'We don't want to be first place.' Wyoming tries to address high gun suicide rates by Kirk Siegler

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Shortly after Christina Williams' fiancé died last spring, her three daughters came to her crying. They said they missed their dad. It got to be too much for her.

"I couldn't handle my grief or my girls' grief at the same time," Williams says.

She made a plan, as grief counselors call it, to take her life that day. But by chance, a couple of hours later, while stopped at a traffic light on Dell Range Boulevard in Cheyenne, she saw a sign for LIV Health, a newly opened mental health urgent care clinic.

She decided to drive in right then. Without an appointment, she was seen immediately by a crisis clinician and a psychiatric nurse practitioner.

 

One of the first questions that crisis clinician Sarai Guerrero-Vasquez asked Williams when she first came in is now an increasingly normal standard across Wyoming: Where are the guns stored at home?

"I always assure them, 'I'm just a social worker — I'm not going to go into your house and take anything,'" Guerrero-Vasquez says. "I just want to make sure that you stay safe, and if that means having a family member secure them for a little bit until you go through this bump, life will resume."

Williams had already given hers to her best friend. Soon after her visit to LIV Health, she agreed to check herself into the hospital and has since been doing better — getting regular counseling and help managing medications. But Guerrero-Vasquez says some patients resist getting more treatment because they're afraid their guns will be confiscated.

This is the reality of suicide prevention work in a state with one of the highest gun ownership rates in the United States. For most of the last decade, Wyoming has also had one of the highest suicide rates and, specifically, high gun suicide rates. Firearms are used in roughly 75% of suicides in the Cowboy State, compared with just over 50% nationally.

 

In conservative Wyoming, it was long seen as taboo to draw a link between guns and suicide.

But survivors and those who work in prevention say there are signs that this is finally changing, with gun shops increasingly talking about safe storage of firearms, and mental health professionals talking more with patients about the risks of easy access to guns during a mental health crisis.

 

"Cowboying up" to get through a mental health crisis

There are a lot of theories behind why Wyoming, alongside several of its neighbors in the Mountain West, has had perennially high suicide rates. It's the least populated state in the nation, and there are huge gaps in care. People have to drive long distances on roads that often close for blizzards or wind. There has also long been a stigma around getting help: that "cowboy up" mentality of getting through the tough times.

But those who work on the front lines of suicide prevention say there's another, bigger elephant in the room. And that's all the guns and easy access to them.

"One of the challenging aspects of working in the Rocky Mountain region is just the availability and accessibility of firearms," says Brittany Wardle, a prevention officer at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center. "Some days it feels very overwhelming because you think, 'If we didn't have firearms to worry about, what would suicide look like here?'"

 

But gun control in Wyoming is widely seen as being off the table. It's also unlikely the state will expand Medicaid anytime soon, which experts say could increase mental health services.

Still, those who work in suicide prevention see some incremental signs of progress. Wyoming now has a locally staffed 988 suicide hotline. Gov. Mark Gordon has been holding high-profile suicide prevention forums in communities, garnering press attention. And efforts to expand mental health care to underserved places — such as the new urgent care clinic in Cheyenne — could serve as a model for other communities.

 

LIV Health has seen a 171% increase in patients since last year. Similar clinics have been popping up around the country since 2020. In rural America, it can take months to get a regular appointment with a mental health specialist, and providers say people in crisis need help immediately.

Suicide by firearm is 97% lethal

In the urgent care clinic's lobby, next to the requisite doctor's office magazines, LIV Health CEO Emily Loos restocks a basket full of free gun safety locks every couple of weeks. Clinic staff members stress the importance of safely storing guns or giving them up temporarily in a time of crisis.

"If we're worried about impulsivity, [we say] you can put the key somewhere up high where you really have to work to get to it," Loos says. "If they're hesitant to give up their firearm, we'll talk about making it harder to access within the home."

 

Even though Wyoming has remained at or near the top in the nation for per capita suicides, B.J. Ayers is at least encouraged that folks are finally talking openly about keeping guns away from people in a moment of crisis.

It's something she knows all too well. The Cheyenne mother lost two sons to suicide more than a decade ago. Both shot themselves.

 

"I mean, at what point do we say enough is enough?" Ayers says. "We need to talk about it. We need to get the resources out to the people that are in crisis."

Unlike, say, intentional drug overdoses, suicide by firearm is almost always lethal. After her sons' deaths, Ayers, who is 62 and works as an insurance agent, channeled her grief into action, starting a suicide prevention foundation.

"It's very disheartening when we stay up there," she says, of her state's ranking on guns and suicide. "We don't want to be first place in this."

 

A push for safe storage as an alternative to red flag laws

In blue America, the reflexive response to gun violence is often a move to restrict access to firearms. With gun control a nonstarter here, prevention workers like Lauren SinClair of the Department of Veterans Affairs talk instead about creating time and space between a person in crisis and a gun.

 

One recent week, she had logged hundreds of miles in her Toyota hybrid minivan crisscrossing southern Wyoming visiting local gun shops and advocating for safe storage — where a customer can bring their guns in and store them temporarily in a safe, no questions asked.

At an unannounced drop-in at Frontier Arms & Supply in Cheyenne, she explained to counter staff: "Maybe their teenager is in crisis or they themselves were just saying, 'Hey, I'm not in the right space to have my firearm at home with me right now. Can you hold that?'"

She was pleased to learn that the shop was already offering this service and getting willing participants. SinClair lost her mother to suicide by firearm when she was a little girl. She says that for too long, suicide prevention and guns were completely siloed from one another in Wyoming.

"They can coexist together: mental health professionals talking about firearms, firearms professionals talking about mental health," SinClair says. "Those can exist together, and I think for too long there was hesitancy."

 

It's not yet clear how many gun shops are offering safe storage in Wyoming. But it's now more common for salespeople to hand out safety locks with purchases and to have taken suicide prevention trainings known as QPR classes — question, persuade, refer.

A local prevention tool that doesn't involve politics

On the outskirts of the wind-swept town of Laramie is Gold Spur Outfitters, a specialty gun retailer popular with local college students. Behind the store and warehouse floor is a huge metal vault. On closer inspection, it's a secure room, not unlike a large safe.

 

Co-owner Lloyd Baker incorporated safe storage into his business model when he opened three years ago, after seeing so many fellow veterans battling mental health challenges.

"Something like this is not going to solve all the problems. But it's a start," Baker says. "We're not here to judge. We're not here to point fingers. We're here to reduce the stigma, first off, around firearm storage and mental health."

Baker is working with the new Firearms Research Center across town at the University of Wyoming to turn this into a model statewide. He's frustrated with what he sees as the gridlock in American politics: Many liberals default to gun control, and most conservatives just say no to anything.

"We can provide tools to the people who do suicide prevention," Baker says. "There are other options than going through state or federal government to try to fix a local problem. Maybe we can do something locally."

He's referring to the alternative to red flag laws, which have been effective in blue states, including next door in Colorado, where a judge can temporarily remove guns during a mental health crisis. In a rural culture where there's often deep mistrust in government, Baker says, gun owners — including some of his most loyal customers — tend to have better relationships with their local dealers.

 

Still, despite all the work underway, Wyoming was expected to finish out 2023 at or near the top in the nation for suicides.

It's frustrating to survivors like Kari Cochran who are turning their grief into action.

In Rock Springs, she lost her 18-year-old son last year to suicide. He had battled mental health challenges his entire life and shot himself after going missing in February.

"He left the house. He talked about buying a gun. At that point, I didn't think he had access," Cochran says.

 

Cochran, a local hairdresser, was elected to her local school board recently in part on a platform of increasing mental health access for students. She says she'll work as hard as she can to ensure that no other family has to endure the pain hers is going through.

"It's a system problem that just is going to continue to repeat itself until we show kids and talk to kids openly. I mean, guns aren't going away," she says.

 

The big leak in Trump and Haley’s oil promises by CHRISTIAN ROBLES

 

The two remaining Republican presidential candidates have repeatedly promised to expand U.S. oil production — but they would be hard-pressed to meet that pledge, writes Shelby Webb.

Presidents have little impact on day-to-day production in the near term, analysts and industry officials told Shelby before former President Donald Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley face off in tonight’s New Hampshire primary.

“It’s not zero, but it’s pretty close,” said Ryan Kellogg, a former BP engineer and economic analyst who’s now a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

 Only 11 percent of oil and 9 percent of natural gas produced onshore in the U.S. is on federal land. U.S. oil production hit a record high last year, even though President Joe Biden has limited federal oil lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and curbed oil and gas exploration in much of Alaska.

Market forces, namely volatile global oil prices and innovation by the oil industry, have greater influence on industry output than the White House, the analysts say.

When global oil and gas prices are high, American companies increase output to financially benefit, Kellogg said. This year, global oil demand is expected to keep rising, bringing prices and production up.

Meanwhile, oil companies continue to innovate, developing technology that better identifies where oil fractures occur and where to drill.

However, a Republican president determined to “drill, drill, drill” — to quote Trump — wouldn’t be inconsequential in the long term.

Analysts say a president’s oil policies can influence future industry developments.

“As far as new production goes, presidential impacts can be quite significant over time — but emphasis on the time,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners. He said opening federal land to oil and gas leasing can affect output five to 10 years down the line.

So far, Trump and Haley have been vague about which Biden environmental policies they would dial back. They could target an upcoming fee on methane emitted from oil and gas infrastructure, rules to prevent methane leaks, or a slowdown in federal oil lease sales.

Such policy changes would hardly affect prices at the gas pump. But they could put the U.S. at odds with international efforts to combat climate change, said Jason Rylander, senior adviser for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.

“We’re coming out of [the U.N.’s annual climate conference] with an international commitment to begin a phase-out from fossil fuels,” he said. “It’s appalling our political leaders would be actively campaigning on expansion of new oil and gas development.”

 

He was stranded. A stranger offered help and a message: 'Today you, tomorrow me' by Laura Kwerel

 This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else

 

In 2010, Justin Horner was driving down a busy freeway in Portland, Ore., when his tire blew out. He pulled over to the side of the road and made a sign that said he needed help.

Three hours later, a van finally pulled up. Out came a family of four. They were Latino, and their young daughter acted as translator between her parents' Spanish and Horner's English, so that they could work together to fix Horner's car.

 

They took about an hour, starting with the father finding a log on the side of the road, and using it to lift the car. When they finished, the mom pulled out a big jug of water, and they drank and washed their hands.

"I just thanked them and thanked them and thanked them," Horner recalled. "And I tried to give her money. I only had a $20 bill, and I just thought, you know, it's the least I could do. And she just wouldn't take it."

But Horner was adamant, and eventually he put the money in her hand, and walked away.

Then he heard their small daughter call out, to ask Horner if he was hungry. Indeed he was, and she came over with a tamale from their cooler. They exchanged thank yous, she got into the van, and the family started to drive away.

 

"As they're trying to get into traffic, I unwrapped the tamale and my money is in the tamale," Horner said. "They had unwrapped the tamale and they'd put the 20 in and then they'd wrapped it back up."

Horner immediately ran over to the van, which was starting to pull into traffic, to get the father's attention.

"He rolls down his window. He sees me coming and he's just shaking his head. And I keep saying like, 'Por favor, por favor' — I'm holding a bill out," Horner remembered.

 

"And he just kind of puts his hand up and he just, you know, with this big smile on his face, he just says, 'Today you, tomorrow me.'"

The man then gave Horner a wave, rolled up the window, and drove off. The last thing Horner saw was the young girl waving goodbye through the window. He never saw them again.

 

A few months later, Horner wrote up his story for Reddit, which drew thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. It turned into an essay in The New York Times, led to references on late night talk shows, and inspired a handful of short films.

Horner knows that the phrase, "today you, tomorrow me," wasn't invented by that stranger in the van — he says it's a common expression in Mexico, where he believes the family was from. But its sentiment is universal. And on many corners of the internet, it's become a kind of shorthand for empathy.

"It's weird. It just seemed like some chicken-soup-for-the soul kind of thing, right? Like 'Today you, tomorrow me,' like, 'It could have been you, it could have been me,'" Horner said.

"But when you start taking it apart, it's kind of big. I think at the end of the day, it just shows you that everyone can be vulnerable in a given situation, and that everyone needs help."

 

Why Are Republicans Still Debating Slavery and Insurrection? by Jelani Cobb

 

The radical Republican leaders who lived through the Civil War understood a principle that has been lost on their successors.

 

 The race for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination has so far been notable mostly for the candidates’ sniping, hyperbole, and self-righteous indignation, but there has been a shared concern for the prospects of the twenty-first century. In a barb seemingly aimed at both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Nikki Haley said, “We won’t win the fight for the twenty-first century if we keep trusting politicians from the twentieth century.” Vivek Ramaswamy, whose fealty to Trump is nearly clerical, hailed him as “the best President of the twenty-first century,” even though Trump leads the three other men elected since 2000 in impeachments by a score of two to zero. Ron DeSantis posted on X, “The 21st century needs to be an American century. We cannot let it be a Chinese century.” It’s ironic, then, that so much time in this heated stretch of the contest has been devoted to issues that defined the nineteenth century.

 

 Trump recently assured a crowd in Mason City, Iowa, that Haley “doesn’t have what it takes.” He cited her meandering answer to a question about the cause of the Civil War, from an audience member at a New Hampshire town hall, in which she failed to even mention slavery. With typical self-satisfaction, Trump noted, “I’d say ‘slavery’ is sort of the obvious answer, as opposed to about three paragraphs of bullshit.”

 

 

This particular problem with the past is not a new one for today’s Republicans. Governor DeSantis called Haley’s reply an “incomprehensible word salad,” and said it wasn’t that difficult to identify “the role slavery played”—yet he has faced criticism for Florida’s new public-school standards, which suggest that some Black people benefitted from the institution. (DeSantis majored in history at Yale and briefly taught the subject at a private high school in Georgia; according to the Times, he “got into debates about the Civil War with students who questioned the focus, and sometimes the accuracy, of his lessons.”) Chris Christie accused Haley of being “unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” and mocked her error again last week, in a speech announcing the suspension of his campaign. Ramaswamy offered the most complete response, pointing to the sectional and political tensions that had existed for decades prior to 1861 before noting that, without slavery, none of them was sufficient to ignite the maelstrom of civil war. Previously, however, he had espoused the discredited theory that the Second Amendment secured the freedom of former slaves (by allowing them to defend it with guns) and deemed Juneteenth a “useless” holiday.

Haley, meanwhile, quickly acknowledged that slavery was, of course, the war’s central cause. In fact, in South Carolina’s 1860 Declaration of Secession, legislators said that their decision was the result of “an increasing hostility on the part of non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” And Haley herself, as South Carolina’s governor, had the Confederate flag removed from the grounds of the state capitol in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans as they prayed in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church.

 Last Monday, President Biden gave an impassioned speech at that church, where he praised not Haley but the congregation for bringing down the flag, through its profound act of forgiveness, which had “changed hearts.” He also reiterated that the defeated Confederates had embraced “a self-serving lie that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights,” and decried current efforts to “erase” history. He went on to denounce those Trump supporters who are fixated on a “second lost cause,” manifested in the insurrectionist assault of January 6, 2021—a reminder that slavery is not the only element of nineteenth-century politics to have resurfaced as a matter open to debate.

 

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to review whether, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Colorado’s Supreme Court is justified in barring Trump from appearing on the ballot in that state’s Republican primary, on the basis of his actions related to January 6th. In December, the state’s Supreme Court found that it is, but put its ruling on hold to give the higher court time to weigh in. Section 3 prohibits the holding of office by anyone who has taken an oath to support the Constitution but “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.” Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, came to the same conclusion as the majority on the Colorado court, and barred Trump’s name from appearing on ballots in her state. More than a dozen other states are considering similar actions; oral arguments in the Colorado case will be heard on February 8th.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, is, like the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, a product of the period when the Republican Party was fixated on preventing another disastrous insurrection like the one that had just cost some seven hundred thousand lives. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in most circumstances. The Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men, implicitly creating a bloc of voters to counterbalance the power of former Confederates in the South. Section 3 of the Fourteenth makes explicit the Republicans’ concerns about the potential threat posed by former insurrectionists.

The third anniversary of January 6th fell in the same week that Trump’s lawyers made their bid to have the Supreme Court keep him on the Colorado ballot. Their argument holds that the state Supreme Court’s ruling will “unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters.” It’s a rich objection, given that Trump is contesting a racketeering indictment in Georgia for, in essence, attempting to do exactly that. Had his efforts to get Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him nearly twelve thousand votes been successful, Trump would have disenfranchised nearly two and a half million Georgians who had cast their ballots for Biden.

Nonetheless, Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy all said in recent weeks that, if elected, they would pardon Trump if he is convicted of any of the federal felony charges he is fighting—including those related to January 6th. This suggests that, for all the controversy surrounding the answer, the audience member in New Hampshire may have asked the wrong question. The pertinent issue now is not what caused the Civil War but what we should have learned from it. January 6, 2021, is not an equivalent date in our history to April 12, 1861, but the radical Republican leaders who lived through the Civil War understood a principle that has been lost on their successors: that, if entrusted with power, leaders who commit assaults on the national government once may well attempt to do so again. ♦

He Became the Nation’s Ninth Vice President. She Was His Enslaved Wife. by Ronald G. Shafer

 

Her name was Julia Chinn, and her role in Richard Mentor Johnson’s life caused a furor when the Kentucky Democrat was chosen as Martin Van Buren’s running mate in 1836.

 

She was born enslaved and remained that way her entire life, even after she became Richard Mentor Johnson’s “bride.”

Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who eventually became the nation’s ninth vice president in 1837, couldn’t legally marry Julia Chinn. Instead the couple exchanged vows at a local church with a wedding celebration organized by the enslaved people at his family’s plantation in Great Crossing, according to Miriam Biskin, who wrote about Chinn decades ago.

Chinn died nearly four years before Johnson took office. But because of controversy over her, Johnson is the only vice president in American history who failed to receive enough electoral votes to be elected. The Senate voted him into office. 

 

The couple’s story is complicated and fraught, historians say. As an enslaved woman, Chinn could not consent to a relationship, and there’s no record of how she regarded him. Though she wrote to Johnson during his lengthy absences from Kentucky, the letters didn’t survive.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is working on a book about Chinn, wrote about the hurdles in a blog post for the Association of Black Women Historians.

“While doing my research, I was struck by how Julia had been erased from the history books,” wrote Myers, a history professor at Indiana University. “Nobody knew who she was. The truth is that Julia (and Richard) are both victims of legacies of enslavement, interracial sex, and silence around black women’s histories.” 

 

Johnson’s life is far better documented.

He was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature in 1802 and to Congress in 1806. The folksy, handsome Kentuckian gained a reputation as a champion of the common man.

Back home in Great Crossing, he fathered a child with a local seamstress, but didn’t marry her when his parents objected, according to the biography “The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky.” Then, in about 1811, Johnson, 31, turned to Chinn, 21, who had been enslaved at Blue Spring Plantation since childhood.

Johnson called Chinn “my bride.” His “great pleasure was to sit by the fireplace and listen to Julia as she played on the pianoforte,” Biskin wrote in her account.

The couple soon had two daughters, Imogene and Adaline. Johnson gave his daughters his last name and openly raised them as his children. 

 

Johnson became a national hero during the War of 1812. At the Battle of the Thames in Canada, he led a horseback attack on the British and their Native American allies. He was shot five times but kept fighting. During the battle, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was killed.

In 1819, “Colonel Dick” was elected to the U.S. Senate. When he was away in Washington for long periods, he left Chinn in charge of the 2,000-acre plantation and told his White employees that they should “act with the same propriety as if I were home.”

Chinn’s status was unique.

While enslaved women wore simple cotton dresses, Chinn’s wardrobe “included fancy dresses that turned heads when Richard hosted parties,” Christina Snyder wrote in her book “Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson.”

 

In 1825, Chinn and Johnson hosted the Marquis de Lafayette during his return to America.

In the mid-1820s, Johnson opened on his plantation the Choctaw Academy, a federally funded boarding school for Native Americans. He hired a local Baptist minister as director. Chinn ran the academy’s medical ward.

“Julia is as good as one half the physicians, where the complaint is not dangerous,” Johnson wrote in a letter. He paid the academy’s director extra to educate their daughters “for a future as free women.”

Johnson tried to advance his daughters in local society, and both would later marry White men. But when he spoke at a local July Fourth celebration, the Lexington Observer reported, prominent White citizens wouldn’t let Adaline sit with them in the pavilion. Johnson sent his daughter to his carriage, rushed through his speech and then angrily drove away.

When Johnson’s father died, he willed ownership of Chinn to his son. He never freed his common-law wife.

“Whatever power Chinn had was dependent on the will and the whims of a White man who legally owned her,” Snyder wrote.

Then, in 1833, Chinn died of cholera. It’s unclear where she is buried.

Johnson went on to even greater national prominence.

In 1836, President Andrew Jackson backed Vice President Martin Van Buren as his successor. At Jackson’s urging, Van Buren — a fancy dresser who had never fought in war — picked war hero Johnson as his running mate. Nobody knew how the Shawnees’ chief was slain in the War of 1812, but Johnson’s campaign slogan was, “Rumpsey, Dumpsey. Johnson Killed Tecumseh.”

Johnson’s relationship with Chinn became a campaign issue. Southern newspapers denounced him as “the great Amalgamationist.” A mocking cartoon showed a distraught Johnson with a hand over his face bewailing “the scurrilous attacks on the Mother of my Children.” 

 

Van Buren won the election, but Johnson’s 147 electoral votes were one short of what he needed to be elected. Virginia’s electors refused to vote for him. It was the only time Congress chose a vice president.

When Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840, Democrats declined to nominate Johnson at their Baltimore convention. It is the only time a party didn’t pick any vice-presidential candidate. The spelling-challenged Jackson warned that Johnson would be a “dead wait” on the ticket.

“Old Dick” still ended up being the leading choice and campaigned around the country wearing his trademark red vest. But Van Buren lost to Johnson’s former commanding officer, Gen. William Henry Harrison.

Johnson never remarried, but he reportedly had sexual relationships with other enslaved women who couldn’t consent to them. The former vice president won a final election to the Kentucky legislature in 1850, but died a short time later at the age of 70.

His brothers laid claim to his estate at the expense of his surviving daughter, Imogene, who was married to a White man named Daniel Pence.

“At some point in the early twentieth century,” Myers wrote, “perhaps because of heightened fears of racism during the Jim Crow era, members of Imogene Johnson Pence’s line, already living as white people, chose to stop telling their children that they were descended from Richard Mentor Johnson … and his black wife. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that younger Pences, by then already in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, began discovering the truth of their heritage.”

Shipping container buildings may be cool — but they're not always green by Chloe Veltman

 

Millions — perhaps tens of millions — of shipping containers are sitting empty at ports all over the world. And they've been a treasure trove for architects Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano.

"We found so many — it felt like something so ripe to pick, basically," said Lignano. He and Tolla were in San Francisco recently for the opening of an art exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery focused on their use of shipping containers as building material and art project.

The Italian "starchitects" got into the shipping container building game in the 1990s, roughly a decade after these types of buildings first started appearing. (Shipping containers were invented in the mid-1950s, but the first reported instance of shipping containers being converted into housing was 1987.)

 Lignano and Tolla's New York-based firm LOT-EK's projects include an experimental art school in New Orleans for people of color and an affordable housing complex in inner-city Johannesburg, complete with swimming pool.

 People like shipping container buildings not only because they look interesting but also because they seem to solve a problem — finding a use for the millions of empty steel shipping containers scattered across the planet. They're used in projects like Photoville in New York City, which transforms the containers into mini art galleries, and Monarch Village, a development for formerly unhoused people in Lawrence, Kansas.

 

"Shipping containers are great for building with because they are modular, movable and durable," said California architect Douglas Burnham. His firm, Envelope, created Proxy, a development in San Francisco that includes several businesses housed in shipping containers, from a clothing store to a beer garden.

Containers are also an attractive alternative to traditional construction materials such as cement — cement manufacturing produces the world's third-highest level of planet-warming pollution — and wood, which requires cutting down trees and growing them again.

Italian architect Tolla said she and Lignano favor containers that are 10 to 15 years old, both for sustainability reasons and because they like the containers' hip, dilapidated look.

 

But here's the thing: The vast majority of people in the market for an office, public facility or home made out of shipping containers don't buy them heavily used, because doing so doesn't make financial sense.

"When you're building a $100,000, $200,000 structure, that $1,000 to $2,000 difference between a new container and a used container is not really significant anymore," said Alex Rozkin, the CEO of Conexwest, a nationwide shipping container supplier. "And most customers will just opt for the new one."

Rozkin said most customers buy old containers only to build basic structures like storage units. And new — or nearly new, "one-trip" containers — come with additional benefits.

 

"They don't have the dents," Rozkin said. "They don't have the rust."

Also, some municipalities, like Los Angeles, won't allow the use of containers that are damaged, that have been previously repaired or that are more than two years old.

"If you're using a one-time-use container ... then that container would be put to better use transporting goods across seas and oceans, which is the purpose it's meant to serve," said architect and construction technology expert Belinda Carr in an episode of her YouTube video series.

YouTube

"The idea that you are saving the environment when you use shipping containers and that it's a highly sustainable practice — I understand if you're using something meant for the landfill. But if you are using a brand-new shipping container, what's the point?"

Carr said another significant challenge is temperature regulation. Those steel boxes get very cold inside — and very, very hot.

 Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurateur Joe Carroll commissioned and lived in an eye-catching shipping container home designed by LOT-EK's Tolla and Lignano for five years. The home is prominently featured in a new documentary about the architects' work, We Start With the Things We Find. 

 

Carroll told NPR that he appreciated many things about LOT-EK's approach.

"It's about designing structures that are unique looking, not just a stack of cubes," said Carroll.

But Carroll also said his energy bills were sky high.

"There was no thermal heat or solar," he said. "We didn't have any of that in the home."

All that heating and cooling takes not only money but environmental resources.

So — what should we do with them?

Critics say the most environmentally friendly use of all these unused steel shipping containers is to recycle them.

 "The pitch of these containers is, 'Well, we're saving them.' But it doesn't make any sense," said San Francisco-based architect Mark Hogan of OpenScope Studio, who has publicly shared his concerns about shipping container housing. "You'd be much better off recycling the container into steel and then build out of steel studs — like the normal way you'd build a building."

Homicides dropped by over 10% in America’s biggest cities in 2023 by Eric Levenson and Mark Morales

 

After three years of distressingly high levels, homicides in the US declined significantly across the board in 2023 – even as the public’s concerns about crime remained at its highest in over two decades.

In particular, the five biggest cities in the US – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix – each saw homicides fall by over 10%, according to the latest data from those police departments.

Further, national data from the FBI covering January to September 2023 showed an 8.2% drop in all violent crime, including a 15.6% drop in murders, compared to the same period in 2022. These declines were seen in cities over 1 million people and those under 10,000, and across all four regional quadrants of the US. The full year of data won’t be released until this fall, but the trend is clear.

Taken together, the broad decline in crimes in 2023 suggests societal disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 police murder of George Floyd have faded, policing experts say. 

 

Taken together, the broad decline in crimes in 2023 suggests societal disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 police murder of George Floyd have faded, policing experts say.

Those years were marked by the closures of schools, courts and social services, a rise in gun sales and a dysfunctional community relationship with police. Now, officials say the decline in the homicide rate is a credit to reopened services, focused crime-fighting tactics, improved partnerships within the law enforcement community, and a significant reduction in the backlog of criminal court cases. 

 We’re kind of looking at a return to where we were pre-pandemic,” said Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami who recently served as the director of the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. “If you were to take and draw a line between where we were in ‘18-19, with respect to most crime types, and where we’re going to be at the end of ’23, it’s almost going to be like a straight line except for that aberration between ‘20, ’21, ‘22.”

Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank examining crime and law enforcement trends, cautioned that homicides still remain above pre-pandemic levels.

“Homicide is trending down but it’s dropped from a big spike,” he said. “It’s good news that we’re headed back into the right direction but there still may be 4-5 (thousand) more people slain in 2023 than prior to the pandemic.”

Some cities have seen homicide numbers fall to historic lows. Detroit recorded 252 homicides in 2023, an 18.4% drop from the year before and the fewest homicides since 1966.

“We are seeing record drops in gun violence in Detroit because every single part of the criminal justice system is getting past Covid obstacles and is now working again,” Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement. “I have never seen such a high level of cooperation.” 

 

There are exceptions, too, including cities like Washington DC, which saw a 35% increase in homicides, and Memphis, which saw a 42% increase in murders.

Even with the national crime declines this year, public opinion on crime has gone in the other direction. According to recent Gallup polling, 63% of Americans describe crime in the US as “extremely serious” or “very serious,” the highest recorded figure since the organization began asking the question in 2000.

And while most violent crime types have fallen over the past few years, there is one notable exception: Motor vehicle thefts increased 10.1% in the period of January to September 2023 compared to the same period a year earlier, FBI data show. In cities over 1 million people, motor vehicle thefts increased 35%, the data show.

Much of this increase stems from the brazen thefts of certain vulnerable Kia and Hyundai models. These thefts increased 10-fold over the past three years in the wake of a series of social media posts showing people how to steal the vehicles. 

 

America’s five largest cities by population saw double-digit declines in homicides in 2023 compared to the year before, the latest data show. (The statistics for Houston and Phoenix only go through November.)

• In New York, homicides fell 11.9%, from 438 in 2022 to 386 last year, a significant drop after four consecutive years of homicide increases, according to the NYPD. Shootings dropped almost 25%, from 1,294 in 2022 to 974 last year, the data show.

Still, complaints of felony assault and grand larceny auto showed increases, meaning overall crime complaints declined 0.3% in 2023 compared to 2022, the data show.

• Los Angeles’ homicide rate is down 15.4% from 2022, with murders falling from 382 to 323, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. In the city, overall violent crime is down 3.5%.

• In Chicago, the number of murders dropped 13% from 2022 to 2023, falling from 709 to 617, and shooting incidents similarly fell by 13%, according to Chicago Police data. Overall crime complaints, though, increased 16% from year to year, spurred by a major 37% jump in motor vehicle theft and a 23% rise in robbery, the data show.

• In Houston, murder and non-negligent manslaughter fell 22% at of the end of November 2023 compared to a year prior, according to police data. Overall, crimes against persons and against property declined 3.1%, the data show.

• Phoenix’s homicide rate was down 14% in 2023 compared to 2022, according to the Phoenix Police Department. There were 174 murders in the city of Phoenix in the first 11 months of 2023 compared to 223 homicides the year prior.

In Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the US, the homicide rate is down 20.2% compared to 2022, falling from 514 homicides to 410, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. 

 

Some potential explanations

So why has the country seen such a widespread drop in homicides? There are a number of potential explanations.

Piquero, the criminology professor, said the pandemic caused vast societal disruptions, including the closure of schools, businesses, childcare and community programs – the bonds that tie society together. With infusions of local, state and federal dollars, those programs have since returned and made a difference, he said.

“That was that pause for about a year where basically all the stuff that we know works with respect to crime prevention and crime intervention really was just put on a shelf,” he said. “And now it’s kind of opened back up.”

Gelb, the head of the Council on Criminal Justice, said the increase in crime during the pandemic was due to more stress and more guns along with less policing, less public trust and disruption of social support services. But now that most restrictions have been removed, some of the crime statistics have started to subside. 

 

“The pandemic and the social justice protests of 2020 were a massive disruption of society and now we’re seeing many things return to normal,” Gelb said.

Detroit officials touted a number of factors, including $10,000 raises used to put 200 additional police officers on the streets, neighborhood violence prevention tactics, a crackdown on drag racing and drifting, the expansion of shotspotter technology, as well as closer partnerships with federal, county, court, state and community leaders. The courts also reduced a backlog of thousands of felony gun cases, the city said.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny credited the significant drop in homicides to the creation of new enforcement zones, where cops flood high-crime areas that are then changed and redirected along with crime trends.

“We haven’t done that in quite some time,” Kenny said, highlighting the summer months where cops flooded the streets. “We used to have impact zones. We got away from that years ago.”

Kenny said detectives had a homicide clear rate was over 70%, which was the second-best number since they’ve kept statistics. Last year, the NYPD had over 12,000 arrests for homicides and nonfatal shootings. 

 “A majority of those incidents are from shootings and homicides that occurred outside of 2023, which shows that the precinct, detective squads and our borough homicide squads, come December 31, we don’t stop working,” Kenny said.

Vineyard Wind, country’s first large-scale offshore wind project, is producing clean electricity by Miriam Wasser

Electricity from the country’s first large-scale offshore wind project is officially flowing into Massachusetts and helping to power the New England grid.

The Vineyard Wind project achieved “first power” late Tuesday when one operating turbine near Martha’s Vineyard delivered approximately five megawatts of electricity to the grid. The company said it expects to have five turbines operating at full capacity in early 2024.

 

The moment marks a major milestone for the project and the country at large, which has long struggled to build offshore wind. It also comes amid great economic turmoil and uncertainty for the industry, making the launch of the utility-scale project all the more significant.

As one industry observer, Amy Boyd Rabin of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, recently put it, getting to the point where big offshore wind projects are generating power on the East Coast “was not inevitable” and should be celebrated “as a very big deal.”

 

“This truly is a milestone for offshore wind and the entire renewable industry in North America. For the first time we have power flowing to the American consumers from a commercial-scale wind project, which marks the dawn of a new era for American renewables and the green transition,” said Tim Evans of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which is co-developing the project with Avangrid.

Vineyard Wind was supposed to have five turbines sending power to the grid by the end of 2023. Instead, they announced first power with just one turbine fully operational, and a few days late. Project leaders chalked up the delay to a bit of bad weather, some extra precautions and a steep learning curve.

 

“As the first-in-the-nation project, there's a standard of care we wanted to meet. There was testing. There were issues that had to get resolved,” said Ken Kimmell, chief development officer for Avangrid.  “No one particularly cares whether the power starts December 31st or January 2nd. The important thing is it happened and we're now on a path to operating this facility.”

The Vineyard Wind 1 project, as it's officially known, is still under construction. Once it’s finished sometime in 2024, it will consist of 62 turbines spaced about a mile apart and rising more than 800 feet out of the water. The project will generate up to 800 megawatts of power, or about enough electricity for 400,000 homes in Massachusetts.

Another smaller project near Long Island, South Fork Wind, also began producing electricity in early December. When that project is complete, its 12 turbines will generate about 132 megawatts of power.

 

It’s hard to overstate what the commissioning of Vineyard Wind and South Fork Wind represent for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry. Prior to these projects, the country had a total of seven turbines in the water — five near Rhode Island and two near Virginia. Together, they generate a paltry 42 megawatts, which is far less than the average natural gas power plant.

"We’ve arrived at a watershed moment for climate action in the U.S., and a dawn for the American offshore wind industry," wrote Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra. "2023 was a historic year defined by steel in the water and people at work. Today, we begin a new chapter and welcome 2024 by delivering the first clean offshore wind power to the grid in Massachusetts."

Still, even with the addition of Vineyard Wind and South Fork Wind, the country has a long way to go to reach President Joe Biden’s goal of getting 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power flowing into the grid by 2030. Meeting this target, the administration says, will provide clean electricity for 10 million homes, avoid 78 million metric tons of planet-warming emissions and create thousands of jobs.

 

So far, states on the East Coast have led the effort to build a U.S. offshore wind industry in order to meet their own clean energy and climate goals. But while they have collectively committed to procuring more than 30,000 megawatts of wind power — with the largest promises coming from New Jersey (11,000 megawatts), New York (9,000 megawatts) and Massachusetts (5,600 megawatts) — the amount of power actually in the permitting or construction pipeline is much smaller. And over the last few months, global economic problems have caused several developers to back out of project contracts or cancel projects all together.

“No one has said that building up this industry was going to be easy. And it turns out that it's not,” Rebecca Tepper, Massachusetts’ top energy official, said at a recent conference about offshore wind. “Despite the challenges that we face, we are confident that we will have a vibrant offshore wind industry off the coast of Massachusetts … And today, we see the promise of that industry in the Vineyard Wind Project.”

 Massachusetts, in partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, is currently seeking bids for another 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind power. Tepper said that Vineyard Wind’s launch should boost confidence in the region’s commitment to offshore wind, and perhaps prompt “some really good bids at the end of the month."

 

Vineyard Wind may be Massachusetts’ first operating offshore wind project, but it’s not the state’s first attempt to build one. In the early 2000s, a company called Cape Wind proposed building a 450 megawatt wind farm about five miles south of Cape Cod. Almost immediately, the project faced public opposition, including from notable politicians like the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. While many worried the project would harm the sensitive Nantucket Sound ecosystem, others simply didn’t want to see the turbines from the beach.

As the Cape Wind project stalled, and eventually fizzled, so too did talk of a big offshore wind industry in Massachusetts and the country.

“I remember talking to developers after Cape Wind and thinking about whether this industry would ever get off the ground,” Tepper said. “Well, this project — [Vineyard Wind] — is proof that it’s off the ground and in the water.”

That’s not to say things have always been smooth sailing for Vineyard Wind.

After winning Massachusetts’ first round of offshore wind project bids in 2018, Vineyard Wind — a joint venture between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — entered the long, and at times bumpy, federal permitting process.

 

The review was supposed to take two years, but in 2019, the Trump administration, which was hostile toward offshore wind, unexpectedly hit the pause button. The delay cost millions, threatened to upend the project’s tight timeline, and once again, raised questions about whether the U.S. could actually build a robust offshore wind industry.

Around the same time, fishermen along the East Coast began to more strongly oppose offshore wind development. Many worried that the turbines would alter the ocean ecosystem and threaten their already-tenuous industry.

While Vineyard Wind has said it has listened to the fishing industry’s concerns — and even modified the project to better accommodate fishing boats — not everyone is satisfied. To date, there are two lawsuits from fishing groups about Vineyard Wind currently winding their way through the federal court system. One of the groups is funded by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank with strong ties to the fossil fuel industry.

 

With the election of Biden in 2020, things began looking up for Vineyard Wind and the dozen or so other proposed projects in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions. The administration resumed Vineyard Wind’s permitting process shortly after taking office, and committed to the 2030 goal of 30,000 megawatts.

In May 2021, Vineyard Wind 1 became the first U.S. project to get full federal approval. A few months later, the project secured financing and began onshore construction. Offshore construction, including the laborious process of laying miles of subsea electrical cables from the project site to Covell’s Beach on Cape Cod, began in 2022. The work to install the remaining 57 turbines will continue into 2024.

"This is a historic moment for the American offshore wind industry,” wrote Gov. Maura Healey. “This is clean, affordable energy made possible by the many advocates, public servants, union workers, and business leaders who worked for decades to accomplish this achievement. As we look ahead, Massachusetts is on a path toward energy independence thanks to our nation-leading work to stand up the offshore wind industry."