June is generally the busiest month of the year. Transactions and litigations slow for the 8 or so weeks between July 4 and Labor Day, which means everything gets packed into June. Not to mention end of school, start of camp for those of us in the parenting track, and your odd June wedding or two. And someone decided to put New York tech week in June which, although probably not a good use of time for anyone actually building a product, is a great opportunity to market yfgc.ai as the future of faster, cheaper legal services. Also, Happy Pride!
As if that is not enough, the Knicks won the NBA championship, which required us New Yorkers to celebrate for a few days. And then we also had Democratic Party primaries in New York, which required us to collectively say “WTF” (more on that below). In theory, we should now be turning to celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary (which I prefer to call the “Semiquincentennial“). I’m happy to celebrate because I love America, but, alas, as I wrote about last week, our current national government is too incompetent to plan anything beyond a drag race in August, a political rally, and a lame Great American State Fair, where not even every state is showing up. As I said last week (and the New York City democratic primaries prove), our institutions are hollow. Something is coming to replace them, but we’re unsure exactly what. That ferment and evolution is very American. If we have anything to celebrate this Semiquincentennial, it’s that we can be critical, resilient and adaptable.
As we conclude June, there is good news (mostly), bad news (actually dumb), and some real ugliness we need to acknowledge and address.
The Mostly Good
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the House 358-32 and the Senate 85-5. This is good. But of course, at the moment, our Toddler-in-Chief won’t sign the housing bill into law until he gets his voter suppression bill. I suspect it will become law, either because Trump will back down on his threat, or if he does not sign the bill or veto the bill within 10 days (excluding Sundays) while Congress is actively in session, the bill automatically becomes law without his signature.
I’ve been writing about the housing supply crisis for a long time. It’s personal for me: like many working Americans, housing costs are by far my largest expense. It is also very important to my real estate clients for obvious reasons. I follow housing policy carefully on the federal, state, and local level. My take is that there are two solutions to the housing crisis: build more housing or depopulation. One is much less painful than the other.
The bill is generally good. It’s a supply-side bill: manufactured housing reforms and environmental review streamlining will move more projects along, and there are other provisions that reward localities for building. It also doesn’t have price caps or other demand-side gimmicks that drive up costs for everyone not in the price control system and suppress supply, which seems to be the housing policy of choice for those who don’t know what they are doing (see “the ugly” below).
There are a few things that should have been in the bill but were not, which is a miss. For a long time I’ve called for repealing the Faircloth Amendment, a law that freezes the number of public housing units the federal government can fund. Basically, it says that the Feds can’t fund any more public housing units. If we’re really going to solve the housing crisis, we need all the units we can get. As far as I am aware, the United States is the only country in the world where the national government does not add to the housing supply (except for military housing). Even if there was no actual funding, just repealing the Faircloth Amendment would have sent a message: We’re committed to housing affordability, no matter what.
The second miss is something in the bill that is just a little silly. It’s one of those boogeyman provisions that creates bad policy. I’ll disclose upfront that I represent institutional buyers of residential real estate, so I’m not exactly objective on this, but it happens to be the objective truth ;). The bill includes a ban on corporate entities owning more than 350 single-family homes. Barring institutional investors doesn’t add a single unit of supply. It drains investment capital from residential real estate based on a sentimental attachment to owner-occupied single-family housing that the economics simply don’t support. The build-to-rent carve-out for new construction is a partial save, but allowing institutional investors to acquire pre-existing homes for rent is actually a good thing. It means that a family that could not afford to buy a $1M home in a nice neighborhood with good schools could have rented it. Otherwise, they would have been locked out, gated away from the generational mobility that America is all about. That creates opportunities for millions of families and also allows for greater workforce mobility. The institutional investor restriction will require close attention depending on how Treasury and HUD interpret the 350-unit threshold, the definition of “directly or indirectly own,” and how the build-to-rent exception gets applied in practice. I’ll be watching it closely.
Side note: In a functioning democracy, I’d be writing about new legislation to address important issues a few times a year. Alas, while I write a lot about what needs to be done, I rarely get a chance to write about what has been done. That is a miss, but happy to have this housing bill as a (mostly) good. Now let’s just hope it becomes law sometime soon.
The Bad (and Dumb)
The Iran situation is an unqualified “bad.” The less that is said the better. America essentially lost a war through the sheer stupidity of Trump and his sycophants not realizing that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz would increase energy prices in America. Someone must have told them that the U.S. is “energy independent,” which is true, without explaining, in terms these morons can understand, that energy prices are set on a world market, so when the price goes up in Asia, it also goes up in the U.S. Americans are addicted to cheap energy, so once those prices went up, Trump had to give up and surrender.
I actually supported the war, so this is a really disappointing finish. The lesson I take is twofold, and directly relevant to my practice: (1) if conflict is inevitable (as it sometimes is), then you need to defuse the other side’s argument in the negotiation stage, not when the lawsuit has been filed; and (2) if you can’t do (1), then hold off the fight until you can. That’s the advice I give my clients all the time. In fact, just this week I was dealing with a messy dispute for a client. The opposing counsel was very aggressive, but we have the better hand except for one weakness where they have the upper hand. My goal this week was to address that. Now, if we can’t resolve it and it goes to litigation, they won’t have that leverage. You can’t prevent your adversary from being a jerk, but you can prevent him from being an effective jerk.
The Very Ugly: Democratic Primaries in New York City
I’m a lifelong Democrat, actually pretty far left. My progressivism is pragmatic. I want a government that works well, and that requires money, and rich people have money, and they should pay their fair share. Also, democracy is not self-sustaining and needs reinforcement by a government that protects the rights of the disadvantaged and protects minorities from majoritarian rule. It’s a very simple framework. I’m not as interested in the substance of the policies — I have my opinions but I’ll leave it to a representative democracy to figure that out. Like any lawyer, I’m very concerned about the process.
And it’s pretty disturbing that the process is breaking down. A vocal minority seems to have taken over the Democratic Party in New York City (and it’s growing around the country), not because they are substantively right (I actually don’t care as much about that) but because they are the only people voting. Only about 10% of eligible voters (which is like 5% of the population, since many in New York City can’t vote either because they are non-citizens or children) showed up. And in a few elections, someone who most New Yorkers would consider to be very fringe won. That is not a good process.
Two of the candidates who won are vehemently anti-Israel (some would say antisemitic, but I won’t go there except to say that I support Israel and resent being thought of as a “bad Jew” by these people because of my Zionism) and another latched onto anti-Zionism to pander to the people he knew would show up to vote. This is a process breakdown: Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and the Shiite Muslim sects funded by Iran is not an issue in New York City. If you asked a New York voter to list issues that affect their quality of life and future prospects, Israel would almost never come up. It’s a typical wedge issue, the type of thing that Trump and MAGA perfected to drag the Republican Party to the right, and now the far left is using to drag the Democratic Party far to the left.
What do I mean? Trump and MAGA vilified trans people to push their hard-right agenda. The far left is vilifying Israel (and the jews, like me, who support it) to do the same thing. It works because Jews are 2.5% of the U.S. population and trans people are even less. Easy targets.
Stated another way, it’s not about the substance of the issue, it’s about hijacking the process to accomplish their other goals. The Democratic Socialists of America or the New York City government is not going to have a material, or any, effect on establishing a Palestinian nation “from the river to the sea,” and MAGA and Trump are not going to make trans people any less trans. It’s about using wedge issues to acquire power to implement your actual policy agenda. A functioning democracy is actually abhorrent to extremists because a lot of their policies, both on the far left and the far right, are pretty abhorrent to most Americans. So extremists try to hijack the process by designating boogeymen.
The primary election in New York goes from bad to absurd. I happen to live in the wealthiest and oldest congressional district in New York State, and anti-Israel sentiment is not going to get you anywhere. We have issues with quality of life and affordability for those of us who are not rich. So what was the primary about? Affordability? Crime? Homelessness? Nope! Artificial Intelligence!
It’s a pretty odd issue — old, rich people don’t have jobs, so the idea that AI is going to lead to mass job loss should not matter much. (Anecdotally, I work from home and can confirm that the vast majority of my neighbors either work from home or just do not work.) Also, no one is putting a data center anywhere nearby. Most of my older neighbors are living on pensions or investments, the former of which is more secure due to the AI boom, and the latter more valuable. They also benefit from the cost reductions (like cheaper legal and investment services) that AI is unlocking. Stated another way, AI policy has almost no impact on the voters in my congressional district (it may in other districts, but not mine). So why was AI such a big issue? No one is really sure. But it points to the fact that our elections don’t really seem to be functioning well anymore because we’re focused on fringe wedge issues, and not what matters to the vast majority of voters.
Perhaps that is why our government can’t really make the policy decisions that matter. The “mostly good” housing bill I highlighted above is a rare example of where something got done. And even then, it’s not quite done, delayed by a fight over an elections bill that threatens to further undermine and hijack the democratic process. Go figure. It’s ugly out there in these waning days of June 2026.
Happy Semiquincentennial America!
Keep thinking, keep building,
Jesse
Hi, and welcome to my newsletter! I’m Jesse Strauss, Your Fractional General Counsel. I’m a lawyer with a private practice based in New York City, helping clients in the United States and globally with their U.S. legal needs. My expertise spans various areas, including raising funding rounds, employment issues, negotiating master service agreements, intellectual property, compliance, legal process management, and dispute resolution. My focus is on founding and nurturing great companies from seed to exit. Discover more at YFGC.AI and book a complimentary 30-minute consultation. You can also follow me on Threads @lawyerjesse1977, on BlueSky @lawyerjesse.bsky.social, subscribe to my Substack here, and follow me on LinkedIn here.
Originally published at Fractionally Yours, Jesse's Substack.