GOP officials appeared in Congress on Thursday, testifying that the vote recount in Maricopa proved that there were free, fair, and accurate elections in the county, which President Joe Biden won.
Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images
Arizona GOP officials told Congress that Biden won a “free, fair and accurate election” in Maricopa County.
They were testifying on the legitimacy of the vote count following a GOP-driven vote audit in the county.
One of the GOP officials told the House that lawmakers being unwilling to accept accurate election results are a “threat to our democracy.”
GOP officials from Arizona’s Maricopa County testified before Congress on Oct. 7, telling the House that the elections in the county were “free, fair, and accurate” and prove that President Joe Biden won there.
“The election of Nov. 3rd, 2020, in Maricopa County was free, fair, and accurate,” Sellers said to the House on Thursday.
Gates told the House that he thought lawmakers being unwilling to accept the election results was the biggest threat to US democracy that he has seen in his lifetime.
“If elected officials continue to choose party over truth, then these procedures are going to continue on, these privately funded government-backed attacks on legitimate elections,” Gates said.
“As a Republican who believes in democracy, I dreamed of one day going to a nation that was trying to build a democracy and help them out. Perhaps a former Soviet republic like Belarus or Tajikistan,” Gates added. “I never could have imagined that I would be doing that work here in the United States of America.”
Bennett was also asked about the result of the Cyber Ninjas vote recount and reiterated to the House panel that the Ninjas’ hand count had found more votes for Biden than were initially recorded.
The fake document was even debunked by Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, who had previously touted election conspiracy theories in favor of former President Donald Trump. In September, Logan also issued a statement to Vice clarifying that the fake audit document was “absolutely false” and not the document he submitted to the Arizona State Senate.
According to The Washington Post, Logan was asked to testify before the committee but declined. The Post added that the panel had asked Logan and the Cyber Ninjas to provide documents, but that request was not fulfilled.
The Cyber Ninjas did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
I don’t think I could roll a joint if my life depended on it, and the last time I smoked marijuana was years ago when I split a joint among friends in Amsterdam.
But I’ve always been up for a new experience – whether that was trying cannabis with my high-school friends (and subsequently making myself sick) or purchasing a tin of gummies when marijuana was legalized where I live in Phoenix at the end of last year.
To give you an idea of my marijuana use, that tin of gummies lasted more than six months in my cabinet.
Despite my general naivete, when I heard about Cloth & Flame‘s new cannabis dinners, I was intrigued. A great meal and an Instagram-worthy tablescape go a long way with me, so I was game.
Cloth & Flame has facilitated high-end events for clients including Bentley, Chanel, and Google. I had high expectations – especially for an event that retails at $195 per person – but this meal exceeded them.
My boyfriend and I traveled about two hours north of my home to the mystical red-rock spiritual wonderland of Sedona and checked into a hotel. After a short drive in a charter bus, my fellow event goers and I were in a mountain-surrounded patch of forest by a stone-lined creek.
The evening started with a welcome mocktail, a cruise around the merch table, time to listen to a band performance – and a joint by the “canna-cabin.”
The dishes being served during the event.
Courtesy of Winona Grey
Attendees were offered a joint donated by Copperstate Farms, with three options for strength. My boyfriend – who is marijuana-shy and tried to get out of this adventure multiple times – opted for the lightest option with me.
Before dinner, guests were given time to enjoy the sunset, smoke, lounge in a hammock, and, in my case, make a lot of Instagram stories.
The menu was a multicourse meal featuring fried chicken oysters on a mesquite waffle, poached pears on a bed of feta cheese, achiote-crusted pork, and brown-butter churros. To say the food was incredible would be an understatement.
The entire meal contained about 12 micrograms of THC – the primary component of cannabis that gets you high – and about six micrograms of CBD. Even as someone who wasn’t taking more than 5 micrograms of THC gummies a night, I knew this wasn’t a lot.
Before each course, our server asked if we wanted a “dosed” or “non-dosed” dish. I opted for dosed every time. My boyfriend, who did indulge in a couple puffs of our joint, did the opposite.
The night ended with craft seasonal lattes by the fire, stargazing, sound healing, and lounging around the various seating areas set up around the venue.
I can’t say I’ve been converted into a weed smoker – most of my high didn’t kick in until I was back in my hotel room – but I did appreciate the slow-paced high, dreamy atmosphere, incredible scenery, and, of course, the food.
Cloth & Flame and Copperstate Farms donated a portion of the proceeds from the event to the Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit that focuses on helping those incarcerated for cannabis-related charges, a sobering reminder of how the drug hasn’t always been an accepted pastime.
This helped me decide to opt for merch, which also benefited the cause.
Between all the good vibes, activities, and a light marijuana buzz, I hardly even missed my usual glass of wine.
Sen. Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz., ask questions of the panel during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee on conditions at the Southern border, Tuesday, July 30, 2019, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Protesters confronted Sen. Kyrsten Sinema at Arizona State University, which employs her as a lecturer.
At one point, protesters followed Sinema into a bathroom on campus and continued listing their demands.
Another protest was organized Saturday night outside a corporate fundraiser for Sinema in Phoenix.
After leaving Washington DC amidst tense budget negotiations, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has been repeatedly confronted by constituents who are demanding that she stop blocking the Biden Build Back Better agenda and to pass immigration reform.
On Sunday, constituents, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and members of grassroots nonprofit Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) confronted Sinema at the University of Arizona, which employs her as a lecturer in its School of Social Work.
At one point, several members of the group followed her into the bathroom and continued to list their demands while she was inside a bathroom stall, a video tweeted by the group showed.
An undocumented immigrant youth named Blanca told Sinema in the bathroom that she was brought to the US when she was three years old and has been unable to visit her grandfather in Mexico, who she said was deported in 2010 and passed away two weeks ago, because she does not have a path to citizenship, according to a video tweeted by the group.
Sinema stayed silent throughout the encounter.
“We knocked on doors for you to get you elected. And just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us,” Blanca said.
LUCHA also organized a protest on Saturday outside the Royal Palms Resort and Spa in Phoenix where Sinema was meeting with corporate fundraisers for a “retreat” for her political action committee, The New York Times reported.
Former President Donald Trump endorsed a former news anchor for Arizona governor just hours after she tweeted at South Dakota’s governor to add him to Mount Rushmore.
Kari Lake, a former journalist for Fox 10 News in Phoenix, has risen to prominence by attacking the media, railing against vaccine mandates, and echoing Trump’s false claims of election fraud during the 2020 election – Trump narrowly lost the state to President Joe Biden by just over 10,000 votes.
“She is strong on Crime, will protect our Border, Second Amendment, Military, and Vets, and will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!),” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday. “She is against Covid lockdowns, Cancel Culture, and will end ‘woke’ curriculum in our schools. She will do a far better job than RINO Governor Doug Ducey–won’t even be a contest!”
Despite a cozy relationship before the election, Trump’s feud with Ducey began after he certified the election for Biden in November 2020 – Ducey ignored a phone call from the president while signing the official paperwork.
“Arizona will not forget what Ducey just did,” Trump said to a crowd in Arizona just after Ducey certified the vote.
Volunteers help voters as voters drop off their ballots at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2020, in Phoenix. In Arizona, Maricopa County, the nation’s second-largest voting jurisdiction, a steady stream of cars go in and out of the parking lot to deliver ballots at the drop box location.
Ross D. Franklin/AP
According to the Arizona Secretary of State, voters can have mail-in ballots sent to a temporary address.
That vote, when cast, will be linked to their previous residence.
Cyber Ninjas falsely implies such votes are illegal.
Republican-led Maricopa County on Friday rebutted claims from the company behind Arizona’s controversial, partisan election review that more than 23,000 mail-in ballots should not have been cast during the 2020 election.
In its long-anticipated report, Cyber Ninjas did not find any evidence that votes were changed or that ballots were made out of Chinese bamboo. But the company – whose founder, Doug Logan, had previously claimed the election was “rigged” – appears to have tried to save face among its right-wing supporters by intimating that there was still wrongdoing.
One of Cyber Ninjas “critical findings” was that 23,344 mail-in ballots were cast by people who no longer resided at their address on file. These voters, the company asserted, “should not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved,” suggesting that they had been wrongly forwarded to the voters’ new address, a claim amplified by the spokesperson for former President Donald Trump.
But that is not true.
According to the office of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican elected in November 2020, “As required by law, all election materials, such as ballots, are marked ‘Do Not Forward – Return Service Requested.'” Returned ballots initiate a process of removing the person from the voter roll.
But sometimes people move in the weeks before an election; they are allowed to request that their ballot be sent to a temporary address. According to Maricopa County, 20,933 voters did so in 2020.
As for the rest? Former Maricopa County residents who are in the military and deployed overseas – and other Americans who live abroad but previously called the Phoenix metropolitan region home – have to list their “address in the state in which [they] were last domiciled” in order to participate in a federal election, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, “Your voting residence is your address in the state in which you were last domiciled, immediately prior to leaving the United States.”
“Cyber Ninjas still don’t understand this is legal under federal election law,” the county posted on its official Twitter account. “To label it a ‘critical’ concern is either intentionally misleading or staggeringly ignorant.”
Former President Donald Trump walked back a statement praising a group of “highly respected auditors” in Arizona after their “audit” of the state’s election results confirmed that Joe Biden won in the general election.
In fact, the audit by the GOP group Cyber Ninjas, which nonpartisan experts and election officials denounced as a “sham,” concluded that Biden actually won by a slightly higher margin than was previously known.
“Interesting that the Unselect Committee of political hacks ‘dropped’ their subpoena request the night before Arizona is expected to announce its findings from the Forensic Audit on voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,” Trump said in his original statement, which was sent around 11 p.m. ET on Thursday.
“This is what they do, this is what they are good at – but everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!” the statement continued.
But the former president seemed unaware that around the time his statement was posted, details of the audit had already been released, and it found that Trump lost to Biden by hundreds more votes in Arizona’s largest county.
Shortly after 10 a.m. ET on Friday, Trump released a new statement calling attention to the “huge findings in Arizona.”
“However, the Fake News Media is already trying to ‘call it’ again for Biden before actually looking at the facts-just like they did in November!” the statement continued, adding that the sham audit “uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD!”
In fact, the Cyber Ninjas audit concluded that the group’s recount of ballots cast in Arizona in the 2020 election had “no substantial differences” from the certified tallies.
Note: An initial version of this story incorrectly said that Trump reportedly deleted his original statement, citing ABC News’ reporting.
The GOP review, led by the cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas and directed by the GOP-controlled state senate, found 261 fewer votes for Trump and 99 additional votes for Biden.
Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, announced on Thursday night that the election review, which it consistently denounced for its flaws and lack of transparency, had found the state was not “stolen” from Trump, as the former president and many of his supporters have baselessly alleged.
“The #azaudit draft report from Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the official county Twitter account wrote.
The draft reports found there were “no substantial differences” between the County’s vote count and the Cyber Ninjas’ count.
Arizona’s election autopsy was funded by right-wing groups and donors, but widely criticized by the state’s Republican leaders, including Maricopa County officials, who said the draft reports were “littered with errors and faulty conclusions.”
Trump and his allies have hyped the report’s findings for months, claiming the outcome would expose enough voter fraud to overturn the state’s election results and embolden partisan audits in other states.
“Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!” Trump said in a statement on Thursday night, even after Maricopa County announced the audit’s outcome.
Rhoda Winkelman, a resident at the New Jewish Home in Manhattan, receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on December 21, 2020 in New York City. Pharmacists from Walgreens administered the vaccine to elderly residents at the upper Manhattan facility. Across the country, residents of nursing homes are beginning to get the vaccine following a week in which thousands of first responders and medical personal received the vaccine.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Republican governors are fighting COVID-19 vaccination mandates, despite mandating other vaccines.
Health law experts say these positions are fundamentally contradictory.
Experts say there’s no legal or substantive difference between mandating COVID-19 vaccines and requiring other kinds of vaccines.
In early 2019, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, declared his state “pro-vaccination” and opposed efforts to broaden exemptions for mandatory vaccines. In August, Ducey banned his state’s authorities from requiring government employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Four years ago, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb mandated meningitis vaccines for public college and university students. Now, he says choosing whether or not to be vaccinated is a “fundamental” right.
Ducey and Holcomb are among a host of Republican governors fighting COVID-19 vaccination mandates, even as their states simultaneously enforce other vaccine mandates. Five health law experts told Insider these positions are fundamentally contradictory and illustrate the politicization of vaccines and public health in the age of the coronavirus.
“There is a certain hypocrisy in mandating childhood vaccines for all school children while objecting to employer mandates,” Lawrence Gostin, a public health law scholar at Georgetown University, told Insider. “Childhood vaccines are required even if the parent objects and several states don’t grant any religious exemptions.”
The US has a long history of mandating vaccinations. The 12 Republican-led states that have banned COVID-19 vaccine mandates all require that children receive several vaccines in order to attend daycare and public schools. Some of these states have vaccination mandates for adults and those in healthcare settings. In certain cases, the same governors who’ve pushed relatively new vaccine mandates, including for meningitis, now oppose COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
Republican governors, in unison with most of their party, argue that getting the COVID-19 vaccine – and even a test – should be a “personal choice.” They raced to condemn Biden’s announcement last week that he’ll require nearly all federal employees, contractors, and federally-funded healthcare providers to be vaccinated and large employers to implement weekly testing for the unvaccinated.
They say there’s no legal or substantive difference between mandating COVID-19 vaccines and mandating other kinds of vaccines, particularly following the Federal Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“If business and educational facilities are not prevented from requiring other vaccines, they should not be prevented from requiring COVID-19 vaccines to make their customers and staff safer and protect themselves against closures and economic loss,” Dorit Reiss, an expert in vaccine law and policy at UC Hastings College of the Law, told Insider.
Doctors, public health experts, scientists, and legal experts have praised vaccine and testing mandates as effective and constitutional tools to promote public health. And federal mandates are warranted because the nation is facing a medical emergency, the unvaccinated are posing a threat to others’ health and safety, and the vaccines are safe and effective.
Peter Meyers, a professor emeritus and former director of the George Washington University law school’s vaccine injury litigation clinic, told Insider that Republican lawmakers are exhibiting a “tremendous amount of hypocrisy and inconsistency in applying this principle of self-determination in America.”
Many view Republican opposition to COVID-19 vaccination and mitigation policies as nakedly political.
“Vaccination and, generally, public health measures have always been political, but we’re really seeing them become partisan today,” Valerie Gutmann Koch, an expert in health law and policy at the University of Houston Law Center, told Insider.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott removals his mask before speaking at a news conference about migrant children detentions.
L.M. Otero/AP
A ‘power grab’?
The GOP fight against COVID-19 mitigation measures has escalated in recent months, even as the delta variant has caused a dramatic rise in infections and deaths.
GOP governors called the vaccine and testing mandates “tyrannical,” “dictatorial,” and “un-American.” All but two Republican state attorneys general signed a letter on Thursday threatening to sue the Biden administration if it doesn’t retract its vaccine mandate. Republicans argue the vaccine mandates and passports constitute federal overreach, violate individuals’ personal freedoms, and are unconstitutional. Some baselessly argued Biden’s mandates aren’t guided by science are instead attempts to “control” Americans’ lives.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Biden’s mandates “a power grab” and an “assault on private businesses.” Last month, he signed an executive order banning local governments from implementing vaccine mandates and businesses from requiring proof of vaccination.
In Florida, the Republican-controlled state legislature recently passed a law barring local governments and private businesses from requiring their employees or patrons be vaccinated. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a conservative Republican, announced this week that his administration would charge $5,000-per-infraction fines against any cities and counties requiring government employees to be vaccinated as a term of employment. During a press conference in Gainesville, he defended the city’s public employees who refuse to get vaccinated and allowed at least one of them to spread anti-vaccine misinformation from his podium.
Many Republicans argue Biden’s policies are federal overreach, but experts say the pandemic has presented a crisis that requires federal action to fill in the gaps.
“In ordinary times, I think that their argument would have some validity … traditionally, it has not been the federal government that has mandated vaccination, it’s been a state and local decision,” Meyers said. “But these are not ordinary times. The COVID-19 epidemic is extraordinary.”
At the same time, many of these governors have overridden local authorities and private businesses, imposing contradictory state-wide public health policies.
“The same states that are pushing back against federal mandates are the ones that have essentially usurped local control over public health emergencies,” Koch said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promotes a monoclonal antibody treatment site for COVID-19 patients. He has banned local authorities from implementing COVID-19 vaccine passports in his state.
Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
‘You do not have a right to harm others’
Legal experts say Republican legal efforts to fight COVID-19 mandates will likely fail. There’s broad agreement in the legal community that Biden’s vaccine and testing mandates are constitutional and in line with Supreme Court precedent.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed an H1N1 vaccine mandate in 2009, has come out in support of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, arguing the mandates promote Americans’ civil liberties by protecting the most vulnerable.
The ACLU and other legal experts argue the mandates are a justifiable intrusion on individual autonomy and bodily integrity because COVID-19 poses such a high risk, the vaccines are safe and effective, and there is no alternative mitigation measure that is as effective.
Howard Markel, a medical historian and professor at the University of Michigan, argued that Republican lawmakers who oppose the mandates are “twisting, perverting, and warping” civil liberties for partisan gain.
“You do not have the right, in your own personal liberties, to harm others … I don’t have a right to infect people with COVID,” he told Insider. “There’s common sense limitations to all of our rights and privileges in America.”
Stephen Richer ran on a pledge to make things boring again. And he thought he ran for the best position to do that: as head of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, best known for processing documents, like deeds to a property, in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.
But the Arizona Republican – a 30-something attorney who worked at conservative and libertarian think tanks – inherited a responsibility that has made the position of Recorder far more interesting than he would have liked: maintaining the county’s list of registered voters. That has put him and his staff right at the center of allegations over the 2020 election.
“This position has given me a front-row seat to many disturbing sides of humanity, really disturbing sides,” Richer said on a press call Wednesday. “Our latent herd mentality; our willingness to lie for personal gain; our predilection for violent rhetoric or even physical violence; and our extreme aggression toward contradicting facts and people. It’s been eye-opening.”
Earlier this month, Richer and a fellow Republican with a normally boring job, Eddie Cook of the Maricopa County Assessor’s Office, issued a joint statement rebutting claims from a right-wing activist that “ghost votes” had been cast from vacant lots in the November 2020 election. Meanwhile, for the past several months Cyber Ninjas, a private firm with no experience auditing elections, has been purporting to do just that, searching Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots for evidence of massive fraud that would discredit President Joe Biden’s victory there.
Led by a conspiracy theorist who has made clear that they believe the election was stolen, Cyber Ninjas has accused Maricopa County Republicans of trying to cover up the alleged crime – saying, for example, that they had destroyed key election data, a claim amplified by former President Donald Trump that the company’s amateur sleuths later retracted, admitting the information in question had been found on one of their own hard drives.
The particulars aside, the broader, sprawling conspiracy makes no sense, Richer said. In Maricopa County itself, he noted, “Republicans won the majority of down-ticket races, including mine, in which I unseated the incumbent Democrat chief county elections official – yes, in a race that was supposedly rigged for Democrats.”
But we now live in an age of “declining respect for professionals in the public space,” Richer said. The knowledge that enables one to counter accusations of voter fraud is itself suspect. It’s not enough for local election officials to hand count some 47,000 votes and finding “zero variances,” as happened in Maricopa County last year – to be trusted, one has to have already concluded that fraud was there, as the founder of Cyber Ninjas did before being awarded a $150,000 contract from Arizona’s Republican-led Senate, supplemented by another $5.7 million in private donations.
We live in an age, Richer argued, where authority is based on the number of followers on Twitter and views on YouTube, at the cost of faith in institutions and the reliability of election results. It’s a lucrative hustle for a few, but “it also has a real human cost,” he said. “I can’t tell you the number of people on my staff who have been targeted, who have been denigrated, [and] who have been harassed.”
In the field of politics, and now with vaccines and COVID-19, too many trust the demagogue and grifter – the likes of Cyber Ninjas and their “horror show” of an audit, Richer said – over the boring and competent.
“Oddly, we still know the importance of professionals in our personal lives,” he said. “We still send our cars to the mechanic, our taxes to the accountant, and our teeth to the dentist … And yet, in the public arena, many now seem to favor the loudmouth astrologists over actual experts and professionals.”
After weeks of delay, Cyber Ninjas is believed to be on the verge of releasing a report on its findings. In the meantime, legislators from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, inspired by the example and eager to please a base that still supports the losing candidate, are engaging in their own efforts to relitigate the results of 2020.
It’s a trend, Richer said, of undermining faith in elections and experts “will soon cause irrevocable damage – if it hasn’t already.”
The desire to live in the country’s warmest corner boomed over the past year. Masses of Americans fleeing cities and cooler climates flocked to Texas, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, breathing even more life into the country’s fastest-growing region.
While the influx of new residents poses challenges – home prices skyrocketed across the country throughout 2021 – few areas have seen values soar as much as the southwest.
In the process, a small group of Americans made out out in the pandemic-era market.
1. Locals
Some of the biggest winners of pandemic-era moves were those who didn’t move at all. Residents in southwestern cities and suburbs now have “awesome equity” in their homes, Ali Wolf, chief economist at real estate data firm Zonda, told Insider.
“There’s this huge divide between the locals and the newcomers,” Wolf added. “The out-of-towner comes in and doesn’t really balk at pricing. But a local will look at pricing and say, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so much more expensive.'”
That divide helped some locals capitalize on the boom. Cristian Mendoza, 25, left Baytown, Texas for El Rancho, New Mexico – a town roughly one hour from Santa Fe – after getting a better job. And while he’s held onto his home in Texas, he’s seen prices for Houston-area properties “go up pretty significantly over the last two years.”
For now, Mendoza is watching his Texas property appreciate, and he’s biding his time on splashing out in New Mexico.
“I don’t see myself buying a house over here anytime soon, just because of the prices. I’m probably going to be renting for a couple of years unless I find something cheaper a little bit outside of town,” he said.
2. Retirees and movers from the coasts
Americans coming to the southwest from expensive coastal hubs like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles might be paying a premium in local terms, but they’re getting a discount from the cities they left.
David Church, 48, already owned a home in Henderson, Nevada, before COVID struck. The newly built house was meant to be an investment property, but the Church family moved in once they realized it brought many of the upsides southern California had to offer, but at a much lower price.
Their home in Oak Park, California, sold in four days and they’ve been living in Nevada since July. Having a home ready to move into helped the Churches reap the rewards of soaring California home prices without getting trapped as a buyer in a seller’s market.
“We were able to leverage our house without needing to find a place to buy. That helped us out quite a bit,” Church said, adding he’s still looking to buy another home near Phoenix. “As inflation goes, if you’re not buying up, you’re going to be left behind.”
Retirees also benefitted from pandemic moving trends. The COVID recession pulled forward millions of retirements, and several southwestern cities were already rife with retirement communities.
“If they’re living in a move expensive area, they can tap their equity, move to this 55-plus community, and have an instant connection with their neighbors because it’s an age-targeted area,” Zonda’s Wolf said.
3. Well-to-do millennials
Many pandemic-era movers are millennials looking to find their first homes. But where those leaving one home for another can tap equity from their current property, first-time buyers don’t enjoy the same benefit. And as millennials sit in their peak homebuying years, demand for affordable homes is soaring.
Middle- and high-income millennials will have the easiest time in the red-hot market, Wolf said. They can afford homes and condos in increasingly expensive cities, and while the market is set to cool, it’s unlikely prices will fall in the most popular urban centers, she added.
“There will be a class of millennials who are absolutely thriving in today’s environment,” Wolf said. “They have enough money or enough support from their family where they can make it work, and they don’t have to compromise location for affordability.”
