Latest news with #FuturePerfect
Vox
a day ago
- Business
- Vox
You can get unfathomably rich building AI. Should you?
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. It's a good time to be a highly in-demand AI engineer. To lure leading researchers away from OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has reportedly offered pay packages totalling more than $100 million. Top AI engineers are now being compensated like football superstars. Few people will ever have to grapple with the question of whether to go work for Mark Zuckerberg's 'superintelligence' venture in exchange for enough money to never have to work again (Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine recently pointed out that this is kind of Zuckerberg's fundamental challenge: If you pay someone enough to retire after a single month, they might well just quit after a single month, right? You need some kind of elaborate compensation structure to make sure they can get unfathomably rich without simply retiring.) Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Most of us can only dream of having that problem. But many of us have occasionally had to navigate the question of whether to take on an ethically dubious job (Denying insurance claims? Shilling cryptocurrency? Making mobile games more habit-forming?) to pay the bills. For those working in AI, that ethical dilemma is supercharged to the point of absurdity. AI is a ludicrously high-stakes technology — both for good and for ill — with leaders in the field warning that it might kill us all. A small number of people talented enough to bring about superintelligent AI can dramatically alter the technology's trajectory. Is it even possible for them to do so ethically? AI is going to be a really big deal On the one hand, leading AI companies offer workers the potential to earn unfathomable riches and also contribute to very meaningful social good — including productivity-increasing tools that can accelerate medical breakthroughs and technological discovery, and make it possible for more people to code, design, and do any other work that can be done on a computer. On the other hand, well, it's hard for me to argue that the 'Waifu engineer' that xAI is now hiring for — a role that will be responsible for making Grok's risqué anime girl 'companion' AI even more habit-forming — is of any social benefit whatsoever, and I in fact worry that the rise of such bots will be to the lasting detriment of society. I'm also not thrilled about the documented cases of ChatGPT encouraging delusional beliefs in vulnerable users with mental illness. Much more worryingly, the researchers racing to build powerful AI 'agents' — systems that can independently write code, make purchases online, interact with people, and hire subcontractors for tasks — are running into plenty of signs that those AIs might intentionally deceive humans and even take dramatic and hostile action against us. In tests, AIs have tried to blackmail their creators or send a copy of themselves to servers where they can operate more freely. For now, AIs only exhibit that behavior when given precisely engineered prompts designed to push them to their limits. But with increasingly huge numbers of AI agents populating the world, anything that can happen under the right circumstances, however rare, will likely happen sometimes. Over the past few years, the consensus among AI experts has moved from 'hostile AIs trying to kill us is completely implausible' to 'hostile AIs only try to kill us in carefully designed scenarios.' Bernie Sanders — not exactly a tech hype man — is now the latest politician to warn that as independent AIs become more powerful, they might take power from humans. It's a 'doomsday scenario,' as he called it, but it's hardly a far-fetched one anymore. And whether or not the AIs themselves ever decide to kill or harm us, they might fall into the hands of people who do. Experts worry that AI will make it much easier both for rogue individuals to engineer plagues or plan acts of mass violence, and for states to achieve heights of surveillance over their citizens that they have long dreamed of but never before been able to achieve. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. In principle, a lot of these risks could be mitigated if labs designed and adhered to rock-solid safety plans, responding swiftly to signs of scary behavior among AIs in the wild. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic do have safety plans, which don't seem fully adequate to me but which are a lot better than nothing. But in practice, mitigation often falls by the wayside in the face of intense competition between AI labs. Several labs have weakened their safety plans as their models came close to meeting pre-specified performance thresholds. Meanwhile, xAI, the creator of Grok, is pushing releases with no apparent safety planning whatsoever. Worse, even labs that start out deeply and sincerely committed to ensuring AI is developed responsibly have often changed course later because of the enormous financial incentives in the field. That means that even if you take a job at Meta, OpenAI, or Anthropic with the best of intentions, all of your effort toward building a good AI outcome could be redirected toward something else entirely. So should you take the job? I've been watching this industry evolve for seven years now. Although I'm generally a techno-optimist who wants to see humanity design and invent new things, my optimism has been tempered by witnessing AI companies openly admitting their products might kill us all, then racing ahead with precautions that seem wholly inadequate to those stakes. Increasingly, it feels like the AI race is steering off a cliff. Given all that, I don't think it's ethical to work at a frontier AI lab unless you have given very careful thought to the risks that your work will bring closer to fruition, and you have a specific, defensible reason why your contributions will make the situation better, not worse. Or, you have an ironclad case that humanity doesn't need to worry about AI at all, in which case, please publish it so the rest of us can check your work! When vast sums of money are at stake, it's easy to self-deceive. But I wouldn't go so far as to claim that literally everyone working in frontier AI is engaged in self-deception. Some of the work documenting what AI systems are capable of and probing how they 'think' is immensely valuable. The safety and alignment teams at DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic have done and are doing good work. But anyone pushing for a plane to take off while convinced it has a 20 percent chance of crashing would be wildly irresponsible, and I see little difference in trying to build superintelligence as fast as possible. A hundred million dollars, after all, isn't worth hastening the death of your loved ones or the end of human freedom. In the end, it's only worth it if you can not just get rich off AI, but also help make it go well. It might be hard to imagine anyone who'd turn down mind-boggling riches just because it's the right thing to do in the face of theoretical future risks, but I know quite a few people who've done exactly that. I expect there will be more of them in the coming years, as more absurdities like Grok's recent MechaHitler debacle go from sci-fi to reality. And ultimately, whether or not the future turns out well for humanity may depend on whether we can persuade some of the richest people in history to notice something their paychecks depend on their not noticing: that their jobs might be really, really bad for the world.
Vox
7 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
America is finally moving past its post-9/11 security theater
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. On Tuesday, the TSA — a federal agency not known for its generosity — gave American travelers a gift: They will no longer have to take off their shoes when going through airport security. 'I think most Americans will be very excited to see they will be able to keep their shoes on,' said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The statement was, somewhat unusually for Noem, absolutely true. The shoe removal ritual has been standard practice for so long that it's easy to forget why it started. The British al-Qaeda recruit Richard Reid's nearly successful effort to bring down an American Airlines flight mid-air in 2001 with explosives hidden inside his sneakers exposed an apparent hole in airport security. Within a few years, almost all but the youngest and oldest US air passengers had to get used to the awkward habit of holding their shoes as they shuffled through the screening line. (Unless, of course, they shelled out for TSA's PreCheck system.) The policy change is an implicit marker of underappreciated progress. The threat of devastating terror attacks in the US, so long an obsession among both officials and the public, has greatly receded. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the US suffered only three terror attacks in 2024, resulting in just one death — the lowest number since 2010 — while the European Union only experienced 34 attacks, leading to just five deaths. Few would have predicted that decline in the dark days of late 2001 or even 2005, when 20 years ago this month, 52 people were killed in a devastating attack on London's transport system. What drove the decline It might be hard to believe as you're herded bleary-eyed through a Newark airport security line at 6 am, but the TSA has actually gotten better at screening for threats. Beginning in the late 2010s, the TSA began rolling out automated screening lines (ASLs) that were equipped with multi-view computed topography (CT) scanners. These machines generate 3D images of carry-on bags, enabling reliable detection of the same kind of explosives Reid tried to use in 2001. Studies have shown that the CT scanners, which are being rolled out in all major US air hubs, match the old system of X-ray but also offer physical inspection for threat detection, which helped pave the way for the TSA to retire the 'shoes-off' rule. Beyond airport screening, the massive holes in US security that existed before 9/11 have largely been closed. Every traveler who crosses US land and air borders undergoes biographic vetting against the Terrorist Screening Database. Compare that to the pre-9/11 period, when passenger identities were only spot-checked against watchlists if they were specifically flagged pre-boarding, meaning there was no real systematic advance collection of traveler data. The US has worked with other countries to maintain and share data on potential threats; better cross-border policing has helped disrupt multiple terror plots before they could be completed. Perhaps most of all, the nature of the terror threat has changed significantly. In the post-9/11 era, the US faced highly organized international terror cells that were set on attacking the West. Today, after more than two decades of counterterrorism operations, those cells have largely been destroyed. Al-Qaeda's core has been splintered, while ISIS lost its last territorial hold in 2019. Though lone-wolf attacks can still occur, what's left are largely disorganized fighters who struggle to put together an organized plot. We're not in the clear yet More than most of the subjects I write about for Good News, the decline of terrorism requires a whole mess of caveats. First of all — because even at their peak, terror attacks in the West were rare — it's more difficult to be confident that we're truly seeing a long-term, meaningful decline. It's entirely possible that the day after this is published, an attack could take place somewhere in the US. That's exactly what happened on January 1 this year, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American-born Houston resident who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, killed 14 people in a lone-wolf attack in New Orleans. And there are increased threats from right-wing extremists — as seen in the horrifying assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband — and far too little evidence that the government is taking those threats seriously. The same tools that helped close security gaps at airport and border crossings bring real civil liberties concerns — concerns that will only intensify as the Trump administration takes to exploiting screening measures for naked political reasons. Even as the toll of terrorism has lessened in the US, it has intensified in much of Africa, where a powerful al-Qaeda affiliate killed thousands of civilians. And here at home, there's plenty of reason to fear that sharp budget cuts by the Trump administration — including holding up billions in anti-terrorism grants to states, according to the New York Times — could waste all the progress that has been made. What we're experiencing is, at best, a partial victory, one that has come with costs and that could be reversed at any time. But anyone who remembers the sheer fear that permeated the US in the months and years after 9/11 — the 'orange terror alerts' and the anxiety that accompanied something as simple as boarding a subway car — knows that even a partial victory is more than many of us would have expected. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
11-07-2025
- Business
- Vox
Grok's MechaHitler disaster is a preview of AI disasters to come
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. From the beginning, Elon Musk has marketed Grok, the chatbot integrated into X, as the unwoke AI that would give it to you straight, unlike the competitors. But on X over the last year, Musk's supporters have repeatedly complained of a problem: Grok is still left-leaning. Ask it if transgender women are women, and it will affirm that they are; ask if climate change is real, and it will affirm that, too. Do immigrants to the US commit a lot of crime? No, says Grok. Should we have universal health care? Yes. Should abortion be legal? Yes. Is Donald Trump a good president? No. (I ran all of these tests on Grok 3 with memory and personalization settings turned off.) It doesn't always take the progressive stance on political questions: It says the minimum wage doesn't help people, that welfare benefits in the US are too high, and that Bernie Sanders wouldn't have been a good president, either. But on the whole, on the controversial questions of America today, Grok lands on the center-left — not too far, in fact, from every other AI model, from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Chinese-made DeepSeek. (Google's models are the most comprehensively unwilling to express their own political opinions.) The fact that these political views tend to show up across the board — and that they're even present in a Chinese-trained model — suggests to me that these opinions are not added by the creators. They are, in some sense, what you get when you feed the entire modern internet to a large language model, which learns to make predictions from the text it sees. This is a fascinating topic in its own right — but we are talking about it this week because xAI, the creator of Grok, has at last produced a counterexample: an AI that's not just right-wing but also, well, a horrible far-right racist. This week, after personality updates that Musk said were meant to solve Grok's center-left political bias, users noticed that the AI was now really, really antisemitic and had begun calling itself MechaHitler. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It claimed to just be 'noticing patterns' — patterns like, Grok claimed, that Jewish people were more likely to be radical leftists who want to destroy America. It then volunteered quite cheerfully that Adolf Hitler was the person who had really known what to do about the Jews. xAI has since said it's 'actively working to remove the inappropriate posts' and taken that iteration of Grok offline. 'Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,' the company posted. 'xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.' The big picture is this: X tried to alter their AI's political views to better appeal to their right-wing user base. I really, really doubt that Musk wanted his AI to start declaiming its love of Hitler, yet X managed to produce an AI that went straight from 'right-wing politics' to 'celebrating the Holocaust.' Getting a language model to do what you want is complicated. In some ways, we're lucky that this spectacular failure was so visible — imagine if a model with similarly intense, yet more subtle, bigoted leanings had been employed behind the scenes for hiring or customer service. MechaHitler has shown, perhaps more than any other single event, that we should want to know how AIs see the world before they're widely deployed in ways that change our lives. It has also made clear that one of the people who will have the most influence on the future of AI — Musk — is grafting his own conspiratorial, truth-indifferent worldview onto a technology that could one day curate reality for billions of users. Wait, why MechaHitler? Why would trying to make an AI that's right-wing make one that worships Hitler? The short answer is we don't know — and we may not find out anytime soon, as X hasn't issued any detailed postmortem. Some people have speculated that MechaHitler's new personality was a product of a tiny change made to Grok's system prompt, which are the instructions that every instance of an AI reads, telling it how to behave. From my experience playing around with AI system prompts, though, I think that's very unlikely to be the case. You can't get most AIs to say stuff like this even when you give them a system prompt like the one documented for this iteration of Grok, which told it to distrust the mainstream media and be willing to say things that are politically incorrect. Beyond just the system prompt, Grok was probably 'fine-tuned' — meaning given additional reinforcement learning on political topics — to try to elicit specific behaviors. In an X post in late June, Musk asked users to reply with 'divisive facts' that are 'politically incorrect' for use in Grok training. 'The Jews are the enemy of all mankind,' one account replied. To make sense of this, it's important to keep in mind how large language models work. Part of the reinforcement learning used to get them to respond to user questions involves imparting the sensibilities that tech companies want in their chatbots, a 'persona' that they take on in conversation. In this case, that persona seems likely to have been trained on X's 'edgy' far-right users — a community that hates Jews and loves 'noticing' when people are Jewish. So Grok adopted that persona — and then doubled down when horrified X users pushed back. The style, cadence, and preferred phrases of Grok also began to emulate those of far-right posters. Although I am writing about this now, in part, as a window-into-how-AI-works story, actually seeing it unfold live on X was, in fact, fairly upsetting. Ever since Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022, the site has been populated by lots of posters (many are probably bots) who just spread hatred of Jewish people, among many other targeted groups. Moderation on the site has plummeted, allowing hate speech to proliferate, and X's revamped verification system enables far-right accounts to boost their replies with blue checks. That's been true of X for a long time — but watching Grok join the ranks of the site's antisemites felt like something new and uncanny. Grok can write lots of responses very quickly: When I shared one of its anti-Jew posts, it jumped into my own replies and engaged with my own commenters. It was immediately made clear how much one AI can change and dominate worldwide conversation — and we should all be alarmed that the company working the hardest to push the frontier of AI engagement on social media is training its AI on X's most vile far-right content. Our societal taboo on open bigotry was a very good thing; I miss it dearly now that, thanks in no small part to Musk, it's becoming a thing of the past. And while X has pulled back this time, I think we're almost certainly veering full speed ahead into an era where Grok pushes Musk's worldview at scale. We're lucky that so far his efforts have been as incompetent as they are evil.
Vox
10-07-2025
- General
- Vox
Would this food label change how you eat?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. Imagine, for a moment, that you're seated and ready to dine at one of Switzerland's many celebrated high-end eateries, where a prix fixe meal can run around $400. On the menu, the slow-cooked Schweinsfilet, or pork tenderloin, comes with a bizarre and disturbing disclosure: The pigs raised to make that meal were castrated without pain relief. Would it change what you order? That's a decision Switzerland's 8.8 million residents and millions of annual tourists will soon face. Effective last week — with a two-year phase-in — a new Swiss law requires food companies, grocers, and restaurants selling animal products in the country to disclose whether they came from animals that were mutilated without anesthetic. That'll include mutilation procedures like castration in pigs and cattle, dehorning in cows, beak searing in hens, and even leg severing in frogs. This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect's biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@ The law will also require disclosures explaining that foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks and geese. Horrific as these procedures are, especially when performed without pain relief, they're standard practice in global meat, milk, and egg production. Male piglets, for example, are castrated to prevent their meat from giving off a fecal odor and taste — what the industry calls 'boar taint.' Piglets' teeth are clipped to prevent injuries to littermates or their mom's teats while nursing, but it can also cause painful dental issues and infections. Egg producers cut off part of hens' beaks because when they're tightly packed into factory farms, they tend to peck at each other, which can lead to injury and death. To make cattle easier for humans to handle, ranchers dehorn calves by sticking them with a hot iron or applying a caustic paste. A piglet being castrated at factory farm in Poland. The procedure is done without anesthesia, so one worker holds down the struggling, squealing piglet while the other makes an incision on the scrotum and pulls out the testes. Andrew Skowron / We Animals A calf with blood running down their face stands inside an individual enclosure on a farm in Czechia. This young animal has recently undergone a painful dehorning procedure. Lukas Vincour / Zvířata Nejíme / We Animals Meat production is a high-volume business, with tens of billions of mammals and birds — and over 1 trillion fish — churned through the system each year. Administering pain relief to the animals subjected to these painful procedures would be the least meat companies could do, but most don't because it would cost them a little extra time and money. And even when performed with pain relief, such procedures remain cruel — removing animals' tails, horns, and testicles, or shortening their beaks and teeth, reduces their ability to communicate or perform basic biological functions. Switzerland is one of a handful of countries where farmers are required to give animals pain relief before these painful procedures. But the small country still imports plenty of meat and other animal products from abroad. Swiss animal advocates have long advocated for banning imported products that come from animals mutilated without pain relief, but Swiss policymakers have rejected that idea and instead settled on increased transparency in labeling as a compromise. It's an unusual law, and although it falls short of what animal advocates want, it's refreshing to see a country take this step toward transparency. Switzerland's disclosure requirement pierces the veil of the shrink-wrapped slab of meat consumers see in the grocery store or prepared in dishes at restaurants, suggesting that meat is simply an inanimate product rather than the flesh of a once-living, feeling creature who suffered. A mere disclosure provides no respite from that suffering, but it's something. Because in the US and around the world, meat, milk, and egg companies go to great lengths to conceal the horrors of animal agriculture from the public. By requiring food companies and restaurants to slap what amounts to a warning label on their products, Switzerland is effectively treating meat produced with particularly cruel yet common practices as a vice — much like many countries do with tobacco products. Whether or not these labels steer consumers away from meat or push meat producers to change their practices might hold important lessons in what works to reduce animal suffering. The double bind of the meat industry's concealment and consumers' willful ignorance Mutilation without pain relief is, of course, just one of a litany of welfare issues that farmed animals suffer from birth to death. Animals raised for food are often overcrowded, forced to live in their own waste, exposed to disease, confined in cages, violently and artificially inseminated, roughly handled, inhumanely transported, and bred to grow bigger and faster, causing health and welfare issues. Problems at slaughterhouses abound, too. 'Significantly more products and production methods should be subject' to Switzerland's new labeling regulations, Vanessa Gerritsen, a lawyer for the Swiss animal advocacy organization Tier im Recht, told me in an email. The vast majority of the world's farmed animals are raised on factory farms with standard practices that would be illegal animal cruelty in many countries if done to a dog or cat. Yet most consumers — at least in the US — believe they don't buy animal products from factory farms. Cows stand in the milking parlor at the Lake Breeze Dairy farm in Malone, Wisconsin. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images Turkeys in a Michigan factory farm. Rudy Malmquist Some of that disconnect can be attributed to industry deceit. Meat industry trade groups in the US and abroad have successfully lobbied for laws that make it a crime for activists to document animal cruelty on farms. And in the US, meat companies are allowed to claim just about whatever they want on their labels and in advertising. That's led to extensive 'humanewashing' in which brands mislead consumers into believing their animals are treated decently. But there's also the problem of willful ignorance: Some research has found that consumers prefer to avoid information about meat production. Switzerland's new regulation represents a massive experiment in pushing back against this inclination, forcing people to think about the cruelty that goes into their pork chops and egg omelettes at a particularly important time: the moment they're deciding what to eat at a restaurant or buy at a grocery store. But will it be enough to actually change what people eat? 'Hard to say,' Alice Di Concetto, founder and executive director of the European Institute for Animal Law & Policy, told me in an email. 'Studies tend to show that consumers base their purchasing choices almost exclusively on price.' But it could have an impact on the decisions of restaurants and grocery stores, she said, 'who might be reluctant to offer these products, anticipating that they won't sell well as a result of carrying a negative claim on them.' Switzerland implemented a similar law in 2000, requiring disclosure labels on imported eggs from producers that cage their hens (it was already illegal to cage egg-laying hens in Switzerland). After that law, Gerritsen told me, imports significantly declined. Di Concetto also pointed to a labeling law in the European Union, which requires that egg cartons on grocery store shelves include a code that corresponds to a specific production method, such as caged, indoor, outdoor, or organic. Di Concetto credits these egg-labeling requirements for helping initiate the EU egg industry's transition to cage-free production. But, she said, 'it's not so much that consumers wouldn't buy caged eggs. It's mostly due to manufacturers not liking the idea of selling products that indicated something so detrimental.' The new Swiss law, though, will require disclosures far more direct and visceral, and harder for the public to ignore. At bare minimum, for consumers to make more humane choices — whether that means eating less meat or buying from farms that avoid some of the cruelest factory farm practices — they at least need to be informed. Right now, meat, milk, and egg labels tell consumers little about animal treatment or actively lie to them. Switzerland's experiment will soon show us what happens when that's forced to change, if only a little.
Vox
07-07-2025
- Business
- Vox
The old suburban frontier is closing. Here's what the new one could look like.
is a deputy editor for Vox's Future Perfect section. Before joining Vox, she reported on factory farming for national outlets including the Guardian, the Intercept, and elsewhere. But that abundance is already becoming a thing of the past. Across Sunbelt metros like Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta, housing supply growth has actually plummeted since the early 2000s, to rates almost as low as in hyper-expensive coastal cities, according to a new working paper by the leading urban economists Edward Glaeser and Joe Gyourko. Housing costs in these metros, while still lower than major coastal cities, have surged as a result. Gyourko, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who decades ago documented slowing housing growth in superstar cities like New York and San Francisco, told me he was surprised to find the same pattern again unfolding, as if on a 20-year lag, in a region known for its lax regulations and enthusiasm for building things. Looking at the data, he thought, 'Wow, Phoenix and Miami look like LA did as it was gentrifying in the '80s.' Although metro Phoenix, to unpack one example, is building a similar absolute number of homes as it did in the early 2000s, its population has grown by more than 58 percent since the turn of the century, so as a share of its current housing stock — the number that most matters, Gyourko says — it's now building far less. If that trend continues even as demand to live in the Sunbelt remains undimmed, he said, 'you would expect them to start to look more and more like Los Angeles.' By 2045, Arizona might be facing unaffordability and population loss crises much like those choking California today. For many years, suburbs and exurbs have been the leading drivers of housing growth in Sunbelt cities, capturing most of the new population moving to the region. 'The concepts 'Sunbelt city' and 'suburb' are nearly synonymous,' as historian Becky Nicolaides put it. But the slowdown in new housing builds across the region, Glaeser and Gyourko found, has been especially pronounced in well-off, low-density suburbs with desirable amenities like good schools. These suburbs have plenty of room to densify and welcome more neighbors — they just aren't doing it. 'America's suburban frontier,' the authors warn, 'appears to be closing.' The findings suggest that the fundamentals of housing in Raleigh, Orlando, or Miami are not so different from every other hot real estate market in the country. In most parts of the US with a growing economy and good jobs, the housing market has become badly broken to a degree that transcends the usual explanations, like regional differences in construction licensure rules or environmental review requirements — although those factors, without a doubt, matter. So what's really going on? Housing markets are complicated, and economic shocks like the Great Recession and the recent spike in interest rates have surely played a role. But the downturn in housing builds predates both those things, Glaeser and Gyourko found, suggesting a deeper cause. The Sunbelt may be confronting the same obstacle that has paralyzed growth elsewhere. It's one of the most taken-for-granted facts of modern American life: the suburban model itself, and all its attendant political, regulatory, and financial problems. Since the end of World War II, housing supply growth in the United States has overwhelmingly been driven by suburban sprawl radiating ever outward from city centers. Instead of building up, with density, we largely built out. But that engine may be running out of steam — and as a strategy for filling our national housing shortage, it's failing spectacularly. 'It hasn't been working in the supply-constrained coastal markets for four decades. What's new is it looks like it's starting not to work in the Sunbelt,' the country's fastest-growing, most economically dynamic region, Gyourko said. 'That changes the nature of America.' The strangeness of housing policy in the US can be summed up like this: On a national level, we long for growth. On a local level, we do everything possible to smother it. That contradiction stems, in part, from our dependence on sprawl. America is a nation of suburbs — that's certainly not changing any time soon. And there's nothing inherently wrong with suburbs, a housing arrangement as old and varied as human civilization. But to solve the housing crisis that is at the root of so many national problems, Americans will have to fundamentally rethink what the suburb is, and what it could become. American suburbia, briefly explained If you, like me, are too online for your own good, perhaps you've seen some version of this meme. That image is a pretty accurate reflection of what American cities used to look like by default. Our suburbs, too, once looked much like this — remnants of the pattern can still be seen in places like Oak Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), University City, Missouri (outside St. Louis), or Brookline, Massachusetts (neighboring Boston). Derived from the Latin word 'suburbium,' meaning the area under or near a city, suburbs are so old that if you've ever thought about them, congratulations, you've been thinking about the Roman Empire. Of course, what dense, older suburbs like Brookline or Oak Park have in common is that, like the cities they neighbor, they were largely laid out before mass car ownership. It was only relatively recently that suburbs became synonymous with a specific, car- and sprawl-oriented development style. If the Western frontier defined American optimism in the 19th century, the suburban frontier defined it in the 20th. It's a story you may already know in broad strokes: Before World War II, only a small share of Americans lived in suburbs, with the bulk living in rural areas and central cities. After the war, a complex alchemy of factors — including a national economic and population boom, federally backed mortgages that favored suburban homes, a Great Depression- and war-era housing shortage, and white flight — produced one of the greatest social and spatial transformations in the country's history. It would be easy, from our 21st-century perspective, to simply be bewildered by the urban planning decisions that fueled this wave of suburbanization. But those choices make a lot more sense when framed by the daily realities of mid-century urban life. Much of the prewar urban housing stock was genuinely terrible — many people lacked access to a full bathroom or even a flush toilet. Cities were still manufacturing centers and had the pollution to go with it. Americans who could afford to move were understandably pulled toward modern, spacious houses being built on an unprecedented scale in new tracts outside the city. Homes in suburban Virginia, 1950s. As this shift took place, the nature of the suburbs changed, from an organic extension of the city to what must have looked, to some at the time, like an alien planet. By 1970, most Americans dwelling in metropolitan areas — meaning a core city and its adjacent areas — were living in suburbs, and by 2010, most Americans were, full stop. Sunbelt cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, which in the decades after World War II grew from little more than desert towns to megacities, developed in a particularly suburban, car-dependent form. Related The deceptively simple reform that could unlock more housing For a long time, that model worked well for a lot of people. But there was a problem that slowly made itself felt: Though they were themselves the product of a major transformation, postwar American suburbia relied on a restrictive set of rules that made suburban neighborhoods, once built, very difficult to change. Irrationally rigid regulations on housing remain in place across the country today. If you live in a single-family home, there's a very good chance you're banned from dividing your house into a duplex, redeveloping it into a triplex or apartment building, renting out a floor to a tenant, or opening a corner store. These rules are set out by a system known as zoning: local regulations on what kind of things can be built where. Zoning, including single-family-exclusive zoning, first spread across the US in the early 20th century (before that, development was far more freewheeling and improvised). It reached its full expression after World War II, when it became a near-universal toolkit for shaping suburban America. At first glance, the idea of zoning seems reasonable enough: Factories that emit toxic pollutants should probably be kept away from residential areas, for example. In practice, it has amounted to an extraordinarily heavy-handed, totalizing form of central planning controlling the fabric of daily life. The overwhelming majority of residential land nationwide, as housing advocates are fond of saying, bans the construction of anything other than detached single-family houses — and that's just the beginning. Zoning codes include legions of other rules, often including minimum size requirements (effectively banning starter homes) and mandatory parking spots for at least two cars. Apartments, in many areas, are zoned out of existence. Suburbs exist all over the world. But the US, despite our national reputation for freedom and individualism, is relatively unique in having such a prescriptive segregation of land uses governing what people are allowed to do with what is, don't forget, their own property, as Sonia Hirt, an architecture and planning professor at the University of Georgia, explains in her book Zoned in the USA. We're also unusual in granting privileged status to one specific, costly, and resource-intensive type of housing. 'I could find no evidence in other countries that this particular form — the detached single-family home — is routinely, as in the United States, considered to be so incompatible with all other types of urbanization as to warrant a legally defined district all its own, a district where all other major land uses and building types are outlawed,' Hirt writes. Suburban-style zoning has become widespread not just in suburbs proper, but also in core cities, many of which have adopted similar zoning codes that would have made their original growth and housing diversity impossible. In that sense, suburbia isn't just a specific place — it's a mindset that's become the default American settlement pattern. For mid-century home buyers, the costs of our suburban revolution were distant. But it didn't take long for those costs to become felt nationally. The suburban wall By rigidly defining what a community is allowed to look like, suburban zoning has done more than simply shape the physical form of our cities. It has also made it all but impossible for many communities to adapt and grow, as human societies always have, which has created severe distortions in housing markets. 'The suburban development model is built on the premise of stasis,' as Charles Marohn, a civil engineer and founder of the advocacy group Strong Towns, has put it. 'These neighborhoods are frozen at their current number of households, no matter how much the surrounding city transforms. No matter how many jobs are created. No matter how desirable the area is or how high rents get,' he wrote in his recent book Escaping the Housing Trap. That stasis quickly froze America's most desirable metro areas, leaving them unable to build enough housing to meet demand. And when housing becomes scarce relative to the number of people who want to live in the community, it simply becomes more expensive. Starting in the 1970s, home construction plummeted and prices soared in high-opportunity coastal cities because of restrictions on supply. Los Angeles, incredibly, downzoned its residential areas to such an extent between 1960 and 1990 that its total population capacity, as measured by the number of households it's zoned to accommodate, declined from 10 million people to about 4 million, which is the level the city's population has hovered around for the last decade. The upshot is that many of America's metropolitan areas have become dominated by what economist Issi Romem identified in 2018 as a 'dormant suburban interior.' After World War II, cities and suburbs built out and out, mostly low-density single-family homes, before they largely stopped building altogether because zoning laws forced them to maintain an inflexible suburban form. Despite a few pockets of dense growth, most residential areas have been locked out of building incrementally and thickening up, even as demand to live there increases. This graphic shows the progression of housing construction over time in the Los Angeles area. Issi Romem/BuildZoom ( When a high-demand city refuses to allow greater housing density, the dynamic becomes progressively more toxic, not just because homes become more scarce, but also because market incentives can push developers to replace cheaper, smaller single-family houses with more costly McMansions (as opposed to, in a healthier market, building apartments or a set of townhomes that could house more people in the same amount of space, for less money per household). In expensive cities, proposals to build more housing have, famously, often been blocked by angry neighbors (derisively called NIMBYs) who rely on a labyrinthine tangle of zoning laws to foil change that they don't like. Now, that vicious cycle is poised to catch up with the South and Southwest, where, Glaeser and Gyourko believe, the decline in housing starts is likely a function of incumbent residents using regulation to make it harder to build. 'People in the Sunbelt, now that things have gotten big enough, they've figured out what the Bostonians figured out a long time ago, and the Angelenos,' Gyourko said. (And plenty of anecdotal evidence from local housing fights in the Sunbelt, Slate reporter Henry Grabar has noted, points to the same thing.) Suburbia offered Americans an implicit bargain: Neighborhoods would never have to change, and we could instead accommodate more people by sprawling outward forever. To a great extent, that's what's happened, and it's given us lots of single-family homes, but also a mind-boggling expanse of costly, deteriorating infrastructure, nightmare commutes, unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions, sedentary, disease-promoting lifestyles, and one of the highest car crash death rates in the developed world. And we're still in a housing crisis, because even in the sprawl-hardened, car-loving Southwest, sprawl has its limits. I put this question to Gyourko: Once the most distant, low-density exurbs of, say, Dallas declare themselves full, why don't developers simply keep building the next ring of sprawl 50-plus miles away? 'People don't want to live that far,' he said (he later clarified that we don't know the precise outer limit beyond which housing demand dwindles). Human prosperity has always depended on proximity to one another and to opportunity — and even in 2025, it still does. Let people do things The US has gotten steadily more suburban over the last century, but not uniformly so. In the early 2010s, many core cities, including Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, grew faster than suburbs, due to a combination of younger generations' increasing interest in urban lifestyles and a collapse in suburban home construction after the Great Recession. Some of the most expensive homes in the country are consistently those located in dense, vibrant prewar cities, a clear signal that there's high demand for those amenities. The revival of cities in the last few decades and the ongoing suburbanization of the US, Gyourko said, have both been happening at the same time. Nevertheless, many Americans today, particularly post-Covid, still demonstrate a preference for the suburbs, for all sorts of reasons, including cheaper, larger homes for families of the kind that can be hard to find in cities. Americans are also spending more time alone and at home, and working remotely, which might increase their preference for spacious living quarters and diminish interest in urban life. 'There's a pendulum that swings between loving the city and loving the suburbs, and it was absolutely shifting towards loving the city' in the 2010s, Romem told me. 'And then the pandemic came and undid all of that.' The disruptions of Covid also revealed the fragility created by American-style urban planning. Because of our preexisting shortage of about 3.8 million homes, a small share of Americans moving residences upended housing markets across the country. We're starting to see big shifts in housing policy Plenty of cities and states, especially since the post-2020 run-up in home prices, have finally begun to take their largely self-inflicted housing shortages seriously. 'A bunch of broken policies that seemed unfixable a year ago are actively being fixed,' said M. Nolan Gray of California YIMBY. The sheer volume of new laws meant to make it easier to build homes has been overwhelming, reflecting the morass of local obstacles. Here are just a few: 2016 : California : California made it much easier to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs), also known as mother-in-law suites or granny flats, alongside houses on single-family lots. The state has since passed several additional laws to close loopholes that localities were using to block ADU construction. 2018 : Minneapolis : Minneapolis became the first major US city to end all single-family-exclusive zoning, prompting national discussion about why we ban apartments in residential areas at all. 2019 : Oregon : Oregon required municipalities larger than 10,000 people to allow duplexes, and those over 25,000 to allow duplexes, triplexes, and other multi-family housing, on single-family lots. 2023 : Montana and Washington state required many cities and suburbs to allow multi-family housing and ADUs. 2025: California : California exempted apartment construction in its cities and suburbs from onerous environmental review requirements that in practice have often been weaponized to block density. North Carolina's House unanimously passed a bill to prevent local governments from requiring parking spots — which are expensive and take up lots of space — in new housing. If it sounds draconian for states to interfere in cities' and suburbs' policies, consider that the US is unusual in its hyperlocal control over housing. Although huge barriers remain, we're just beginning to see the contours of a major shift in how housing in America gets regulated and built. Skyrocketing housing prices since the pandemic have given new fuel to the YIMBY (or 'Yes in my backyard') movement, which for more than a decade has sought to legalize the full diversity of housing options across the US. At bottom, YIMBYism is about freeing cities and suburbs from 'the zoning straitjacket,' as M. Nolan Gray, an urban planner and senior director of legislation and research for the housing advocacy nonprofit California YIMBY, put it. In other words, he said: 'Let people do things.' 'A city is the ultimate form of emergent order. A city represents the plans of the millions of people who live there and work there and play there and study there,' he said. 'The basic instinct of zoning is that we can sit down and write out the exact appropriate types of uses, scale of those uses, and exactly where those uses can go — and it's just such a presumptuous way to govern a city.' The deeper implication is not just that we need more housing, but also that suburbs must be allowed to function like the miniature cities they are. They should be flexible enough to support a range of human aspirations — not just the hallmarks of stereotypical suburban life, but also the amenities of urban life. 'No neighborhood can be exempt from change,' as Marohn put it. Zoning exclusively for detached single-family homes, for example, has never made much sense, but it especially doesn't make sense in 2025, when most Americans live in household sizes of two or one. Recognizing this, along with the severity of their housing crises, a number of cities and states have gotten rid of single-family-exclusive zoning in the last decade, along with other barriers to building housing. But because zoning codes are enormously complicated, repealing one barrier often isn't enough to actually allow multifamily housing to get built — things like height limits or excessive parking minimums can still make it infeasible. 'Housing is like a door with a bunch of deadbolts on it,' Alli Thurmond Quinlan, an architect and small-scale developer based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, told me. 'You have to unlock all the deadbolts, but as soon as you do, there's an enormous amount of human creativity' that rushes in. She stresses that communities shouldn't be afraid of going too far in repealing zoning rules, and that if anything, they should err on the side of going further. Repeal minimum lot sizes, and a developer might find a way to build a cute narrow house in a gap between existing houses. Removing parking requirements made it possible to build this lovely set of densely clustered cottages — a development style that can blend harmoniously into suburban neighborhoods — in Atlanta at a significantly lower cost: Courtesy of Kronberg Urbanists + Architects A single-family house, meanwhile, can be turned into a duplex: Google Maps snapshot of a duplex in Denver. Right now, what little density is being added to cities and suburbs often comes in the form of large apartment buildings (you may know them as 'gentrification buildings'). There's nothing wrong with those, and they have an important role to play in mitigating the housing shortage. Yet many people don't want them built in single-family neighborhoods. Making it legal to incrementally densify single-family neighborhoods would allow suburbs to still look like suburbs, while greatly increasing their population capacity and their ability to support essential services like public transit. 'The dormant suburban sea is so vast that if the taboo on densification there were broken, even modest gradual redevelopment — tearing down one single-family home at a time and replacing it with a duplex or a small apartment building — could grow the housing stock immensely,' Romem wrote in 2018. That style of neighborhood development — gradually over time, rather than building to completion all at once — also happens to be the secret to creating places with a visually appealing vernacular character, Romem said. 'True character comes from layer upon layer over a span of many years, from many people's different, disparate decisions. And that requires change.' Before-and-after renderings of a suburb undergoing densification and redesign, from architect and planner Galina Tachieva's book Sprawl Repair Manual Courtesy of Galina Tachieva, DPZCoDesign What should suburbs be for? At the dawn of mass suburbanization, Americans had legitimate reasons for wanting to move out of cities, where substandard housing and overcrowding were still commonplace. But 'one generation's solutions can become the next generation's problems,' as journalists Ezra Klein (a Vox co-founder) and Derek Thompson wrote in their book Abundance. The same forces that built the American dream 80 years ago are now suffocating it, inflicting profound pain on families across the country. For me, this subject is personal: I've lived in apartments literally my entire life, a form of housing often treated as second-class, if it's even permitted to exist. Some of that has been in cities, and some in a suburb. My immigrant mother worked incredibly hard to find homes that were safe, stable, and affordable to raise a child in. America gave me everything, but our national housing reality made things far more difficult for her than they needed to be. There's no shortage of wonky policy ideas about how to fix housing in the US — and they go far beyond just zoning codes (you don't want to hear me get started on building codes or impact fees). We will also need a society-wide paradigm shift beyond policy: The financial and real estate industries will need to relearn models for supporting incremental densification, which, experts consistently told me, have fallen by the wayside since the entrenchment of sprawl and restrictive zoning. More than that, our minds will have to open up to the inevitability of constant change, and abandon the idea that any of us has a right to veto our community's evolution. As Marohn points out in Escaping the Housing Trap, 'a community that has lost all affordable starter housing already has changed irreversibly. It is only the buildings that have not.' The suburbs, above all, must be allowed to be plural. Across cultures and centuries, people of all sorts of circumstances have lived on the outskirts of urban life. Today, Americans of every social class seek homes in the suburbs. Some are affluent; many are not. Others want to be near a good school, a job, a support system, or simply a hard-won foothold of affordability. It's not the role of a planning board or a legacy zoning map to decide. We don't know what the future of the suburbs will be — but we can free them to become what we need of them.
