Thu: Want to Blame Someone For High Housing Prices?

Blinded by the Light

It’s nearly impossible to know how often headlight glare causes crashes like Madrid’s, according to automotive safety experts. But improving lighting to help prevent nighttime crashes — which have a fatality rate three times higher than daytime collisions — has been a priority for U.S. automakers, safety advocates and regulators for more than a decade. Yet Americans today may face more headlight glare and less effective headlights than drivers in other countries.

“The United States is decades behind the rest of the developed world with respect to updating standards to keep up with technologies, particularly in the headlight area,” said Greg Brannon, AAA’s director of automotive engineering and industry relations. “The standards have not been substantively updated since the ‘70s. Meanwhile, technology has marched on.”

Better road illumination and less glare from oncoming traffic are both key for safer night driving, automotive safety experts say. Technology that can do both at once — known as adaptive driving beams — has been in use in Europe since 2012, according to automakers, and today is available in cars sold in every major automotive market worldwide, except the U.S.

A triptych of the damage Aaron Madrid's crashed car.
Aaron Madrid's car after he crashed into a tree.Courtesy Aaron Madrid
A 2022 regulation allowed the technology in the U.S. for the first time, but more than a year later, no vehicles with it are available for sale.

At the same time, Americans may be experiencing more glare. In the past two decades, vehicle headlights have shifted from primarily warm-yellowish halogen to cool-bluish LED, which human eyes are more sensitive to. New vehicles are increasingly taller, making oncoming headlights more likely to be eye-level for drivers in small cars. And few states annually check for headlight misalignment, which can lift light into an oncoming driver’s eyes.

That combination of risk factors makes it all the more important to get adaptive driving beams on U.S. roads, automotive safety researchers said. But the new rule’s testing requirements are so detailed and cumbersome that automakers say they would have to redesign the systems, potentially delaying implementation by years, despite the already available European technology. Safety researchers cautioned regulators against creating that kind of red tape years ago.

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New home construction is key to unlocking lower housing prices. But the rate of this type of construction has fallen month to month since March 2022, and experts say tough immigration policies that have shrunk the construction workforce are behind the building squeeze.

Nationally, foreign-born people make up 30% of construction workers, data from the Census Bureau shows, making immigrants a key part of the home building puzzle. But against a backdrop of tightened immigration policies instituted during the Trump administration and exacerbated during the pandemic, the number of foreign workers entering the construction industry has almost fallen in half. There were more than 67,000 new workers in 2016, compared to 38,900 in 2020.

The lack of immigrant workers has led to a construction shortage, even as supply-chain stoppages and material costs have eased. NBC News compared Census Bureau data on the immigrant construction worker population in each state with a 2022 report on home underproduction by affordable housing nonprofit Up for Growth and found a strong relationship between foreign workforces and slowed home building. Specifically, for each additional 1% increase in immigrant worker share, there was a predicted corresponding increase of 6,563 in the gap between built housing units and demand for units.

“I can’t say how many times our members have said, ‘We’d bid on more work, we’d be doing more projects if we had more people to do the construction,’” said Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs at Associated General Contractors of America, which represents home builders across the country.

While immigrants are employed in many sectors, certain fields lean more heavily on immigrant labor. This means that tighter immigration policies have an outsize effect in certain areas.

Lower immigration was a policy goal of the Trump White House, and the administration issued several policies toward that goal from 2017 to 2021, including freezing visas. The administration also took several hard stances toward undocumented immigrants, issuing executive orders for a wall along the southern border, deploying additional Border Patrol agents, and instituting the Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico while waiting for hearings.

The number of new immigrant workers entering the construction industry dropped by a third in 2017 — Donald Trump’s first year in office — the first such decline in six years. And more than 2 million fewer immigrants than expected entered the labor force from March 2020 to late 2021, according to estimates from researchers Giovanni Peri and Reem Zaiour of the University of California, Davis.

Are You Using Disinfectant Wipes at the Gym? Quats and Squats?

Since the pandemic’s outset, the global use of disinfectants has gone through the roof. Clorox dramatically boosted production of its wipe packs to 1.5m a day by mid-2021, and an industry trade group said 83% of consumers surveyed around the same time reported they had used a disinfectant wipe in the last week.

But as schools reopened, a group of toxic chemical researchers grew concerned as they heard reports of kids regularly using disinfectant wipes on their classroom desks, or teachers running disinfectant foggers.

The researchers knew the disinfectants did little to protect consumers from Covid, and were instead exposing kids at alarming levels to what they say are a dangerous chemical group – quaternary ammonium compounds, also known as QACs, or “quats”.

Quats are common components in popular disinfectant wipes and sprays, especially those that claim to “kill 99.9% of germs”. But in a new peer-reviewed paper, the researchers assembled the conclusions from a fast-growing body of quat studies that point to several main issues: the chemicals are linked to serious health problems, they contribute to antimicrobial resistance, they pollute the environment and they are not particularly effective.

The chemicals “might not be efficacious, but also might be harmful”, said Courtney Carignan, a co-author on the paper and toxicologist at Michigan State University.

“We did the review to answer the question of ‘What do we really know?’ and what was most surprising was there was a lack of health hazard data in the majority of QACs, and the few that have been studied have red flags,” Carignan added.

The paper – developed by a group of toxics researchers from academia, government agencies and non-governmental organizations – highlights quats’ risks and calls on regulators to eliminate the chemicals for non-essential uses.