By Claire Rush, Janie Har and Michael Casey
The Associated Press

PORTLAND — Tossing tent poles, blankets and a duffel bag into a shopping cart and three wagons, Will Taylor spent a summer morning helping friends tear down what had been their home and that of about a dozen others. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

Contractors from the city of Portland had arrived to break down the stretch of tents and tarps on a side street behind a busy intersection. People had an hour to vacate the encampment, one of more than a dozen cleared that July day, according to city data.

Whatever they couldn’t take with them was placed in clear plastic bags, tagged with the date and location of the removal and sent to an 11,000-square-foot (1,020 square meter) warehouse storing thousands like them.

“It can get hard,” said Taylor, 32, who has been swept at least three times in the four years he’s been homeless. “It is what it is. … I just let it go.”

Angelique Risby, 29, watched as workers in neon-yellow vests shoveled piles of litter into black garbage bags. Risby, who has been homeless for two years, said she was prepared for a drill she’s done multiple times.

“Everything that I own,” she said, “can fit on my wagon.”

Tent encampments have long been a fixture of West Coast cities, but are now spreading across the U.S. The federal count of homeless people reached 580,000 last year, driven by lack of affordable housing, a pandemic that economically wrecked households, and lack of access to mental health and addiction treatment.

Records obtained by The Associated Press show attempts to clear encampments increased in cities from Los Angeles to New York as public pressure grew to address what some residents say are dangerous and unsanitary living conditions. But despite tens of millions of dollars spent in recent years, there appears to be little reduction in the number of tents propped up on sidewalks, in parks and by freeway off-ramps.

Homeless people and their advocates say the sweeps are cruel and a waste of taxpayer money. They say the answer is more housing, not crackdowns.

The AP submitted data requests to 30 U.S. cities regarding encampment sweeps and received at least partial responses from about half.

In Phoenix, the number of encampments swept soared to more than 3,000 last year from 1,200 in 2019. Las Vegas removed about 2,500 camps through September, up from 1,600 in 2021. And in Minneapolis, camp removals have more than doubled from last year to 44 through Nov. 9, according to city records.

But even officials at cities that don’t collect data confirmed that public camping is consuming more of their time, and they are starting to track numbers, budget for security and trash disposal, and beef up or launch programs to connect homeless people to housing and services.

“We are seeing an increase in these laws at the state and local level that criminalize homelessness, and it’s really a misguided reaction to this homelessness crisis,” said Scout Katovich, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of sweeps and property seizures in a dozen cities, including Minneapolis, Miami, Albuquerque, Anchorage and Boulder, Colorado.

“These laws and these practices of enforcement do nothing to actually alleviate the crisis and instead they keep people in this vicious cycle of poverty,” she said.

But California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state is home to nearly one-third of the country’s homeless population, says leaving hazardous makeshift camps to fester is neither compassionate nor an option.

He is among Democratic and Republican leaders urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a controversial 9th Circuit appellate court ruling that prohibits local governments from clearing encampments without first assuring everyone living there is offered a bed indoors.

San Francisco, which was sued by the ACLU of Northern California last year for its sweeps and property seizures, is under a court order to enforce the ruling.

“I hope this goes to the Supreme Court,” said Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, in a September interview with news outlet Politico. “And that’s a hell of a statement coming from a progressive Democrat.”

Earlier this month, crews in Denver erected metal fencing as police officers called to residents to leave an encampment covering several downtown blocks. A bonfire blazed against temperatures in the teens and snow covered the ground around tents.

“The word ‘sweep’ that they use … that’s kind of how it feels, like being swept like trash,” said David Sjoberg, 35. “I mean we’re not trash, we’re people.”

He said he and his wife would “wander a couple blocks from here and see if we get yelled at for being there.”

David Ehler Jr., 52, left the encampment with his toiletries, a sleeping bag, tent and a propane heater.

Ehler has been homeless in Denver for about two years after a friend kicked him out. He said work was hard to come by in Connecticut, where he lived before Colorado, and the public has no idea how big a problem homelessness is.

“It started ever since the COVID, people losing their jobs, losing their houses, losing their apartments, losing everything,” he said. “And this is where they end up.”

Sometimes, numbers can’t explain what a city is doing.

The city of Los Angeles said its sanitation department responded to more than 4,000 requests a month from the public at the end of 2022 to address homeless encampments, double the amount the previous year.

But the agency would not explain whether that meant the encampment was dismantled or simply cleaned around or how large the encampments were, directing AP to the city attorney’s website for definitions. The city defines an encampment as a place where at least one person is living outdoors.

In contrast, Portland clears some 19 encampments every day on average, according to the mayor’s office. Crews have shut down nearly 5,000 camps in the city of 650,000 since November 2022, but residents continue to report new clusters that need to be dismantled.

Crews have even found bodies of overdose victims in tents, said Sara Angel, operations manager for the contractor that clears encampments for the city.

“If we never cleaned a camp in the city of Portland, I just don’t know what Portland would look like,” she said. “I don’t think that we’re making it better by moving them, but I don’t think that we’re making it worse.”

Removing encampments is costly — an expense more cities, counties and states have to budget for. Several cities queried by the AP provided some cost breakdowns, but officials at others said comprehensive costs were difficult to get given the multiple departments involved, including police, sanitation and public health.

Denver reported spending nearly $600,000 on labor and waste disposal in 2021 and 2022 to clean about 230 large encampments, some more than once. Phoenix said it spent nearly $1 million last year to clear encampments.

Despite all that spending, said Masood Samereie, little seems to change on the streets. The San Francisco real estate broker has seen businesses lose customers because of people camped on sidewalks, some clearly in mental distress, and he wants tents gone.

“It’s throwing money at it without any tangible or any real results,” Samereie said.

Being homeless is supposed to be a temporary event, he added. “Unfortunately, it’s becoming a way of life, and that is 100% incorrect.”

For homeless people, sweeps can be traumatizing. They often lose identification documents, as well as cellphones, laptops and personal items. They lose their connection to a community they’ve come to rely on for support.

Roxanne Simonson, 60, said she had a panic attack during one of the four times she was swept in Portland. She recalled feeling dangerously overheated in her tent. “I started yelling at them, ‘Call an ambulance, I can’t breathe.’ And then I changed my mind, because if I go, then I would lose all my stuff,” she said.

And yet, cities can’t stand by and do nothing, said Sam Dodge, who oversees encampment removals for the city of San Francisco. His department, created by the mayor in 2018, coordinates multiple agencies to place people into housing so crews can clear tents.

“Saying, ‘This is not working, this is dangerous, you can do better than this, you have a brighter future than this,’ I think that’s caring for people,” said Dodge, who has worked with homeless people for more than two decades. “It seems immoral to me to just … let people waste away.”

One August morning, Dodge and his crew surveyed about a dozen structures and tents, some inches away from vehicles zipping by.

Four outreach workers fanned out, asking people if they had a case manager or wanted shelter indoors. Police officers stood by as Department of Public Works employees, masked and wearing gloves, hauled away a rolled-up carpet. The block was crammed with bicycles, ladders, chairs, mattresses, buckets, cooking pots, shoes and cardboard.

City officials are particularly frustrated by people who have housing, but won’t stay in it.

Michael Johnson, 40, has been homeless in San Francisco for six years. Before that, he lived with his pregnant girlfriend and was a driver for a commuter van tech start-up. But he lost his job, and their baby died.
He was assigned a coveted one-room pre-fabricated structure with a bed, desk and chair, a window and locking door. But his friends aren’t there and to him, it feels like jail, so he’s sleeping in a tent.

At his tent, friends hang out, including Charise Haley, 31, who says shelter rules can make grownups feel like children. She left one shelter because residents weren’t allowed to keep room keys and had to ask staff to get in.

“Then you get pushed somewhere else,” she said. “There’s too many directions. But never an end solution.”

There are many reasons why someone might reject shelter, say homeless people and their advocates. Some have been assaulted at shelters, or had their belongings stolen. Sometimes, they don’t want to pare down their belongings, or follow rules that prohibit drugs and drinking, officials say.

Of the 20 people at the San Francisco encampment, six accepted temporary housing and seven declined, said Francis Zamora, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management at the time of the August operation.

Two people already had housing and five wouldn’t communicate with outreach workers, Zamora said. The city has connected more than 1,500 people to housing this year. It’s unclear, however, if they remain housed.

Many cities say they link camp residents to housing, but track records are mixed. Homeless people and their advocates say there are not nearly enough temporary beds, permanent housing or social services for drug or behavioral health counseling so people caught up in sweeps just get kicked down the road.

In New York City, more than 2,300 people were forcibly removed from encampments from March to November 2022, according to a June report from Comptroller Brad Lander. Only 119 accepted temporary shelter, and just three eventually got permanent housing.

Meanwhile, tent encampments had returned to a third of the sites surveyed.

“They just totally failed to connect people to shelter or to housing,” Lander, who opposes sweeps, told the AP. “If you’re gonna help them, you have to build trust with them to move them into housing and services. The sweeps really went in the opposite direction.”

A spokesperson for Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Charles Lutvak, disagreed. He said 70% of camp sites cleared were not re-established and homeless residents accepted offers of shelter at a rate six times higher than under the previous administration.

“Despite the inherent difficulty of this work, our efforts have been indisputably successful,” Lutvak said in a statement.

The city of Phoenix cleared out a massive downtown homeless encampment by a court-ordered deadline this month, and said it had helped more than 500 people find beds in shelters and motels.

Encampments were not a serious issue in Minneapolis until the pandemic, when they became more commonplace and much larger, drawing thousands of complaints. In response, the city closed down more than two dozen sites where 383 people were camped from March 2022 until February.

At the same time, Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, launched a program last year aimed at finding short- and long-term housing for homeless people, including some living in encampments.

“We are hyper-focused on housing,” said Danielle Werder, manager of the county’s Office to End Homelessness. “We’re not walking around with socks and water bottles. We’re walking around saying, ‘What do you need?'”

In Portland, the encampment dismantled in July was cleared again, in September and November. Two dozen newly installed boulders helped keep the camp from being reestablished along parts of the sidewalk.

Kieran Hartnett, who’s lived in the neighborhood for seven years, said there was fighting, drug use, open fires and vehicle break-ins around the encampment. Some tents were on grass just outside his house, which was particularly stressful when people started acting in erratic ways.

He hopes the people moved from the site are getting help.

“I understand the argument that clearing them just moves them to somewhere else, and they don’t really have a better place to go,” he said. “On the same account, I feel like you can’t allow things to just fester.”

“There’s not a good solution to it,” he said.

Thomas Peipert, Angeliki Kastanis and Christopher Weber also contributed to this report.

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By ISABELLA O’MALLEY
Associated Press

The Energy Department is making a push to strengthen the U.S. battery supply chain, announcing up to $3.5 billion for companies that produce batteries and the critical minerals that go into them.

Batteries are seen as an important climate solution because they can power cars, which are a major cause of climate change when they burn gasoline. They are also a solution when they store clean electricity made from solar panels or wind turbines, allowing gas or coal power plants that cause climate change to turn off.

Lithium ion is currently the dominant battery type both for electric vehicles and clean electricity storage. The DOE wants to strengthen the supply because even though there is plenty of work underway to develop alternatives, it estimates demand for lithium batteries will increase up to ten times by 2030.

The Biden-Harris administration has a goal of lowering the pollution that causes climate change to zero by 2050 and for half of all new cars sales to be electric in 2030.

Some officials, industry experts and others concerned about climate change uneasy supply of battery materials will not keep pace with demand. Others worry that too much of the industry is anchored in Asia.

Jodie Lutkenhaus, professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, said she is closely watching U.S. battery production and manufacturing. “I’m worried that we may not catch up and end up in the same situation we’re in now with the semiconductor industry,” she said. When assembly lines stopped during the pandemic, it stalled manufacturing in Asia, resulting in a global microchip shortage that affected the availability of vehicles and electronics.

“The same thing can happen with batteries if we don’t diversify where batteries are made and where materials are sourced,” Lutkenhaus said. “It is essential that the U.S. participates in battery production and manufacturing so that we can avoid global shortages of batteries, should that ever happen.”

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law assigned $6 billion in total funding for battery material processing and manufacturing. An initial round went to 15 projects including companies that mine critical minerals like graphite and nickel, used in lithium batteries. This second round will fund similar companies but also those that rely on alternative chemistries, such as flow and sodium batteries.

Here’s how it works: A company might want to build a factory to make cathode materials for electric cars. It determines the cost of building the facility, commits to covering half of the cost, and the government grant would cover the other half, if the company is selected.

Albemarle, a major lithium producer, received funding in the first round for a facility in Kings Mountain, North Carolina that processes lithium from ore collected around the world.

The company said that in addition to EVs, demand for lithium also comes electronics like medical devices and smartphones. Without the DOE funding, the project “would have likely progressed along a different time scale,” it said in an email.

While the funding may not have been make-or-break for them, Matthew McDowell, associate professor of engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, said the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act have “dramatically” transformed the U.S. battery manufacturing sector in the past three years. He is excited, he said, about the next generation of batteries for clean energy storage, including solid state batteries, which could potentially hold more energy than lithium ion.

Tom Moerenhout, a professor at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it will be a big challenge to ramp up the global supply of critical minerals for the projected battery demand in 2030. “It’s pretty huge, it’s almost scary,” he said, noting that a new mine on average takes 16 years to begin commercial production.

But with the price of lithium rising, Moerenhout said, alternative battery types become more attractive. One he hopes to see scale up is sodium ion batteries to help bolster the electrical grid. “The potential is quite huge,” he said, because they are safe and affordable.

Companies can apply for funding through mid-March.

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By ALEX HARRIS
Miami Herald

MIAMI (AP) — Their billboards used to plaster South Florida. Their contractors went door-to-door, offering expensive and much-needed upgrades to roofs, windows and air conditioning units — with no money down, no credit check needed.

was the biggest player in a novel and controversial industry that bankrolls home improvements and gets paid back by charges added to a homeowner’s tax bill. It was once lauded by politicians and environmentalists, even President Barack Obama, as a key solution to adapting to climate change and hurricanes.

But late last year, Ygrene, the state’s most high-profile green energy finance company, suddenly vanished from the Florida market — a move that left contractors in the middle of projects unpaid and homeowners scrambling to pay big unexpected bills. Now, despite an ongoing investigation into the company by Florida’s attorney general, over a hundred consumer complaints and dozens of lawsuits across the state, Ygrene may be poised to restart business in Florida, its largest and least-regulated market.

For Ray and Kelly Coulter, the company’s abrupt withdrawal came weeks after their brand-new roof and impact windows were installed on their West Palm Beach home.

The email — sent Oct. 5 — said that Ygrene, the company responsible for paying the contractors, had canceled its financing. That left the Coulters with a $45,000 bill that was supposed to have been paid out through manageable and appealing annual payments attached to their tax bill.

“We were sold a bill of goods that’s no longer there,” said Ray, a 53-year-old facilities manager.

Coulter is one of more than a dozen homeowners and contractors across Florida the Miami Herald spoke to about the problems caused by Ygrene’s sudden withdrawal. Public forums, like the Better Business Bureau and Google reviews, are filled with recent posts from frustrated homeowners and contractors.

Jonathan Akl, a St. Lucie-based contractor, said he had 60 projects affected under his former employer, a Broward County-based roof and solar company. Construction ground to a halt, leaving some homeowners with unfinished roofs while the financial details were worked out.

“We had 60 open files with the company. They reneged on every single one of them,” he said. “Literally at midnight they dropped all contracts that weren’t closed. A lot of people got screwed.”

Exactly how many people is hard to pin down. Ygrene wouldn’t share numbers, although the company estimated at one time it signed around 2,000 new contracts a month. Based on conversations with others in his industry, Akl’s personal estimate is that the withdrawal disrupted thousands of contracts statewide.

Back in October, Akl said his former company’s lawyers pondered suing Ygrene but found contract language gave the company the legal right to pull out at any point until the homeowner actually started payments.

That clause can leave a large window of time because Ygrene specializes in a unique type of financial agreement called the property-assessed clean energy program, or PACE.

Companies like Ygrene that provide money for “green” home improvement projects don’t refer to it as a “loan” but — just like banks and mortgage companies — they make money by charging fees and interest rates. But instead of writing a check to the company, homeowners pay only through their annual property tax bill, collected from a lien local governments allow to be placed on the property.

For tens of thousands of customers already paying for completed projects, Ygrene’s sudden exit had no impact. But homeowners and contractors with projects left in limbo told the Herald they had to race to find new funding, or in some cases drop the work altogether. Some homeowners said they paid off contractors with their credit cards, racking up tens of thousands in debt.

Contractors expecting to be paid by the company right after the job also faced uncertain delays and potential battles to collect for their work.

Dr. Mohamed Hegazy said he had trouble applying for a traditional home equity loan to cover the costs instead because Ygrene had already placed a lien on his Miramar home when the project got started, even though it had not yet paid the solar and roofing company for its work.

“This company dropped funding without respect to the people or accountability to anyone,” he said. “They should pay for their mistake.”

Plenty of homeowners, including most of Akl’s clients, eventually switched to another PACE company like Renew Financial, which accepted many of the contracts but charged a slightly higher price.

But pulling out of the incomplete Florida projects was only one of the complaints about Ygrene’s practices.

In October, the Federal Trade Commission and the state of California came down hard on the California-based company over how it sold its financial agreements to sometimes-confused consumers. An FTC order said the company deceived consumers about the potential financial impact of its financing and unfairly placed liens on consumers’ homes without consent. As part of its agreement with the FTC, Ygrene agreed to create a $3 million fund to free “defrauded” customers from liens, as well as to step up its monitoring of contractors and to be honest with consumers.

“Today’s settlement holds Ygrene accountable for their misconduct and establishes guardrails to protect property owners from future deception. PACE financing was meant to help families make important home improvements, but the dishonesty of companies like Ygrene has left some homeowners at risk of losing their homes,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.

Florida’s Attorney General’s office also has received more than 100 complaints against Ygrene since January 2019, and a spokesperson confirmed there is an ongoing investigation into the company but didn’t provide further details.

Now, despite the complaints, probes and five-month-long exit from the market, Ygrene has told South Florida officials it’s ready to begin signing up new customers starting on Monday.

Ygrene declined to answer questions about its withdrawal but Mark Scheffel, vice president of government affairs, said in a statement to the Herald that the company believes the majority of property owners left without funding were able to find another way to pay for projects.

“We look forward to the restart of operations in Miami-Dade,” he wrote.

MIAMI-DADE IS THE LARGEST MARKET

There is no doubt that the company has found a large and receptive market in South Florida. At just over 21,000, Miami-Dade has more homes with PACE agreements than any other county in the state. And the vast majority of them — over 15,000 — are with Ygrene.

“For some people, PACE is particularly good because it’s not based on your income and it doesn’t necessarily count as debt on your debt sheet,” said Phil Stoddard, the former mayor of South Miami and chair of a South Florida board that oversees Ygrene contracts statewide.

While PACE is often incorrectly advertised as a “government program” by some contractors, it’s actually financed by private for-profit companies. PACE lenders make money off fees and interest collected through annual tax bills for five to 30 years, depending on the project. And because it’s a lien, it makes it a “first priority” payoff in the event of a foreclosure. That’s attractive on Wall Street, where PACE providers also bundle and sell their loans.

PACE is available for commercial projects in over a dozen states without generating much controversy. But only three states have changed their statutes to allow PACE residential projects: California, Missouri and Florida.

And in all three, according to federal and state agencies as well as media reports, Ygrene and other PACE companies have racked up allegations of shoddy workmanship by contractors and accusations that salespeople misled prospective customers or even outright lied to them. Previous reporting from the Miami Herald as far back as 2018 revealed problems with the program that left lower-income consumers in particular saddled with more debt than they could handle.

Many of the industry’s problems come from unscrupulous contractors, who often serve as the unofficial sales and marketing arm of the lending companies. Their at-times misleading pitches are such a persistent source of consumer complaints (and lawsuits) that it worries even contractors who are fans of PACE, like Akl.

“A lot of contractors have ruined the reputation of PACE as is, and now with this happening it’s a nail in the coffin,” he said.

In August, Ygrene announced it was suspending operations in Missouri following an investigation by ProPublica that sparked new state oversight and consumer protections. The news outlet found the high-interest loans disproportionately burdened borrowers in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

At the same time, Ygrene also stopped lending in California, where the program was born and Ygrene was founded. California was the first state to see the PACE program, hailed as an innovative solution to paying for pricey green energy projects, take off. And it was the first state to start seeing problems that came with that rapid growth.

Renovate America, at one point one of the biggest PACE lenders on the market, filed for bankruptcy in late 2020 amid allegations from California regulators that the company created a fake construction company to bilk customers, the San Diego Union Tribune reported.

The state started regulating the industry more strictly in 2016, after some customers who didn’t understand (or weren’t told) what they were agreeing to couldn’t afford their new, higher property taxes and lost their homes, according to reporting from KPIX, San Francisco’s CBS affiliate.

The growing list of complaints prompted a since-settled class action civil lawsuit against Ygrene featuring both Florida and California plaintiffs, which accused the company of not telling consumers that their liens would make it harder to sell their homes. For instance, the nation’s largest mortgage holders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, refuse to buy mortgages of homes with PACE liens, which stay with a property until they’d paid in full.

EVERYTHING STOPPED

Still, Ygrene and the PACE industry continued to do more business around the country, until the company admitted in summer 2022 it was done writing new financing in California and Missouri. At the time, Ygrene was making some upbeat business comments, with press releases touting an “expansion beyond PACE” into traditional lending and new funding from venture capital firms.

But the actual numbers did not look so good. In a public presentation given a week before the company called it quits, Ygrene said rising interest rates and investors’ desire for greater profits left the company “squeezed from both ends.”

“Revenue margins have declined over 60 percent,” Ygrene wrote.

Fewer Floridians were applying for Ygrene, too. In summer 2020, applications peaked at more than 4,000 a month, according to a chart included in the presentation. In 2021, those numbers were falling every month. By February 2022, fewer than 2,000 Floridians applied.

In response, Ygrene asked the only government board that oversees it, the little-known South Florida Green Corridor, for approval to raise fees and interest rates on consumers, from up to 7.99 percent to up to 9.99 percent.

“In order to stay competitive in the capital markets, Ygrene must increase rates accordingly,” it said. The board agreed to allow the company to charge more for its services.
But just days later, everything shut down.

‘ALL I GOT WAS A SCRIPT’

Contractors and homeowners got emails that their financing was yanked, their phone calls went straight to voicemail and the website suddenly featured a message — “ATTN: All Ygrene PACE financing operations have been paused.” — directing customers to a traditional home loan service instead.

“I called the number Ygrene gave me and all I got was a script,” said Ray Coulter. “I asked for a copy of that script to be emailed to me, and it wasn’t.”

In a December letter, Ygrene’s CEO, Jim Reinhart, explained the move was due to money problems.

“Ygrene suspended operations in Florida due to the loss of our funding partner making it impossible to fund new projects,” he wrote. “It is Ygrene’s intent and plan to finalize agreements with new capital providers and restart operations in the first quarter of 2023.”

Reinhart wrote that letter to the Green Corridor board, which is staffed with seven South Florida mayors or their representatives.

Because the PACE program collects payments through annual property taxes collected by local governments, it needs an agreement with local governments to operate. For any Ygrene contract in the entire state, that agency is the Green Corridor, which approves rate hikes, new consumer protections and reviews recent complaints and lawsuits against the company.

Stoddard, who as mayor of South Miami has championed environmental causes and pushed to expand solar power, remains an advocate for the program, despite its troubles. He has been the chair of the Corridor’s board for most of the decade it’s been in existence, and he said Ygrene’s withdrawal from the market happened once before and lasted only a couple of months.

“It ran pretty smoothly for the next nine years until this happened,” he said.

COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN?

Stoddard acknowledges, however, that there’s nothing his board can do to ensure that Ygrene, if it does return to the market, can’t drop out once more if there is business trouble. In fact, the latest contract between the Corridor and Ygrene explicitly allows Ygrene to pause financing for up to six months, or more if the Corridor allows it.

Miami-Dade’s Chief Resilience Officer, Jim Murley, also said he wasn’t sure if there was anything the county could do to protect residents from the same thing happening again. Still, he urged county residents with issues with Ygrene or other PACE companies to contact his office for help.

“We’re here to help any of our residents,” he said.

And if more problems arise, Stoddard said he’s confident the Green Corridor board he leads can work with Ygrene to fix them.

“If we get complaints we can work with Ygrene to change the procedures,” he said. “And we’ve done that.”

Florida law offers very few consumer protections for homeowners financing improvements through any PACE company, although some counties have added additional protections. Miami-Dade, although it has more PACE customers than any other county, falls about in the middle of the pack for protections throughout the state. At the top of the spectrum are Palm Beach and Pasco Counties, which have hired staffers in the tax collector’s office to call up everyone who signs up for a PACE lien and walk them through the process.

Stoddard dismissed some of those efforts as “over the top and redundant” and worries that more layers of bureaucracy will make the program harder to use and less attractive to customers.

“We provide consumer protections and we’re proud of it,” he said. “Nothing is ever perfect because consumers don’t always read the fine print on everything they sign.”

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By WILFREDO LEE, TERRY SPENCER and DAVID FISCHER��

Associated Press��

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — A wing of a 12-story beachfront condo building collapsed with a roar in a town outside Miami early Thursday, killing at least one person while trapping residents in rubble and twisted metal. Rescuers pulled dozens of survivors from the tower during the morning and continued to look for more.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett warned that the death toll was likely to rise, saying the building manager told him the tower was quite full at the time of the collapse around 1:30 a.m., but the exact number of people present was unclear.

“The building is literally pancaked,” Burkett said. “That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me that we are going to be as successful as we wanted to be in finding people alive.”

About half of the building’s roughly 130 units were affected, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told a news conference. Rescuers pulled at least 35 people from the wreckage by mid-morning, and heavy equipment was being brought in to help stabilize the structure to give them more access, Raide Jadallah of Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue said.

Sally Heyman, of the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, told CNN that 51 people were unaccounted for — but that some may not have been in the building at the time of the disaster. The tower has a mix of seasonal and year-round residents, and while the building keeps a log of guests staying, it does not keep track of when owners are in residence, Burkett, the mayor, said.

Earlier, Burkett said two people were brought to the hospital, one of whom died. He added that 15 families walked out of the building on their own.

Work was being done on the building’s roof, but Burkett said he did not see how that could have caused the collapse. Authorities did not say what the cause may be.

Gov. Ron DeSantis said officials were “bracing for some bad news just given the destruction that we’re seeing.”

The collapse, which appeared to affect one leg of the L-shaped tower, tore away walls and left a number of homes in the still-standing part of the building exposed in what looked like a giant dollhouse. Television footage showed bunk beds, tables and chairs still left inside. Air conditioner units were hanging from some parts of the building, where wires now dangled.

Piles of rubble and debris surrounded the area just outside the building, and cars up to two blocks away were coated with with a light layer of dust from the debris.

Barry Cohen, 63, said he and his wife were asleep in the building when he first heard what he thought was a crack of lightning. The couple went onto their balcony, then opened the door to the building’s hallway to find “a pile of rubble and dust and smoke billowing around.”

“I couldn’t walk out past my doorway,” said Cohen, the former vice mayor of Surfside. “A gaping hole of rubble.”

He and his wife made it to the basement and found rising water there. They returned upstairs, screamed for help and were eventually brought to safety by firefighters using a cherry-picker.

Cohen said he raised concerns years ago about whether nearby construction might be causing damage to the building after seeing cracked pavers on the pool deck.

At an evacuation site set up in a nearby community center, people who live in buildings neighboring the collapse gathered after being told to flee. Some wept. Some were still dressed in pajamas. Some children tried to sleep on mats spread on the floor. When a news conference about the collapse appeared on the TV, the room went silent.

Jennifer Carr was asleep in a neighboring building when she was awakened by a loud boom and her room shook. She thought it was a thunderstorm but checked the weather app on her phone and saw none. The building’s fire alarms went off, and she and her family went outside and saw the collapse.

“It was devastation,” Carr said. “People were running and screaming.”

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said in a tweet that more than 80 units were “on scene with assistance from municipal fire departments.”

Teams of firefighters walked through the rubble, picking up survivors and carrying them from the wreckage.

Nicolas Fernandez was waiting early Thursday for word on close family friends who lived in the collapsed section of the building.

“Since it happened, I’ve been calling them nonstop, just trying to ring their cellphones as much as we can to help the rescue to see if they can hear the cellphones.”

The seaside condo development was built in 1981 in the southeast corner of Surfside. It had a few two-bedroom units currently on the market, with asking prices of $600,000 to $700,000.

The area has a mix of new and old apartments, houses, condominiums and hotels, with restaurants and stores serving an international combination of residents and tourists. The community provides a stark contrast from bustle and glitz of nearby South Beach with a slower-paced neighborhood feel.

Patricia Avilez considered spending the night in her brother-in-law’s vacant condo on Wednesday but didn’t — only to awake to news of the collapse.

“And then I came here, and it’s gone,” she said. “Everything is disaster.”

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By Susan Montoya Bryan��

Associated Press��

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Many New Mexico communities are behind the curve when it comes to investing in drinking water infrastructure as persistent drought threatens supplies, and the state’s fragmented funding process makes it hard to know what taxpayers are getting for their money, legislative analysts said Wednesday.��

New Mexico provided roughly $876 million for water projects over a five-year period. But the analysts told members of the powerful Legislative Finance Committee during a meeting that communities aren’t doing enough to leverage federal and local dollars.��

A review of the state’s numerous financing mechanisms for water projects found that New Mexico over the last decade made proportionally more grant and loan funding available for water projects than any other state in the U.S. But inconsistent vetting and piecemeal funding put projects at greater risk of being delayed or derailed, according to the review.��

About one-third of the state-funded local water projects that were examined did not meet their intended purpose — even several years after the initial funding was issued.��

In the village of Maxwell, for example, $1 million was spent to drill and equip a new drinking water well that could be used in times of drought. A $30,000 shortfall resulted in the well not being hooked up to electricity, leaving the project unfinished and unable to yield any public benefits. Similar issues were found with projects in Lovington and Pecos.��

Republican Rep. Larry Scott of Hobbs described the process as a “train wreck.”��

“The way we’re doing it now — from a business person’s perspective — there’s no comprehensive effort toward a sustainable goal. That’s what we need to be looking for here,” said Scott, who is an engineer.��

The concerns raised in the report also prompted lawmakers to question whether New Mexico will be able to efficiently spend its share of federal pandemic relief aid and infrastructure funds to address communities’ water needs.��

President Joe Biden in March proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that includes more than $110 billion to address aging water systems, pollution and water-related natural disasters. While the White House has been short on details about how the money will be distributed if approved by Congress, New Mexico officials said many of the state’s most significant water-related challenges would fall into the categories that have been outlined as priorities.��

Still, the report noted that communities often seek grants before tapping local revenues or pursuing funding through the state’s federally backed revolving loans. Analysts said those revolving loan funds had untapped capacity of about $125 million as of this spring.��

The uncommitted balances have drawn the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Like the legislative analysts, federal officials determined the availability of state grants is undercutting interest in federal funding options even though state dollars are typically not enough to see a project through to completion.��

If improvements aren’t made, analysts warned lawmakers that future federal funding could be compromised.��

According to the report, federal support for drinking water and wastewater projects has declined overall since the 1980s, while state and local spending have risen.��

The problems with the state’s water project funding system stretch back at least two decades. Analysts expressed some frustration during Wednesday’s meeting, noting recommendations have been made in the past and previous attempts to change the system have fizzled.��

This time, analysts recommended that New Mexico lawmakers consider creating an interagency team to vet funding requests using a scoring system that could help prioritize projects on an annual basis. They also suggested that scoring and policies be standardized across the state’s grant programs and that a report on all water project requests be submitted to the Legislature each year so the state can begin to track the outcomes of the spending.��

Officials with the New Mexico Environment Department said the agency would need more money and personnel to implement the recommendations.��

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By Joyce M. Rosenberg and Ken Sweet
AP Business Writers

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans are likely to see more “for lease” signs in the coming months as many businesses devastated by the coronavirus pandemic abandon offices and storefronts and potentially end a long boom in the nation’s commercial real estate market.

Hotels, restaurants and stores that closed in March have seen only a partial return of customers, and many may fail. Commercial landlords have already reported an increase in missed rent payments. They expect vacancies to rise through the end of the year.

Two trends compound the problem: Office tenants are considering renting less space as more employees work from home, and the trend toward online shopping is accelerating, which could cut already weak demand for retail space in downtown areas and malls.

The swift emptying of commercial space marks a sharp departure from the real estate market that boomed in New York, Chicago and other cities in recent years. The virus outbreak has encouraged businesses of all types to choose simplicity and convenience over the prestige of a big-city address.

The effect on landlords and local economies could be disastrous. A weak commercial real estate market can mean layoffs among its estimated 3.6 million workers and at companies providing goods and services to real estate firms. Moreover, a weak market attracts fewer investors, limiting construction activity.

“The outlook isn’t good. There are going to be defaults and losses,” said Matt Anderson, managing director of Trepp, a data and research firm.

One out of 5 loans tied to hotels is now delinquent, as are 1 in every 10 loans for retail properties, according to Trepp. Moody’s Analytics forecasts a record office vacancy rate of 19.4% by the end of the year, up from 16.8% last year.

In the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, several tenants in Bruce Ailion’s office buildings want to downsize because their business has contracted due to the virus. He’s trying to keep as many tenants as possible by reducing their monthly payments and allowing them to pay over longer periods of time. But even that may not be enough.

“If their business does not recover, we will look at termination provisions or downsizing,” Ailion said.

Still, some real estate experts and landlords see this as just another boom-and-bust cycle, although the bust is happening at lightning speed. The next question is: How soon does the pandemic fade? When employees return to offices, they will presumably go to restaurants, make quick shopping trips and rent hotel rooms while traveling for business. That will determine how rapidly the real estate market recovers.

For now, landlords will see their income decline sharply. Average office rents are expected to fall 10.5% nationally this year, according to Moody’s Analytics. Average retail rents are expected to fall 2.7% nationwide in 2020, and another 1.2% next year, surpassing declines seen during the Great Recession.

Dan Bailey decided to give up his Austin, Texas, office a month after his staffers began working remotely.

“I only have a few who have any interest in going back to the office, and I can’t justify the costs to keep them there,” said Bailey, whose company, Wikilawn, operates a website where homeowners can find lawn care. He will not renew his lease in October, potentially saving $5,800 a month.

Concerns about a future pandemic are likely to prompt some employers to move from densely populated urban areas to the suburbs, said Victor Calanog, a real estate economist at Moody’s.

But real estate professor Glenn Mueller expects that even as some companies leave, others will need extra space to make their offices more conducive to social distancing. The net effect will be to require the same amount of space, said Mueller, who teaches at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.

And while some of the changes in commercial real estate could be permanent, Calanog expects the overall market to do what it always does — recover. A similar scenario played out after many companies fled New York following the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Manhattan eventually regained its appeal, and the office market boomed.

“It will bounce back as soon as the world normalizes, but not as quick as some optimists say,” Calanog said. “You don’t just flick the light switch on again.”

The same trajectory can be expected for restaurant space. Broker Stephen Siegel expects thousands of restaurants across the country to fail.

“It will be a year or two before the restaurant market comes back, before everyone feels comfortable again,” said Siegel, head of the brokerage division of real estate firm CBRE.

History shows there will likely be a new wave of chefs and entrepreneurs ready to fill empty spaces. In 2006, before the previous recession, the Census Bureau counted over 549,000 restaurants and bars in the country. By 2010, when the industry was still struggling to recover, that number had fallen to nearly 519,000. But by 2017, the most recent data available, there were nearly 658,000.

The outlook for the retail market is darker. Moody’s predicts retail vacancies will hit a record 14.6% by the end of 2021. And unlike restaurants, there may not be new retailers ready to fill the void.

While the economy prospered the past few years, thousands of stores succumbed to online competition, including small, independent operators and big names like Macy’s, Penney’s and Payless ShoeSource. More than 15,000 closings were announced in 2018 and 2019, according to Coresight, a research firm.

The trend has been exacerbated by the virus crisis. For instance, the Italian fashion house Valentino sued its landlord this week to break a lease in Manhattan. The company says the pandemic has made it impossible to offer a high-end shopping experience at the glamorous Fifth Avenue address where it has sold $1,000 pumps and $2,600 clutches since 2013.

Meanwhile, online shopping keeps growing. Amazon.com’s first-quarter sales rose 26%.

“Retail is on life support. It already was,” Siegel said.

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By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. construction spending fell 2.1% in May with both home building and nonresidential activity declining.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday the May decline followed an even larger 3.5% fall in April. Construction spending was also down in March, falling 0.3%.

The construction industry has been rocked by the shutdowns triggered by the coronavirus pandemic and with cases rising again in many parts of the country there are concerns that construction could see further declines in coming months.

Economists, who had been expecting a slight improvement in the May activity, said the construction industry was likely to face more headwinds in coming months as the country deals with the uncertainty caused by the cornavirus.

“The data are consistent with our expectations for sharp declines in investment in the second quarter,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist for Oxford Economics.

She predicted some rebound in construction in the second half of the year but she said any overall gains would be held back by expected declines in government spending “as state and local budgets are squeezed by the pandemic.”

Construction of homes dropped 4% in May with single-family homes down 8.5% while apartment construction rose 2.3%.

Nonresidential construction declined 2.4% with office building down 1.1% and hotel construction falling 3.5%. The category that includes shopping centers fell 1.2%.

Spending on government construction projects rose 1.2% in May.

The various changes left construction spending up a slight 0.3% from a year ago at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1.36 trillion.

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By John Rogers
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Before there was Frank Gehry there was Paul Revere Williams, who shaped the face of Los Angeles throughout much of the 20th century, a time in which he also became known as perhaps the greatest Black architect of his time.

Now Williams’ archives, containing tens of thousands of drawings, blueprints, vintage photographs and other papers once thought lost, have been acquired by the University of Southern California School of Architecture and the Getty Research Institute.

“Paul Williams was a trailblazing architect whose long career helped shape Los Angeles and Southern California. His archive essentially tells the story of how the modern Southland was built,” Getty Research Institute Director Mary Miller said Tuesday. “Its importance as an aesthetic and educational resource cannot be overstated.”

The archives contain approximately 35,000 plans, 10,000 original drawings, blueprints, hand-colored renderings, photographs and other materials. They have been cared for by his granddaughter Karen Elyse Hudson, who has published extensively about his work.

“The collaboration of two such esteemed institutions, the University of Southern California and Getty Research Institute to preserve and further his legacy, would make our grandfather extremely proud,” Hudson said.

Williams began his career in the 1920s, a time when there were few opportunities for Black architects, and indeed segregation greatly affected the way he often did his work.

He learned to draw upside down so he could sketch across a table for white clients who might be uncomfortable sitting next to him. At construction sites he often kept his hands clasped behind his back as he watched his work being created, so as not to risk making anyone uncomfortable about shaking hands with him.

He came to be known, Hudson said, as the “architect to the stars,” designing eye-popping homes for Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, among others.

Creating unique homes for the rich and famous represented only a small part of his work.

His archives also document his early residential commissions from a 1920s housing boom to landmark mid-century civic buildings. The Los Angeles County Courthouse, Los Angeles International Airport and First African Methodist Church were among the projects he led or worked on.

He was also chief architect for the Pueblo del Rio neighborhood of South Los Angeles, built in 1940 to house African American defense industry workers.

Although he mainly worked in Southern California, Williams also was chief architect for the United Nations building in Paris and the Langston Terrace in Washington, D.C., the nation’s first federally sponsored public housing.

He was the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, its first African American Fellow and the first African American recipient of the institute’s Gold Medal, its highest honor.

It was once believed his archives were lost when a South Los Angeles bank building where they were thought to be stored was burned down in the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of four white police officers for the beating of Black motorist Rodney King. Although some of Williams’ business records were stored there, most of his papers were housed elsewhere.

Born in Los Angeles in 1894, Williams was orphaned following the death of his father at age 2 and his mother at age 4. He died in 1980 at 85.

Despite those early hardships he would go on to be hailed as one of the University of Southern California’s most distinguished alumni. Milton S.F. Curry, dean of the university’s School of Architecture, said Tuesday USC was honored to play a role in the archives’ acquisition.

The archives will be a central feature of the USC Center for Architecture + City Design and the African American Art History Initiative at Getty. They will eventually be made available to scholars and others through a digitalization project that will take several years.

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By Joseph Pisani

The Associated Press

NEW YORK, N.Y. — Amazon is bringing its climate change message to a new arena. Literally.

The company, eager to prove that it’s working to combat climate change, is paying to name a Seattle hockey stadium Climate Pledge Arena.

The new moniker is meant to recall The Climate Pledge, an initiative Amazon launched last year to push other companies to join it in being carbon neutral by 2040. The venue was previously called KeyArena and is in the midst of a major renovation.

Companies typically pay millions to name stadiums after themselves. But Amazon said its name and logo won’t appear outside the stadium.
A rendering for the arena, set to open next year, has Climate Pledge at the top in green. The word Arena is underneath in smaller blue letters. Amazon didn’t disclose how much it’s paying for the naming rights, but said it will last at least a decade.

Asked if there was better way to use its money, Amazon’s head of sustainability Kara Hurst said the company invests heavily on other climate-related projects. “It isn’t the only thing we’re doing,” she said.

The online shopping behemoth, which ships billions of items around the world on planes and trucks that guzzle gas, has been trying to highlight its greener side after employees criticized the company for not doing enough to combat climate change.

The company is using more solar and wind energy to power its businesses and ordered 100,000 electric vans that will start delivering packages next year. This week, it said it would spend $2 billion to fund companies or technologies that could help fight climate change.

Nonetheless, Amazon’s carbon footprint has gotten bigger. It rose 15% last year from the year before and its emissions from fossil fuels rose 18%. Amazon, however, said emissions for every item it sold fell 5%.

Amazon hopes the new name will spread the word on The Climate Pledge. And the more than 18,000 people who cram into the arena to watch a game will get a sustainability lesson at the same time.

Trash cans will be replaced with recycling bins and uneaten snacks will be composted. Natural gas is gone from the stadium and replaced with electricity. Reclaimed rainwater will be used for the ice, which Amazon proclaimed in a press release makes it the “greenest ice in the NHL.”

The arena will be the home for Seattle’s yet-to-be-named hockey team that is set to take the ice for the 2021-22 season. It will also be the home for the Seattle Storm of the WNBA and host concerts and other events.

The arena is near the Space Needle and a 20-minute walk from Amazon’s headquarters.

It’s the first time Amazon has bought naming rights for a major venue. But a theater in Las Vegas, where pop icon Britney Spears had a long-running residency, is named after Amazon-owned online shoe seller Zappos.

AP Sports writer Tim Booth contributed to this report from Seattle.

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By ANDREW SELKSY
Associated Press

SALEM – A U.S. regulatory agency on Thursday approved a controversial natural gas pipeline and marine export terminal project in Oregon, with one member saying the environmental impacts are acceptable considering the public benefits that will be provided by the project.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington voted 2-1 in favor of the terminal. Commission Chairman Neil Chatterjee said it is now up to Pembina, the Canadian energy company behind the Jordan Cove project, to obtain all the necessary permits.

“This certificate does include a provision which requires Jordan Cove to file documentation that it has received all applicable authorizations for the LNG facility before construction begins,” Chatterjee said.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has already denied a water quality certification for the project.

Chatterjee said Jordan Cove is the first export terminal the commission has certificated on the West Coast in the lower 48 states and it would be capable of liquefying up to 1.04 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day for export to global markets.

The dissenting commissioner, Richard Glick, said the decision violates the requirements of the Natural Gas Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, fails to consider the impact greenhouse gas emissions will have on climate change and would significantly impact 20 threatened and endangered species.

Commissioner Bernard McNamee, who voted in favor of the project, said that while the commission considers local and state interests, it ultimately is required to consider the national interest in making a decision.

“After taking the necessary hard look at the project’s impacts on environmental and socioeconomic resources, the order finds that the project’s environmental impacts are acceptable considering the public benefits that will be provided by the project,” McNamee said.

The marine export terminal would be located at Coos Bay, with a 230-mile (370-kilometer) feeder pipeline crossing southern Oregon.

Last month, Oregon Department of State Lands Director Vicki Walker refused to grant another extension to Pembina to file documents in its application for a permit to dredge sediment out of Coos Bay and to construct the pipeline. Pembina reacted by withdrawing its application for the state permit.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans.

Klamath Tribes, a federally recognized group of three Native American tribes, said it was disappointed in the commission’s approval of a project “that would harm the cultural and natural resources that are vital to our people.”

“We will consider our options to protect those resources and we hope that the state of Oregon will stand with us,” tribes Chairman Don Gentry said.

The Trump administration supports energy export projects and in particular Jordan Cove. It has proposed streamlining approval of gas pipelines and other energy projects by limiting states’ certification authorities under the U.S. Clean Water Act.

State Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, recently told demonstrators opposed to Jordan Cove that he expects the battle to go to the courts if the Trump administration tries to ram the project through despite a lack of state permits.

Opponents of the project have demonstrated against it and on Nov. 21 occupied the governor’s office until they were removed by state police.

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