In The Atlantic

In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)

The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.

One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.

“Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse,” announced the headline of the top story on the WSJ website on Monday. The article illustrated “Austin’s recent downswing” and its “glut of luxury apartment buildings” with photographs of abandoned downtown plazas, as if the fastest-growing city of the 2010s had been suddenly hollowed out by a plague and left to zombies and tumbleweeds.

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If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset.

This magical thinking isn’t just a phenomenon of real-estate reporting. It is deeply rooted even in the highest echelons of policy making.

For the world’s viruses, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. An estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could conceivably infect humans. Most do not, because they have few chances to leap into our bodies. But those chances are growing. Earth’s changing climate is forcing animals to relocate to new habitats, in a bid to track their preferred environmental conditions. Species that have never coexisted will become neighbors, creating thousands of infectious meet-cutes in which viruses can spill over into unfamiliar hosts—and, eventually, into us. Many scientists have argued that climate change will make pandemics more likely, but a groundbreaking new analysis shows that this worrying future is already here, and will be difficult to address. The planetary network of viruses and wildlife “is rewiring itself right now,” Colin Carlson, a global-change biologist at Georgetown University, told me. And “while we thought we understood the rules of the game, again and again, reality sat us down and taught us: That’s not how biology works.”