WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY - MAY 28: A help wanted sign is displayed at a boardwalk restaurant the day before the Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer, in the shore community of Wildwood on May 28, 2021 in Wildwood, New Jersey. Wildwood, like many beach communities throughout the United States, is looking for a successful and busy summer season after staying mostly closed or partially open last summer due to Covid-19 restrictions. Many resort community retail businesses are also suffering from a shortage of labor as some workers are choosing to stay home and others have changed career paths. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The number of job openings has declined sharply in every state since 2022, better aligning the numbers of unfilled jobs and people seeking work.

Nationally, for the first time since before the pandemic, the number of job openings and unemployed people is roughly in balance: a little more than one opening per person looking for work, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the height of the labor shortage in 2022, there were two job openings per job seeker. As of April, the ratio was down to 1.2 openings per person.

But the proportion of workers to jobs ranges widely from state to state. In California, where layoffs in tech and the film industry have unsettled the job market, there is less than one opening per unemployed person. In North Dakota, where a brain drain has left a shortage of skilled and educated workers, there are almost three openings per unemployed person.

The federal government defines a job opening as an available position that an employer wants to fill within a month.

California, one of the few states where unemployment is above 5% and unemployed people outnumber job openings, has replaced Mississippi as the state with the highest unemployment rate. Washington state and Nevada also have less than one job opening per unemployed person.

The epicenter of the decline in job openings has been California’s Bay Area, including the San Francisco and Silicon Valley metro areas. California ended up losing nearly all the tech jobs it gained during a pandemic boom fueled by online work and shopping.

Vishwanath Eswarakrishnan, a 35-year-old software engineer in the Bay Area, was shocked by his layoff from a San Francisco robotaxi firm in December, a day before the birth of his second child. But as soon as he posted the news to social media, he started getting calls from major firms, including Airbnb, Uber and Nvidia. He accepted an offer from Meta within a month and started work again in March.

“There are opportunities out there for folks with eight to 15 years of experience. You do get calls,” Eswarakrishnan said. He added, however, that friends who have less experience or who work in less technical fields, such as product management, are having a harder time.

In North Dakota, by contrast, there are still almost three job openings for every unemployed person, though that’s down from more than four openings in some months of 2022. Before the pandemic, there were 2.7 openings for every job seeker.

North Dakota suffers from a lack of skilled workers to fill open jobs, and many who could fill them move to nearby cities, such as Minneapolis, looking for a more urban lifestyle and more desirable jobs, said Thomas Krumel, a professor at North Dakota State University who studies labor demand.

North Dakota’s oil boom peaked a decade ago but it left a lasting legacy of high wages and cost of living, he added.

“The positions that employers find most difficult to fill do not require a four-year college degree. Skilled trades, healthcare support and technical jobs often face shortages,” Krumel wrote in an email.

Unemployment nationwide was at 4% in May, higher than the 3.5% before the pandemic but still near historic lows. The only states with unemployment rates above 5% were California (5.3%) and Nevada (5.1%), along with the District of Columbia (5.2%). The lowest rates were in North Dakota and South Dakota (2%), and Vermont (2.1%).

A return to a pre-pandemic labor market is a good sign, said Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed Hiring Lab.

“It was a strong labor market, robust and seemingly sustainable,” Bunker said.

However, states with the largest declines in job openings could be in for future trouble.

“We’ve hit the spot now where if employers do continue to pull back on openings, the probability of the unemployment rate rising more sharply becomes higher,” Bunker said.

Of the 10 metro areas with the largest decline in job listings since the beginning of the pandemic, four are in California, according to Bunker’s research. San Francisco (-31%) had the largest decline, followed by San Jose in the Silicon Valley (-28%); Seattle (-27%); New York City (-12%); Boston (-8%); Los Angeles (-6%); Oxnard, California (-5%); Provo, Utah, and Washington, D.C. (-4%); and Buffalo, New York (-3%).

In California, there has been a steep decline in the number of jobs in film and tech, especially supporting roles in sales and recruiting that blossomed in the early pandemic years. Some of the boom in startups was fueled by low interest rates that allowed new tech firms to operate for years before reaching profitability. Higher rates have hit hard.

“Most software is built in startups, with the bulk of the work at the beginning of a business. VC [venture capital] is down and there’s been a flood of talent from big companies that have cut the fat,” said Cody Palmer, a software engineer who does contract work for Silicon Valley companies from Denver. He lost a large contract job this year.

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I choose jobs that are hard and high-risk, typically startups,” Palmer said. “I’ve seen, like, 13 layoffs in my career. I’ve grown into this mindset of ‘Always be looking, always try and find the next gig, and be wary of just how fast a job can cut you.’”

The cooling of the labor market without an unemployment spike, at least so far, has surprised some economists.

“It had never happened before, but it did happen,” said Olivier Blanchard, an emeritus economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-authored an influential paper in 2022 with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers predicting that by raising interest rates to curb inflation and cool down an “overheated” labor market, the Federal Reserve would cause a “painful” spike in unemployment.

“Larry and I turned out to be wrong,” Blanchard said.

Other economists such as Andrew Figura at the Federal Reserve argued that a “soft landing” without high unemployment was possible as long as layoffs didn’t spike nationally, as they did in California.

California’s creation of new jobs, the largest in the nation before the pandemic, has now reversed into the largest losses in employment, according to an earlier Stateline analysis. Since 2022, when the Fed first raised interest rates, California has lost 93,000 jobs in the information sector, which includes many internet services and also film and sound recording, according to a March report from the Public Policy Institute of California.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

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New Jersey continues to use humor in its highway safety messages, like this one advising against “camping” in the left lane. (Courtesy of the New Jersey Department of Transportation)

States have had their fun with highway safety messages, posting everything from Taylor Swift lyrics to discourage texting in Mississippi, to a “vibe check” — winking at Gen Z — to encourage seat belt use in Arizona.

Such messages are shown intermittently on thousands of highway signs, known as variable messaging signs, when the billboards aren’t lit up with alerts about accidents, construction or other real-time traffic issues.

As the summer vacation season gets going, millions of America’s interstate drivers can expect to find more puns, silly turns of phrase or cultural references on those massive missives.

But federal safety officials aren’t amused by states’ cheek. In recent years, they’ve begun to discourage what they view as overly creative messages, fearing that in trying to entertain drivers, highway officials are confusing rather than enlightening them. Some states, most recently Arizona and New Jersey, have pushed back. As a result, officials at the Federal Highway Administration clarified this year that they’re not banning road-sign humor outright.

Mississippi, the state with the highest motor vehicle fatality rate in the country last year, has been particularly creative. Recent messages have included “FOUR I’S IN MISSISSIPPI TWO EYES ON THE ROAD,” and a reference to the Taylor Swift song “Anti-Hero”: “TEXTING AND DRIVING? SAY IT: I’M THE PROBLEM IT’S ME.”

“It’s been an effective program for us. We haven’t been contacted by [the] federal highway department and told to cease and desist. We want to be in compliance, but we haven’t stopped our message program,” said Paul Katool, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Transportation.

A new rulebook issued last year “does not prohibit messages from including humor or cultural references,” Federal Highway Administration chief Shailen Bhatt wrote in a recent letter to U.S. Reps. Greg Stanton, an Arizona Democrat, and Thomas Kean Jr., a New Jersey Republican.

The representatives had complained earlier this year that the agency was stifling state creativity, calling the new rules “a blanket discouragement of humorous signs that leaves no room for state-by-state discretion.”

“Both of these states have signs that use slang or popular language, but the messages are clear,” the representatives wrote in their letter to Bhatt.

They cited messages such as two Arizona contest winners, “SEATBELTS ALWAYS PASS THE VIBE CHECK” and “I’M JUST A SIGN ASKING  DRIVERS TO USE TURN SIGNALS,” as well as New Jersey’s recent holiday messages: “DON’T BE A GRINCH, LET THEM MERGE” and “SANTA’S WATCHING, PUT DOWN THE PHONE.”

Bhatt’s response is an apparent softening of the FHWA’s opposition to the signs, after the agency asked New Jersey to pull down some messages in 2022. Some became so popular on social media that the state Department of Transportation asked drivers not to take photos of the signs while driving, posting a cat meme on its own social media accounts: “IF YOU KEEP TAKING PHOTOS OF THE VMS BOARDS WHILE DRIVING WE WILL TURN THIS CAR AROUND AND GO BACK TO THE OLD MESSAGES.”

Messages shown in 2022 included “GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR APPS” and “SLOW DOWN. THIS AIN’T THUNDER ROAD,” a reference to a song by favorite son Bruce Springsteen, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The Federal Highway Administration isn’t telling states what to do — states retain control of their message boards — but it doesn’t think humor and cultural references are helpful. Vehicles pass under the signs in the blink of an eye, and the missives could puzzle people who don’t “get it” right away.

“FHWA appreciates the States’ efforts to creatively convey important safety messaging to motorists. Those messages need to be balanced with maintaining driver attention,” Bhatt wrote in his letter to the lawmakers.

An agency spokesperson, Nancy Singer, said in a statement that “states may develop their own traffic safety campaign messages” but they should avoid “messages with obscure meaning, references to popular culture, that are intended to be humorous, or otherwise use non-standard syntax.”

There’s some serious research behind the new guidance: One of the studies cited in Bhatt’s letter shows that overly creative language can have the wrong effect when used on a highway message sign. Driving behavior can get more dangerous, not less so, if you’re trying to process a confusing message.

“Messages involving humor, wit or pop culture references could have adverse consequences on driving behavior for motorists who are unable to correctly interpret those messages,” according to the 2022 study published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Lead author Gerald Ullman, who was senior research engineer at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute at the time the study was published, said it simulated highway-sign messages seen while driving.

Highway wit can work well but only “for drivers who get the humor used and the traffic safety point of the message,” Ullman said in an email exchange. “However, it does appear to have adverse effects on those drivers who don’t get it.

“Pop culture references that younger drivers get might very easily be confusing for older drivers,” he said. “Conversely, puns or references to older funny movies that older drivers find witty can fly completely over the heads of younger drivers.”

Still in states such as Mississippi, state officials have heard from residents who say creative messages changed their habits, which might not have happened with more direct language, Katool said.

“It’s all good fun, but the point is to save lives,” Katool said. “There’s really only so many times you can just tell somebody to stop texting and driving or tell them to slow down. Eventually they just kind of tune you out. So we feel this is a way to leverage holidays, popular culture, music, that kind of thing.”

New Jersey is still using humor in its messages: A batch that ran in May included “SLOW DOWN BAD DRIVERS AHEAD” AND “CAMP IN THE WOODS NOT THE LEFT LANE.”

But the state is “mindful of the kinds of messages we put up, keeping them safety oriented” and does follow federal guidance, said New Jersey Department of Transportation spokesperson Stephen Schapiro.

The latest messages in June include “THERE’S NO DEBATE DON’T TAILGATE” and “LET THE WAVES DO THE CRASHING STAY ALERT!”

New Jersey has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities as of 2023, about 0.78 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven. Minnesota is the only state lower, at 0.71, with the highest being Mississippi (1.76) and Arizona (1.69), according to preliminary National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics.

In Arizona, messages “sometimes include humor and cultural references, and we work hard to make sure key messages about safety will be easily understood by drivers,” said Doug Pacey, a transportation spokesperson. Over the Memorial Day weekend, the department used a relatively straightforward message: “COOKOUT ESSENTIALS BBQ, MUSIC, WATER, DESIGNATED DRIVERS.”

Like New Jersey and Mississippi, Arizona sometimes gets the public involved in picking safety messages with contests. A contest last fall led to two winning messages: “I’M JUST A SIGN ASKING DRIVERS TO USE TURN SIGNALS” — a reference to a line in the 1990 film “Notting Hill” with actor Julia Roberts, whose character in the film says, “I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

Another contest winner, Elise Riker, won for “SEATBELTS ALWAYS PASS THE VIBE CHECK” which was also displayed last fall. A marketing professor at Arizona State University, Riker told Stateline she crafted it to appeal to Gen Z drivers.

“A vibe check is Gen Z slang for good vibrations, from the 70’s,” Riker said. “Levity definitely helps a safety message get through. ‘You can die in a car accident without your seatbelt’ is more likely to be ignored.

“Nobody likes to think about dying,” she said. “Friendly and funny safety messages are a reminder that there are humans at the heart of it.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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Children watch as rescue personnel carry a manatee to the water during a mass release of rehabilitated manatees at Blue Spring State Park, Monday, Feb. 13, 2023, in Orange City, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

Births continued a historic slide in all but two states last year, making it clear that a brief post-pandemic uptick in the nation’s birth numbers was all about planned pregnancies that had been delayed temporarily by COVID-19.

Only Tennessee and North Dakota had small increases in births from 2022 to 2023, according to a Stateline analysis of provisional federal data on births. In California, births dropped by 5%, or nearly 20,000, for the year. And as is the case in most other states, there will be repercussions now and later for schools and the workforce, said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who follows birth trends.

“These effects are already being felt in a lot of school districts in California. Which schools are going to close? That’s a contentious issue,” Johnson said.

In the short term, having fewer births means lower state costs for services such as subsidized day care and public schools at a time when aging baby boomers are straining resources. But eventually, the lack of people could affect workforces needed both to pay taxes and to fuel economic growth.

Nationally, births fell by 2% for the year, similar to drops before the pandemic, after rising slightly the previous two years and plummeting 4% in 2020.

“Mostly what these numbers show is [that] the long-term decline in births, aside from the COVID-19 downward spike and rebound, is continuing,” said Phillip Levine, a Wellesley College economics professor.

To keep population the same over the long term, the average woman needs to have 2.1 children over her lifetime — a metric that is considered the “replacement” rate for a population. Even in 2022 every state fell below that rate, according to final data for 2022 released in April. The rate ranged from a high of 2.0 in South Dakota to less than 1.4 in Oregon and Vermont.

Trends for Latina women

The declines in births weren’t as steep in some heavily Hispanic states where abortion was restricted in 2022, including Texas and the election battleground state of Arizona. Births were down only 1% in Arizona and Texas. When health clinics closed, many women might have been unable to get reliable birth control or, if they became pregnant, to get an abortion.

Hispanic births rose in states where abortion is most restricted, even as non-Hispanic births fell in the same states, according to the Stateline analysis. It’s hard, however, to tell how much of a role abortion access played compared with immigration and people moving to growing states such as Texas and Florida.

In states where abortion access is most protected, births fell for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic women.

“The big takeaway to me is the likely increase in poverty for all family members, including children, in families affected by lack of access [to abortion and birth control],” said Elizabeth Gregory, director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Houston.

Many of the nation’s most Hispanic states where abortion and birth control are more freely available saw the biggest decreases in births: about 5% in California, Maryland, Nevada and New Mexico.

“Hispanic women as a group are facing more challenges in accessing reproductive care, including both contraception and abortion,” Gregory said in a university report earlier this year. “Unplanned births often directly impact women’s workforce participation and negatively affect the income levels of their families.”

Hispanic women on average have more children than Black or white women. Their fertility rates rose throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, then fell in the late 2000s to near the same level as other groups. That’s because both abortion and more reliable birth control became more widely available, Gregory said.

The fact that some of the steepest drops were in heavily Hispanic states outside of Arizona and Texas suggests that Latina women are continuing a path toward smaller and delayed families typical of other groups.

Most of the decline in California has been associated with fewer babies born to Hispanic women, especially immigrants, said Johnson, of the Public Policy Institute of California.

“California has a high share of Latinos compared to other states, and so fertility declines in that group have a huge effect on the overall decline in California,” he said. California was above replacement fertility as recently as 2008, he added, and would still be there if Hispanic fertility had not dropped. California is about 40% Hispanic, about the same as Texas and second only to New Mexico at 50%.

Birth rates also declined steeply in heavily Hispanic Nevada and New Mexico, with each dropping about 4% from 2022 to 2023. But Arizona, Florida and Texas, also in the top 10 states for Hispanic population share but faster-growing, saw relatively small drops of about 1%.

Texas banned almost all abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The state also requires parental consent for birth control, a rule that’s included federally funded family planning centers since a lower court ruling that same year.

Arizona also saw the number of abortions drop in 2022. After the high court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, an Arizona judge revived enforcement of a near-total ban on the procedure that was enacted in the Civil War era. Many clinics closed and never reopened.

Abortions in the state plummeted from more than 1,000 a month early in 2022 to 220 in July 2022, and never fully recovered, according to state records. The rate of abortions dropped 19% for the year. Births that year increased slightly, by 500, over 2021.

In Texas, Gregory’s research at the University of Houston research saw an effect on Hispanic births when an abortion ban took effect in 2021. Fertility rates rose 8% that year for Hispanic women 25 and older, according to the report.

Both Texas and Arizona also are growing quickly, making the smaller decreases in births harder to interpret, Arizona State Demographer Jim Chang noted. Chang declined comment on the effect of abortion accessibility on state birth rates.

Budget effects

Overall, the continuing fall in birth numbers could have significant effects on state budgets in the future. The slide augurs more enrollment declines for state-funded public schools already facing more dropouts since the pandemic.

“The decline we see in enrollment since COVID-19 is a bigger problem than just the decline in birth rates,” said Sofoklis Goulas, an economic studies fellow at the Brookings Institution. Rural schools and urban high schools have been particularly hard hit, according to a Brookings report Goulas authored this year.

“We don’t have a clear answer. We suspect a lot of people are doing home education or going to charter schools and private schools but we’re not sure,” Goulas told Stateline.

Still, states need to recognize declining births as an emerging factor in state budgets to avoid future budget shortfalls, said Jeff Chapman, a research director who monitors the trend at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Nationally, births did increase slightly for women older than 40, indicating a continuing trend toward delayed parenthood, said William Frey, a demographer at Brookings.

“The last two post-pandemic years do not necessarily indicate longer-term trends,” Frey said. “Young adults are still getting used to a recovering economy, including childbearing.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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Malek Hajar, senior project manager at the Vanbarton Group, shows a bathroom inside a model apartment while touring a high rise undergoing conversion from commercial to residential apartments, Tuesday, April 11, 2023, in New York. A growing number of developers are considering converting empty office towers into housing as part of an effort to revive struggling downtown business districts that emptied out during the pandemic. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

HERNDON, Va. — Juan Ramirez, watching his dog play in Chandon Park here in suburban Virginia on a Saturday morning, tries to imagine the massive office buildings next to the park becoming apartments and townhouses.

“I guess it’s inevitable. People don’t use offices as much now. I hope it’s affordable. Maybe it’ll bring more young people to town, more taxes for parks,” said Ramirez, 38, who grew up in the area and returned recently to take a restaurant management job after living in Minnesota and Ohio.

Cities and suburbs around the country are struggling with vacant office space as remote work becomes an established post-pandemic reality. States are stepping in with tax breaks and zoning changes to help replace the unwanted cubicle farms with much-needed housing. In suburbs such as Herndon, the answer might be tearing down an office complex and replacing it with a residential building. In more urban environments it might mean renovating and retrofitting office buildings to create apartments.

“Office vacancy has climbed to a 30-year high and at the same time there’s a housing shortage. So naturally the question is, ‘Why can we not convert all these vacant office buildings into housing?’” said Jessica Morin, research director for CBRE, a commercial real estate firm. CBRE research shows converting offices to other uses, mostly housing, is set to peak this year at more than 20 million square feet, up from 6.3 million in 2021.

Some places that started conversions before the pandemic are leading the way: New York state and New York City changed their laws during a 1990s downturn to allow more office-to-apartment conversions in Manhattan, although now there’s a state vs. city standoff on zoning rules to convert newer offices.

Ohio, where interest in city living grew when Cleveland spruced up its downtown for the 2016 Republican convention, now has three cities — Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus — in the top 15 list for office conversions to housing, according to CBRE.

Nationwide, 119 office conversion projects, including for residential and other use, are under construction or were completed this year, the most since CBRE began tracking them in 2016. Those projects could add about 44,000 new housing units when completed.

Since 2016, projects representing 125 million square feet of offices have or are slated to be converted to other uses, usually to housing but sometimes to warehouses or laboratories. But despite the recent increase, that represents only about 2% of all U.S. office space.

Impediments to making apartments out of offices include the still-high value of office buildings in some downtown areas in cities such as San Francisco, and the cost of demolishing or refitting old office buildings with plumbing for individual kitchens and bathrooms. Many office buildings also lack windows with natural light, which apartment-dwellers often demand.

That’s why state incentives have played a large part, as well as streamlined zoning that makes project costs more predictable for developers. Some states are further along than others. A new California law allows residential “building by right” in office and other commercial zones, meaning developers don’t have to petition for a zoning change. Washington state passed a law last year requiring cities to ease zoning requirements for housing in existing commercial buildings. And an Arizona bill signed into law this month will allow larger cities to convert more commercial buildings into housing without zoning changes.

Predictable zoning rules are important to developers who don’t want to get bogged down in negotiations and refusals that could sink a project.

“Developers just urge their states and localities to be really transparent, streamline the process, make the unknowns limited, because it’s the unknowns that drive risks,” said Julie Whelan, a vice president at CBRE. “Otherwise, they’re going to go look at the next pasture.”

Incentive programs

In addition to the Ohio cities, Chicago; Dallas/Fort Worth; Houston; Hartford and Fairfield County in Connecticut; the Kansas City metro area; Louisville, Kentucky; Minneapolis/St. Paul; Pittsburgh; Milwaukee; New Jersey; and Washington, D.C., are on CBRE’s top 15 list for rate of office space converted to apartments.

Ohio has two incentive programs for office conversion to housing. A 2020 program for “transformational” projects that could spur further development helped convert four floors of offices to apartments under construction at Playhouse Square in Cleveland. A historic building preservation incentive in place since 2007 helped partly convert Carew Tower in Cincinnati to apartments, said Mason Waldvogel, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Development.

Missouri is hoping to replicate that success in St. Louis, where about a quarter of the commercial space, including offices, is vacant. That includes the massive 44-story One AT&T Building downtown, with almost 1.5 million square feet, that sold for $3.6 million this month, compared with $205 million in 2006.

Missouri state Sen. Steven Roberts, a Democrat who represents the downtown St. Louis area, said a bill he’s sponsoring has bipartisan support from suburban Republicans, and is aimed at creating downtown areas in St. Louis and elsewhere where people can live, shop and eat as well as work. The bill was voted out of committee in February and is awaiting consideration by the full Senate.

The bill would create a state tax credit for up to 30% of the cost of converting office space to housing, retail or other uses.

“It’s a creative workaround to make downtown more vibrant and successful. We want to get more restaurants, more stores, more nightlife — and the way to do that is to get more people living there,” said Roberts. “It’s an issue for downtown and also for the whole state.”

Other states have enacted laws to encourage more conversion of offices to housing, according to a Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank report last year. Laws passed by Florida and Montana in 2023 allow new and converted multifamily housing in commercial areas, and laws in Rhode Island and Wisconsin support conversion of existing commercial and office buildings.

A Colorado bill now in committee would provide tax credits for commercial conversion to housing starting in 2026, supporting Denver’s plans to transition its office-oriented Central Business District to a “Central Neighborhood District.” Denver identified 16 commercial buildings as prime candidates for housing.

Zoning changes

Starting in the mid-1990s, a combination of state and city laws helped transform lower Manhattan’s business district with more apartments, a process that accelerated after 9/11. A proposal by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to expand the program to newer buildings failed to pass the legislature as part of a broader measure that included requirements for suburban and upstate communities to build more housing. Negotiations are continuing with lawmakers to make the change for New York City this year.

New York City also has begun working on its own rules to allow office-to-housing conversions citywide for buildings built before 1990, said Casey Berkovitz, spokesperson for the Department of City Planning. The state could do it faster and could also create tax incentives that the city cannot create on its own, and that’s also part of current negotiations with the state legislature, Berkovitz said.

“When you have a 20% office vacancy rate and a 1.4% rental apartment vacancy rate, it makes a lot of sense to substitute one for the other,” Berkovitz said. “We don’t want our own regulations standing in the way of that if it makes financial sense.”

In Herndon, town officials last month approved a zoning change that would clear the way for demolition of the Worldgate Drive offices and the construction of a combination of rental apartments, townhouses and “two over two” units with accessory living areas an owner can rent out or share with family members. All apartments would be market rate without subsidized affordable units, Ken Wire, an attorney for the developer, Boston Properties, said at last month’s hearing on the zoning change.

“We believe that by providing more housing in the area, we are adding to the overall supply, which thereby reduces price pressures in the market,” Wire said.

Virginia considered two state Senate bills this session that would have created incentives to convert offices to apartments but neither has passed, said Allison Brown, policy associate for the nonprofit Virginia Housing Alliance. One would have created a state income tax credit for office-to-residential conversion, and another would have allowed more residential building in commercial areas if they included affordable housing.

The Worldgate Drive housing plan may spur Herndon to change its zoning rules to allow similar projects without zoning changes, said Elizabeth Gilleran, the town’s director of community development.

Herndon wants to “retain its sense of community and historic small-town feel” but also keep a strong commercial tax base that has helped support the town’s tax coffers when home values inevitably rise and fall, Gilleran said. The town recently approved conversion of a small office park and a hotel to homes. But offices and other commercial buildings will remain a key component of the town’s suburban building mix as density grows with a recent new commuter rail stop that opened in 2022.

“The town doesn’t wish to become a bedroom community,” Gilleran said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Too many cubicles, too few homes spur incentives to convert offices to housing appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

Grand Haven Pride Fest attendees are seen cheering during a drag show at the Lynne Sherwood Waterfront Stadium in Grand Haven, Mich., on Saturday, June 10, 2023. The West Michigan city celebrated it's first Pride Festival on Saturday. (AP Photo/Kristen Norman)

In recent years, millions of people across the United States have moved from Democratic cities to Republican suburbs, complicating the politics of swing states in a pivotal election year, according to a Stateline analysis.

Republican suburban counties in four swing states — Georgia in the South and Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Midwest — gained the most new arrivals; heavily Democratic cities lost the most. In Western swing states Arizona and Nevada, meanwhile, the biggest people magnets have been slightly Democratic cities that are expected to be hotly contested.

Those shifts reflect a nationwide trend: In Republican counties, as defined by the 2020 presidential vote, 3.7 million more people have moved in than have left since 2020, while Democratic counties had a net loss of 3.7 million, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates and county presidential election data kept by the University of Michigan.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates released in March included people who moved within the country between mid-2020 and mid-2023, a time of pandemic dislocations, lockdowns in big cities, and the rise of remote work that fed a search for affordable housing in less crowded and more scenic settings. Those settings, as it turns out, also tend to be more conservative. The census numbers do not include births or immigration.

Whether the newcomers will vote Democratic this year, or whether they were disenchanted with Democratic policies in their former homes and will vote Republican, remains to be seen. The changes might affect local and congressional races the most, but even a few movers crossing state lines could sway presidential vote totals in swing states.

“We are looking at an election to be determined by a shift of such small numbers of people in each of these states that a few thousand votes in any one state can impact the electoral vote there,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in Minnesota who has edited and helped write several books on presidential swing states.

The counties gaining the most movers in Georgia (Forsyth County), Michigan (Ottawa County), Pennsylvania (Cumberland County) and Wisconsin (Waukesha County) were solidly for then-incumbent President Donald Trump in 2020. But in the three Midwest counties, Joe Biden had the best showing for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Politics in a changing county

In some of the growing counties, there has been tension as new residents bring their own expectations.

“People keep moving here because they like it, then they try to make it like the place they left,” said David Avant, who runs a business networking website in Forsyth County, Georgia. His county gained about 17,000 new arrivals between mid-2020 and mid-2023, according to the Stateline analysis.

Politics might not yet be changing in some of the red counties surveyed. In Michigan, Doug Zylstra became the first Democrat elected in almost 50 years to the 11-member Ottawa County Board of Commissioners in 2018 and was reelected in 2022, but the commission took a more conservative turn in 2023 when a new majority took office.

“The people of Ottawa County chose to replace the previous Republican-majority board, which promoted Democratic ideology and practices,” said Sylvia Rhodea, one of the new Republicans on the commission.

In a January 2023 meeting, Rhodea criticized the previous board’s diversity, equity and inclusion program as “based on the premise that county resident characteristics of being 90% white and largely conservative were problematic for businesses” and as one that “seeks to replace the American value of equality with the Marxist value of equity.”

“There is not a racial divide in Ottawa County, there is an ideological divide. The welcoming of people will continue, but the ideology that tries to divide us has to end,” Rhodea said in the meeting.

The Rev. James Ellis III, who is Black and who moved to Ottawa County in April 2023, lives in the area that elected the county’s sole Democrat. He said the “racial divide” remark “feels inaccurate to me, not to mention unhelpful.” And while he said he has no party affiliation, he thinks “people on every side have a hard time listening to each other.”

Ellis grew up in Maryland and has lived in cities including Washington, D.C., and British Columbia, Canada. He attended a local seminary in Ottawa County.

“Ottawa County is not a utopia. It is an area full of wonderful citizens, lakeshore living, lots of churches and winter sports, and yet simultaneously it has power dynamics and inequities like any place that need addressing,” said Ellis, of Maplewood Reformed Church. The county’s population is about 83% white with small but growing Asian, Black and Hispanic populations.

‘They vote for the same thing’

In Wisconsin, affluent and suburban Waukesha County has gained about 5,200 movers, while urban Milwaukee County has lost 37,000. Still, that’s not likely to change the politics of either county soon, said Steve Styza, a Republican who won an open seat on the Waukesha County Board of Supervisors in Tuesday’s election.

“Democrats are definitely trying to make as big of a push as they can to turn the most conservative counties in our state blue or purple and try to gain some kind of foothold because it is strategically important,” Styza said before the election. “If I was on the other team, I’d be trying to do the same thing.”

Waukesha County voted almost 60% for Trump in 2020, though the roughly 38.8% vote for Biden was the highest share for a Democrat since 1964. The county’s 2022 vote for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was slightly higher at 39.4%. Milwaukee County voted 69% for Biden in 2020 and 71% for Evers in 2022.

Like Avant in Georgia, Styza said that Democratic newcomers sometimes pose a threat to the suburban lifestyle that drew them there in the first place.

“They say, ‘Well, I gotta get out of there because of what’s going on,’ and then they vote for the same thing in a different place and then wonder why things turn out poorly,” Styza said.

In the Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada, the politics are similar, but the largest cities are still growing fast. Arizona’s Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, voted Democratic in 2020 for the first time since 1948, when Harry Truman carried the county.

In Nevada, Clark County, the home of Las Vegas, has voted Democratic for president since 1992, but the Republican vote has been growing since 2008, reaching 44% for Trump in 2020. Some of the new Republican strength could be transplants from California’s conservative inland region east of Los Angeles, said David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“In contrast, Reno, which has been voting more Democratic in recent cycles, is attracting more liberal Californians from Sacramento and the Bay Area,” Damore said. “Statewide, the vote share that the Democrats lost in Las Vegas, they gained in Reno.”

Some conservative scholars argue that residential moves from blue to red areas show a political preference or at least an attraction to the results of conservative policies.

“Every day, Americans appear to have a clear preference about the sort of state government they want. Far from flocking to states that have imposed mandates and lockdowns, they have freely chosen to move to states that focus on securing the mandates of liberty,” Jeffrey Anderson, president of the conservative nonprofit American Main Street Initiative, wrote in an analysis of state-by-state moving statistics published in City Journal in January.

Other demographers see the movement of people as a search for housing and jobs that doesn’t take politics into account.

“Domestic migration [moving] across state and metro areas is not strongly affected by politics but by labor market and housing conditions,” said William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution. He added that movers from blue to red states “could make their destination states less red — Arizona and Nevada are good examples.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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AUSTIN, TEXAS - FEBRUARY 20: An employee assists a customer at The Home Depot store on February 20, 2024 in Austin, Texas. Home Depot has reported positive earnings and revenue, beating analysts expectations. The growth comes even as quarterly sales have dropped nearly 3 percent year over year. The company is expecting sales to increase by 1 percent in fiscal 2024. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

From health care for immigrants in California to universal school vouchers in Tennessee, states are being forced to rethink expensive projects as tax revenues decline and federal pandemic aid ends.

State tax revenue fell last year by 4%, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates released this month. Revenue is still up since 2019 by about 28%, though, higher than the inflation rate of about 18% in that time.

California and New York bore a disproportionate share of the loss, even accounting for their large populations. Those states lost a combined $56 billion in state tax revenue, the bulk of the $66 billion national loss.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, confronting a budget deficit that has ballooned to $73 billion, called on lawmakers to reopen the state budget for changes, including a proposed $1.5 billion increase in taxes on health insurers to maintain an expansion of state health insurance for low-income people regardless of immigration status.

Republican Assemblymember Bill Essayli called the expansion, which would include $4 billion in state funds, “money we don’t have” for “illegal immigrants” in a March 14 budget committee meeting ahead of an Assembly vote. Democratic Assemblymember Akilah Weber, who is also a San Diego physician, said the expansion would mean “we can keep on doing our work and helping patients without having to cut services.”

The higher tax would need to be approved by March 21 to get federal approval. The governor and lawmakers are negotiating other budget changes, which could include more taxes or billions of dollars in cuts to school construction, homeless housing, broadband or transit funding.

Conservative agendas also are under scrutiny as tax revenues dipped in 32 states last year and failed to keep up with inflation in 40 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Stateline analysis.

Tennessee Republicans favor Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s $140 million proposal for universal school vouchers. But a budget deficit has some GOP members questioning increased public school funding meant to sweeten the deal and dampen opposition from Democrats and others who fear the program will harm public schools.

Republican state Rep. Charlie Baum noted that the current House version of Lee’s voucher plan includes an extra $320 million for public school funding in rural areas, staff health insurance subsidies and construction costs — spending the state can’t afford given its $400 million budget deficit, he said.

Some states are adding taxes to find more money as surpluses dwindle: In New Jersey, where state tax revenue dropped 4% last year but remains 32% higher than 2019, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy asked lawmakers to approve a tax on large businesses to support the state transit system by raising about $1 billion this year. The extra funds may help preserve a program to lower property taxes for older people.

In Arizona, a projected $1.7 billion budget deficit looms after a flat income tax enacted by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in 2021 took effect last year. Current Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs proposed clawing back money from road projects and school vouchers approved under rosier forecasts. The Stateline analysis shows Arizona state tax revenue was down 8%, or about $1.9 billion, last year compared with 2022, but up 26% from 2019.

Tax cuts may be “coming home to roost” for states such as Arizona that cut deeply during the pandemic, slowing states’ ability to improve things such as schools and housing, said Wesley Tharpe, senior adviser for state tax policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“More than half of states used the cover of temporary surpluses coming out of the COVID-19 recovery to enact permanent reductions in their state income tax,” Tharpe said. “In several states the reductions are really, genuinely historic like Arizona, North Carolina, West Virginia. It’s not only that states might have to cut services, when they cut taxes this deeply — it’s also that they’re forgoing revenues that could be used for unmet needs.”

But conservatives insist cutting taxes will help states in the long run by putting more money back in the hands of consumers and attracting more high-income workers.

“Most states which cut taxes found ways to deliver responsible, sustainable tax relief,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the pro-business The Tax Foundation. “Tax competition matters more than ever, and if you’re balancing a budget, you’d much rather be dealing with the tax-cutting Mountain West than some of the tax-hiking states on the coasts right now.”

Utah and Iowa also had double-digit state tax revenue decreases.

Falling oil prices in 2023 hurt some states. Alaska had the largest percentage drop in state tax revenue last year: 50%, or $2.1 billion, though the state expects a boost this year from higher oil prices, and state tax revenues are still 32% higher than in 2019.

Maryland, which — like California — is unusually dependent on income tax revenue from high earners, is facing political battles over whether to cut spending or raise taxes in light of continuing tax revenue disappointments that created a $500 million deficit in the proposed budget.

States got used to having their revenue and giving it back, too, as most states were able to cut taxes and increase spending at the same time because of stimulus funding, a booming economy and consumer spending that boosted tax collections. Now decisions are getting harder as consumers tighten their wallets, tax cuts take effect, stimulus spending is over, and some sources of high-income jobs such as energy and tech have fallen back to earth.

One worrisome new trend in late 2023 continuing to this year: lower sales tax revenue as consumers spend less on retail items, said Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“This is alarming,” Dadayan said. “The two holiday months, November and December, saw declines in sales tax, indicating that consumers are tightening their wallets.”

Texas reported a 2% drop in March sales tax revenue distributed to local governments based on January sales, and Arizona retail sales tax revenue grew by only 1% in January, the lowest growth in a decade. Maryland is considering expanding its sales tax to more services in light of a retail slump.

The puzzling sales tax dip is especially hard on small towns that depend on it to pay for basic services such as police and firefighters. Sales tax revenues make up more than 43% of the budget for Greenwood, Arkansas, a city of about 9,600 near the Oklahoma border. Sales taxes are about flat so far this year instead of growing 4.5% as forecast, said Finance Director Thomas Marsh.

Greenwood’s sales tax revenue soared 50% during the pandemic as big-box stores and restaurants in the nearby city of Fort Smith closed and residents did their shopping and eating out closer to home or online — an Arkansas state law required local sales tax for online purchases starting in 2019. City officials expected growth to slow, but they were caught off guard when growth stopped in January and February, which could force a hiring freeze and postpone building projects if the situation continues, Marsh said.

David Thurman, director of Tennessee’s Budget Analyst Agency and president-elect of the National Association of State Budget Officers, said Tennessee and other states need to take a step back on ambitious programs for a “reset year” while taxes drift back to pre-pandemic growth levels.

“We’ve structured the [fiscal] 2025 budget to allow taking care of the normal cost of government but do very little else,” Thurman said. “I think we should all move forward more cautiously until we get a better read on what the new normal will be like.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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A bus picks up passengers in downtown Richmond near the Virginia Capitol. Richmond is one of the few areas to fully recover transit ridership last year after pandemic drops. (Tim Henderson/Stateline)

RICHMOND, Va. — Free bus rides have made life easier for Melvin Wilson, a 28-year-old Richmond resident who was on his way to his warehouse job on a recent morning. His only worry is that fares, which once ate up $60 or more of his monthly pay, might come back and go even higher, making it harder for him to afford to get to work.

“It could throw a lot of people like me out of their comfort zone. I think people would lose their jobs over this, especially if it happened too fast,” said Wilson, who was waiting with other riders at a downtown transfer station on a cold, sunny day earlier this month.

Richmond is one of the few cities where transit systems have regained pre-pandemic ridership, according to a Stateline analysis, and waiving fares has played a large part. A $4.5 million state grant from Virginia’s Transit Ridership Incentive Program has helped make the free rides possible.

In addition to Richmond, only 22 other cities had ridership in 2023 that was equal to or higher than in 2019, and 14 of those had free rides at least part of the year, according to the Stateline analysis of National Transit Database data. The largest of the cities that fully recovered ridership all offered free rides at least part of the year: Tucson, Arizona; Albany, New York; Birmingham, Alabama; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Shreveport, Louisiana, with 2023 ridership ranging from 17.5 million in Tucson to 3.3 million in Shreveport.

It’s not surprising that free rides can juice ridership numbers for systems struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shift to at-home work. And offering free and reduced-price rides is a boon to the low-income workers who disproportionately rely on public transit. The question is whether such policies are financially sustainable — or fair, given that higher-income riders benefit too.

As is the case with Richmond, states will play a pivotal role in determining the viability of city transit systems facing diminished ridership and a “fiscal cliff” of the end of federal pandemic funding, according to a Brookings Institution report last year.

In Richmond, regional leaders first dropped fares in March 2020 during the pandemic to support essential workers and to make it easier for people to get to hospitals and doctors. Scrapping fares also prevented passengers from clustering around fare boxes and eliminated the need for some face-to-face interactions.

Officials kept the free rides when they realized how the change was helping lower-paid workers and the employers who depend on them. A survey found 71% of riders had household incomes of less than $40,000 a year, while higher-paid riders such as state employees got free passes as part of their jobs, said Henry Bendon, spokesperson for GRTC Transit System, which runs bus service in the Richmond area.

“There was an equity issue. Fares were falling on the backs of people who could least afford it,” he said. “Transit is a public service. We build roads and we don’t charge people to use them, so why should we charge for this?”

Bendon took buses to work and school on a recent day — he’s studying for a master’s degree in public administration at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and many students pile onto free buses that pass by the downtown campus. Riders saw the transit insignia on his jacket and asked questions or voiced concerns, mostly about cleanliness and security on buses. But riders were generally happy with new service expansion that brought service every 15 minutes on main lines, up from every half-hour a few years ago.

Dee Otey, a 25-year-old restaurant worker at Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken in Richmond, said she also worries about fares coming back higher than before. She doesn’t miss the weekly struggle to calculate her transportation needs to determine whether it made more sense to pay single fares of $1.50 or buy a weekly pass.

A free ride for all?

Other cities are grappling with the question of whether higher-income riders should support the system by paying fares. In the Worcester, Massachusetts, area, which includes part of Connecticut, the Worcester Regional Transit Authority has extended fare-free rides one year at a time, and some want to keep it that way.

Alex Guardiola, vice president of public affairs and public policy at the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, said “there are many benefits to our residents and employers getting employees to their jobs as well as health care [appointments].” But some local officials see a benefit in charging fares to those who can afford it.

“I appreciate that we are trying to increase ridership, but adding riders without any increase in funding puts us in the position of not being able to afford drivers,” said Robin Grimm, town administrator for the Worcester suburb of Sturbridge and a member of the agency’s board. Using a sliding scale would still allow lower-income riders to pay less or nothing, she said.

Brian Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the university’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said reduced or free rides make less sense in cities with more affluent commuters, such as San Francisco.

“It’s difficult to make an equity case for it,” Taylor said. “There is an excellent argument to be made for free fares in the right situation. But to do it universally would cost enormous amounts of money and actually convey benefits to high-income people who don’t need it.”

Historically, city transit systems were for-profit businesses, but they became subsidized public services after World War II when widespread car ownership made them unprofitable. Systems in Richmond and other cities that have recovered their pre-pandemic ridership have large populations that depend on public transit because they don’t have access to cars, Taylor said.

But even in Richmond, there’s a financial strain from the loss of fare revenue, which amounts to more than $8 million a year. That loss is offset somewhat by not having to cover the $1.5 million cost of managing fare cards, plus the state money the system gets because it does not collect fares. The authority is considering asking for tax-deductible contributions from employers such as Amazon whose employees benefit from free rides, Bendon said.

“There will be some difficult conversations about funding in the next five or six years,” Bendon said. “We’ll go back to charging fares only if everything else fails. We don’t want to do that, and we don’t ever want to do that.”

Even some of the largest systems are experimenting with limited free rides. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, which Stateline found has recovered about 76% of its 2019 bus and subway ridership, is using a state grant to fund five fare-free bus routes among its 325 total routes. Washington, D.C., delayed a free city bus proposal until later this year; its regional ridership on bus and rail service, which includes suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, is about 71% of 2019 levels.

Staffing shortages

But it’s harder for very large transit systems to waive fares without damaging their finances, said Stephanie Lotshaw, director of TransitCenter, a New York City foundation devoted to transportation funding and strategy.

“In Richmond they get significant state support, and they are a small agency, but for larger operations it is less feasible,” Lotshaw said. San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit, for instance, received 71% of its operating costs from fares, parking and advertising before the pandemic. That figure is down to about 50% now.

And some of the big cities that have waived fares still haven’t regained pre-pandemic ridership. In New Mexico, Las Cruces and Albuquerque both have free rides, but only Las Cruces has recovered ridership fully and Albuquerque is still at about 75%, said Leslie Keener, the Albuquerque system’s transit director.

One reason is a shortage of drivers and other employees: Albuquerque has only about 62% of the service hours it did in 2019, with a job vacancy rate of 34% overall and almost 50% for mechanics.

“We have been struggling with vacancies peaking last summer. We are starting to see some hiring come back, but we still have a ways to go,” Keener said.

Richmond addressed its driver shortages by raising pay 43% to $24.91 an hour last year and waiving a requirement for a commercial license, instead requiring only a clean driving record and training.

“We set an ambitious goal to bring back the 300 drivers we needed in a year and a half, and we met that goal in pretty much half the time,” Bendon said.

Staffing shortages are part of the ridership problem with most mass transit agencies, along with decreased commuting as work-from-home becomes a permanent consequence of the pandemic, said Tracy Hadden Loh, a Brookings fellow and co-author of its recent transit report.

“Some systems are dropping way more trips than others because of lack of staffing. People can’t use something they can’t rely on,” Loh said. “There’s no doubt that free fares juice ridership. Just look at Richmond.

“So, do we cling to the fantasy that somehow transit will pay for itself,” she said, “or do we figure out a way to pay for it that really solves the free rider problem?”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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Emily Lu, a student in the environment science graduate program at Ohio State, tries to extract ribonucleic acid (RNA) from wastewater samples to test for fragments of the coronavirus, March 23, 2022 at a school lab in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Patrick Orsagos)

Although it’s spotty and inconsistent in many places, wastewater testing is pointing to a new wave of COVID-19 infections, with as many as one-third of Americans expected to contract the disease by late February.

With pandemic fatigue also in full force, and deaths and hospitalizations well down from peaks in 2021 because of high vaccination and immunity rates, many people are inclined to shrug off the new wave, fueled by the JN.1 variant. But COVID-19 continues to take thousands of lives a month. Older, sicker people need to take particular precautions, experts point out, and everybody should think about the debilitating condition known as long COVID that can strike even young, healthy people and last years.

Wastewater testing indicates the current wave of COVID-19 peaked in late December with 1.9 million daily infections, the highest since the omicron wave of 2021. Some experts want to maintain and expand wastewater surveillance to stay on top of future waves at state and local levels, even as the public has wearied of COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

“If you know you are one of the first communities where it’s surging, that could be very helpful,” said Michael Hoerger, a Tulane University School of Medicine assistant professor who made the national estimate about peak infection rates and future infection forecasts.

Like many experts, Hoerger said everybody should be more aware of the high risk and try to avoid getting infected or reinfected with COVID-19, since every new infection increases the chance of long COVID. He said Americans might be experiencing “descent neglect,” the phenomenon that makes people more careless when things are getting better.

“Everyone is vulnerable in some way. The best way to avoid getting long COVID is to avoid getting COVID,” Hoerger said.

Deaths have declined more slowly in states with older populations such as Vermont, Hawaii and Maine, according to a Stateline analysis of preliminary data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vermont hospital employees started masking again earlier this month amid the new surge.

Alarm bells are going off in other states as well: Indiana’s most populous county asked residents with mild symptoms to avoid crowded emergency rooms to prioritize care for patients seriously ill with COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses. Michigan reported its highest weekly COVID-19 death toll since late 2022, around 156, in mid-January. Illinois saw a 17% jump in COVID-19 hospitalizations in one week earlier this month.

It can be hard to get a read on local trends, however, when testing is inconsistent and methods of analysis vary.

The CDC publishes a “current conditions” map based on wastewater analysis that shows “high” or “very high” COVID-19 levels in wastewater for every state with sufficient data. The categories are not specific but indicate virus levels that are high compared with the past.

But at the same time, public patience with masking and other precautions is at a low, making it more likely that infection will spread and claim new victims among the vulnerable.

In South Carolina, Clemson University got high marks in 2020 for its wastewater surveillance program, earning a congratulatory visit from the White House coronavirus task force. But today the university has lost interest, said David Freedman, an environmental engineering professor who ran surveillance for three sewer plants, including the university’s.

Today he monitors only one community plant, though he can see that its level of COVID-19 is higher than at any time since 2021 by looking at virus copies detected in tests. Even the university’s plant itself has dropped out of testing, he said.

“The testing is free, but there’s some labor involved in collecting the sample and sending it off, and I haven’t been able to convince the university to keep doing it,” Freedman said. “Interest in this has really fallen off.

“To me it’s almost unethical that we’re not warning people that this highly transmissible virus is still with us and some people should really be taking precautions,” he added. “Some people with higher health risks should really be putting on a mask again.”

A Clemson spokesperson, Joe Galbraith, said the university considers wastewater testing to be a “valuable tool” but decided recently to rely on individual COVID-19 testing instead to monitor the disease within the university. Clemson is, however, partnering with the state and other South Carolina universities to create a statewide wastewater testing program, Galbraith said.

There are statewide wastewater testing programs, based on partnerships with academia, in other states such as New York and Oregon.

Older people and cancer patients make up an increasing proportion of COVID-19 deaths, according to Stateline’s analysis. People 65 or older made up 88% of those deaths last year, compared with 69% in the peak year for deaths, 2021. Cancer patients made up 12% of COVID-19 deaths last year, up from 5% in 2021.

In some states with older populations, COVID-19 deaths remain stubbornly high compared with other states. Vermont had the lowest COVID-19 death rate in the country in 2021 but now ranks fourth in the number of deaths per capita, behind Kentucky, West Virginia and Mississippi.

Last year Vermont had 220 deaths related to COVID-19, according to the analysis. That was almost two-thirds of the 2021 total of 331 such deaths.

No other state had nearly as high a proportion: Hawaii was next with 35% of its peak-level 2021 COVID-19 death toll happening in 2023. That was followed by Maine (32%), Massachusetts (31%) and New Hampshire (29%), all states with relatively old populations.

Texas, which is relatively young, last year had 10% of the COVID-19 deaths that it did in 2021, about 4,700 compared with 48,000.

Vermont has seen increased hospitalizations for COVID-19 this year and has been suggesting that people wear masks if they think they were exposed or have a high risk of serious illness, said Ben Truman, a spokesperson for the state health department. The guidance also applies to the flu and RSV, which are peaking in winter months, he said.

Residents in Vermont reacted calmly and cooperatively in the early days of the pandemic, saving lives early on compared to other states, said John Davy, an epidemiologist for the state health department.

“It wasn’t divisive. It wasn’t an identity issue here,” Davy said.

In some areas the latest wave of infections may even be higher than the 2021 omicron wave, which crested at around 6.5 million infections per day, according to Hoerger’s analysis. In Santa Clara County, home of California’s Silicon Valley, wastewater shows some areas reached their highest infection counts ever earlier this month.

Hospitalizations and deaths in the area remain low, said Sarah Rudman, a deputy health officer at the county health department, but the county is advising vulnerable people to consult with doctors and consider masking. “It’s an individual decision,” she said.

The county’s wastewater monitoring covers 90% of county residents and has benefited from strong support from local universities. The county uses an advanced form of measurement that can estimate the number of cases in the community without individual testing, Rudman said. It helps that the county started gathering data early and can compare levels from the start of the pandemic, she added.

Even those without underlying risk factors can get debilitating long COVID.

Jay Breneman was 39 and athletic, cycling and training for marathons, when he got COVID-19 in the summer of 2022 — too young to qualify for medication such as Paxlovid at the time. He ended up bedridden or in a wheelchair for more than a year.

Now the president of the Erie, Pennsylvania, school board, Breneman said he masks in public despite heckling, including from a man who told him at the county Democratic Party headquarters on election night that COVID-19 was “a hoax.”

“This has been hell. There’s no other word that describes it,” Breneman said. “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. And every single person I know is sick with something right now. The last thing I want now is to get sick again.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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A worker cleans outside of an In-N-Out Burger restaurant in San Francisco, Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022. More than a half-million California fast food workers are pinning their hopes on a groundbreaking proposal that would give them increased power and protections. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Pay hikes over the past four years have lifted the wages of people who work in hospitality — the nation’s lowest-paid industry — nearly 30% on average, reversing much of the wage inequality that has been growing for decades in the United States.

In 40 states, even those that haven’t raised their minimum wage beyond the $7.25 federal floor, the recent pay jumps outpaced those of earners in each state’s highest-paying industry, usually energy, technology or the federal government.

The lowest-wage industry in every state is leisure and hospitality, a category that includes restaurants, bars and hotels. Those lowest-earning workers got bigger percentage raises than the highest earners, averaging a 29% boost between mid-2019 and mid-2023, a Stateline analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics quarterly data shows.

“We’re experiencing a historic moment of worker power, where workers just aren’t willing to accept these wages anymore,” said Saru Jayaraman, who has advocated for higher wages for tipped hospitality workers in several states as president of One Fair Wage in Massachusetts.

The 29% average raise for hospitality workers compares with an average increase of 20% for the highest-earning category in each state. Inflation was 19% in the period between the second quarters of 2019 and 2023.

Nationally, wages for the bottom 10% of earners have grown more than for the top 10% since 2019, a change that has undone about 40% of the inequality that had built up since 1980, according to a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research updated in November. The shift is giving more power to young workers without college degrees, who have capitalized on the tight labor supply to find better-paying jobs.

The inequality turnaround was already happening before 2019 in states that raised their minimum wage, but starting in 2021, it spread to states that didn’t raise minimums, according to a social media post by one of the working paper’s authors, economist Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Regulation doing its thing” turned into “market tightness doing its thing,” Dube wrote in the post. “Tightness drives out low-wage jobs by creating better-paying ones,” he wrote, adding that policymakers can “make the market work better for workers or fix it with regulation. Or both.”

On Jan. 1, 22 states raised their minimum wage, while 38 cities and counties raised theirs beyond the state standard, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that examines how policies affect low- and middle-income workers.

It’s still hard to tell whether the wage boost for lower-paid workers will translate into less economic inequality over the long term. It may depend partly on whether tax policy favors them or the wealthy. A U.S. Census Bureau report in September said income inequality improved for the bottom 10% of earners versus the top 10% between 2021 and 2022, for the first time since 2007.

But the advantage disappeared after taxes, the report found, partly because of the expiration of child tax credits expanded during the pandemic.

The highest wage increases for hospitality workers were in Maine (up 41% over four years), New Jersey (35%), Florida (34%) and Virginia (33%). All are states with a higher minimum wage than the federal floor.

But increases were nearly as high, about 33%, in states without minimum wage boosts, including Idaho, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Carolina and South Carolina.

“Mostly what you’re seeing is the effect of a tighter labor market,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “More competition, more scarcity of workers, means employers have to pay more regardless of what state you live in.”

Many states with slower wage growth for hospitality workers already had high wages compared with other states: Nevada (up 20%), California and Hawaii (both up 23%) were among the slowest growing. But they still were in the top five for hospitality wages, ranging from an average weekly $826 in Hawaii to $784 in Nevada and $720 in California.

Higher wages for hospitality workers such as resort housekeepers in Nevada are helping to boost more Hispanic families into the middle class, according to a previous Stateline analysis.

For some conservatives, the movement is a sign that a hands-off approach works to raise wages without government intervention when labor demand outstrips supply. Some red states such as Texas have resisted minimum wage legislation and forbid localities from setting them, while Florida set a minimum only after a successful ballot referendum in 2020.

“My position is very much that wages are ultimately set by economic conditions, not politicians,” said Paul Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which has opposed legislation to raise minimum wages in the state.

New Mexico won’t see a minimum wage increase this year but had four straight increases from 2019 to 2023, and some cities have continued to raise minimums. The state’s hospitality wages increased 30% in that time, compared with 20% for the highest earners in federal government jobs.

Gould, of the Economic Policy Institute, said minimum wage legislation and other worker protections need to continue because low-wage workers cannot count on positive market conditions to boost pay indefinitely.

“History has told us they will need it at some point,” Gould said.

The governments in California and the city of Chicago are among those that have recently gone even further to raise pay for hospitality workers after negotiations with industry representatives.

California approved legislation to raise pay to $20 an hour for fast-food workers while a council of worker and business representatives helps decide on future wages and working conditions. The agreement came after negotiations with the fast-food industry, which had spent $50 million in an opposition campaign but agreed to drop a planned ballot measure to block formation of the council. The state agreed in return to drop plans to hold fast-food corporations liable for franchisee labor violations.

In Chicago, the city council in October passed a plan to gradually abolish the difference in the minimum wage for workers who receive tips. The Illinois Restaurant Association, which had opposed the change as “extra burdens to our neighborhood family-run restaurants,” agreed after the phaseout period was extended from two years to five, with tipped employees getting the full minimum wage, on top of any tips, in 2028.

California already requires the full minimum wage for tipped workers; District of Columbia voters approved a measure to phase out the lower minimum wage for tipped workers in 2022, while voters in Portland, Maine, voted against a similar measure in 2022.

The industry has been more willing to negotiate in the new economic climate, said Jayaraman, of One Fair Wage, who helped negotiate the Chicago compromise and hopes for similar change at the state level in Illinois, one of the 43 states where employees can be paid less than minimum wage if tips make up the difference.

“They want a level playing field. They want workers to come back, knowing they’ll be paid fairly,” Jayaraman said.

The fact that lower-income workers ended up doing better on average than high earners was a surprise result of pandemic conditions, said Vincent Fusaro, who studies low-income households at Boston College’s School of Social Work.

“Going back to what was expected in spring of 2020, that’s astonishing,” Fusaro said in an email. “It was perfectly reasonable to assume the pandemic period would be a disaster for folks at the bottom of the economic distribution.” Still, he added, “low-wage workers, who had been among the hardest-hit in the Great Recession, instead saw gains.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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DALLAS, TX - MARCH 21: Attendees mingle at a Hispanic Power Lunch with local buisness leaders at the Consulate de Mexico on March 21, 2018 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images)

The Hispanic middle class has grown faster than the white or Black middle class in the past decade and has reached near-parity with the white middle class in seven states, according to a new Stateline analysis.cBetween 2012 and 2022, the percentage of Hispanic households in the country that qualified as middle class grew from about 42% to 48%, while the share of white households in the middle class remained about the same at 51%. The proportion of Black middle-class households grew more slowly, from 41% to 44%.

Hispanic households’ increasing economic success reflects the maturing of a community that now has more U.S.-born residents. But it also reflects a change in fortunes for immigrants filling service jobs that are in high demand, as well as a broader labor shortage that has pushed up wages.

However, the gains are fragile and could evaporate over time, said Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which advocates for fair labor practices for Hispanic workers.

“While I welcome the progress, it’s not enough to say we’re close to solving the problems with inequity for communities of color. We’re not,” Saenz said. He noted that middle-class income takes a long time to translate into wealth, which often entails passing the financial benefits of homeownership to future generations.

A Pew Research Center report last year found Black and Hispanic adults are more likely than white adults to fall out of the middle class once they’ve reached it, based on data through 2021. Black and Hispanic Americans still lag in college education, which is associated with greater chances of economic success, Rakesh Kochhar, a senior researcher and author of the report, said in an email.

Furthermore, the percentage of Hispanic households that make more than twice the median income, 10%, is still far lower than the 21% of white households in that category.

For purposes of the analysis, Stateline defined as middle class those households making between two-thirds and twice the state median income adjusted for family size, which ranges from about $70,000 in New Mexico to almost $108,000 in Massachusetts. The analysis is based on responses to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey provided by the University of Minnesota at ipums.org.

According to the Stateline definition, a three-person household would have to earn $46,000 to qualify as middle class in New Mexico. The same size family would have to make $53,000 in Florida and $72,000 in Massachusetts and New Jersey. The analysis only included the 15 states where at least 10% of the population is Hispanic.

Among those states, the share of Hispanic families who are middle class is nearly the same as it is for white households in seven states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. In Illinois, Nevada and New Mexico, the Hispanic middle-class share is higher than the white share, and it is within 3 percentage points in the other four states.

In 2012, the only state where the Hispanic middle-class percentage approached the share for white households was New Mexico.

Nevada illustrates the progress that Hispanic families have made. Fifty-seven percent of Hispanic households in Nevada are middle class, compared with 52% of white households. That’s a reversal from 2012, when 53% of white households and 49% of Hispanic households were middle class.

Recently, the roller-coaster fortunes of the Nevada tourism industry have been an economic boon to Hispanic workers. Layoffs came in both the Great Recession and the pandemic, but lately jobs have come back with higher wages than before.

Last month, the Culinary Union ratified a contract for 40,000 Nevada resort workers that will raise pay 32% over five years. For Elsa Roldan, a single mother who cleans guests’ rooms at the Bellagio resort in Las Vegas, that would put her over the middle-class threshold she is already approaching at her $25-an-hour pay. In Nevada, the middle-class household income range is about $54,000 to $161,000.

“I couldn’t be more happy or more proud. I feel like I’m middle class, or maybe working class but I have my benefits, my health care, I own my house in Henderson [a Las Vegas suburb], a very peaceful area where I feel safe, and my son is in college,” said Roldan, who was born in Chicago and lived in Mexico for a time before moving to Las Vegas 17 years ago.

Las Vegas has changed a lot since Antonio Munoz grew up there as the son of laborers who arrived in the 1960s as part of the Bracero Program that brought workers from Mexico to ease labor shortages. Back then, neighborhoods were segregated into different areas for white, Latino and Black families, but now neighborhoods are mixed, he said. Munoz is the first in the family to own his own business, the 911 Taco Bar restaurant and catering service.

Being a small-business owner is not easy, though.

“I feel like we’re doing pretty well, though there are always ups and downs in the restaurant business. We’ve been busy, but with all the inflation we’re not making any more money,” said Munoz. He’s considering buying his own restaurant building, but prices are as much as $1.5 million for a simple drive-thru location, and he’s not sure he can afford such a big loan.

The gap between Hispanic and white middle-class households is largest in Northeast states, where living costs are higher. Hispanic residents in states such as Rhode Island and New Jersey are also less likely to be U.S.-born and to speak English easily, factors that have been shown to boost access to middle-class incomes.

The disparity between the Hispanic and white middle class is still 10 percentage points or more in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

In Rhode Island, where 13% of households are Hispanic, 39% of Hispanic households are middle class compared with 56% of white households, a gap that’s about the same as it was in 2012.

Many Hispanic residents in Rhode Island are single mothers from Central America with low-paying work in house cleaning and child care, with little chance of buying homes and building wealth in today’s inflated housing market, said Marcela Betancur, director of the nonprofit Latino Policy Institute in Providence.

“Being middle class means more than money. It means being able to pass it on to the next generation,” Betancur said, adding that she sees hope for the future in increasing college enrollment among children of immigrants.

Rosa Flores was born in the Dominican Republic and owns a beauty salon in Providence where she moved after studying at a beauty college in New York City about 20 years ago. A single mother, she endured some hard times in the pandemic, living on her savings when the salon, Disnalda, closed for 72 days.

“People came back, thank God, that was a big relief and we’re doing well now,” Flores said. “I do feel middle class and it’s much easier to get by now that I have my own business. I’m very happy.”

The middle-class gap between white and Hispanic households is 12 percentage points in Massachusetts, 11 points in Connecticut and 10 points in New Jersey.

Overall, the growth of the Hispanic middle class is “rapid but not surprising” as the community matures and includes more U.S.-born citizens who are educated and speak English, said William A.V. Clark, a geography professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote a 2003 book on immigration and the middle class.

A report published this year by The American Journal of Economics and Sociology also emphasized the importance of fluency in English.

The report looked at spending between 2010 and 2019 and found that English-speaking Hispanic families spent more than those who spoke only Spanish on expenses considered middle-class like home mortgages, car payments and family vacations, said author Hua Zan, a family economics researcher at the University of Hawaii.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

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