Author: openjargon

It was a Tuesday afternoon just after Labor Day weekend in 2020 and a flurry of 911 calls were coming in to Dekalb County police dispatchers from the Efficiency Lodge.

One man called to report that armed security guards were being aggressive toward long-staying residents at the motel in Panthersville, a community just southeast of Atlanta.

Then a woman called, saying she lived in unit 118, to report that "people are being kicked out, illegally evicted without notice."

Another woman called in concerned about the security guards with guns. "Somebody needs to come take control of this, because it's getting ridiculous," she said in the recording.

Dekalb County police officers arrived on the scene. Though they'd responded to the panicked calls of residents, the officers described them as suspects.

Officers interviewed two motel residents who called 911; they said they did not want to leave their homes. In the police report, the residents were not referred to as tenants, even though some had lived there for over a year. Instead they were recorded as "guest/suspect" and "offender." Their alleged debts, down to the cent, were listed next to their names: one woman owed $2,508.70; one man $2,468.00. The report noted that the motel staff had previously warned those who were behind on their rent that they would change the locks on their units — and were now proceeding to do so.

In this and other cases, whether a person qualifies as a tenant would prove crucial.

In Georgia, an eviction requires a court order, but the law doesn't explicitly make lockouts illegal. In this case, an officer classified the incident as a "crime against property" — a crime committed by the residents themselves.

A Business Insider investigation has found that in cities across the United States, complaints about illegal lockouts are on the rise. Most states require landlords to seek a judge's approval before removing a tenant, a process that gives tenants a chance to plead their case — and offers them notice if an eviction is approved. But court filings and 911 calls BI obtained from several major cities record tenants complaining of landlords bypassing the legal process, instead resorting to tactics such as changing the locks or cutting off utilities to get them out.

People in informal housing arrangements are particularly vulnerable to lockouts, housing advocates say, because laws in many states leave them out of tenant protections. And a recent wave of anti-squatter laws, in states including Florida, Kentucky and Georgia risks muddling tenants' right to due process, advocates say.

"Any time somebody doesn't have formal legal protections they're at risk of others taking advantage of that," said Eric Tars, the senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center.

An outreach worker, Marshall Rancifer from the Justice for All Coalition, arrived at the Efficiency Lodge that afternoon, hoping to halt the removals. He called 911 to report the lockouts, claiming they violated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new COVID emergency order banning evictions. Then someone from the hotel called 911 to report that Rancifer was engaging in obstruction.

Police officers returned to the motel, where the showdown had escalated. Rancifer had by then been joined by members of the community group Housing Justice League and local journalists. By the end of the day, Larry Johnson, then a DeKalb County commissioner, had called on Atlanta Legal Aid to get involved.

"When I got over there, I was like in a war zone," Johnson said. "I saw people with vests on with guns. I saw people outside scrambling around and it was just so surreal." In the midst of it all, he recalled seeing a young girl playing quietly with her toy kitchen set.

"They kicked out about two dozen families that night," said Lindsey Siegel, an attorney who worked on the case for Atlanta Legal Aid. "It was a traumatic event for the community."

"DeKalb County botched this," she said.

Millions of rental gray zones

Traumatic events like this are playing out across the nation, as ambiguous housing arrangements have become more common in the face of a national affordable-housing crisis. Half of all renters in the US spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities — a benchmark used to gauge affordability — pushing more people into less traditional modes of housing. Lacking a traditional written lease or other documentation of their status as renters, these tenants exist in legal gray zones.

A 2019 survey of extended-stay motels in one Atlanta suburb, called "When Extended Stay Becomes Home," found that roughly a third catered mainly to travelers; the rest were primarily residential. And nearly two-thirds of the residential tenants surveyed said they had stayed there for a year or more.

Data from the US Department of Education shows that during the 2021-2022 school year, nearly 107,000 students reported hotels or motels as a primary nightly residence. More than 900,000 reported living doubled up — meaning they were staying with family or friends without being named on a lease.

Hundreds of thousands of other US families live in unpermitted units, making it difficult to exercise their rights as tenants. A 2008 report from the Pratt Center for Community Development estimated 114,000 illegal rentals, such as basement apartments and rooming houses, in New York City alone; in 2014, a researcher at UCLA estimated 50,000 illegal backyard or garage units just in the city of Los Angeles. A 2020 report from Freddie Mac identified approximately 1.4 million so-called accessory dwelling units nationwide, with the vast majority likely unpermitted.

Others in search of housing have settled long-term into Airbnbs.

Even in locales with more protective laws, tenants in informal or unpermitted housing situations may think twice about rocking the boat, said Harrison Bohn, an attorney at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.

"The hardest part about people who live in these really odd lease scenarios of either renting a room or renting a couch," he said, "is that if you do want to start a process of enforcing your rights, you are disrupting that relationship with your landlord."

The tagline of the Efficiency Lodge is "stay a nite or stay forever." But residents, even longtime residents, had to sign a contract stating they were not tenants. For some, the motel was their only home. The property's address was listed on residents' IDs; school buses made stops at the motel to fetch children.

"Many of them were never intended to be people's homes," Charlie Bliss, another Atlanta Legal Aid attorney who worked on the Efficiency Lodge case, said of long-stay motels. "They're the home of last resort because there is not affordable housing."

Some states, such as Nevada and California, spell out when a resident earns tenant status — after, say, 30 days. But Georgia's regulations leave room for ambiguity. According to rules governing hotels and motels, the state stops collecting hotel taxes after 30 days, at which point a rental becomes an "extended stay," but those rules are silent on whether the renter gains the protections of landlord-tenant laws. A statute defining the landlord-tenant relationship is vague, saying it begins "when the owner of real estate grants to another person, who accepts such grant, the right simply to possess and enjoy" it.

Asked about how the police handled the lockouts at the Efficiency Lodge that day in September 2020, a Dekalb County spokesperson, Andrew Cauthen, said in an email that while officers told two people they were trespassing, they "were not arrested or required to leave."

Brandon Turner, the president of Natson Hotel Group, said his company had acquired this and other Efficiency Lodge properties in 2022. He declined to comment on an incident that took place prior to the purchase.

'It can't be obvious that people live here'

Darlene DeLaRoca was actually hopeful when she attended her own eviction hearing.

That day in November 2023, she thought she'd get a chance to expose what she saw as her landlord's illegal pressure tactics. Instead, she found herself out of a home in a matter of minutes.

DeLaRoca and her partner, Mike Rausch, had been renting backyard space on their landlord's property in unincorporated Clark County, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, for at least three months at that point. After living out of their truck for a few months, the couple said they traded it for a motor home that, even if it wouldn't run, got them closer to stability.

They invested over a thousand dollars to move, the couple said: from the cost of towing the motor home to paying the deposit for the backyard space and buying a special extension cord to plug into the electricity in a shed behind the house.

"It was all worth it," Rausch said. "It was getting us a home and getting us power and off the streets."

The two lived in the backyard with their dogs and, they said, five other trailers of families who shared the space.

They had found the listing for the lot on Facebook and, at the time, considered it a godsend because of how close the location was to Rausch's work at Harry Reid International Airport's car-return center, less than an hour's walk away.

The couple used a rented U-Haul as their main form of transport. As they were driving back from a Walmart run one day, DeLaRoca said, police officers stopped them in front of the landlord's house, saying the U-Haul had been reported as stolen. The couple, it turned out, had failed to return it on time.

Once officers walked into the property's backyard and saw their living arrangement, DeLaRoca said, the couple's relationship with their landlord, a man named Luis Barraza, soured.

After that, Barraza told them they had to leave.

In a subsequent recording reviewed by BI, DeLaRoca asks for a receipt for $300 she had paid toward her monthly rent. In the recording, a man she identified as Barraza tells her others haven't asked for receipts and he won't give her one. After telling him that she's recording, DeLaRoca asks why he wants them out.

"We established some rules," the man tells her. "One thing I said is that it can't be obvious that people live here." In unincorporated Clark County, where the property is located, operating a short-term rental without a license is illegal.

Barraza cut off their power, DeLaRoca said, blaming a code inspection. County records show inspectors had visited the property after receiving an anonymous complaint that the owner was using his land for short-term rentals; photos they took document at least half a dozen mobile homes there.

But the records make no note of inspectors asking for utilities to be discontinued.

"Code Enforcement did not order utilities to be disconnected in this case," Stacey Welling, a spokesperson for Clark County, said by email. She said that "it was a violation of County Code to reside in an RV on the property" but that Barraza was not fined.

Barraza did not respond to a request for comment.

When DeLaRoca brought up the utility disconnection during her November hearing in the Las Vegas Justice Court, she hoped her landlord would be held accountable.

Hearing Master David Brown told her their situation wasn't a normal tenancy, she said. But he still issued a "no cause" eviction order; in Nevada, landlords don't have to name a reason. DeLaRoca and Rausch had 10 days to move out.

Landlords are generally given wide leeway to use the eviction process even for people not strictly considered tenants, according to Eric Dunn, the director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project.

"Even if the property is not a space that somebody should be living in, if the landlord is seeking to remove the person from it, then you want them to at least go to court," he said.

A debate over what constitutes a tenant

The battle over the Efficiency Lodge lasted for years.

Lawyers at Atlanta Legal Aid filed suit in 2020 on behalf of three former residents who were locked out of the motel: Armetrius Neason, who had lived there continuously since 2016 before falling behind on his payments in 2020; Lynetrice Preston, who had lived there with two of her children and a grandchild for two years, when she fell behind on her weekly payments after her pandemic employment benefits ran out; and Altonese Weaver, who lived at the motel for a total of 11 months prior to being locked out in July 2020 after she fell behind on her weekly payments, with all of her possessions locked inside.

The case largely centered on the ambiguity in Georgia state law: whether the residents were tenants or merely guests. The Legal Aid lawyers argued that their clients had made a life at the motel and that it was illegal to evict them without going before a judge. "When you leave families susceptible to being locked out of their only home with no notice at the whim of a landlord, that's a very troubling situation," Bliss said. "It creates the possibility of abuse and exploitation."

The Efficiency Lodge had high-powered representation — former Gov. Roy Barnes, whose brother was then a co-owner of the motel chain, who argued that the residents were just like any other inn guests and, having signed a contract accordingly, could be removed without a formal eviction process.

Courts ruled in the residents' favor in 2021 and 2022 and ordered the Efficiency Lodge to file an eviction if it wanted to remove them. But Barnes appealed the rulings to the Georgia Supreme Court, which finally issued guidance in June 2023 on what constitutes a landlord-tenant relationship, saying it hinges upon a person's use of a place as a home, with the permission of the owner.

These questions, the guidance states, are dependent on the intent of both parties. The Supreme Court did not make a ruling on the Efficiency Lodge residents, remanding the decision back to a lower court. But the Supreme Court laid out specific factors for courts to take into consideration, such as the length of time someone lives in the property, whether they routinely clean their unit, and whether they can have guests. The court said the granting of permission to occupy the property as tenants can be implicit.

The case settled in August 2023 before the lower court decided the question of whether the three plaintiffs qualified as tenants. Bliss declined to comment on the terms of the settlement; Barnes did not respond to a request for comment sent to his law firm.

Landlords and loopholes

In Nevada, state law is more explicit, laying out that people who stay in a hotel or motel for more than 30 days gain the protections of a tenant. But the Desert Moon Motel in Las Vegas appears to have found a way around the provision.

Tera Strawter and her boyfriend, Khari Varner, had been living at the vintage downtown motel for nearly three months at the time they were locked out in October 2023, far longer than should have been required to trigger the status change. During that time, she gave birth to twins, the couple said in a court complaint. All of their possessions were inside, Strawter said, including her medications.

The night of the lockout, Varner said, he and Strawter managed to get back into the room and slept there. The next day, Strawter took to Facebook to livestream at least two law-enforcement officers as they arrested Varner after telling the couple to leave the unit. Police officers stood by as a motel representative read Strawter a statement warning her that she would be considered a trespasser and would be arrested if she came back.

Varner filed two complaints with the Las Vegas Justice Court, claiming the Desert Moon had illegally evicted them. The second complaint, which BI obtained, asserts that the couple had been living at the motel for almost three months.

One detail would prove critical as the couple fought the motel in court: They had received financial help from two different nonprofit agencies — Puentes Las Vegas and Lutheran Social Services of Nevada — which had each paid for 28-day stays, Strawter said, before she and Varner took over the weekly payments themselves.

Puentes' president, Guy Girardin, declined to confirm details of this case but said the organization does provide housing assistance and sometimes refers people to extended-stay motels. He said the group caps its payments at 28 days at the request of the motels.

Puentes has seen an increase in the number of people who have made homes at extended stays in recent years, Girardin said, turning a model once geared to business travelers to "almost 100% housing."

BI sat in on the couple's hearings over the complaint. The first hearing ended quickly after a judge ruled that Varner had failed to give Desert Moon proper notice, a common occurrence with tenant-lockout complaints, according to a sample of outcomes BI examined and hearings one reporter attended.

At the second hearing over the lockout, in November, the couple explained to Brown, the hearing master, that they had been living in the motel since August through a variety of payment structures. First, the cost of the room was covered by one nonprofit, then another, and then the stay rolled over into their names.

The motel's owner, Brian Michael Schwalbe, said he thought the couple had agreed to leave. The couple countered that they had verbally told the motel of their intent to stay for at least 90 days.

When Brown said continued occupancy of the motel would make them tenants, Schwalbe said he thought the payments from other entities would change the situation.

"I'm really grappling with the fact that you've been there," Brown said to the couple, adding that if they had proof they had personally paid for even two days after their last, self-funded, 28-day stay, he would rule in their favor.

Varner started to cry. The couple could not provide proof of payment, Strawter later told BI, because they had paid in cash. Brown denied their petition, stating their relationship with the Desert Moon didn't qualify as a landlord-tenant one under the law.

"I'm sorry, it's not fun for the judge at all," he said.

Natalie Bergevin, the manager of Desert Moon, said the motel always considered Strawter and Varner as short-term guests, not tenants. Though the couple had stayed for more than a month, the motel's agreement was with the paying agencies, not with Strawter and Varner, she said. Bergevin said they had each signed written agreements that they would not be considered tenants.

They weren't locked out, she added; their key was simply deactivated. She insisted, as Schwalbe had in court, that the couple had previously agreed to leave.

"Long-term residency is never our intention," Bergevin said, calling the situation "truly unpleasant and unfortunate."

Matthew Main is an attorney who has represented residents in similarly precarious housing situations in New York City, where state law also grants residents tenants' rights after 30 days. He said courts had become overly restrictive about whom tenant laws cover, making them less effective at preserving housing stability than at protecting the economic interests of landlords.

"Removing someone from their home is a violent act," he said, adding that public officials shouldn't tolerate landlord gamesmanship.

Main said he had seen hearings about illegal evictions of residents in "shady gray areas of housing" get bogged down in fights over whether residents are tenants under the law. "The litigation should take five minutes: Was this person there with permission? That's the end of the question," he said. "The reason these proceedings become so lengthy is occupants have to litigate their status."

Makeshift rooming houses

Paul Panusky, an attorney in Atlanta who represents tenants in unlawful-eviction cases, said he had been getting more calls lately from people living in unlicensed makeshift rooming houses. And Sara Heymann, a community activist with Únete, a volunteer-led housing advocacy group in Chicago, said rooming houses had also become more common in her city.

One single-family home in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood, converted into a 16-unit rooming house, illustrates how these illegal conversions increase tenants' vulnerability. In this case, lacking formal leases, the tenants were even accused of being squatters.

In August 2022, the landlord, Go Home LLC, filed for eviction against one named resident along with "all unknown occupants" of its "single family home" and was granted an eviction through the courts.

BI obtained bodycam footage of what followed: two attempts by the Cook County Sheriff's Office to execute the eviction on what they discovered was a far cry from a single family home.

On the first attempt, in February 2023, the footage shows several rooms connected by a long hallway, each door bearing a number. "You know I've had a problem with him before," an officer said, "where he told us it was one house and there were separate rooms." The officers departed without removing anyone.

Two months later, the sheriff's office made a second eviction attempt.

That time, a representative of the landlord assured the officers that individual rooms were not being rented out anymore.

"If we go in there, and it's numbered, turn right the fuck back around," one officer said.

The first room they checked was small, with only one window. In the video, the bed was pushed to the end of the room and toys were strewn all over the floor. This time, only remnants of the numbers were visible on the doors; a resident later told a deputy the owner took down the numbers just hours before the deputies showed up.

At one point an officer asks, "Does anyone have a rental agreement? A lease?" But no one appears to have one; one resident says he has text messages.

The lead officer calls off the eviction.

"We can't pick apart the house," he told Michael Duckworth, the CEO of Go Home, which manages the property. "The way that you guys are going about this is just really illegal."

Duckworth told BI that he'd described the property in court as a single-family home on the advice of counsel but that in fact "each room was its own entity." He said that while he didn't usually offer traditional leases, the sheriff's officers declined to evict only because the occupants were colluding to create confusion. "Basically, if there's anything that looks like it may be off a little bit or if they're not 100% sure," he said, "they're kind of tasked to call it off."

He wanted the residents out because, he claimed, they were "maliciously refusing to pay" and the company had "lost control of the house." But he insists he handled the eviction by the book and did everything legally.

Matthew Walberg, a spokesperson for the sheriff's office, said Go Home failed to properly serve notice to the home's occupants. "The order for eviction did not describe the property as it was," he said. "It was all these multiple units and officers couldn't enforce" the eviction order.

In April of last year, Go Home filed a new motion asking for emergency intervention, claiming all of the tenants were squatters. The judge denied it. He pointed out that Duckworth, representing himself as the landlord's agent, had admitted that several tenants had rented from him at other properties, casting doubt on his claim that everyone at the property was a squatter.

The eviction order, however, remained in place. Ultimately, the City of Chicago vacated the home over building safety concerns.

Left living under a freeway

After their hearing last November, Darlene DeLaRoca and Mike Rausch faced a 10-day deadline to vacate their trailer home outside Las Vegas. That wasn't much time given that the trailer still wasn't working and they'd have to repair it before they could move. If they weren't out by then, the court-ordered eviction meant a county constable would remove them by force.

But DeLaRoca wasn't ready to give up. Instead of using their savings to pay for a tow or repair the trailer, she told BI, she and Rausch decided to pay a bond of $250 to appeal their eviction.

Without an attorney, DeLaRoca said, she had trouble figuring out the paperwork and wasn't sure whether she had filed the appeal correctly. She worried she had doomed their chances of being heard by a judge.

Meanwhile, the constable's visit loomed. On nights she couldn't sleep, depressed about the prospect of spending Thanksgiving on the streets, she'd work on drafting a post for a GoFundMe. "The judge says we need to be out in 10 days, we don't have enough money to move," she and Rausch wrote. "In 10 days we will be homeless. We are asking for help, because if this landlord can do this to our family and 5 other families and get away with it, he will do it to other families."

On the day the constables came, DeLaRoca said, everything went wrong. They had been able to pack some things but, in the shuffle, left their bags inside, along with the motor home's keys.

"We left with the clothes on our backs," DeLaRoca said by email shortly after they were put out. "I should have been more prepared. It's my own fault, but it's kind of hard when you're not really sure what you're doing or have the means to do it."

They didn't have even a day's worth of food for them or their two dogs.

The removal upended their lives. The pair spent some nights under a freeway overpass; some days, they resorted to panhandling for food.

Eventually, they separated. On Christmas Day, Rausch sent Business Insider a text message. It was too cold on the street for DeLaRoca, he wrote. He sent her and the puppies to California, where her daughters live. "I am still in Vegas," he wrote. "Alone."

The promise of a stable life had gone as quickly as it had come.

DeLaRoca said she wished they had never answered that Facebook rental ad.

• My husband and I wanted to raise our daughter differently than how we were raised. 
• I followed gentle parenting influencers when she was little and having regular meltdowns. 
• I realized that techniques that work for neurotypical kids don't work with my neurodivergent child. 

I was raised with a style of parenting that leaned more toward authoritarian. My husband's upbringing was strict and punishment-heavy. He has distinct memories of hearing "Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about" frequently.

From personal experience, fear-based, punitive parenting does not lead to healthy adults who can manage their emotions well. That's why respectful and empathic gentle parenting that acknowledged a child's feelings had a real appeal to me.

I looked into gentle parenting

Early in my daughter's life, I started following gentle parenting influencers. This included Big Little Feelings, which debuted on Instagram just as we were entering the difficult toddler years. Although I had years of experience working with children, my daughter's meltdowns felt overwhelming and unmanageable. I didn't like the concept of time-outs, and I also didn't like how frustrated her explosive reactions made me feel.

I purchased Big Little Feeling's "Winning the Toddler Stage" course in the hopes of discovering the magic words to say to tame my daughter's tantrums, as they said. I hoped learning the scripts they provided would transform my daughter into a more cooperative toddler and me into a calmer, more patient mom. But even though I watched all the videos and tried to implement their advice, most of it didn't seem to work with my daughter. And OKing her feelings started to feel ridiculous after a while.

The next big influencer whose advice I tried to follow was Dr. Becky. I waited months for her book to be available from the library. The waitlist was so long I ended up with the audiobook. I spent hours listening to techniques that I tried to implement (unsuccessfully) with my daughter, some of which seemed to make her more upset. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.

Until the end of the book, when Dr. Becky admitted that the behavioral techniques she discussed in the book weren't effective with neurodivergent children. Eight hours wasted (and many bops from a dysregulated, angry child) on a book that wasn't even written for her. I was pissed.

I thought I was the problem

After several years of trying to gentle parent in the style of influencers like Big Little Feelings and Dr. Becky, I had started to believe that the problem was me. If I couldn't make their expert advice work, then obviously I was just a bad mom. Eventually, I discovered that the disconnect was that my daughter is autistic. As a result, advice developed for neurotypical children was usually not a good fit for her.

The frustrating thing is that these influencers seem to be selling one-size-fits-all behavioral techniques when there is no such thing, especially with neurodivergent children. Even with neurotypical children, there is no one-size-fits-all way to deal with difficult behaviors. The rigidity of that seems to harken back to the strict way of parenting my husband and I grew up with that refuses to acknowledge that every child is an individual.

I've changed how I parent her. Since my daughter thrives on consistency and is very focused on schedules and time, we try to keep things as structured as possible for her, which recently has meant implementing a visual schedule and timer. Although it's incredibly frustrating sometimes, she might not react in the same way to something that she did yesterday, and we have to be flexible as well.

These days, I'm not sure what label I'd put on my parenting style, perhaps mostly authoritative, a parenting style that is more focused on being responsive and supportive while still setting boundaries. Sometimes it feels like we are throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

I am done with following gentle parenting experts and taking their advice on how to parent my child, though. The parenting choices I make are very much customized to my daughter's own specific needs and struggles. And how I parent is constantly evolving as my daughter grows and changes.

• Montana homeowners face rising costs and housing insecurity amid soaring property taxes and insurance.
• Older Montanans, particularly those with health issues, are especially vulnerable.
• State housing reforms aim to boost supply, but one housing counselor worries about short-term aid.

Owning a home doesn't guarantee financial security in retirement — even when home values have skyrocketed, as they have in communities across the country over the last few years.

This is particularly apparent in the state of Montana, which has seen home values surge as out-of-staters move in and its home shortage deepens. But in Big Sky Country, as in much of the nation, costs associated with homeownership, including home insurance premiums, property taxes, and home repairs, have also risen quickly.

Older homeowners who live on fixed incomes are having a particularly hard time managing these rising costs. With mortgage interest rates sky-high and home inventory low, they have few options to downsize.

Beverly Dashnaw has worked as a HUD-certified housing counselor for about two decades in Montana, and she says she's never seen so many retired and elderly homeowners struggling to make ends meet. She blames rising property taxes and insurance costs but notes that inflation, in general, has also squeezed those on fixed incomes.

"Elderly and disabled people are struggling really, really hard," she said. "The cost of living, inflation is going up for everything, and their income doesn't go up."

Montana's crisis is particularly acute as it has one of the oldest populations in the US. Nearly 20% of the state's residents are 65 or older, significantly higher than the 16.8% share nationwide, according to the 2020 Census. The state is also particularly impacted by climate change — in the form of more severe wildfires and hail storms, among other extreme weather events — which is pushing its insurance premiums up among the fastest in the country.

But Montana isn't alone. Older homeowners are struggling in communities across the country. Insurance costs have risen dramatically all over — a result both of increasingly severe climate issues, including flooding and fires, and the elevated cost of home construction and repairs. Nationally, average home insurance premiums rose by 21% between May 2022 and May 2023, Policygenius found. Home repairs are also more costly these days, with a construction worker shortage and the elevated cost of materials.

The portion of homeowners 55 and older who are cost-burdened — or spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities — rose from 30% in 2001 to 45% in 2022, according to a new report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies on the state of US housing. "A shocking 95 percent of older adult homeowners with low incomes and mortgages are cost burdened, dramatically higher than the 56 percent of their counterparts who own their homes outright and the 74 percent of those who rent," the report found.

The housing affordability crisis comes as the country is also facing a retirement crisis. A fifth of Americans 50 and older have no retirement savings. And older people are increasingly losing their homes. The portion of unhoused people who are 50 or older has grown from about 10% to more than 50% over the last three decades.

A crisis exacerbated by the pandemic

Dashnaw works for the nonprofit NeighborWorks Montana, where she counsels existing homeowners struggling to afford their housing costs or facing foreclosure, potential first-time homebuyers, and those seeking affordable rental housing. Many of her clients are also struggling with illness.

"A lot of it is the health issues," she added. "People that got sick during Covid or even after and just couldn't manage to catch up their payments."

Those who own mobile homes but not the land the home sits on are increasingly vulnerable to rising rents.

Many older homeowners forced out of their housing end up unhoused, part of a growing homeless population in the state. Montana's homeless shelters are increasingly filled with older people.

Dashnaw said it's also become more common to see multiple families living in the same home. "That's another trend that you didn't see in years past," she noted.

While Montana's housing issues have been mounting for years, they exploded during the pandemic as tens of thousands of Californians and others took advantage of remote work and moved into the state. At the same time, the state's booming outdoor tourism has pushed long-term rentals off the market in favor of Airbnb and other short-term rentals. The surge in demand from transplants with fat wallets sent home prices and rents soaring. Statewide, home prices have soared by 60% since early 2020, while rents are among the fastest-growing in the country.

The crisis has gotten so severe that Montana's conservative governor, Greg Gianforte, and the state's Republican-majority legislature have acted, recently passing a slew of housing reforms designed to boost the supply of homes. The state loosened zoning restrictions, allowed for more housing density, and required localities to devise a land-use plan, among other measures. The measures have been hailed by pro-housing experts as the "Montana Miracle" and a model for the rest of the country.

"The bottom line, demand outstripped supply and we saw housing prices really spike," Gianforte told Business Insider earlier this year. "We knew we had to do something about it."

But Dashnaw worries there isn't enough assistance available in the meantime. The Homeowner Assistance Fund — a pot of money provided by the American Rescue Plan of 2021 and dedicated to aiding homeowners struggling with pandemic-related hardships — has been a crucial source of aid for her clients, but its funding is finite and will run out at some point, she noted. In other states, pandemic-era homeowner assistance programs have already run out.

For years, Dashnaw ran a catering business to supplement her nonprofit salary. There, she worked for second-home owners who left their large Montana houses empty for months at a time.

"The gap in the classes has just grown where you've got a middle class that's been pushed into poverty," she said, "And the wealthy are still wealthier."

Are you a homeowner struggling with rising insurance premiums or other costs? Reach out to this reporter at erelman@businessinsider.com.

• Nancy, 72, has no retirement savings and relies on her salary and Social Security.
• She's looking into low-income housing and wishes the US had a better social safety net.
• Increasingly, lower-income older Americans face retirement with insufficient savings.

Nancy, 72, loves her life. She loves living in the Seattle area, and is happy to log in remotely to her job in education after years of working as a teacher.

"I've had a real happy life, and I'm a happy person," said Nancy, whose last name is known to Business Insider, but withheld over privacy concerns.

She's "pretty healthy" and feels like a young 72. But there's just one catch: Nancy has no savings for retirement.

"That's kind of a scary situation," she said. She said she had a 401(k) in the early 2000s but withdrew the money from it to cover a new business venture. Right now, she said she's subsisting on her salary and Social Security.

"It's not fun to look ahead at my older years wondering 'what the heck am I going to do?'" Nancy said.

More older Americans are heading toward retirement with little to no savings, and the situation is increasingly income-stratified. It's creating haves and have-nots of retirees, wherein higher-earning — or luckier — Americans can sit back and enjoy their later years. For others, it means working until they can't anymore.

"You think of all the ways someone my age could accumulate something for retirement. And I don't fall into any of those buckets," Nancy said.

Over time, the ability to save for retirement has become increasingly reserved for higher-earning Americans. An AARP survey found that just around a fifth of American adults 50 and older have no retirement savings. According to the Survey of Consumer Finances, just 57% of Americans ages 55 to 64 have a retirement account, and only 51% of those 65 to 74 have an account.

At the same time, there's a growing income disparity between retirement savings. A 2023 analysis from the Government Accountability Office found that, since 2007, the percentage of lower-income households that have a retirement balance has fallen from 21% to 10%. And, except for the richest Americans, retirement balances didn't have any "detectable differences" during that same period — suggesting that only the highest-earning retirees were saving up more. Pensions — which provide monthly payouts to retirees — are still available for some lower-earning Americans, like educators, although even those benefits are coming up against funding crises.

Indeed, many Americans are living on paltry post-work incomes, of $1,000 a month in Social Security, with some having to return to work entirely or just planning on working until they can't anymore.

Nancy — who doesn't have children, a spouse, family knowledge and motivation for investing, or generational wealth — feels this acutely.

"My parents weren't rich, so I didn't inherit anything. So not having any real estate assets, inheritance family money, is a real handicap for someone as they grow older," she said.

Concerns about the future — but no regrets

Despite her current situation, Nancy is still content with how she lived her life. If she had to go back and do it all again, she'd probably try to save more for retirement. But she said it would've been "terrible" to spend her life working at a hard, high-pressure job that she didn't enjoy, spending her days looking forward to retirement.

"The quality of life and how I spend my life is much more important to me than saving money for some future date. So it's a values decision as well," Nancy said. "I'd rather be happy in what I do every single minute of every single day, including what I do for work, even if I have to sacrifice making a lot of money."

Nancy lives in a 55-and-up retirement community. She said that her fellow residents have assets, kids, and things to fall back on. To her, the key to making retirement more accessible would be low-income housing. Right now, she's exploring what different living situations she might be able to have in her older age.

"I need both my working income and my Social Security to live where I live. So if I wasn't able to work, I'd have to really find a decent low-income place to live in," she said.

Nancy is also worried about the current political situation; which she said seems only bound to get worse for women and people without money.

"One of my considerations is, gee, am I going to have to move to a different country? I think a lot of people are thinking that right now — oh God, am I going to have to move to Canada?" Nancy said. Nancy said she's glad she's not younger, or of childbearing age; she's concerned about our democracy.

"I think a good democracy has a good social safety net for people, especially seniors," she said. "Under a really bad democracy or a non-democracy, like what I see us heading for, that could go away."

Are you struggling with retirement savings or don't have enough money saved? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@businessinsider.com.

• Retirees are turning to Uber and Lyft driving to supplement Social Security or pension income.
• Some retirees who drive part- or full-time say low earnings and rising costs hurt their wallets.
• Drivers face financial instability and declining tips, despite enjoying job flexibility.

George Conner, 78, retired in 2007 from his career as an owner of two businesses. He took it easy for the first few years, but to supplement his Social Security and pay for his medical bills, he tried various jobs — including delivering auto parts — before trying out Uber driving.

He started in 2018 in central Florida, driving five days a week for extra income. His health issues made holding down a full-time job difficult, and he valued the flexibility of gig driving to set his own schedule. It also made him feel like he had a purpose in retirement. However, he estimated he only made $13 to $15 an hour before costs like gas and car maintenance, which brought him to about $7.35 an hour net.

He quit Uber and tried another full-time job for nearly two years, though health issues brought him back last June. Working only weekends during peak times, he said he earns about $16 an hour, making him more financially stable but still without enough to live comfortably. He said all this driving has rendered his car "virtually worthless."

Many older Americans have recently told Business Insider they're struggling to get by on Social Security and are forced to take part- or full-time jobs. Some fear they'll never properly retire, even after working four to five decades behind a desk.

Some recently started driving for Uber and Lyft to earn extra income and have something to do. Some drivers who spoke with BI said this was the only option that could work with their appointments, home maintenance, and health issues. Others said they wanted a service position after decades of working with people.

Still, many said with earnings declining and tips becoming harder to get, they're worried about their financial futures. Some are considering returning to past jobs, while others are willing to keep going since any income can help pay rent or put food on the table.

"Uber offers people from all walks of life the ability to work when and where they want," an Uber spokesperson told BI. "We have seen retirees and seniors take advantage of this opportunity to supplement their incomes and meet new people — and even to get a college degree for free."

Lyft did not respond to a request for comment.

Having something to do in retirement

Some drivers like Glenn Mueller, 75, said Uber driving gives him something to do in his retirement. Mueller, who drives in Naples, Florida, only works one day a week since he doesn't rely on driving to stay afloat, and he uses his earnings for expenses like dinners or filling up his tank.

"I think driving is beneficial to do besides the financial reasons — it gives them something to do," Mueller said. "It's important that they're still a part of their community, and it makes them physically active."

Others like Bob Milosavljević, 72, rely on driving income to supplement his Social Security income. The Boston driver worked as an IT and cybersecurity specialist and doesn't fully rely on driving income to get by.

Milosavljević said his main reason for starting ride-hail driving five years ago was to get out of the house and interact with people. Once the pandemic hit, he said his personal finances weren't great, and the extra income helped with rising inflation.

"I don't see options for people like me short of going out and finding a real job like a desk job," he said. "I worked my whole life to get away from that, and I'm not looking forward to having to go back to that. I will avoid it at all costs. But I see it's not going to be any easier for us than it is today, and today is not easy."

Over the last 18 months, he estimates his earnings have fallen 25-30%, according to earnings statements viewed by BI. He's noticed incentives have dwindled, and growing competition has contributed to fewer profitable rides — he now declines more than half of available rides because they're not worth it. As an older driver, he has worried about his safety while driving, though he hasn't had issues recently.

"The reality is that people who work a 9-to-5 job in the private sector and expect to be able to retire on Social Security are deluding themselves," Milosavljević said. "That's just not possible. It's imperative for retirees to religiously contribute to those 401(k)s and resist the temptation to dip into them before they retire."

Driving with few other options

For some Uber and Lyft drivers in their retirement years, flexible employment options are few and far between.

David Petrie, 74, was laid off last year as a computer field engineer. Now, Petrie, who lives in Anderson, South Carolina, said he gets $1,780 in Social Security, which isn't enough to cover all his expenses. He drove for Uber part-time starting six years ago for extra income but has increasingly relied on it as one of his best options to pull in enough.

At his age, driving gives him the flexibility to work when he wants. He said he makes about $700 a week with Uber, which he said has become increasingly too little for him to get by. He also said tips have declined, even though he goes the extra mile to make his passengers feel comfortable.

"My income goes down due to overhead," Petrie said. "My income is also going down because fees are going up, and people cannot afford Uber. They also cannot tip, due to many reasons, one being lack of funds, and another being the tipper rebellion."

Steve Wilkie, 72, has a similar story. He retired 11 years ago in Southwest Florida and started driving for Uber and Lyft in 2017 to supplement his Social Security. Still, he said his earnings have eroded to the point he barely makes enough to justify the time and money he puts into driving.

He struggles to make $20 in gross earnings an hour, screenshots show, and doesn't do many longer rides to Miami since he can't usually get return trips. He worries he and his wife — who still works part-time as a nurse — won't be able to keep up financially.

"Drives from home to the airport in Fort Myers pay about half what they used to, and with gas prices, car repairs, maintenance costs, and auto insurance all increasing substantially, I can only make money because I'm driving an extremely efficient and fully depreciated 2013 Toyota Prius with 350,000 miles on it," Wilkie said.

Some drivers are seeing benefits

For some drivers, transitioning to Uber and Lyft is challenging but worth it.

Marilyn Cassidy, 73, spent most of her life as a single mother doing her best to provide for her daughter with a disability, which left her with little to save for her retirement. The former paralegal provides what she can for her daughter and grandchildren using income from driving in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

She drives two to three times a week during the daytime with a goal of $100 to $150 a day, though she's struggled to do that recently. She enjoys how every day is "an adventure," though she fears getting complaints that could hurt her near-flawless performance.

"It helps me afford basic life expenses and car expenses and allows me to remain independent and active," Cassidy said, noting she gets tips for nearly half her rides.

Susan Harward, 67, doesn't depend on Uber driving to pay her bills in Salt Lake City, though the extra income is handy for travel or emergency expenses. Since she receives enough from Social Security and has enough saved, she doesn't feel the need to drive late at night or on weekends, when earnings are often higher.

She drives 15 to 20 hours a week and maintains a clean car, drives as smoothly as possible, aims for genuine conversations, and helps many passengers with luggage.

"The really great thing about that is that when I'm ready to travel, I don't have to ask a boss for time off, and I go way too much for the vacation time available in any regular job anyway. I just stop driving," Harward said. "I always say that I'm at a point in my life where I just cannot bear to be told what to do anymore."

Are you an Uber or Lyft driver working into your retirement years? Reach out to this reporter at nsheidlower@businessinsider.com.

When Wendy's ignited the internet's ire in February with its dynamic-pricing proposal, the fast-food chain was forced to do some haphazard cleanup. It insisted that, despite rumors, it wouldn't implement surge pricing and charge more for burgers during busy times. Instead, it said it might offer discounts during slower times of the day and roll out promos based on the weather. The new framing made sense — who doesn't love a deal — but the overall notion was exhausting. Since when do we need to gamify the cost of fries?

Thanks to inflation, people have found themselves in the grocery aisle or a restaurant or a car lot over the past few years wondering just what is going on with prices. Maybe they're not sure exactly how much the item in question used to be, but they know it sure wasn't this. And now that uncertainty has been compounded by tech-enabled (and greed-fueled) dynamic pricing, which is creeping across the economy. Want to know what your Uber ride or concert ticket or bowling-alley visit is going to run you? It depends! Even Walmart is testing out digital price tags, which it says make life easier for associates and improve the customer experience. There's been speculation that the tags could be used for variable pricing, though Walmart says its "every day low price" strategy isn't changing.

All these changes add up to one pervasive sensation: America is suffering from a major case of price fatigue.

It's incredibly frustrating not to know what anything costs, and the situation is only getting worse. While inflation is cooling, the return of discounts doesn't mean a reversion to pre-pandemic prices. People are still on edge that high inflation could rear its ugly head again. The use of surge pricing is extra anxiety-inducing.

"If you're going to introduce something that's new and that may give a pause or a hesitation, you might not want to necessarily do it when people are very price sensitive," said Carly Fink, the head of research and strategy at Provoke Insights, a market-research company. "If it was a great economy and everyone felt like, 'Oh, yeah, I have the money to spend,' I would assume they would be less nervous."

It goes without saying that inflation has been a problem in recent years. The consumer price index is up by more than 20% since February 2020. Financially and psychologically, it's a pain.

When wages don't rise along with inflation, it hurts people's buying power and forces them to change their budgets and spending habits. Low-income people in particular suffer, and workers blame their employers' greed for their wages not budging. Even when pay does rise with prices, everything costing more still feels like a loss. Inflation is stressful, and it can make planning extra challenging. If prices are going up, how are you supposed to know how much money you need to save for your next vacation — let alone stash away for retirement?

And even as inflation settles down, the tool employed to fight it — higher interest rates — adds another layer of uncertainty. If you're in the market for a house, it's tough to gauge whether you ought to wait for mortgage rates to come back down or whether you should pull the trigger now. It's a similar story if you're in the market for a new car — maybe prices have come down some but interest rates have not, and it's hard to know what the right move is.

A "good" price for something today may have seemed outlandish five years ago.

Fink said her surveys indicate that even though inflation is calming, consumers are still nervous about it, with nearly two-thirds ranking it in April as one of their top two concerns. A similar proportion said they'd become more budget-conscious than they were six months earlier. We're looking at a very "price sensitive" and "worried" consumer, she said, adding, "It's very hard for them to keep up with everything that's happening."

Even relatively small-ticket items can come with a price tag that provokes a sense of whiplash. A "good" price for something today may have seemed outlandish five years ago, and it's understandable to wonder whether today's price is just as fleeting.

"I absolutely understand shoppers who have price fatigue. It just beats you down, and certain commodities have increased so quickly," said Jon Hauptman, the founder and president of Price Dimensions, a retail consultancy. "Think of carbonated soft drinks. The whole idea of what's a good price for a 12-pack of carbonated soft drinks has changed dramatically over the past few years."

Consumers tend to be price sensitive, meaning their buying behaviors change as prices go up or down, though they're not very price aware. Most people can name the specific prices of only a handful of things at the grocery store that they buy all the time, like milk or eggs. Overall, however, they intuitively sense that prices are increasing, and broad-based inflation means purchases big and small require a second thought.

"It forces shoppers to shop more carefully," Hauptman said.

The proliferation of dynamic pricing — meaning prices that fluctuate based on market conditions such as supply and demand — makes the landscape harder to navigate. The prices of a variety of products and services aren't just different from what they were a year ago; they may be different from what they were a day ago or even a few minutes ago.

Dynamic pricing isn't new. For better or for worse, it's well established in some industries. People have long been used to it when they're booking flights or hotels, for example. It can make sense in some of these settings, like hospitality, said Timothy Webb, an assistant professor of hospitality business management at the University of Delaware who's worked on pricing strategies for sports teams and tourism spots. "It really centers around the perishable nature of the product and that its capacity is constrained," he said. A hotel can't store up more rooms to rent out during the summer, so raising prices for peak times lets it stay afloat all year, financially, and may help prevent overcrowding. Conversely, dropping prices during the slow season means it's not sitting empty all winter.

People don't like the fluctuations because you always feel like somehow it's exploiting you.
Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management

Still, nobody likes paying extra for a Christmas flight or their summer hotel room. Yes, happy hours and early-bird specials have been around forever, but the idea of paying extra for a restaurant reservation or meal during busy times is not great. The supply-demand forces that make peak-time Ubers outrageously expensive or Taylor Swift tickets prohibitively pricey may be real, but that doesn't mean consumers feel they are fair or good.

People often interpret dynamic pricing as a mechanism for companies to maximize profits. Provoke Insights' research shows that most consumers still aren't super familiar with the concept, but when asked what they would do if a restaurant they visit implements it, two-thirds say they would eat there less often. A survey from consumer analytics platform CivicScience found that a majority of consumers say they agree with the statement that dynamic pricing is "price gouging."

Instead of focusing on getting a discount when they pop into Starbucks during a slow period, people think about the experience of trying to order a Lyft in the rain. They're not wrong to feel this way — making money is how companies talk about their pricing choices to Wall Street.

"Companies have framed this debate around profit maximization. And so as a result, people see it as zero-sum," Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and marketing and the director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management. "People don't like the fluctuations because you always feel like somehow it's exploiting you."

Constant prices aren't guaranteed and never have been. Discounts and promotions are well-trodden retail tactics, and the invisible hand of the market moves on the principles of supply and demand. Every business wants to charge a higher price to customers who can and will pay more and a lower price to those who can't and won't, said Z. John Zhang, a marketing professor at Wharton who focuses on pricing. We can't blame consumers for feeling like it adds uncertainty to an already tumultuous world, he said, but this is sort of the way things go.

"If you look at the big picture, there is actually no presumption for a constant price for a long time for a particular product, and the reason is that's not what prices are supposed to do," he said. "What price is supposed to do is to mediate between demand and supply to make sure that the product is really delivered into the hands of the right people, the right customers."

That sounds fine and good, except we do not live in a world where markets are perfectly efficient, and nobody wants to be constantly watching for changing prices throughout their day. Many industries are uncompetitive, meaning consumers aren't even getting a fair shake. Plenty of companies can move their prices, whether by using dynamic prices or downright raising prices, because they're the only game in town. That's true for airlines and car-rental companies and wireless providers. It's why if you call your internet company to threaten to change services unless your bill stops creeping up, the answer you'll probably get is "LOL good luck with that."

"With the airlines, if you asked people 30 years ago if they wanted to pay different prices, they'd be like, 'No way, it's not fair,'" Webb said. "But the airline also knows that, hey, there's limited providers here, so competition does matter, and if you don't want to pay, well, that's fine. We're still at this price."

Technology is a modern-day X-factor as well. Amazon changes the prices of various items throughout the day. Both Uber and DoorDash have been accused of displaying higher prices for certain customers with low phone batteries or those with iPhones, though both companies have denied this. Today's Blue Light Special is no longer in a store aisle on a Wednesday at noon; it's on a website that knows exactly who you are and is intimately familiar with your spending habits. Companies can use your data to identify an exact price for you, which may work in your favor but may not.

"Because of this optimization, it reduces trust in the company," Dhar said. "I don't trust them to do things that are good for me. They're going to do things that are good for them."

If companies were more transparent about what they were doing and how, it might ease some discomfort. But many aren't.

There are no easy solutions here. Most economists agree that government-mandated price fixing is a bad idea. Achieving a more competitive economy is a long-term project that won't happen overnight. Inflation is getting better, but the threat of it getting worse again still looms. The answer to getting accustomed to high prices is basically to forget what those numbers were in 2019. We didn't even get into hidden fees, another layer in the what-does-anything-even-cost-and-why maze.

You can't fault anyone for feeling tired of it all. After so much economic uncertainty, and with more uncertainty ahead, we're all in our feelings about prices. A prix fixe menu sounds pretty good right now, just to, for a moment, know what we're getting into cost-wise and enjoy a meal.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Job opportunities seem to have dissipated for some previously strong industries.
• Leisure and hospitality is one sector where job gains are far below where they were a few years ago.
• Government and healthcare are areas of the labor market where many jobs are still being added.

Job seekers have it rough these days. Pay raises have cooled for job switchers. People looking for remote positions find this kind of work in short supply.

Plus, the leisure and hospitality industry, which had particularly robust job gains in 2021 as the overall labor market was still recovering from its deep losses during the early pandemic, has slowed hiring dramatically, adding to the less-than-ideal picture for job searchers.

"We're a service economy, and the service sector seems now to be struggling with the kind of rolling recession that hit interest rate-sensitive sectors first," Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told Business Insider. "We first saw tech and housing, real estate industries like that cool down, but we're now seeing weakness spill over into services, and that's the main engine of job growth in the US economy."

It took a long time for the leisure and hospitality industry to get back to where employment was in February 2020; it only surpassed this level this past May, while the economy as a whole passed that benchmark in June 2022. Still, the industry largely saw strong monthly job gains following the losses it faced early on in the pandemic, averaging 205,000 jobs a month in 2021.

But that breakneck pace has slowed to a trickle. Data out Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed this industry saw a month-over-month job gain of 7,000; the overall nonfarm payroll job gain in June was 206,000.

The industry has historically had higher rates of quits and job openings than the overall labor market, per the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

Professional and business services was another industry that had healthy job growth for a lot of 2021, averaging 115,000 jobs a month that year, but the story has changed; it saw a one-month job loss of 17,000 in June 2024.

Other sectors are still growing. Federal, state, and local governments together have a historically high number of employees, with around 23.4 million people, and the public sector added 70,000 jobs in June.

"I think the very high government payrolls number is a further testament to how much weaker things have gotten on the private sector side," Pollak said. "The government has been trying to rehire for years and struggling because the private sector was so strong. Now, people are falling back on those safer government jobs."

Additionally, the healthcare and social assistance sectors have seen robust job growth and likely will be looking for job seekers long-term. "The health care and social assistance sector is projected to not only grow most rapidly of any sector, but it is also projected to create about 45 percent of all the projected job gains from 2022 to 2032," BLS said in a news release in September 2023, as the US population continues to get older.

Pollak previously told BI healthcare is an industry that faces less risk of automation and could be considered a "recession-proof sector."

Still, healthcare monthly job gains pale in comparison to what the leisure and hospitality industry added for the majority of 2021 and the monthly gains in 2022. Healthcare added 48,600 jobs this past June, compared to leisure and hospitality's best month in 2021, which was 422,000 jobs added in July.

The overall tougher labor market still has potential for job seekers.

"I think it's one that workers still have some leverage, but not as much as in the recent past," Nick Bunker, the economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told BI.

When Matt Kugizaki and Nick Levenhagen first saw The Rainbow House in Joshua Tree, California, they knew instantly that they had to live there. It was 2023, and the couple wanted a home in the Mojave Desert. But initially, they wanted something simple.

"I remember telling Nick once when we were looking for homes that I want our house to be like a hotel — nothing on the walls, very plain interiors, no clutter," Kugizaki said. "I envisioned very minimal and easy spaces for our dream home, preferably painted inside using one color and with maybe one statement wall. That's it."

But when they saw The Rainbow House on Zillow, they had to go see it. Stepping inside, the couple were gobsmacked by the sheer number of rainbows. The 1,028-square-foot house had been thoroughly hand-painted over a period of two years by its owner, Patrick Hasson. Each room featured a different bright color with hanging light strings to match. Sixteen different rainbow skulls peppered the interiors. The garage, perhaps the standout feature, showcased rainbow lines that spilled out across the driveway — a real-life version of the unicorn-barfing-rainbows meme.

The house was anything but minimalist — and yet it struck a chord with the couple. "We met the artist, who actually came to the house. He said he painted the house this way to bring more joy to the world. That's certainly what we felt when we saw the house," they told me. The couple bought it for $385,000 and plan to keep all the rainbow features.

Kugizaki and Levenhagen aren't alone in their unexpected love for a kooky home. In fact, their house was featured in the third episode of the new HGTV series "Zillow Gone Wild," which tells the backstories of unusual houses people just purchased or are looking to sell. The series was inspired by the popular Instagram account of the same name that Samir Mezrahi, a former deputy director of social media at BuzzFeed, created in December 2020 when he started noticing weird homes randomly listed on Zillow. "There wasn't anything for the casual home browser looking for these," he told me, so he began sharing the unique houses he found. The account immediately caught on; today it has nearly 2 million followers.

While most people follow Zillow Gone Wild to gawk at the weird and bizarre features of other people's homes, some are looking to buy. And being featured on the account gives listings a leg up. Mezrahi said that real-estate agents actively try to juice up the bizarre elements of their homes to get picked up. "If it's around Halloween, for example, agents seem to use it as an excuse to cover the house in all these skeletons and spooky decorations," he said.

Thanks to a hot housing market and a growing boredom with cookie-cutter new-builds, there's a newfound fervor for bizarre houses. More people are ditching the white and gray homes of the 2010s modern-farmhouse craze for something that can show off their personal style. And with Zillow Gone Wild and a host of other real-estate influencer accounts, a wild home is now easy to find.

The homes that Mezrahi features aren't necessarily bad, ugly, or anything built in bad taste. These are not the over-the-top McMansions that Kate Wagner shares on the blog McMansion Hell. As Mezrahi explains it, a wild house just needs to have interesting or quirky features; it's the customization that matters. He cited a viral home in Gilbert, Arizona, that had been owned by the former Los Angeles Dodger Andre Ethier as the perfect example. The $20 million house came with a go-kart track, a golf simulator, a shooting range, a built-in aquarium, and much more. Other homes might have a single unique element like the giant peacock mosaic in one $2 million home in San Luis Obispo, California, or the McDonald's-style playroom in the basement of an otherwise normal-looking $750,000 home in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

These standout features make homes more likely to go viral, leading to more exposure and possibly a higher selling price. Nick Leyendecker, the founder and principal broker at Leyendecker Luxury Real Estate, said that if maximizing the sale price is the primary objective, the more attention a property receives from potential buyers, the higher the probability of success. When trying to sell a home, most real-estate agents try to garner attention in three ways: paid ads, organic sharing on social media, and earned media from news outlets — aka "organic attention on steroids," Leyendecker said. "There is no such thing as too much exposure."

Homeowners with highly customized spaces often ask Mezrahi to feature their homes before they're even on the market. "The homeowner that converted their swimming pool into a man cave was one that comes to mind," he said. And when homes get featured, they often sell.

There is no such thing as too much exposure.

At the end of April, Leyendecker had a listing in Plymouth, Minnesota, posted on Zillow Gone Wild. The house was decked out with flashy, customized designs including a secret room behind a classic Coca-Cola machine door. Within two months, it sold for $2.8 million.

This new trend flies in the face of previous wisdom that weird houses don't sell. When Hasson, the previous owner of The Rainbow House, was preparing to place the home on the market, his real-estate agent warned him not to have high expectations. "My real-estate agent was like, 'It's a rainbow house and not the easiest to sell,'" Hasson told The Desert Sun. But then the listing was shared on TikTok and blew up. Within two months of being listed, it sold.

Interest in outrageous homes has begun to expand beyond Zillow Gone Wild. A surge of other real-estate influencers and real-estate accounts showing off unique homes have cropped up. In a recent Zillow survey, respondents said that if cost weren't a factor, they would want a home with whimsical features they had dreamed of as a child: 76% said they would want a home theater, 43% pined for a bowling alley, and 58% wanted their own personal elevator. The study also found that different generations favored different features. For example, 38% of those born in the '50s dream of a home with a white picket fence, whereas only 21% of those born in the '90s shared the same vision. Millennials preferred a hot tub and an elevator instead.

Now that millennials are able to buy, those with the cash to spend are making those dreams a reality. And at a time when more people see into your home via social media, having cool features you can show off is a major bonus.

Ashley Spencer and her husband, both in their 30s, were looking for an eye-catching midcentury-modern home at the end of 2021 when they stumbled across one featured on Zillow Gone Wild. The house's interiors were covered in floor-to-ceiling tile — a showroom for the previous owners' tile business. "For us, it's really the Mid Mod architecture that drew us," Spencer said. "This house was just so unique with all the colors, and outside the home is shaped like a bow tie because it was built on such a thin lot. The home has really cool angles."

They also loved that the home was in the woods and next to a lake. They traveled from Austin to Minneapolis to see it for themselves and made an offer the next day. Within a month, they closed on the house.

When guests come over, Spencer loves to show off her 1955 home's built-in shuffleboard court. "I've never seen anything like it anywhere else," she told me. Her guests are always amused to discover the home was listed on Zillow Gone Wild. "My husband was a little bit more reserved and nervous about sharing that the house was from Zillow Gone Wild. But I have no problem talking about it," she said.

Of course, not every wild home will be loved by everyone. But Leyendecker said that with unique homes, it's always a matter of finding the right person. "Marketing exposure is just one piece of the puzzle — homes are a very personal thing," he said, adding: "Even the most broadly marketable properties imaginable are a good fit for some buyers and a bad fit for others."

As the old saying suggests, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The beholders are just getting more ambitious.

For their part, Kugizaki and Levenhagen don't plan on ever selling their wild rainbow house. They feel like stewards of the home and promised the former owner that they would keep everything the same. "He really wanted to make sure someone wasn't going to buy it and then keep the rainbow garage but then paint everything else over," said Levenhagen. The couple agree that rainbows mean a lot to people for many different reasons. "It's really important to a lot of communities including the LGBTQ community," said Kugizaki.

"It is in some ways just a house," Levenhagen added, "but I guess you could say The Rainbow House was a dream we didn't know we always had."

Michelle Mastro covers lifestyle, travel, architecture, and culture. When she's not researching or writing, she's hiking trails (badly).

• Amazon is reminding customers they can pick up Prime Day orders instead of having them delivered.
• The retailer has thousands of pick-up points, including its lockers, around the US.
• The option might be convenient if you shop at Whole Foods — and there's a benefit for Amazon, too.

Amazon has built its delivery chops for years. In fact, one big selling point of its $139-a-year Prime membership is free one-day shipping to customers' doors.

But this year, Prime Day promotions are pointing shoppers toward the option of taking on some of the delivery work themselves by instead collecting packages from its growing network of lockers and other pick-up points.

Prime members are "able to choose how and where those items arrive— whether at home, work, or places you frequent with Amazon's network of thousands of package pick-up locations," Amazon said last month as it touted the massive shopping event, which is scheduled for July 16 and 17.

Amazon has been adding pick-up points in recent years. Its locker banks, for instance, are common sites in apartment lobbies, college dorms, convenience stores, and even police stations. There are also staffed Amazon Counters at Whole Foods stores.

An Amazon spokesperson said that Amazon offers "tens of thousands of package pick-up locations" in the U.S. The spokesperson also directed Business Insider to a blog post from last year, which says that items ordered for pick-up at lockers must be fulfilled by Amazon and weigh under 10 pounds, among other requirements.

And while picking up parcels might seem contrary to Amazon Prime's noted quick-shipping benefits, it's could be useful both for the customer and for the company.

If shoppers already go to Amazon's stores or other places with an Amazon locker, it's quite convenient, said Jeremy Bartlow, a partner and consumer expert at PA Consulting.

"I know it's going to be sitting there in the locker on the way home or at the grocery store, wherever I'm stopping," Bartlow told BI.

It's especially convenient to get an order delivered to a locker if you've had Amazon packages stolen from your porch or apartment mailroom, or if you're ordering an expensive item and want the extra security.

There's another reason why Amazon would love for you to pick up your Prime Day deals instead of delivering them to your front door: their bottom line.

Amazon's annual spending on shipping has ballooned over the last few years, particularly as it ramped up its one-day and same-day shipping operations.

Amazon spent $89.5 billion on shipping in 2023 — an increase of roughly 7% over 2022, the company said in its annual filing with the SEC.

That's despite offering options like "Amazon Day Delivery," where customers can choose to wait a few days if the order isn't urgent, and Amazon will try to put as many items in the same box as it can. (Amazon sometimes offers credits to customers who choose this option.)

Delivering orders to a single pick-up point instead of going out on an hours-long route through suburbia saves time — and probably gas — compared with individual delivery.

The cost of shipping back items that customers want to return is also steep for Amazon and other retailers — so steep, in fact, that Amazon may give you a refund and tell you to keep the product.

All of that has pushed Amazon to come up with new ways to get you to pick up or drop off stuff instead of relying on the company's delivery workers or third-party services like the U.S. Postal Service.

Earlier this year, Amazon offered a discount at Amazon Fresh grocery stores if patrons used one of the supermarkets to return something they bought on Amazon.com, for example. Whole Foods and Fresh Prime customers can also get their groceries selected from the selves and pre-packed for pick-up for free. Amazon's grocery delivery service for Prime members costs an extra $9.99 a month and requires a $35 minimum order.

Last year, Amazon offered customers $10 if they picked up purchases at a store, such as Whole Foods, Fresh, or Kohl's.

But whether the pick-up strategy will save Amazon money remains to be seen. After all, Amazon itself helped make free, fast shipping (at least, if you've paid for Prime first) an expectation for millions of consumers.

Do you work for Amazon, Whole Foods, or Amazon Fresh and have a story idea? Reach out to this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com

• I've been sober for eight months and recently traveled to an all-inclusive resort.
• I was nervous about the trip but ended up enjoying it so much more without alcohol. 
• Sipping mocktails, reading sobriety books, and doing resort activities helped me navigate sobriety.

I recently planned a vacation with my husband to an all-inclusive resort, something I wasn't completely sold on since I've been sober for the last eight months. We'd visited all-inclusive resorts in the past, but my memories of those trips revolve around days spent drinking margaritas poolside and evenings fueled by wine and after-dinner cocktails.

I stopped drinking cold turkey at the end of last year, desperate to shake hangovers and increased anxiety. I've found a sense of well-being in sobriety that I won't be giving up anytime soon. Still, I wondered what it'd be like to be in a booze-centric environment and abstain from alcohol.

When we visited Sandals' newest adults-only, all-inclusive resort in St.Vincent and the Grenadines, I found that the beautiful resort and the island it lies on were way more enjoyable without the chaos alcohol brings to a vacation. Here's how I navigated being a sober person in an environment where the booze was always flowing.

I made sure my room was stocked with alcohol-free drink options

Even though I'm sober, my husband still drinks alcohol. I didn't request a completely "dry" room at Sandals St. Vincent and the Grenadines — though it's not a bad idea for others looking to stay sober — because I didn't want to stop him from enjoying that aspect of the all-inclusive resort.

Instead, I requested that non-alcoholic drinks be stocked in our room in addition to things like the wine and vodka that were included. With ingredients like club soda, Diet Coke, and grapefruit juice on hand, it was easy to sip a mocktail whenever I wanted.

"Quit lit" books and sobriety podcasts made me feel less alone in my choice to abstain

While I'm sober, I don't consider myself an alcoholic or work with a support group or sponsor to maintain my sobriety. To make sure I didn't feel alone in my choice to be sober at an all-inclusive resort, I listened to sobriety podcasts like "The Sober Mom Life" and read "quit lit" on my Kindle.

Having books like "Unbottled Potential: Break Up with Alcohol and Break Through to Your Best Life" by Amanda Kuda at the ready was a great way to keep other sober voices in my head throughout the trip.

The resort offered so many great booze-free drinks that I didn't miss alcohol

Sandals had a great selection of fresh juices and mocktails available across its bars and restaurants, so there was never a time when I felt like everyone else had a fun drink, and I was left sipping water. I used my time at the resort, where everything was included, to try new drinks, and even found a refreshing new summertime favorite: coconut water with ice and a lime.

I also had fun trying new-to-me treats on excursions

On days when we went on excursions around St. Vincent, I used the travel time to explore food and drink options I'd never find at home. From sorrel, a hibiscus and ginger drink I ordered at a bar on Mustique, to a line of canned sparkling water from the makers of Angostura bitters, there were many new-to-me drinks to try that kept me from craving alcohol.

Focusing on the flavors of the food at Sandals — rather than alcohol — made dinners feel special

Sandals has more than 10 restaurants on its St. Vincent property, so there was always some kind of food to try, from coconut macaroons at the coffee shop to jerk pork at our favorite lunch spot.

During my drinking days, food and wine went hand-in-hand, so it was refreshing to really focus on the flavors in the food at the resort rather than drift through each meal slightly tipsy and be left with little recollection of what was served.

I filled my downtime at the resort with activities

There were plenty of activities on the schedule at our resort, from poolside movies in the evenings to dance parties with Caribbean performers. I attended a bracelet-making class one morning with an iced latte in hand, and sipped mocktails at the property's rum bar one evening while watching guests do karaoke. Focusing on things to do rather than things to drink was the key to having a really great time in every circumstance.

My trip only solidified my decision to be sober

I spent many years trying to moderate my drinking and find a happy medium that would allow me to have my nightly wine but not feel like garbage the next day. As a sober person, the burden of worrying about when to switch to water or whether I'm talking too loud because I'm tipsy are now non-issues, and I feel a freedom I wish I could impart to others.

Visiting an all-inclusive resort as a non-drinker was a great experience for me — something I can't wait to do again. While I worried I'd feel like I was missing out on the value of an all-inclusive being sober, I realized the real benefit was the incredible scenery, delicious food, and relaxing activities. To my surprise, I didn't need a drink in my hand to enjoy everything the resort had to offer.