 2000s. 

Pontiac was so well known as an automobile manufacturing hub throughout the 20th century that General Motors named a car brand after the city. Then came the Great Recession: GM ceased operations for the Pontiac brand in 2009 and shuttered its four assembly plants in the city as part of a bankruptcy agreement.

Since then, the city has repurposed historic buildings and remains the marquee city for the annual Woodward Dream Cruise — a live auto showing of classic and original vehicles spanning the entire 27-mile Woodward Avenue connecting Detroit to Pontiac.

Still, Glenn said he’s seen people either leave Pontiac or turn to substance abuse. He said that places around the city are aware of the city’s unemployment level and have offered job training sessions to help people. 

“I do notice that a lot of people don’t want to do anything because they lost a lot of hope,” Glenn said. “I try to stay hopeful and encouraging like, ‘Hey, you can do it. Just take a little step.’”

Dickerson told SAN the work requirements would encourage people to seek higher-paying jobs and break cycles of welfare dependency. If able-bodied adults who don’t support others financially rely less on public assistance, Dickerson said more money could be provided to people who are “truly needy.” 

Jordan told SAN she sees it differently: Most people aren’t cyclical recipients and instead use the program so they don’t go hungry, she said.

Community will be key for many people as they navigate the changes. Glenn said this is now a time for neighbors to help one another.

SNAP needed improvements

Everyone who spoke to SAN agreed that the nation's food assistance program needed to be updated to meet the needs of both recipients and taxpayers, and also account for rising food costs. The disagreement comes in how these changes should be created. 

Jordan envisioned the program being improved to allow for a fully digitized application process used in all states. Jordan said it can be easier to order a pizza from Domino's than it is to apply for benefits. 

"I would say that any fiscal effects are completely secondary to the human effects," Dickerson said. "We want people to be able to go into the workforce and be able to provide for their families."

Glenn’s sights are set on his neighbors, encouraging them to keep asking for help and employment around the city, even if they get rejected.

“Go to the next one,” he said. “Don’t stop asking.”

Freelance Photojournalist Kimberly Todd contributed to this report.

“It’s way too much responsibility for teens whose frontal cortexes aren’t fully developed,” she told Straight Arrow News.

But coordinating the schedules of three children while both she and her husband worked full-time wasn’t easy. At first, Treacy let her oldest children, then 12 and 13, take rideshares, as long as they weren’t alone, but she said they had a few “scary experiences.” They tried public transportation, but that felt unsafe, too. When Waymo became available for kids, Treacy and her husband decided to let the older kids test it out. 

Families have long weighed questions about safety, insurance and fuel prices when determining when to teach teenagers to drive. But as gas prices spike, and autonomous rideshares become more readily available, some parents are adding a new variable to their equation: Waymo. 

Are automated ride services like Waymo safer than teen drivers?

Motor vehicle accidents were the leading cause of death among U.S. teens in 2023. Among teens 16 or older, the fatal crash rate was three times higher than for drivers over 20. 

Waymo’s most recent data shows that its automated vehicles — what the company calls its “Waymo Drivers” — were involved in 92% fewer serious injury-or-worse crashes than human drivers traveling the same distances in the same cities.

“The juxtaposition is pretty significant between these two classes of drivers,” said Shawn DuBravac, Ph.D, a technologist with Avrio Institute, an organization that helps clients discern technological trends and transformations. “We are comparing arguably the safest drivers on the road with the least safe.”

But that doesn’t mean Waymo Drivers don’t make mistakes. 

During an active police stand-off in downtown Los Angeles a few months ago, a Waymo Driver cruised slowly through the scene, taking a left-hand turn feet away from the suspect.

“The computer sees people. And it’s like, ‘OK, I’m going to slow down. I’m going to avoid the people,” DuBravac told SAN. In this case, it misread the context of the situation. Still, DuBravac said, the vehicles have been well tested, exposed to a wide range of real-world experiences.

One Phoenix resident, Karen Bell-Zinn, described watching two Waymos get stuck in an awkward face-off at a Circle K parking lot. Another told SAN a Waymo once took her to her destination but kept circling the parking lot and wouldn’t let her out.

“We are committed to continuous improvement and take several steps to ensure our technology operates appropriately on public roads,” Chris Bonelli, a Waymo spokesperson, told SAN. Those efforts include constant software updates, a measured approach to expansion and partnerships with regulators and emergency officials, he said. 

Waymo as a dependable carpool choice 

Treacy and her family have heard the stories. But they also heard reports from their own social circle, as her kids’ friends took the autonomous rideshares everywhere — the beach, school and sports practices. 

When Treacy’s eldest daughter began attending an arts-centered high school in downtown Los Angeles, about 90 minutes from their home, Treacy formed a carpool with other nearby parents. She spent nine hours a week covering three drop-offs or pick-ups.

Eventually, the three carpool families decided to split a Waymo most days to get to and from school. In her eyes, it beat giving a high schooler car keys to drive through city traffic, which she described as “a house on fire.” 

In the time since, her family “never had any of the issues that people talk about,” she told SAN. “If Waymo said that it was dropping them off at a spot, it did.”

Is it cheaper to drive or use an automated ride service? 

Treacy’s solution came at a cost. 

Waymo rides to and from school for Treacy’s daughter usually cost between $45 and $50 each way — a manageable expense, she said, when split three ways between parents. 

In Phoenix, Christina Harvey and her husband relied on Waymo to shuttle their 14-year-old to basketball practice and to hang out with friends. Each ride costs about $20, for a roundtrip cost of about $40 a day. 

“It is pretty expensive to use Waymo,” Harvey told SAN.

But adding a teenager to your car insurance policy is expensive, too. Rates vary by state, but the national average cost of a full-coverage insurance policy with a teen driver is around $500 a month, said Maya Afilalo, an insurance analyst at AutoInsurance.com. Rates don’t tend to drop until 19 and 21, before evening out at 25. 

It would take a teen about 12 to 13 outings a month to hit that $500 threshold. But that’s just one line item: There are other hidden costs of insurance, like what happens if a teen is involved in an accident, said Daniel Setareh, a managing partner and personal injury attorney at Setareh Law Firm.

“All it takes is one serious crash with several other vehicles to go far beyond the cap of that policy,” Setareh told SAN. 

If a teen is involved in a serious car accident, the parents holding the policy could end up paying for others’ bodily injury and damages. And Afilalo said after an accident, teen premiums typically rise about 45% to 50%.

With a service like Waymo, the accident is on the company. 

“That's a different world to be in, and one that's more important to families in more urban areas where the probability of a problem is already greater,” Setareh said.

Maintaining a car can come with many surprising costs, too 

Cars have costs beyond insurance. Routine maintenance like shocks, tires and fluids can add up fast, Glen Hayward, owner of Good Works Auto Repair, told SAN. 

“I think most families underestimate the true cost of maintaining a teenage driver’s vehicle,” said Hayward, who is a member of Neighborhood Auto Repair Professionals. 

And with a teen behind the wheel, certain parts may wear out sooner.

“Sometimes even a minor bump against a curb can damage tires, shock absorbers, struts or suspension parts, leading to hundreds of dollars in damage,” Hayward said.

On top of these potential maintenance expenses, gas prices are soaring — eclipsing $4 per gallon in recent weeks.

“At the very most, I feel like you're breaking even with what you have to pay for your car and for gas and for insurance to just pop in a Waymo,” said Treacy. 

What’s at stake if teens rely on automated ride services? 

All states have their own version of a “Graduated Driver Licensing” program (GDL) that includes three stages: a learner’s permit; an intermediate license; and, finally, an unrestricted license.

These programs are designed to help teens gain confidence and often restrict higher-risk driving, such as nighttime driving or carrying other teen passengers. Some teens wait to learn until they are older. That can lower short-term crash risks, but once they do begin, they remain novice drivers, now without the safety guardrails designed for new teen drivers.

And teens who don’t build a driving history will pay higher premiums as young adults, said Afilalo. A 2022 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that people who secure a driver’s license in their teens were more likely to report better health, higher educational attainment and greater employment as young adults.

But that study was published before autonomous rideshares became a legitimate option. Both Treacy and Harvey said Waymo has given their kids a sense of independence similar to what a license might provide, raising questions about whether the long-term trade-offs may look different in cities with autonomous transportation. 

DuBravac can think of one key tradeoff worth considering: family connection. When his children were younger, he said, car rides became the go-to time to open up about their day. If families increasingly rely on autonomous vehicles to shuttle teens, parents may need to be intentional about preserving time for connection. 

Depending solely on autonomous vehicles can have downsides in times of crisis or change

In cities that offer autonomous vehicles, it can be tempting to assume they can replace driving entirely. 

Don’t, said Michael Okubajo, a transportation consultant and founder of Capital Transport Planning. This kind of “mobility dependency,” he said, “creates reliance on a single mode with limited reach.” 

If teens leave the service area, relocate to a more car-dependent region or encounter situations where on-demand services are unavailable, they’ll need another option. 

In emergency situations such as mass evacuations, flooding or infrastructure damage, DuBravac said it remains unknown whether autonomous vehicles can function as a reliable, large-scale mobility solution. 

“If the infrastructure is damaged, it's not yet clear if self-driving vehicles will be a viable solution in those types of situations,” he said. 

This isn’t just hypothetical: Waymo temporarily pulled its fleet from pockets of Los Angeles last year after several cars were damaged in protests. 

“We have a robust event response team to prepare for and react to dynamic changes in traffic conditions,” said Bonelli, from Waymo. These “changes” include times of civil unrest and extreme weather, he said. 

Some parents might want to choose a happy medium approach

“Driving is still a critical life skill in most of America and will be for many decades to come,” said DuBravac.

In 2025, the Treacys moved to a small town outside of Nashville, where the speed limit on most roads is 35 miles per hour. The kids are now 13, 15 and 17. 

“Here, they’re going to be able to take it slow and learn,” Treacy said.

All three kids will take driver’s ed classes and go for their licenses; had they stayed in Los Angeles, Treacy said she would have waited until the kids were in their early 20s. 

Harvey and her husband want their son to get his permit next year, when he’s 15, so he can learn independence. But she believes he will continue to use Waymo even after he has his license, especially if she and her husband do not buy him a car — another substantial cost, with the average ticket price for used cars at around $25,000, and new cars double that.

Driving decisions don’t have to be all-or-nothing. 

“A teen holding a permit — without being fully licensed — can give them a chance to hone driving skills that will serve them in adulthood,” Afilalo told SAN. In some states and insurance cases, she added, some rates don’t increase with permitted drivers. 

Another lower-risk approach: Allow teens to get their licenses but lean on rideshares in riskier situations, like nighttime driving and driving other teens.

The future of autonomous vehicles 

Waymo isn’t the only game in town. Or at least, not in every town. Tesla’s Robotaxi rides are currently available in Austin, Texas, and Uber has launched a partnerships to commercialize autonomous vehicles. 

“It will take a long time before we see wide adoption, general deployment, especially in northern states where there’s more adverse weather,” said DuBravac.

While driving remains a useful skill, that doesn’t mean it will always be seen that way. It may become an atrophied skill — one that eventually turns obsolete.

“Does that matter?” DuBravac asked. “Is this a skill that people really need?”

Repairing balky electrical outlets and replacing cracking concrete is exactly what both career-shifters and investors are looking for: problems homeowners must resolve, driving consistent sales and revenue. But there’s a downside for consumers: because so many firms are under new ownership, homeowners now must take extra steps to ensure they are dealing with a company that actually is a hometown business.

Why are white-collar professionals moving to home services?

Though he was a rising star at a Big Four accounting firm, Nick Riley realized the trends were against him. His knowledge-industry job was vulnerable to obsolescence at the cold hands of artificial intelligence. And, he decided he wasn’t wired to be a corporate lifer.

So, he applied his consulting experience to his own career, assessing the long-term prospects of shifting into home services — low on glamour but high on reliable cash flow. Through a local business networking group, he put the word out that he was looking to buy a home services business. A longtime roofing company owner was looking to sell. At the end of 2025, Riley bought Driftwood Builders Roofing.

“A huge confidence boost was that the seller was willing to offer seller financing. That told me that he was willing to invest in the company and in me,” Riley told Straight Arrow News.

Shifting into home services isn’t as much of a stretch for degreed professionals as one might think, said Riley, who as a teenager worked alongside his father in the family landscaping business, absorbing the basics of building a loyal customer base.

“I picked up customer service, the importance of high-quality work and how to manage a team,” he said.

Is a blue-collar career path the best option for Gen Z?

Riley has plenty of company. Americans have a newfound affection for work that must be done in-person and on-site.

The annual “Blue Collar Report” by Jobber, a digital administrative platform for contractors, found in late 2025 that 77% of Gen Z believe it’s key to have job skills that can’t be automated away. Job growth in the trades is projected to advance at twice the overall 4% increase in employment. And, of keen interest to potential business owners and investors, the report detailed the proportion of contractor businesses that pull in at least $1 million annually, from 21% of heating and cooling firms to 14.7% of landscaping firms.

At the other end of the acquisition spectrum, big equity firms are equally enthusiastic.

Investors and aspiring firm owners all see the same upside to buying into the home services category: a boost in profits from replacing outdated administrative and customer support systems, and amplified sales through modernized marketing, said Matthew Mooney. He is a former acquisition manager for home services for an investment firm and is now a senior partner with Profitability Partners, which provides management support to home services firms.

Infusing homegrown contractors with the latest operational and sales structures replaces intuition with data-based decision-making, Mooney said.

“The quality of the overall service is likely to go up with extra training and resources. The technician will show up on time, present well, and not make a mess in your house. But the price will go up, too,” he said.

Nearly guaranteed cash flow delivers a reliable return, especially for investors who want to diversify their portfolios beyond Wall Street. For instance, Founders Advisors, a private equity firm, acquired 13 home services companies in the first half of 2025. Its analysis found that the pest control, heating and cooling, landscaping and roofing categories brought rising financial returns, even in an erratic consumer economy.

Riverside Company, an international investment firm, expanded its portfolio of home services franchises and operators last year with additions of home-cleaning services.

Julian Scadden hears about private equity offers all day long, thanks to his position as CEO of Nexstar Network, a networking and professional development group for owners of independent contracting firms

The only remaining mystery is why it took private investors so long to discover home services, he told SAN.

“These are great businesses that, when well run, have good returns,” said Scadden, himself a plumber by trade and former owner of a plumbing firm. Typically, a well-managed contracting firm might attract a buyout offer of seven or eight times its annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — also known as EBITDA.

Main Street or Wall Street?

“Private equity is offering huge multiples — up to 17 and 18 times EBITDA,” he said. “That’s unheard of.”

Demographics can prompt aging firm owners to sell. Baby boomer owners often count on selling to finance their retirements. Inquiries from private equity firms can catalyze owners to review their options, which include selling to a single independent owner or to a group of longtime employees.

Either way, it’s common for new owners to retain the established local brand, Scadden said.

“In the 1990’s, there was a consolidation trend of rolling up into national brands. That didn’t go well,” he said. “Now, they know: Keep a local brand. That keeps customers attached.”

Retaining the original company image makes it harder, though, for consumers to ensure they are engaging a truly local contractor.

Looking up the owner as registered with the state Secretary of State is usually a reliable mode of confirming true ownership. Looking up contractor licenses with the relevant state regulator isn’t as helpful, as licenses usually are held by individual tradespeople, not business owners.

Financial advisers say the easiest way to confirm ownership is to ask the firm's manager. Service technicians and customer service reps aren’t likely to be clued in. Regardless of their vetting strategy, homeowners can take a cue from professional investors, said Riley, by developing long-term relationships with locally owned contractors who have as much of a stake in the community as their customers do in their homes.

The tax provision, as part of 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows eligible workers to deduct up to $25,000 of voluntary tips from federal taxes until 2028. The measure was made to give immediate financial relief to and increase take-home pay for service workers such as kitchen waitstaff, beauty salons, bartenders or delivery drivers.

Members of Las Vegas’ powerful Culinary Union, for example, welcome these benefits as tourism took a significant hit last summer. As Nevada relies on tourism and hospitality to survive, it has significantly affected workers, housing and the state’s economy far deeper than other cities nationwide.

Rising unemployment and housing costs have contributed to recent down years in Las Vegas, where unemployment rates are among the country’s highest.

Why are some workers calling the no tax on tips law a letdown?

Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s treasurer, said while he welcomes the provision, it hasn’t gone far enough to make a difference to many members. He said deductions apply only to certain types of tips, which excludes automatic gratuities, such as those often added to large parties or banquet services, and phases out for those making $100,000 a year. 

Married couples must file jointly to qualify and dampen the impact of the tax break from $25,000 to $12,500 per person, creating what he considers a “marriage penalty.”

“What this amounted to was a [small tax] credit and it has significant restrictions. This is not of anything of real substance,” Pappageorge told Straight Arrow News. “Some will take advantage of it, but they feel let down by these promises.”

The Culinary Union is actively engaging lawmakers like Nevada Congressman Steven Horsford to amend the legislation nationwide before the next tax season. Horsford has proposed the TIP Improvement Act, which expands upon the tax code on a national level. 

“It’s the main industry here to raise your kids and hopefully own a home. This is a company town,” Pappageorge told SAN. “Trump to his credit put the issue on the table but it is a mixed bag with many flaws.”

The bill includes making the tax changes permanent, fixes the marriage loophole, allows the use of a verified taxpayer identification number so immigrant workers are not excluded, protects gratuity payments and eliminates subminimum wages for tipped workers nationwide.

Nevada is one of only seven states that pay tipped workers beyond the federal sub-minimum wage of $2.13 an hour.

How is declining tourism and automation affecting Las Vegas tip earnings?

“This bill was shaped by direct conversations with the Culinary Union and tipped hospitality workers who know exactly how these tax changes hit their paychecks,” Congressman Horsford said in a statement. “Tips should never substitute for a real, livable wage. We are going to keep pushing until this relief is permanent, fair and truly built around the workers who earn tips every single day.”

Bellman Joe Spica told SAN he was let down by the tax provision, especially in the wake of declining tourism. On a good day, he can make $100 in tips; on a slow day, it can be less than $30, he said.

“The harder part is that we’re getting less people, and the people coming are tipping way less,” Spica said. “The middle class is getting squeezed really hard, and when they feel it, we feel it.”

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), tourism dropped 7.5% in 2025, the lowest since 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some local economic experts predict the city will make a comeback; however, recent LVCVA data show visitor and room occupancy have improved from last year.

“I think it’s fair to say we lost a huge swatch of the working class. The prices are just skyrocketing,” Spica told SAN. “Every good we need to survive is going up. When we’re feeling the squeeze, they do too. And the trips to Vegas go with it.”

In addition to fewer visitors, Spica says his and others’ jobs progress toward automation also lessens tip earnings as kiosks, locked luggage-storage units and other options become available. According to one study, more than 90% of hospitality jobs on the Strip are at risk of automation.

“Fewer interactions with customers can mean fewer opportunities to earn tips,” Spica said. “There’s no way a robot can take my job, they can’t handle the service or questions. But I think we’re dangerously approaching this cliff where automation is around the corner.”

Will raising the minimum wage for tipped workers help or hurt restaurants?

While Las Vegas stakeholders believe in raising the minimum wage for tipped workers, the reaction is unfolding differently in other parts of the country. In Chicago, the Illinois Restaurant Association has pushed back against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s veto to raise the tipped minimum wage to match the city’s $16 an hour wage. 

Sam Toia, the association’s president, said that tipped workers — who make $12.62 an hour — already earn competitive pay when tips are included and that higher wages could force restaurants to cut staff, raise prices or close altogether.

Toia specifically cited Washington, D.C. Initiative 82 as a warning. The initiative, which raised the city’s subminimum wage from $5.32 an hour to the city’s standard $17.50, gutted the restaurant industry, causing as many as 4,000 workers to lose their jobs and 70% of restaurants to cut worker hours.

According to Toia and the Illinois Restaurant Association, 86% of tipped restaurant servers in Chicago believe they will earn less if the tip credit is eliminated; 87% of tipped employees believe the current system works and does not need to be changed.

“Everytime you raise the minimum wage or do away with tip wages, the restaurants have to raise menu questions. You lose some customers because they can’t afford to eat,” Toia said. “They start cutting hours as a result, and they shrink their menu and close their restaurants earlier. This will devastate the restaurant scene in this city.”

Supporters of wage increases, however, say relying on tips leaves workers vulnerable to economic swings. Cass Shum, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies workplace conditions in hospitality, said the policy's limitations highlight the instability of tipping as a major source of income.

“If you have a week of bad days, you don’t know how you’re going to pay for food or housing,” she said. “That affects not just financial stability, but performance and well-being.”

Shum has argued that Americans are growing fed up with tipping altogether. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that more than 72% of Americans tip in more place than they did five years prior, with more Americans opposing (40%) than favoring (24%) businesses suggesting tip amounts to their customers.

Tip-based systems can widen and reinforce current racial biases as well, Shum said. Studies have shown workers of color earn less in tips than white workers do, and women who work service jobs like bartending endure and are expected to accept sexual harassment for higher tips.

Like Spica, she also said the increase in automation will lead to workers tipping less or that the tips would not go to human workers.

“It is better to guarantee a stable livable income rather than rely on the generosity of customers,” Shum told SAN. “Change is always scary but it doesn’t mean the current system is acceptable.“

The White House has used the cocaine threat as a pretext to conduct military strikes on more than 45 alleged narco boats, killing 163 people in the Caribbean, and to detain Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. It has repeatedly discussed deploying the military to fight drug trafficking organizations, labeling them “narco-terrorists”, and has threatened Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro. Cocaine seizures at the U.S. border are up, and so are overdoses linked to the drug.

Given the scale of these efforts to shut down supply, people would be excused for presuming that the demand for cocaine in America is as robust as ever. Yet the data reveals that, unlike most of the world, where cocaine use is on the rise, the drug is actually losing traction in the U.S. Why this is the case reveals some interesting insights into modern America, from a cultural shift in the way people are choosing to get high, to the continued spread of questionable government-backed messaging about drugs.

“I think there is a level of shame around using cocaine in certain circles now, especially among Gen Z," Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist in his early thirties who writes about international drug culture, told Straight Arrow News. "Cocaine's not an aspirational drug anymore. There is a sense of cocaine being this grubby thing, a growing consciousness around the violence associated with the cocaine trade, from Latin America to the streets of Philly, and its impact on the environment in the Amazon.”

But this is just one part of a trend that in some ways feels counterintuitive. 

Almost 6 million people (5.9 million) in the U.S. admitted to prior-year use of cocaine in 2017, according to the annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health. By 2024, this number had fallen to 4.3 million. Among 18-25 year olds, the drop over these 7 years has been steeper, from 2.1 million to 811,000 — a trend reflected in a fall since 2017 in the number of people aged under 30 admitted into treatment for cocaine addiction. 

In the drug’s heyday in the mid 1980s, 6.7% of Americans, including 13% of 12th graders, said they had used cocaine in the last year, compared with 1.5% and 1.4% respectively in 2024. Yet the narrative in some spheres is that "America Loves Cocaine Again." 

In reality, Americans are walking away from the drug at a time when it has never been more abundant. Since Colombia’s 2016 peace deal with the rebel group FARC helped spark a free-for-all in the country’s cocaine trade, production has reached record levels. 

This cocaine bonanza has led to rising levels of the drug’s use across the world, from Canada and South America to Europe and Australia. In Europe, wastewater analysis across multiple European cities released in March found cocaine residues had more than doubled since 2017. So much of the drug is being seized in the Belgian port of Antwerp that they can’t incinerate it quickly enough, while suppliers are burying huge stashes of the drug to be dug up and sold when it returns to a more respectable wholesale price.    

Increased supply has meant interdiction efforts only slow the tide. Traffickers continue to face familiar, surmountable difficulties smuggling it into America, especially as the Department of Homeland Security’s focus appears to have switched from drugs to deportation. Increased production also means purity has gone up. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, in 2020, wholesale cocaine seizures in the U.S. had an average purity level of 54%, while last year it was 88%. Unlike most products, the street price of cocaine has not spiraled upwards, and has instead remained steady in the U.S. at around $80-100 a gram.

One driver for the downturn is fear. People are more scared of taking cocaine than they have ever been before because of the much-repeated story the drug is being intentionally laced or contaminated with fentanyl, a highly potent opioid designated a Weapon of Mass Destruction by the White House in 2025. Over and above cocaine's well-known risk of causing heart problems, fear of fentanyl in cocaine has become a mounting concern that, due to both the nature of the U.S. drug trade as well as public health messaging, has remained largely unique to North America. 

In 2018, New York City’s Department of Health and Hygiene declared that the average weekend cocaine user was at “exceptionally high risk of overdose” from fentanyl-laced cocaine. Since then, a line-up of institutions, from the DEA and the White House to the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the national media, have asserted that drug suppliers are intentionally lacing America’s cocaine with fentanyl at the wholesale level. This attention has likely depressed American appetites for the drug.

“It’s possible that fear of fentanyl adulteration is making some people stay away from cocaine,” said Joseph Palamar, professor of Population Health at NYU Langone Health, and an expert on New York City’s drug scene. His research found New York clubbers “have become increasingly aware of the possibility of cocaine being adulterated with fentanyl,” although he said these fears were more common among people who did not use cocaine. 

Yet fears about America’s cocaine being awash with deadly fentanyl have most likely been exaggerated. New data Palamar has collected, but has yet to publish, suggests New York clubbers have “rarely detected fentanyl in their cocaine.” Of 462 people who said they tested their cocaine for fentanyl, 29 (6%) said they either detected or suspected it contained fentanyl based on a test. 

Adams Sibley, a researcher at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center's Opioid Data Lab, which tests hundreds of cocaine samples from community drug checking services around the U.S. each year, told Straight Arrow News that “fentanyl showing up in appreciable amounts in cocaine is very rare in our data.” Sibley said tests carried out between 2025 and 2026 found only 2-5% of samples bought as cocaine tested positive for fentanyl. 

In Philadelphia, just six cocaine samples submitted by city drug outreach staff to the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education for drug checking in the first half of 2023 contained fentanyl. In New York City, a detailed analysis of 131 cocaine samples collected between 2021 and 2023 from five syringe programs and tested by the city’s health department found no fentanyl in any of the samples. 

There has been a steep rise, between 2017 and 2023, in cocaine-related overdoses, mainly involving victims with both cocaine and fentanyl in their bodies. This has been widely interpreted as people dying after using cocaine that had been mixed with fentanyl by unscrupulous drug gangs hoping to get people more addicted. But experts suspect most of those who have died with cocaine and fentanyl in their bodies intentionally used both drugs, either together or at different times on the same day, rather than by accidentally consuming fentanyl in their cocaine. 

It's reflective of two diverging realities for drug users: Cocaine contaminated with fentanyl is most often sold by street dealers selling to people with heavy opioid addictions, while the cocaine being sold to more bourgeois markets is less likely to become contaminated. “It appears that in certain types of neighborhood — primarily low-income — the cocaine supply has a higher likelihood of being cut with fentanyl, while much of the cocaine obtained by EDM party attendees is at lower risk for being adulterated with fentanyl,” said Palamar. 

At the distribution level, SAN has found no reported evidence of police or border forces unearthing wholesale-level seizures of cocaine containing fentanyl, and dealers themselves have rejected the idea of mixing the two as bad for business. Of course, there is still a real risk. There have been groups of middle-class cocaine users who have died because their cocaine has contained fentanyl, and there was also the case of New York criminals who sold people cocaine they had laced with fentanyl in order to incapacitate and rob them.  

For the U.S. government, reducing demand by producing media campaigns and PSAs to warn people off using drugs is one of the two key factors in tackling the drug trade, alongside reducing supply. The pretense that drug dealers are purposefully lacing America’s drug supply with fentanyl has resulted in increased punishment for people who sell drugs, knowingly or not, that contain fentanyl. Convictions under new drug-induced homicide (“‘death by dealer”) laws have rocketed during the fentanyl era. 

Rather than stopping taking drugs altogether, researchers say fears about fentanyl in cocaine are most likely shifting people to use other drugs. Daniel Ciccarone, professor of addiction medicine at UCSF, accepts that “contamination fears may be a player” in the reduction in cocaine use “for at least one generation now,” but he suspects people are switching to other drugs for purely economic reasons too. 

While the prevalence of cocaine has fallen, rates of methamphetamine, ketamine and hallucinogen use have increased significantly since 2017. The number of people who said they had used methamphetamine, a drug much less prevalent in Europe, in the last year rose from 1.6 million in 2017 to 2.3 million in 2024. 

As the cost of living has hit harder over the last decade, cocaine’s relatively high price compared with similar drugs — around four times that of meth and double that of ketamine — is prohibitive to some.

“There is a good reason for cocaine use to be flat or down: meth use is on the rise and spreading geographically. It is not a pure competitor, but it will compete for some of the population. And this meth is cheap and super strong,” said Ciccarone. 

Cocaine use has also been impacted by the shifting sands of American culture, as new generations ditch the drugs used by their parents. For some, it’s a drug that no longer suits their lifestyle or their ethics. Cocaine has always been heavily associated with alcohol, and the two drugs spur each other on: cocaine enables longer drinking sessions and alcohol increases risky behavior. American alcohol use is now at a record low. This decline is much more pronounced in the U.S. than in Europe, and especially among young Americans, who are also less likely than before to go out to bars and clubs. 

“I’ve always considered cocaine more of a social and bar, party-focused drug, and it appears that Generation Z are much less likely to go out than previous generations. Maybe a lot of these young people simply have no reason to use cocaine because they’re sitting at home,” said Palamar. 

Busby, the drugs journalist, said that more than most drugs, “cocaine's cultural cache has diminished” in the last decade. He said people now want different highs. 

“People are moving towards more mind-expanding drugs. The nature of the cocaine experience, this sort of moorish buzz, just doesn't really fit into the current zeitgeist. Why would you want to be more glued to your screen watching World War III happen? Surely you want to dissociate from that,” he said.

On Reddit’s drugs forum, when asked why Americans had fallen out of love with cocaine, one proclaimed Gen Z poster said: “Cocaine isn’t cool no more.”

But America's love affair with cocaine is far from over. It’s still thriving in some circles, especially amongst the stereotypical upper-class nightlife demographic. Last year’s college survey on drug use trends among teenagers found that, although cocaine use has been trending downwards, last year it detected a small jump in use among 13 to 18-year-olds, and warned: “Future surveys will clarify if the increases observed in 2025 mark the beginning of a resurgence in adolescent cocaine use or instead represent a short-term fluctuation.”

For now, a drug whose popularity in America launched the careers of some of the world’s biggest gangsters, and became a symbol of rock & roll and capitalist excess, appears to be fading from view, maybe as people retreat from today’s harsh reality.

“Cocaine, at least the version of cocaine that is loud, aggressive and stupid, really does embody this age of ‘might is right’, of violent chaos, this world of anarchy,” said Toby Muse, a filmmaker and author who has investigated the cocaine trade. “Maybe people are so profoundly disappointed by this world of chaos they are living through, they are rejecting the ‘out there’-ness of cocaine, and retreating into their homes, to pass out in the corner.” 

Drip, drip, drip. Lick, lick, lick.

The ice cream was free on this sunny Saturday afternoon, courtesy of food carts parked in front of the Heights Neighborhood Library, where residents celebrated the Italian-Renaissance style building’s 100th birthday. 

Lavoy and Cox love this library. Come here often. Want to see it at its best.

But despite being one of Houston’s most popular libraries, the Heights branch is not at its best, hasn’t been at its best in a long time — and, according to city budgets analyzed by Straight Arrow News, isn’t likely to be at its best for several more years. At best.

“I mean, it would be great if the windows were replaced,” Lavoy said. “Just like walking through the children’s area would be nicer, but I don’t know how that would happen. Who would fund that?”

That is a multi-billion dollar question being asked in communities across the country. A landmark report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed nearly 16,400 U.S. public libraries. The findings describe a system in a state of “benign neglect” — a term for facilities ignored until they become too expensive to save.

An estimated 38% of public libraries have building systems — HVAC, plumbing or the roof — in “poor” condition. And 61% have features that pose potential health or safety concerns, according to the report.

“These buildings are aging,” David Marroni, a director at the GAO and lead author of the December report, told SAN. “The average age of a library in this country is more than 40 years old at this point. And as buildings age, their systems degrade. You have to keep up maintenance and repair to keep them going.”

But that can be expensive. And once something becomes too expensive, it can be deemed impossible.

The $22 million backlog: Why do library repairs cost so much?

“If you defer maintenance over time, it can be even more expensive to do so, and that can create a backlog of cost that's really hard to fund,” Marroni told SAN.

According to the GAO, 70% of libraries have a backlog of deferred maintenance. That same percentage expects their backlog to either hold steady or grow in the next three years. In 39% of libraries, the cost of these respective backlogs exceed $100,000. 

Houston is a prime example: A SAN review of 15 years of Houston capital budget documents found that the Heights library first requested a roof replacement and an upgrade to the building’s exterior in 2014. That year, the library system received a $450,000 budget allocation to keep the library “safe and easy to use.” It wasn’t yet an immediate need: The line item was added to the final year of the five-year budget request. It stayed there, in year five of five-year budgets, over and over again.

By 2026, the city budget declared the “Heights Library is in need of a full restoration,” for an initial $2.5 million cost in 2030 — more than a dozen years after the city had first promised to start fixing a much cheaper problem.

But that $2.5 million won’t be enough to fix the library, even when it does come to fruition: Mary Benton, a spokeswoman for Houston Mayor John Whitmire, told SAN that money is only for design work. Construction funding will be proposed beginning in 2031, Benton said. 

City Council Member Abbie Kamin, who represents the Heights neighborhood, told SAN the full cost is “projected to be over $22 million.”

That $22 million price tag is driven in large part by the building’s pedigree. As both an officially designated local landmark and a member of the National Register of Historic Places, the Heights branch can’t be “fixed” with off-the-shelf parts. 

The library hasn’t gone completely unfunded in recent years. In February 2025, city council voted to spend $79,000 on emergency repairs after a roof damage from a 2024 derecho “allowed intrusive moisture to damage interior ceilings, archways, plastered walls and carpet on the main and loft floors.” After the vote, Kamin attempted to sound the alarm.

“This will do some of the repairs specifically from the storm,” Kamin said. “But I do want to bring attention to the needs of the library as listed as one of the most critical needs in the library system.”

The Heights library has a “facility condition index” rating of 59.1%. An FCI rating is a report card for a building’s health, calculated by taking the cost of necessary repairs and dividing it by the total cost to replace the building entirely.

In civil engineering, an FCI rating under 10% is widely considered “good,” while anything over 30% is considered “poor.” Crucially, 60% is the tipping point for an FCI rating, where municipal planners often consider a building a total loss.

The Heights library is 0.9% away from this point. And, city documents show, it’s not even the worst: Four Houston Public Library branches have FCI ratings above 60%.

The tipping point: What happens when a library is a total loss?

About 400 miles east of Houston, in Jackson, Mississippi, the Eudora Welty Library — the crown jewel of the Jackson Hinds Library System — finally gave up in 2023.

“The roof was leaking and by the last couple years, ceiling tiles were falling down. We were hanging onto the building because people really loved it. The location was great, and there was a lot of stuff going on down there, but it got to the point where they just couldn’t keep it up,” said James Hampton, a reference librarian who worked at the downtown branch for several years. “It took a toll on morale in general. It was rough.”

And it was one of several building failures in a row.

“We used to be a 15-branch system, but we’re now a 12-branch system,” said Jeanne Williams, executive director of the Jackson Hinds Library System in Jackson, Mississippi.

“We had another very busy, very needed library called the Richard Wright Library that closed, and then another busy library, the Tisdale Library, also closed over the last five years,” Williams told SAN.

All three are planned for eventual replacement, but shovels have yet to hit the ground.

Morgan Hedglin began working for the Jackson Hinds system in August 2023.

“It was right about that time that our Richard Wright Library in South Jackson, we had to evacuate all of our materials out of there,” Hedglin told SAN. “What started off as a tiny leak over there and a plumbing issue, because the city took so long to fix it, we had to close that branch.”

The trouble didn’t stop with closing the building, said Hedglin, who is deputy director of the library system.

“Once the building was empty, we really had a hard time keeping the building secure,” she said. “Some people were stealing the copper out of the ceiling.”

Beyond the building: What does losing a library do to a community?

The plumbing leak started as a small problem, said Hedglin.

Drip, drip, drip. Leak, leak, leak.

“If the leak and the plumbing had been fixed right then, it would have been expensive,” Hedglin said. “But now we're looking at a $6 million building that's completely destroyed with really no hope of getting that back.”

And hope is desperately needed in that neighborhood.

“When the Richard Wright Library closed, that is a very economically depressed area,” Williams told SAN. “They’ve lost most of their grocery stores, drugstores. They are an area that sorely needs a library that does not have one at the moment. So the community impact is devastating.”

While Mississippi’s reading rates have skyrocketed from 49th in the nation in 2013, into the top 10 in 2024, those gains have been unequal. Mere steps from the shuttered Richard Wright Library, Key Elementary School still lies on the other side of the coin. While more than half of Jackson Public School third graders met state requirements for reading in 2025, Key Elementary had the lowest pass rate in the district — and even across the entire state — at just 31.9%, according to state data. For every third grader at Key who met state standards in reading, two did not.

Finding the funds: Who pays for library repairs?

Jackson is a stark example of what can happen to a system when maintenance is deferred past a breaking point. But it is far from an outlier. According to the GAO report, in about 54% of library systems, “the condition of at least one of their building systems poses a risk, or potential risk, to their collections.” The GAO found that 22% of libraries reported risks to their collections because of the conditions of mechanical systems like HVAC or plumbing; another 19% cited concerns with their buildings’ exteriors, including roof and window issues.

Librarians in Jackson lamented that they do not have control over the capital budget that funds city facilities like public libraries. In Houston, too, it is the city, rather than the library, that makes the final call on capital spending.

The GAO found that an estimated 90% of public libraries must rely on local revenue for repairs.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary federal agency charged with supporting the cornerstones of American literacy. In fiscal year 2024 alone, IMLS distributed $211 million in grants to libraries. But there’s a catch: By law, IMLS funds cannot be used for construction or repairs. While federal money can fund a new digital literacy program or a summer reading initiative, it cannot be used to fix the very ceiling that might be leaking onto the new computers.

That could change in the future. Marroni told SAN that his GAO report was the first of its kind, commissioned by Congress to assess the state of the nation’s libraries.

“The purpose of this study was to help inform Congress as they decide what to do going forward,” Marroni told SAN. “Should they alter what grants can go to library and museum purposes or not? And this was an important piece of information they were trying to gather to support that consideration.”

Of course, waiting for Congress to act won’t bring instant relief. With 71% of libraries citing construction costs and funding issues as key obstacles to maintaining their buildings, the line for funding requests is more than 11,000 libraries long. 

The nature of ‘support’: What does it mean to ‘invest’ in a library?

History suggests that in Houston, library infrastructure often requires a crisis to prompt action. The Eleanor Freed-Montrose branch sat in a state of advanced neglect for years, largely ignored by city officials. It was only after an act of investigative journalism highlighted the facility’s deteriorating conditions that the city sprang to action.

The Heights branch could be different. Circulation data obtained by SAN shows that while many libraries struggled to recover visitor numbers post-2020, the Heights branch has seen increased use, with circulation numbers up 37% since 2018, even as the building’s physical health declined.

“Libraries are an indicator of investment in a community,” Houston resident Britney Ramirez told SAN during the centennial celebration. “Whether or not people feel like 'Oh yeah, this is a space for me' says a lot about how we make decisions surrounding public amenities.”

The “investment” required now isn't for new books or shiny tablets. It’s for unglamorous, expensive line items like HVAC systems that keep children safe from Houston’s triple-digit heat and roofs that protect a century of history during hurricane season.

Williams, in Jackson, offered some advice to folks in Houston: "The best way you can support your library is to use it," she said. "Just being there shows the city that this is a needed community space."

In the Heights, the community is still showing up. The toddlers are still reading, and circulation numbers continue to increase. But as the FCI ratings climb toward 60%, the question remains: How much longer will the building be able to show up for the community?

Wes Bryant, who owned 420CraftBeverages, told Straight Arrow News that laying off the 50 people he directly and indirectly employed at the beverage business “cut me to my core.”

After several boom years, new legislation in states like Ohio and New Jersey, as well as new federal laws, are bringing about a bust for business owners like Bryant. 

“There’s just no viable path forward,” he said.

What is driving changes in the hemp industry?

New state and federal hemp restrictions represent an existential threat to a struggling industry, according to hemp sellers and growers.

Even if the rules, which are intended to combat a flood of marijuana imitation products stocking convenience store and gas station shelves, don't destroy the hemp industry, they will leave it irrevocably damaged, they said in interviews.

Nov. 12, 2026, when federal restrictions take effect, "is tattooed in my brain," said Jammie Treadwell, who owns a citrus and hemp farm in Umatilla, a central Florida town hugging the Ocala National Forest. “Every day I wake up worried about it.”

Her farm persevered through tribulations like COVID-19.

“We're at a place where we can make a reasonable profit and now we have the threat of all of these federal sanctions,” Treadwell said. “It's disappointing that we've survived through all of this tumultuousness and now we have a whole other set of concerns.” 

Hemp restrictions were quietly tucked into a Congressional budget bill in November.

State and federal laws previously said that hemp could contain no more than 0.3% THC Delta 9, marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient. 

Hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) is often marketed as a wellness supplement, although its efficacy is a matter of debate. But hemp — which, like marijuana, comes from cannabis — also contains THC A, THC Delta 8 and THC Delta 10. Those components, made popular in the early 2020s, are thought to produce a mild high and are often derided as "gas station weed."

The budget bill says hemp can contain no more than 0.3% total THC and bars hemp-derived products with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container. At least three states — Ohio, Texas and New Jersey — passed similar laws.

“Nearly all of the Delta 8 you see on the market has been synthetically produced from hemp,” said Katharine Harris, a fellow at Rice University’s Drug Policy Institute.

A once-hot market cools

A handful of hemp growers were buffeted by the mid-2010s CBD craze, when state lawmakers eager to give farmers a windfall legalized cultivation of the crop in dozens of states.

Word of hemp's profitability seeped out of early-growing states like Kentucky and Colorado, said Marguerite Bolt, a hemp extension specialist for Purdue University.

“The language that I was hearing from farmers was ‘get rich quick,’ and ‘We're going to make so much money,’” she said.

But supply exceeded demand, leaving many without a place to sell their wares, she said. By the early 2020s, hemp-related bankruptcies were common.

“There are not many of us left,” said Allison Justice, founder and CEO of the Cannabis Research Center and Coalition.

Ohio awarded 539 hemp cultivation licenses in 2020, the first year those licenses were available. In 2025 the state issued 45, including 10 for researchers. Other states saw similar declines. 

When New Mexico first issued hemp manufacturing and warehouse licenses in 2018, it awarded hundreds, a New Mexico Department of Agriculture spokesperson said. In 2025, the state awarded 18. New Jersey gave out 55 hemp growing licenses and 21 processor and handler licenses in 2021. In 2025, those numbers declined to 21 and 10, respectively, Kerr said.

Ohio farmer BobMcKenzie stopped growing the crop several years ago. 

"There's no money in hemp," he told SAN. 

Can hemp restrictions keep kids safe?

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell said in November that he included hemp restrictions in November’s budget bill because cannabis products were being marketed to children.

Industry backers successfully pushed back in some states.

Hemp supporters effectively killed an Indiana law that would have heavily restricted hemp-based products, Bolt said. But nothing is stopping state legislators from trying again.

“They've been trying to ban these hemp-derived THC products for a couple of years,” she said.

The language in the Senate budget bill “clarifies the original intent of the 2018 farm bill, rooting out the bad actors and protecting the growing hemp industry,” McConnell said in November on the Senate floor.

However, it’s virtually impossible to grow cannabis without at least some THC, said John Kerr, hemp program manager for New Jersey's Department of Agriculture.

"They're essentially saying you can't even grow the plant," he said.

A 250 milligram bottle of hemp-derived CBD easily fits in the palm of your hand, and CBD shops sell containers with thousands of milligrams.

The 0.4 milligrams "is a speck of dust," said Chris Karazin, owner of Carolindica, a hemp manufacturer and seller with locations in and around Raleigh, North Carolina.

A McConnell spokesperson told Straight Arrow News that McConnell is not available for an interview while the legislative body is on a break.

The Texas Poison Control Center recorded 2,669 cannabis-related hospitalizations in 2025, compared with 923 in 2019, the year the state legalized hemp cultivation and sale. Texans who are 19 years old or younger made up nearly two thirds of those hospitalizations in 2025. Proponents of hemp restrictions highlight such data points.

“Children end up being the unknowing consumers of these poisonous products and being sent to the hospital at an alarming rate,” McConnell said in November.

Texas’ ban on smokeable hemp took effect March 31.

The Ohio Prosecuting Attorney’s Association categorized its own state's ban as an effort to shield children from potentially dangerous intoxicants.

“The safety and the need to protect children exposed to marijuana in any form have been tantamount to our views,” the association wrote in a Jan. 29 letter supporting the state’s hemp updated hemp rules, which took effect in late March and mirrors the language in the federal budget bill.

What does the future look like for hemp growers and retailers?

The advocacy organization Texans for Safe and Drug-Free Youth said Texas’ hemp law doesn’t go far enough.

“We’ve always stood by the evidence and research that shows the most effective prevention is total elimination of these products from the marketplace,” Betsy Jones, the group’s director of policy and strategy, told SAN.

Restriction advocates also cite intoxicated driving as  a concern.

“We already have a DUI problem in our state,” South Carolina state Rep. John McCravy said during a debate on a bill banning intoxicating hemp products, according to the South Carolina Daily Gazette. “To hand this into the mix, on top of the alcohol, it’s just going to make things worse.” 

South Carolina’s bill is currently stalled.

Hemp-derived products are not well-studied and the extent to which they contribute to impaired driving and hospitalizations is unclear.

Industry backers say they aren’t opposed to restrictions, but favor a targeted approach. Karazin supports regulating hemp products like tobacco or alcohol.

“Clear regulation, not prohibition, is what our industry is asking for,” he told SAN.

Some legal marijuana businesses support hemp restrictions. David Bowling, executive director of the Ohio Cannabis Coalition told the Ohio Capital Journal that Ohio’s hemp law “gives law enforcement clear authority to ensure that intoxicating THC products are no longer freely sold to children through thousands of locations in Ohio.”

Opponents of the state's intoxicating hemp rules say the coalition's stance is self-serving.

“They’re worried about competition,” said Tim Johnson, founder of the advocacy organization Cannabis Safety First, noting that Ohio dispensaries still sell products with THC.

A coalition spokesperson did not respond to SAN’s requests for comment.

Could we see a second hemp boom in time?

Hemp industry lobbyists continue to push Congress to soften federal restrictions. JD McCormick, founder and chairman of the hemp lobbying organization Americans for Healthy Alternatives, supports a bill before Congress to delay the federal rules by three years.

“There are quite a few champions of this issue,” he told SAN.

The latest version of the Farm Bill softens hemp restrictions, Harris said, but that could change.

Hemp is also a versatile crop that can be made into clothing, building materials and paper, and experts like Bolt predict the industry will endure.

“We do have industrial hemp processing facilities throughout the U.S.,” she said. “Not as many as we need, but they have a big economic impact in their communities.”

Utah’s 2026 water outlook is especially precarious. The state relies on snowpack for roughly 95% of its annual water supply, yet this year’s underwhelming accumulation melted weeks earlier than usual after a record warm spell.

Against that backdrop, concerns are growing about the physical limits of the valley as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent $145.4 million in March to purchase an 833,000-square-foot warehouse on the city’s west side. Located in the Utah Inland Port industrial district just south of the Utah State Correctional Facility, the site is under review for conversion into one of eight planned “mega centers” across the nation capable of holding 7,500 to 10,000 immigration detainees.

A facility of that size would require a lot of water to run daily operations. More, even, than Salt Lake City officials told Straight Arrow News the city has to spare. 

A water system already at its limits

“We don’t have the water to house 10,000 people in the western side of Salt Lake Valley,” said Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.

“We don’t have the infrastructure, we don’t have the water as a resource,” Moench told SAN. “We don’t have the sewage system.”

To better understand the scale of the shortage, SAN reached out to the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities. The department deferred questions to the mayor’s office, where spokesperson Andrew Wittenburg provided a comparison based on the nearby Utah State Correctional Facility. That prison uses about 450,000 gallons of water per day to serve roughly 3,000 inmates, staff and operational needs — about 150 gallons per person per day. Scaled up, Wittenburg said the city water department reported a 10,000-person detention center would require approximately 1.5 million gallons daily.

Nearly all of that water would add demand to the system: The warehouse currently uses 5,600 gallons a day in its current life as storage space.

The comparison underscores the magnitude of what is being proposed — not just a building conversion, but the effective addition of an entirely new population center.

“From the standpoint of the limits of what the environment here can bear in terms of water quantity, water quality and air quality, bringing that many people into the valley is not sustainable,” Moench said.

Most of the state of Utah is currently in some level of drought, and the Great Salt Lake has been drying up for years, with an exposed lakebed becoming a source for toxic dust. To mitigate the crisis, Salt Lake City passed an ordinance in late March, limiting new nonresidential developments to 200,000 gallons per day. The ordinance came two weeks after the federal government purchased the warehouse as part of the Trump administration’s nationwide push to expand immigration detention capacity using roughly $45 billion in funding for warehouse-based facilities.

The new rule has the potential to disrupt DHS’s plans for the facility. It is one of several similar efforts, which appear to be aimed at blocking the federal government’s detention plans, playing out across the country.

Similar efforts, which appear to be aimed at blocking the federal government’s detention plans, are playing out across the country.

In January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) quietly toured a warehouse facility in Kansas City, Missouri. Within hours of the secret visit, all but one city council voted to approve an ordinance that would block applications to expand detention facilities not owned or operated by the city through Jan. 15, 2031.

In Salt Lake City, even before the ordinance capping water at 200,000 gallons, the city had already urged residents and businesses to conserve 10 million gallons of water per day as part of a Stage 2 drought advisory. That advisory level is the second in a five-stage system, which progresses from a “watch” at Stage 1, to “critical” at Stage 5. The “mild” Stage 2 degree was last issued in 2022, according to local reports.

Mosquitoes, air quality and echoes of prison problems

“It is not easy to turn a warehouse into a habitable place for thousands of people,” Salt Lake City Council Member Alejandro Puy told SAN.

People housed at a facility would need water for drinking, hygiene, showers, culinary services and cleaning, among other things, said Polly Prince, co-founder of the Med-Team Utah Prisoner Advocate Network.

“It’s concerning that we’re putting it in Salt Lake City, in a county that’s been warning us about our water usage for years,” Prince said.

Water scarcity is a big problem on the west side of Salt Lake City, but it isn’t the only concern. Air pollution and mosquito mitigation pose ongoing threats in the heavily industrialized area where the new detention center is planned. Because of the neighborhood’s proximity to the massive Kennecott Copper Mine — one of the world’s largest open-pit operations — the west side is exposed to multiple sources of air pollution that are not found on the east side of the Salt Lake Valley, according to Moench.

“If you’re bringing in here, essentially a new city of 10,000 people, you’re going to aggravate all those problems,” Moench said.

A spokesperson for ICE told SAN that “ICE fully complies with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) as implemented by DHS directives and policies when planning and executing all ICE actions, including real estate acquisitions.” 

The agency added that prior to purchasing the warehouse, it evaluated existing facilities to “help minimize environmental impacts, including potential impacts to protected species, sensitive natural resources and valued cultural resources.”

Mosquitoes are perhaps not a valued cultural resource. But they are a potential health concern. When the Utah State Correctional Facility relocated to the west-side area a few years ago, inmates and staff reported being swarmed by mosquitoes both indoors and outdoors, with complaints pouring in about bites during short walks between buildings, standing water and unbearable conditions that limited time outside. Families and advocates described inmates being “mauled” by the insects, prompting repeated calls for repellent and abatement. The state prison now spends thousands of dollars yearly on mitigation efforts.

In 2023, a West Nile virus-positive mosquito pool was detected at the site, according to the Utah Department of Corrections. 

Officials relied on repeated pesticide applications, which has ushered in concerns about pesticide-resistant mosquitoes. 

Prince, who has visited the prison and worked with mosquito abatement efforts, said mitigation measures such as removing sod for gravel and treating standing water helped somewhat last summer. The proposed warehouse site — farther south in the Inland Port and thus farther from the main wetlands — will likely face a less severe problem than the prison itself. Still, she cautioned, mosquitoes remain a concern. 

“I can’t imagine the retrofitting that would be necessary for that warehouse,” Prince said. “I know the federal government can come in and do eminent domain, but it’s very concerning that they’ve chosen to do this in an industrial area.”

Transparency and a “bulldozer approach”

Salt Lake City officials say they were not meaningfully consulted before the purchase. In fact, the city learned of ICE’s plans to convert the warehouse into a detention center only after the deal was closed, leaving local leaders blindsided and struggling to respond to the sudden development. 

Puy described it as a “bulldozer approach.”

“There is a disregard of local communities and local leaders,” he said.

Across the country, DHS has justified similar projects through an internal finding that the proposed projects will have “no detrimental effect,” excusing limited early local engagement. 

Chris Judd, a city council member in Surprise, Arizona, told SAN he learned of DHS’s $70 million purchase of a large warehouse in his city during a phone call with a reporter, only after the deal had closed.

In a Feb. 4 letter to then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar asked, “What consultations, if any, have occurred with the City of Surprise, Maricopa County, local school districts, and public safety agencies prior to site selection?”

Noem responded by writing in part, “Site selection was predicated on a ‘No Detrimental Effect’ determination.”

Noem indicated local officials in Surprise didn’t need to know about the deal by adding, “ICE will continue to engage with state and local stakeholders when appropriate.”

The ‘practical implications’

Back in Salt Lake City, Puy said ICE’s approach is part of a “we don’t care what you think” mindset and “we’re going to do whatever we want.” And that, he said, “is really not the American way.”

Under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, the federal government can bypass many local rules, but Puy said basic safety requirements remain. 

“There are some basic things they still need to abide by. Like health and code,” he told SAN. The city is now focused on enforcing those standards, including plumbing, fire safety and habitability.

“We’re going to highlight every code violation… we need to make sure they’re following the rules even if it takes us to court,” he said. “We’re not going to stop.”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has expressed general support for the state’s additional ICE detention capacity, but did not respond to SAN’s requests for comment. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s office has emphasized the city’s duty to protect reliable utilities for residents.

ICE did not respond to SAN’s request for comment regarding concerns about water scarcity and mosquitoes posing potential health risks to detainees, but previously told SAN the warehouse “will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

But Moench said he is worried the region’s drought is not being seriously considered. 

“Do they understand it? No, they don’t,” Moench said. “Do they care about it? No, they don’t. They’re not paying any attention to the practical implications of what they’re doing.”

“In my building, there’s nowhere for students or postgrads to come and sit down and talk,” he said, highlighting the lack of “third spaces” or communal areas outside of home or work that are key to forming organic connections.

Frederick seized the opportunity to build connections in his life, as well as the lives of others. He started the Social Plant, a business that teaches people how to socialize, and hosts weekly Friday night volleyball outings. Within 30 days, his group had 250 members, he said. Some made new friends, and some even found love interests.  

It was much-needed work. While Frederick was building a new community from the ground up, some of the region’s largest community connectors and organizations were mobilizing around a similar realization.

What is the loneliness epidemic?

Stephen Ives, president and CEO of YMCA of Greater Houston, recalls a pivotal moment at a YMCA conference years ago that predated national headlines about the loneliness epidemic. 

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, directly addressed the rise of loneliness, disconnection and isolation. “YMCA, we need you,” Murthy told the assembled leaders. “You are it.”

Murthy emphasized the YMCA’s unique position to address the public health crisis due to its ability to bring people together and its established brand reputation.

“That was a turning point for me,” Ives told Straight Arrow News. He said the YMCA has reflected on that ever since, and in 2010, embedded it into its rebrand mission to strengthen the foundations of community. 

Murthy publicly called out the loneliness epidemic again in his 2023 advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community, noting that it harms both individual and societal health. He associated loneliness with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and anxiety.  

“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity,” Murthy said in the statement.

Loneliness was a national issue, Ives knew. But it was one he hoped Houston could help solve.

After Murthy’s declaration, Ives approached Ruth López Turley, the director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, to study social connection and establish a baseline for the Houston area’s social health. The institute is an interdisciplinary research organization that focuses on the intersecting issues of housing, education, economic mobility, health and population. 

“In Houston, we’re fortunate because we have the Kinder Institute, and I think what we’re demonstrating here is a good example of using that data and putting it to work for something,” said Ives. He noted that while more than a dozen YMCA CEOs in other major metro areas are uniting around other great ideas, Houston is the first to conduct a community-wide study in this specific, data-driven manner.

The idea spoke to López Turley personally as someone who considered dropping out of college at Stanford University due to feeling disconnected and like she didn’t belong as a Latina woman who grew up poor. 

Who is most affected by the loneliness epidemic?

The resulting study found that loneliness is disproportionately affecting Houston’s young adults and those with lower incomes, specifically, those aged 18 to 29 and residents earning less than $35,000. This survey focused solely on Harris County and received responses from roughly 5,000 of its 11,000-member community panel, according to López Turley.

The data offered a silver lining: a sense of connection was a stronger predictor of life satisfaction than race, income or age.

“I was stunned to find just how consequential it was, and then it was a stronger indicator than income,” López Turley told SAN. 

What manifested is a movement, “Stronger Together,” a partnership between the American Leadership Forum Houston/Gulf Coast, the YMCA of Greater Houston, the Houston Food Bank and the Kinder Institute at Rice University, which recently convened more than 100 leaders from nonprofits, government and business owners to discuss the findings. At the event, they challenged attendees to rally around a shared vision: establishing a baseline today so the region would fare significantly better in five to 10 years.

“When we’re talking about some of the challenges and problems that the Houston area is having to tackle, we are talking about systemic structural challenges,” said Daniel Potter, the director of the Houston Population Research Center, who specializes in demographic surveys. “You can’t do that in silos; you have to do that by tackling these things together.” 

The movement aims to move beyond mere awareness to collective, systemic action, scaling solutions that address the loneliness epidemic head-on. By prioritizing region-wide connection, leaders believe the greater Houston area is positioning itself as a national model for fostering genuine community belonging.

Some of that work has already begun in smaller rooms. López Turley said a roughly 30-person focus group at the Houston Food Bank earlier this year began taking action. 

How can a community solve loneliness?

“We wanted to get more ideas and actions,” she said. “These aren’t ideas that we’re just jotting down; the organizations in the room are going to follow up in terms of implementing these ideas.”

While these efforts are starting small, López Turley emphasized that they are designed for longevity. The coalition hopes to conduct a follow-up survey in one to two years to measure the movement's impact, ensuring that the “Stronger Together” initiative continues to respond to the region's evolving social needs.

With baseline data at their fingertips, change agents like López Turley and Potter can better identify the challenge and work to solve it. Potter pointed to two significant factors driving loneliness: a decline in social aptitude, where people increasingly avoid healthy conflict and the interaction necessary for deep connection, and the disappearance of the third space.

“We stopped learning how to socially connect,” he said. 

This is worsened by the decline of organized religion, Potter said, which historically brought diverse groups together. As faith institutions have had less prevalence in some people’s lives, he said, alternatives have not stepped up to fill the void.  

The first time Frederick read the findings, he was shocked by the results. As a Black man, he expected the data to mirror national trends that show Black people typically have higher rates of loneliness, according to data from the Mental Health Foundation. However, Houston told a different story. 

Solving loneliness isn’t a stated mission for the YMCA. But Ives told SAN that he believes fostering connection is as important as solving homelessness and poverty. And, he said, it’s a more immediately attainable mission that provides a source of strength, empowering people to become the best version of themselves. These new findings, he said, will move the needle on those issues and provide a tangible path to action. 

“We could create a more connected community, where people experience what it's like to belong, experience what it's like to have neighbors who watch out for them,” he said. “And I think that bit by bit, as we grow that in our community, it’s yet to be seen, the kind of impact that will have on the other issues that matter greatly to us.”

The work of transforming Houston into a region of connectors has already begun. As the Stronger Together movement takes shape, Ives believes the city is on a trajectory to see significant, measurable improvement by the time the next study is conducted, proving that a major metro area can indeed move the needle on loneliness.