In Dallas–Fort Worth, TX, the apartment construction boom over the past few years has effectively lowered rental prices by 2.9% compared to the previous year, as stated by Realtor.com.

However, a recent study indicates that easing the financial burden on the city’s most rent-strapped residents could still take a staggering 474 years.

This timeframe is nearly triple the 169-year estimate for a similar relief in the New York City metropolitan area.

Meanwhile, rents in the Big Apple have climbed over 6% in the last year.

These surprising insights are derived from the newly launched Housing Affordability Toolkit by the National Multifamily Housing Council and NYU Urban Lab, an initiative aimed at assisting urban areas in tackling the nation’s challenges with rental housing affordability.

The contrast is not an argument that New York City has solved its housing crisis—it clearly has not.

But it gets at a piece of the affordability debate that often gets lost inside bigger conversations about rent growth and housing supply: whether the homes being built can ever reach renters whose incomes are too low to support market rent.

In the words of Caitlin Sugrue Walter, NMHC’s senior vice president of research and innovation, “The data make clear that the rental affordability crisis is not one problem—it’s several, each requiring its own set of tools.”

Or, as the examples of Dallas and New York City show, a city can build enough apartments to bring asking rents down without solving the housing crisis for those most in need of relief.

The oxymoron of ‘affordable housing’

The report points to several issues holding back the development of affordable rental housing, all of them rooted in the same problem: These projects are expensive to build, but often generate too little income to support themselves.

Consider a standard apartment development. A project is generally deemed viable when the rent it can collect is high enough to cover acquisition, construction, financing, and operating costs.

Add more of those units, and renters have more options, which slows rent growth and, eventually, pulls asking rents down—that’s essentially the thesis that Dallas has proved works.

But deeply affordable housing starts with a different equation.

These projects often operate under restricted rent structures, which can leave net operating income too low for the deal to pencil out on its own.

Less income means less debt the project can support, and that difference has to be filled through tax credits, public capital, below-market loans, tax abatements, project-based rental assistance, vouchers, and operating subsidies—each solution more onerous, time-consuming, and costly than the last.

One analysis suggests that these types of projects can be as much as twice as expensive to build as a typical market-rate project due to the added costs of closing the financing gap.

Another gives these projects the dubious description of “Affordable Housing Is an Oxymoron.”

However you slice it, the cost reality for developers has depressed the supply of these units.

The report estimates that subsidized affordable homes account for about 14.3% of occupied rental housing nationwide, while even high-production years have produced fewer than 200,000 new subsidized units.

Despite those barriers, there is no shortage of need.

“The numbers are too big to spin,” Matthew Kwatinetz, clinical associate professor at NYU SPS Schack, director of the NYU Urban Lab, and Toolkit author, said. There are “22.4 million rent-burdened households, 10.1 million households that can’t even afford to pay utility costs.”

Why New York City has a shorter clock

For his part, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put those renters at the center of his housing plan—even as the city faces its own century-and-a-half timeline to close the affordable housing gap.

That commitment was on display this week, when Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin reached a last-minute budget agreement that included a new $175 million rental-assistance program for New Yorkers at risk of eviction or homelessness.

“We accelerated the affordability agenda by investing in housing, mental health services, parks, libraries, and students of all ages,” Mamdani said in announcing the deal. “This agreement proves that fiscal responsibility and public excellence can go hand in hand.”

His broader Block by Block plan makes the same premise explicit, while also highlighting the infrastructure required to move these apartments from idea to reality: a robust subsidy system, a large public-housing authority, rental assistance, tax abatements, and preservation programs that can keep lower-cost homes from disappearing.

But the toolkit suggests New York City’s affordability problems are bigger than any one program can address.

In that sense, New York City is the near mirror image of Dallas.

The city has more of the machinery needed to close the gap, but it is trying to make that machinery work in one of the country’s most expensive and constrained housing markets.

The problem is bigger than Dallas and New York City

New York City is far from alone. Perhaps the most striking part of the toolkit’s metro rankings is how widely the timelines vary by city—and how often fast-growing, lower-cost markets still fall into the same century-plus category as the Big Apple.

Only 13 metros in the ranking could close their affordable housing gaps in less than a century at their current pace.

Every other metro in the report’s ranking faces an estimated wait of at least 100 years.

In rapidly growing markets such as Phoenix, Miami, Jacksonville, FL, Orlando, FL, and Houston, those timelines stretch from more than two centuries to more than five.

The report also found that 38 of the country’s 50 largest metros had average two-bedroom rents above their affordability threshold and failed the test for new naturally occurring affordable housing.

In other words, many cities are not only failing to add enough subsidized housing—they also are no longer producing much unsubsidized housing that lower-income renters can realistically afford.

It’s a clear illustration of how the timeline to address those needs is shaped by far more than rents alone: the size of the rent-burdened population, the pace of subsidized-housing production, development costs, and whether local governments have systems in place to preserve older low-cost homes, layer subsidies, and make new projects feasible.

What happens when there is nowhere cheaper to go?

The case for closing this gap extends beyond the fact that the most cost-burdened renters need a place to live.

Pressure at the bottom of the market pushes upward, raising the cost and competition for everyone relying on the next cheapest apartment.

The toolkit breaks this powder keg of demand as follows: Of the country’s 22.4 million rent-burdened households, about 4.3 million households could benefit from more market-rate supply, 10.1 million more have incomes too low for the private market to serve on its own and are subsidy-dependent, and roughly 8 million more households fall somewhere in between—too burdened for the market as it exists, but not necessarily served by deep subsidy.

When cities fail to build or preserve homes, these households compete for the same older, lower-cost apartments that moderate-income renters also rely on.

And that supply is already shrinking: The report notes that the U.S. lost more than 500,000 low-rent units between 2019 and 2022, or more than 150,000 a year—more than the average annual production of new Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program rental homes during that period.

Adding to the tumultuous landscape, an anti-Israel protester recently admitted to manslaughter in connection with the tragic death of a pro-Israel demonstrator. This week, the perpetrator was handed a sentence of one year in county jail.

The defendant, Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, aged 53, was involved in a 2023 altercation with Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old activist. The confrontation saw Alnaji hit Kessler in the head with a megaphone, causing Kessler to fall back and sustain a fatal head injury. He later succumbed to these injuries in the hospital.

This tragic encounter unfolded amid escalating tensions linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict and a noticeable rise in antisemitic sentiments in the United States and globally. Originally, Alnaji faced the possibility of a four-year prison sentence. However, his decision to plead guilty in May led to a reduced sentence.

Despite the guilty plea, prosecutors have expressed dissatisfaction with the sentence, arguing that a one-year term in county jail falls short of adequate punishment. They contend that Alnaji deserved a longer period of confinement in state prison, given the severity of the case.

“Mr. Kessler lost his life in a violent attack that took him from his family and his wife of 43 years,” Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said in a statement. “Given the circumstances of this case and the death that resulted, we believe a state prison commitment was the appropriate and just sentence.”

Kessler’s widow wrote a victim impact statement that said, in part, “There are no words to describe the pain of losing a husband in such a sudden and violent way.”

“The grief is relentless. The silence in our house, the absence of his voice, his companionship, his love and the future we had planned together are losses I carry with me every day,” she continued, according to the district attorney’s office.

Jonathan Oswaks, a friend of Kessler’s who was at the rally with him when the incident took place, spoke to the Jewish Journal when news of Alnaji’s expected sentence was released, calling it “deeply frustrating.”

“I’m not a lawyer, but the way this was handled raises serious questions for me. It sends a troubling message about accountability,” he told the outlet.

Oswaks recounted moments from the event in his interview with the outlet, noting how the pro-Palestinian protesters vastly outnumbered them that day. He said after the pair had split up, people began approaching him and stood inches from his face yelling into his ear and using a megaphone.

“When I tell you I had never experienced that level of hate in my life, I hadn’t,” he said. “I told them to get out of my space. They backed off briefly, then started again. I made it clear they needed to stay away, and eventually they did.”

In an astonishing twist of fate, an Arizona toddler surfaced alive in a hospital morgue nearly five hours after being mistakenly pronounced dead by a doctor, a shocking report reveals.

The 18-month-old child, whose identity remains undisclosed, was found in a family’s swimming pool in Gilbert around 5:30 p.m. on February 8. Following the harrowing discovery, he was promptly rushed to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center.

Upon his arrival at the hospital, the young boy was declared deceased. However, in an unexpected turn of events, medical personnel returned to the morgue five and a half hours later to discover that he was, in fact, alive.

Initial accounts of this extraordinary occurrence suggested it was miraculous, yet according to a critical police report obtained by ABC15, the heart-stopping error was the result of a doctor’s grave misjudgment.

Accompanying the findings, heavily blurred bodycam footage from police captured the dramatic sequence as officers and paramedics responded to the scene, hastily transporting the toddler to the hospital on that unforgettable day.

Once they arrived, a police officer recalled in the report that he heard a nurse state: ‘I have a pulse’, leading him to alert the doctor handling the case, records stated. 

But when he did so, the male physician, who has not been named, appeared to brush off his concern, the cop wrote in his report. 

‘[The doctor] arrogantly told me he was the doctor, he has the medical degree, he went to medical school for a reason, and to let him do his thing,’ the officer documented, per the report.

The audio, which was heard in some of the footage, captured what appeared to be the moment the officer and doctor interacted just before the child was declared dead by the medical professional. 

‘I went to medical school for a reason,’ the physician stated. 

The cop then appeared to respond, but the doctor cut him off, stating: ‘Ok, let me just clarify. Thank you.’ 

Shortly after their conversation, the doctor officially declared the toddler dead, records showed. 

But officers continued to detail the signs of life they saw in the child in the report. 

‘The release of the air was audible and visible,’ a cop wrote. 

They later added: ‘It also began to sound like [redacted] was gasping for air,’ the report stated. 

When medical staff went to move the little boy’s body to the morgue, a female officer recalled that she ‘observed what appeared to be another audible gasp’ coming from the child, the outlet stated. 

Then, when she entered the morgue, the cop said: ‘I again observed what appeared to be a gasp or air release, which was now almost an hour later.’ 

But a nurse who was there said the alleged breathing sounds could have been a response to efforts to save the child, the report said. 

Audio related to that moment was redacted from the released report. 

The child was declared dead ‘in error’ by the Mercy Gilbert doctor, the report said. 

The end of the footage showed the moment an officer told the child’s family the heartbreaking news that it was time to say goodbye. 

But when the child was found alive and breathing hours on, he was flown to Phoenix Children’s Hospital for treatment. 

He suffered severe brain damage and will now need lifelong care, according to MRI results, ABC15 reported. 

A spokesperson with Mercy Gilbert Medical Center told the Daily Mail: ‘This is a heartbreaking situation. We immediately conducted a thorough review of all aspects of the care provided to learn what happened and to make meaningful changes to strengthen our care.

‘Out of respect for the patient’s privacy, we cannot discuss details. We continue to work with the family and their representative. Patient safety and exceptional care is our highest priority.’ 

HILL CITY, Kansas/CHICAGO/NEW YORK — This Wednesday, sweltering record temperatures have extended from the Midwest to the eastern United States. These heat warnings could affect millions through the July 4 holiday weekend, coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

Forecasters predict that the intense heat will drive “real-feel” temperatures to range between 100 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 to 46.1 degrees Celsius) in many areas. This surge poses a heightened risk of heat-related illnesses among vulnerable groups and may strain power grids already under pressure from increased demands by data centers and electric vehicle usage.

In the small high plains town of Hill City, Kansas, situated 270 miles east of Denver, Sabrina Hooper faces the challenge of working as a mail carrier amidst these extreme temperatures, having just started the job a week ago.

“The heat is absolutely crippling,” shared Hooper, 34, who spends her days traversing up to 10 miles to deliver parcels. Fortunately, she finds some respite from sprinklers: “It’s delightful. I can remove my hat, let it soak, and put it back on.”

Back in 2012, Hill City held the title of the hottest location in the U.S. for five consecutive days during another extreme heatwave, with heat indexes soaring to a blistering 108 degrees.

The heat index measures ​how it feels when humidity is factored into the air temperature.

Dana Robles, who lives in Brownsville, Texas, a city just off the Gulf Coast at the US-Mexico border, worried on Wednesday about the mounting costs ​of cooling her home as the heat index rose to 108 degrees. During peak temperatures, her family’s monthly power bill can exceed $300, which is nearly one-third what they pay for rent.

Robles also fears blackouts due to the overtaxed power grid.

“I’m scared the electricity is going to go off all day and our food is going to get spoiled,” she said.

In Chicago, high-school science teacher Michelle Klein, 57, had started preparing for the heat over the weekend. She filled ​her car with gas, did her weekly grocery shopping early, stocked the refrigerator with extra cold drinks and gave her plants a deep soak.

“The basil was being a diva and needed another drink of water this ​morning,” Klein said on Tuesday evening after going on her usual evening walk despite the 103-degree heat index.

In the city’s suburbs, property investor Amy Kaspar got an urgent call Monday night from a tenant whose air conditioner ‌was only ⁠blowing out warm air.

Kaspar discovered that the appliance was working fine – it simply could not keep up with cooling the tenant’s unit, given the intense heat and humidity.

“Combined with the wind, it feels like standing behind the exhaust of a bus right now in Chicago,” said Kaspar, 50.

Cooling centers and check-ins

Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications urged residents on Wednesday to periodically check in with relatives, neighbors, seniors and other vulnerable populations. If contact cannot be made, the office said, Chicagoans can request a well-being check from the city by calling 311.

The scorching US temperatures mirrored those in western Europe, which recently has been engulfed ​in its own record-breaking heatwave, an event scientists said ​would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate ⁠change.

Scientists have confirmed through years of studies that greenhouse gas emissions are making heatwaves around the world both more likely and intense.

The extreme heat only began creeping into New York City as of Wednesday morning, by which point the city had opened hundreds of cooling centers and deployed more ​than a dozen “cool vans” equipped with water, electrolytes, sunscreen and meals for New Yorkers in need of relief, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a ​press conference.

Air conditioning was on ⁠full blast at a senior center in Harlem on Wednesday, where a sign in 13 languages advertised the space as a “cooling center” for the public.

The senior center’s director, Richard Allman, said it would remain open beyond its usual hours over the July 4 weekend.

“We try to make this a comfortable place for people on an extra-hot day,” he said.

Ahead of the heatwave, city leaders had asked operators of signs in ⁠the city’s iconic ​Times Square to reduce the brightness of their billboards to lower energy consumption, and requested that businesses set thermostats no lower ​than 78 degrees.

The city’s energy provider, Con Edison, urged customers to limit energy use from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The city has also extended public pool hours, opened additional cooling centers in libraries and municipal buildings, and expanded street outreach ​efforts.

Florida’s Attorney General, James Uthmeier, alongside several local legislators, is attempting to impeach a judge following his controversial acquittal of a woman through an unprecedented COVID-related insanity defense.

Circuit Judge Miguel de la O, sitting in Miami-Dade, acquitted Precious Bland, who faced charges of manslaughter and attempted murder after allegedly drowning her young daughter and attacking her husband and another child with a knife.

Defense attorneys for Bland argued that she had a psychotic episode triggered by COVID-19, rendering her incapable of comprehending her actions. Their case centered on claims that Bland experienced hallucinations and felt compelled to ‘baptize’ her family, believing it was a divine instruction.

According to a police report accessed by News Media, during the incident in 2021, Bland was reportedly shouting proclamations that “Jesus Christ is coming, and COVID will end us all,” as stated by her husband to the authorities.

“The defendant insisted that everyone needed to be baptized and that she was going to baptize everyone in the bathtub,” the report read.

The police report details a harrowing scene where Bland instructed one of the children in the home to retrieve a knife, but the child claimed to not know why.

Bland then allegedly stabbed her husband several times during a struggle, and he “along with his four other children, ran out of the residence in fear for their lives and he contacted the police,” the report read.

Bland’s older daughter, in an attempt to grab the baby away from the defendant, “sustained a stab wound to her forearm during the struggle,” the report continued.

The girl “then ran out of the residence in fear for her life. Officers arrived on the scene, made entry into the residence, and placed the defendant into custody,” the report said.

Officers located the baby “face down, unresponsive, inside the bathtub filled with bloody water,” according to the report.

De la O sided with the defense, acquitting Bland on all three counts and allowing her to return to her home ahead of a future hearing to decide on her treatment options. Uthmeier called the judge’s decision unacceptable.

“In a bench trial — where the judge made the decision, not a jury — he allowed a woman off on an insanity defense after she drowned her baby. He cited insanity related to COVID. This is unacceptable,” Uthmeier told News Media in an interview.

“I believe we have impeachment provisions in our state constitutions for a reason. The federal government has similar authorities, but we don’t see judges getting impeached in modern times. So, I believe this is wrong. We’re going to be pushing hard to work with our legislature to hold some of these judges accountable. I believe they’re violating their oath and endangering our citizens,” Uthmeier told News Media.

Uthmeier also revealed that he was exploring impeachment options for a number of other judges as well, disclosing to News Media that he was working with other Florida legislators on the matter.

“I’ve already had some Florida legislators reach out, excited to work with me on articles of impeachment, and hopefully get some of these dangerous people off the bench,” he told News Media.

“We have taken a big interest in judges that we believe are exceeding their authority, abusing discretion, or acting in a way that jeopardizes public safety. We’ve already called for impeachments in a couple of other judicial cases: a judge in Tallahassee who let a convicted child predator go free — a guy where a jury found him guilty of a child sex offense, and he then murdered his five-year-old stepdaughter. There’s a case in Miami where a judge let the defendant out on bail after he shoved rocks in a girl’s mouth as she was being raped,” Uthmeier explained.

Bland’s attorney, Larry Handfield, said he believed the ruling was the first successful COVID-related insanity defense in the country.

“This was COVID,” Handfield told NBC6 South Florida.

“It’s a woman who served our country for five years,” he said, referring to Bland’s five years in the U.S. Navy.

Handfield said she was “living the American dream until COVID came. She didn’t ask for COVID.”

Uthmeier also said he believed this was one of, if not the, first ruling of its kind.

“I am not aware of this having happened before. I certainly have not read through all of the transcripts from the proceeding, but to me, anybody who drowns their daughter should not be released. To the extent that insanity is going to weigh in on things, I believe it should factor into where you are housed for your incarceration, not give you a ‘get out of jail free’ card where you’re just allowed to walk scot-free and put other people in danger. If somebody truly has serious mental defects where they need treatment or help in some way, so be it, but they should get that help behind a barred hospital — some sort of mental institution where they are confined and not able to go free and walk the streets again,” Uthmeier said.

The Florida attorney general also said he believed the ruling was part of a “national trend” of federal judges overstepping.

“I think all of us as leaders in this country need to wake up and realize that the impeachment and removal of judges is something under the Constitution that can be pursued. And until we do it — until we reject their abuse of authority — they’re going to continue to have credibility when they do these wayward things. So, I’m going to be pushing impeachment very often and loudly over the next year,” he concluded.

The court appointed forensic psychologist Dayra Bodan to determine whether or not Bland’s degree of insanity warranted involuntary hospitalization. Bland is slated to have another hearing on July 6 to determine treatment options.

News Media contacted Bland’s attorney but did not receive a response. The 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida, where Judge de la O presides, told News Media “judicial ethics canons do not permit comment on pending cases.”

A new star has emerged!

Before she ascended to the heights of global fame and became a household name, Taylor Swift was simply another aspiring young girl with dreams in the fiercely competitive world of country music.

Now, at 36, as she gears up for her headline-grabbing wedding to NFL star Travis Kelce, a collection of never-before-seen photos unveiled by the Daily Mail chronicles her incredible journey from a charming, toothless youngster with platinum blonde hair to the worldwide celebrity we know today.

This extraordinary collection of images offers a unique peek into her formative years, capturing the transformation from an innocent-faced child to a promising teen with a guitar in hand, on the verge of stardom.

Andrew Orth, a noted celebrity portrait photographer and former neighbor of the Swift family, meticulously documented her evolution over a ten-year span.

‘Taylor was a very pretty little girl,’ Orth previously told the Daily Mail.

‘She had this white hair, crystal blue eyes, pale skin, and pouty lips. She was just something,’ he continued.

‘She had a way about her, she knew she was adorable and she really was the cutest thing in the world.’

He first snapped Swift when she was just four years old in her family’s barn in Reading, Pennsylvania, where the future star proudly showed off her toothless grin.

When the Swift clan eventually headed off for the bright lights of Nashville, Tennessee, Orth continued to shoot her sporadically as she sought to make a name for herself in country music.

In the cache of photos, Swift can be seen posing with her guitar, cowboy hats and her once-iconic curly tresses.

The selection of past snaps is a far cry from the countless red carpet and paparazzi images of the 14-time Grammy winner that now flood every stretch of the internet.

Taylor Swift’s wedding: Read all the top stories

The treasured shots resurfaced just as Swift and Kelce, also 36, prepare to tie the knot at New York City’s Madison Square Garden later this week. 

Remarkably, Orth anticipated in an interview more than a decade ago that the Grammy winner would likely find the one in her 30s.

‘Probably in her thirties she’ll find something more that’s significant… I think that she has no patience for them now,’ he said back in 2013 – long before her string of high-profile relationships – and breakups – dominated gossip headlines. 

‘She’s the kind of girl that when she finds the right guy, she’s going to stick with him.’

More than a decade on, the rumor mill has been kicked into overdrive as the Swift-Kelce wedding inches closer.

The pair started dating in 2023 – two years before Kelce got down on one knee with a diamond ring said to be ten carats.

The couple dropped news of their engagement in August last year with a flurry of photos on social media from the intimate proposal.

Now, after months of fevered will-she-won’t-she speculation, activity around MSG reached a fever pitch this week as a huge volume of delivery trucks arrived at the venue and workers fueled whispers that The Love Story hitmaker may be entering her ‘bridezilla’ era.

Adding to the growing sense of drama, it was also claimed that the couple were building a custom princess ‘castle’ inside the arena ahead of lavish celebrations that are expected to take place across Thursday and Friday.

There are even rumors that Swift has bought up every available calla lily in New York City. 

While the superstar couple have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep specific details of their wedding under wraps, the ceremony looks set to rival any one of Swift’s sold-out Eras Tour concerts.