We're all spending more time these days at home — including our bathrooms. But why do they look the way they do? From toilets to toothbrush holders, bioethicist and journalist Elizabeth Yuko explains how infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza have shaped American bathroom design
More than 3.4 million homeowners are temporarily skipping their mortgage payments because they've lost income during the pandemic. Under the CARES Act rescue package passed by Congress, affected homeowners can skip or delay payments for up to a year.
Jasmine's husband Frank Gullo works for the Long Island Rail Road, which cut back his hours. Even with Jasmine's unemployment money, the couple says they're still making thousands of dollars less a month. So they called up their lender, Freedom Mortgage.
"They told me, yes, you can skip three months' payments," Frank says. "But then they told me there was a balloon payment at the end of it." He was told after three months, they'd have to come up with all the money for those skipped payments. So they'd suddenly owe four months of mortgage payments all at once — $14,000.
Many unemployed tenants won’t be able to pay April rent. There will be a domino effect on landlords, real estate industry officials said.
I think we are only starting to see how deep the economic abyss may become in the coming months.
American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973, when the Census Bureau started tracking home sizes, the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015.
This rise, combined with a drop in the average number of people per household, has translated to a whole lot more room for homeowners and their families: By one estimate, each newly built house had an average of 507 square feet per resident in 1973, and nearly twice that—971 square feet—four decades later.
