Canada is the latest country hit with tariff announcement
President Trump sent a tariff letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday, notifying him that the federal government will place a 35% levy on imports starting Aug. 1.
Trump's tariff letter comes as U.S. border officials have noticed an increase in illegal drugs coming into the nation from the north. Border officers confiscated 43 pounds of fentanyl in 2024, up from two in 2023, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Officials have seized 58 pounds so far this year.
Trump mentioned the trend in his letter to Carney.
"If Canada works with me to stop the flow of Fentanyl, we will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter," Trump told Carney.
Serious mortgage delinquencies rising in the South
Homeowners in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are seeing a sharp uptick in serious mortgage delinquencies, according to real estate research firm Cotality.
Serious mortgage delinquency is when a homeowner is 90 days or more past due on a payment.
Florida's serious delinquency rate has hit 1.43%, up 38 basis points from a year ago, data published Thursday found. South Carolina's rose 20 basis points to 1.05% during the same period, and Georgia's climbed 18 basis points to 1.12%. Increasing property taxes and homeowners insurance prices after natural disasters have played a role, the researchers said.
"Take Florida. Property taxes there jumped nearly 50% over five years," the firm said in a blog post. "Insurance costs are also climbing fast, especially in areas at risk of hurricanes and floods."
The story is pretty similar in the other two states, the researchers said.
"In South Carolina, 14 insurers ran out of funds between 2020 and 2023," the report said. "When insurers leave, premiums go up. For homeowners, that means paying more to stay in the same place. Georgia, meanwhile, saw property taxes jump more than $700 on average in just five years."
Lot sizes have been shrinking
The National Association of Home Builders published an analysis of new home construction data from the U.S. Census Bureau and found that lot sizes for those properties have been slowly shrinking since 1999.
Two-thirds of new single-family detached homes sold in 2024 were less than 9,000 square feet, or one-fifth of an acre, the NAHB said Friday. The Census Bureau began tracking lot sizes in 1999. That year, only 46% of new builds were on lots of 9,000 square feet or less.
"A shift in speculatively built home building towards smaller lots first became noticeable during the anemic housing recovery that followed the Great Recession," Natalia Siniavskaia, NAHB's assistant vice president for housing policy research, said in the analysis. "The trend towards more compact spec building continued during the post-pandemic housing boom, with the share of smaller lots gaining an additional 4 percentage points during the last five years."