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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Heres a stat that would likely make financial adviser and radio personality Dave Ramseywho has long advocated for Americans to pay off their mortgages early as a key pillar of his debt-free philosophyat least somewhat pleased: A staggering 39.8% of U.S. owner-occupied housing units in 2023 were mortgage-free, marking a new high for this data series. Thats up from 39.3% in 2022 and 32.8% in 2010. Among the 85.7 million U.S. homeowner occupied households, 34.1 million are mortgage-free. The other 51.6 million have an outstanding mortgage. So why did I say itd only make Dave Ramsey somewhat pleased? Well, the reason is that a higher percentage of Americans are mortgage-free isnt necessarily because so many are paying off their mortgages faster. Instead, it reflects a powerful underlying demographic shift: the aging composition of the American population. As Americans live longer, the U.S. fertility rate declines, and the massive baby boomer generation ages into their senior years, the U.S. population has skewed older. Since older homeowners are more likely to have paid off their mortgages, the aging composition of the American population means a larger share of homeowners are achieving mortgage-free status each year. The other thing is that when older Americans sell their house and buy another home, theyre more likely to rollover their equity and purchase that next home in all-cash. Given that most demographic forecasts expect the composition of the American population to continue shifting upward in age, the share of mortgage-free households could also continue rising in the years to come. The wild card? If reverse mortgages get more popular and more older Americans take on mortgage debt again to tap into their equity.
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The notoriously unrealistic beauty standards for women are about to get even less realistic. The star of a new ad for Guess in the latest issue of Vogue is a willowy, AI-generated model, whose synthetic status is only called out in a a fine-print caveat. Now that AI has hit the ads of fashions bible, it seems only a matter of time before similarly unrealistic models proliferate throughout its editorial pagesmaybe even the cover. AI-powered marketing agency Seraphinne Vallora is behind the design of Guesss corporeally challenged vixen. According to the BBC, the process for generating such a model involves five AI-specialist employees, takes about a month to complete, and costs up to somewhere in the low six figures. The result is a glossy, golden-tressed Aphrodite; an Animorph at the precise midpoint between Kate Upton and Margot Robbie, strapped into a striped maxi dress. What might be more striking than who she looks like, though, is who she doesnt look likeand why. Beyond a six-figure price tag, offering no real savings from a typical photo shoot that employs real photographers, hairstylists, and makeup artists, it also threatens to further unravel the progress the fashion world has made in diversity over the past 15 years. How fashion got less homogenous If the Greek chorus of Doves Real Beauty ads didnt spell it out clearly enough, racial and body diversity made huge strides in fashion throughout the 2010s. In a decade-ending retrospective from late-2019, Vogue traced the turning of the tide back to Michelle Obama. The former First Lady championed diverse American design talent, while global fashion houses clamored to outfit her. As the Vogue piece puts it, An arbiter of style in Washington and beyond . . . Michelle Obamas presence in the fashion world became a part of her image and American history. Around the same time, models like Jourdan Dunn and Chanel Iman started to speak openly about the indignity of being the only Black model at fashion shows. Bethann Hardison, a pioneering Black model, went a step further. After noticing the pitiful diversity on display at New York Fashion Week in 2013, she sent an open letter to each of the major fashion design councils in New York, London, Paris, and Milan, calling out the abundance of houses featuring only one Black model or none at all. Although many of the letters recipients responded without much enthusiasm to the suggestion, a change came anyway in the years ahead. The back half of the decade was full of diversity wins in fashion. A 2017 report from The Fashion Spot assessed 241 shows at that years New York Fashion Week, and found 27.9% of the models were minorities. That figure represents a near doubling from the 15.3% the publication found in its first report two years earlier. At the same time in 2017, semiretired pop star Rihanna introduced her forcefully inclusive Fenty Beauty brand and its lingerie line, Savage x Fenty, offering a high-profile showcase for models of all races, sizes, abilities, and gender expressionsincluding trans and nonbinary models. The brands enormous success seemed to confirm that this approach was perhaps something worth emulating. By January 2020, Ashley Graham had become Vogues first plus-size cover model, while body positivity advocate Lizzo followed suit that September. Considering how quickly Vogue ended up repeating its milestone cover move, though, it might come as a surprise that the magazine hasnt had another plus-size cover model in the five years since. Goodbye body diversity, hello Ozempic Lizzos appearance on the Vogue cover in fall 2020 reflects the social justice reckoning that followed George Floyds murder at the hands of police that summer. (The cover copy hovering near the knee-line of her dazzling red dress reads: Lizzo on hope, justice, and the election.) In retrospect, that cover appears to be a product of its momenta moment that quickly faded. In December 2023, Vogue Business described the preceding 12 months as the year fashion backtracked on diversity, citing post-pandemic macroeconomic challenges, a brewing backlash to DEI, and a handful of major fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen and Gucci choosing white men as their new creative directors. (Indeed, it was the uncontroversial nature of those hiring decisions that seemed to signal a return to the old ways.) DEI backlash has since been felt everywhere in the business world, including the fashion industry. As a Forbes reporter wrote of New York Fashion Week in fall 2023, Black designers made up approximately 15% of the weeks calendar, and the stereotype of the thin, white model prevailed on many of the runways. Meanwhile, the emergence of Ozempic may have quelled the appetite for plus-size fashion inclusivity that had been building throughout the 2010s. The earlier drumbeat of body positivity has now been replaced by a conga line celebrating sudden, miraculous weight loss. With the increasing visibility of GLP-1 meds and their effects, self-acceptance no longer seems culturally aspirational; instead, looking like your most chiseled possible self once again does. Of the 8,703 looks shown during fashion week this past spring, 0.3 % per cent were plus-size, dropping from an already low 0.8% the previous season. Body diversity may have peaked in fall 2022 at 2.34%, two months before the New York Post surveyed the fashion industry and the broader landscape of prominentfemale bodies and concluded in a headline: Bye-bye booty: Heroin chic is back. Now, fashions retrenchment is coinciding with the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated AI image-generation tools. Deep learning models vs. supermodels Although the first digital supermodel, a Black woman named Shudu Gram, was created in 2017, the age of the AI model only began recently. Fast-fashion retail giant Mango launched its first advertising campaign featuring purely AI-generated models last summer, while H&M started developing digital twins of models like Mathilda Gvarliani this past March. Proponents say the growing use of AI in fashion modeling showcases diversity in all shapes and sizes, Associated Press reported in 2024, allowing consumers to make more tailored purchase decisions that in turn reduces fashion waste from product returns. That sunny projection does not seem to line up, however, with the reality of the process that birthed the new Guess ad. According to the BBC article, Seraphinne Vallora created 10 draft models for Guess cofounder Paul Marciano to choose from, with Marciano selecting one brunette and one blonde, which the agency further refined. That description makes it seem as though the agency isnt intentionally perpetuating the stereotype of models as unattainably fit, white goddesses, but rather that this is simply how that particular iteration shook out. The agencys Instagram, however, is a talent pool teeming with similar models. Asked by the BBC about its social media homogeny, the owners threw their Instagram followers under the bus. “We’ve posted AI images of women with different skin tones, but people do not respond to them, cofounder Valentina Gonzales told the outlet, we don’t get any traction or likes.” Incredibly, the agency seems more willing to suggest that its fans are low-key racist than it is to admit that Seraphinne Valloras tech might be bad at generating AI approximations of women of color. But that’s the excuse the founders use to explain the lack of body diversity more broadly, claiming they have not yet experimented with creating plus-size models because “the technology is not advanced enough for that. This line offers a blueprint for other companies exploring the AI fashion model space in the near future. Its a cop-out explanation that absolves anyone on the agency side or client side of intentionally dialing back diversity in fashion to pre-2010 levels. Either group can now just say that theyd love to feature people of color or plus-size models in a campaign, but sadly their hands are tied. With DEI now thoroughly demonized, the chances of anyone in either company flagging it as a problem are considerably smaller than an AI models waist size.
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Most U.S. adults say they use artificial intelligence to search for information, but fewer are using it for work, drafting email, or shopping.Younger adults are most likely to be leaning into AI, with many using it for brainstorming and work tasks.The new findings from an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll show that 60% of Americans overall and 74% of those under 30 use AI to find information at least some of the time.The poll highlights the ubiquity of AI in some areas as well as its limits in others. Only about 4 in 10 Americans say they have used AI for work tasks or coming up with ideas, a sign that the tech industry’s promises of highly productive AI assistants still haven’t touched most livelihoods after years of promotion and investment.At the same time, wider AI adoption by younger Americans shows that could change.There’s a particularly large age divide on brainstorming: About 6 in 10 adults under age 30 have used AI for coming up with ideas, compared with only 2 in 10 of those age 60 or older. Young adults are also more likely to use AI to come up with ideas at least “daily.” Young adults are most likely to use AI Bridging the generations are people like Courtney Thayer, 34, who’s embracing AI in some parts of her life and avoiding it in others.Thayer said she is regularly using ChatGPT to come up with ideas about planning what to eat, while also having it calculate the nutritional value of the pumpkin-banana-oat bread she’s been baking for years.“I asked it to make a meal prep for the week, then to add an Asian flair,” said Thayer, of Des Moines, Iowa. “It wasn’t the most flavorful thing I’ve ever had in my life, but it’s a nice stepping off point. More importantly, I use it for the amount so that I’m not over-serving myself and ending up with wasted food.”The audiologist has embraced AI at work, too, in part because AI technology is imbued in the hearing aids she recommends to patients but also because it makes it easier and faster to draft professional emails.She avoids it for important information, particularly medical advice, after witnessing chatbots “hallucinate” false information about topics she spent years studying.Roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they use AI for work tasks at least sometimes, while about one-third say they use it for helping to write emails, create or edit images, or for entertainment, according to the poll. About one-quarter say they use it to shop.Younger adults are more likely than older ones to say they have used artificial intelligence to help with various tasks, the poll shows. Searching for information is AI’s most common use Of the eight options offered in the poll questions, searching for information is the most common way Americans have interacted with AI. And even that may be an undercount, since it’s not always apparent how AI is surfacing what information people see online.For more than a year, the dominant search engine, Google, has automatically provided AI-generated responses that attempt to answer a person’s search query, appearing at the top of results.Perhaps defying emerging media consumption trends, 28-year-old Sanaa Wilson usually skips right past those AI-generated summaries.“It has to be a basic question like, ‘What day does Christmas land on in 2025?'” said the Los Angeles-area resident. “I’ll be like, ‘That makes sense. I trust it.’ But when it gets to specific news, related to what’s happening in California or what’s happening to the education system and stuff like that, I will scroll down a little bit further.”Wilson, a freelance data scientist, does use AI heavily at work to help with coding, which she said has saved her hundreds of dollars she would have had to pay for training. She also occasionally uses it to come up with work-related ideas, an attempt to bring back a little of the collaborative brainstorming experience she remembers from college life but doesn’t have now.When it first came out, Wilson said she also used ChatGPT to help write emails, until she learned more about its environmental impact and the possibility it would erode her own writing and thinking skills over time.“It’s just an email. I can work it out,” she said. “However many minutes it takes, or seconds it takes, I can still type it myself.” Most don’t use AI for companionship but it’s more common for young adults The least common of the eight AI uses was AI companionship, though even that showed an age divide.Just under 2 in 10 of all adults and about a quarter of those under 30 say they’ve used AI for companionship.Wilson has no interest in AI companions, though she isn’t surprised that others do because of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on her generation’s social experiences.“I totally understand and sympathize behind why people in my age group are leveraging it in that way,” Wilson said.Thayer, the audiologist, also has no interest in AI companionship, though she tries to be polite with chatbots, just in case they’re keeping track.“I mean, I am nice to it, just because I’ve watched movies, right?” Thayer said, laughing. “So I’ll say, ‘Can you make me a meal plan, please?’ And, ‘Can you modify this, please?’ And then I’ll say, ‘Thank you.'” The AP-NORC poll of 1,437 adults was conducted July 10-14, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. Matt O’Brien and Linley Sanders, Associated Press
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