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Homelessness has been rising in America’s West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease.

But the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities; nationwide the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade. To figure out why some places are so much more successful than others, we took a trip to Texas where the homeless population declined almost 30 percent over the last decade. (It grew by more than 40 percent in California in that same time span.) Today, the Lone Star state counts 90 homeless people per 100,000 residents. In California, the problem is almost five times as bad.

Not only does Texas have vastly different politics and policies from the West Coast, but it’s also home to three large cities with three very different approaches to homelessness: Austin, San Antonio, and Houston.

From a privately run village of tiny homes just outside Austin to a nonprofit serving San Antonio’s homeless with an intensive, no-excuses treatment and skills training program to a single, centralized provider in Houston that’s streamlined its approach to quickly house thousands of the city’s homeless residents, what we found in Texas was innovation.

But the federal government doesn’t fund innovation. For decades, it’s committed to a one-size-fits-all approach known as “Housing First.” States like California have followed suit, leaving many charities with a choice to either fall in line or turn down millions in federal and state grants.

The result: More people livingand dyingon the streets as governors and big city mayors promise that the much-awaited free, permanent housing is just around the corner.

Our first stop was the city of Austin, where progressive activism exists in the shadow of a conservative state house. It’s a boom-and-bust towna magnet for business and tech innovation, which has lured some of Silicon Valley’s top performers. When the ultrarich moved in, housing prices started to resemble San Francisco’s, and the homeless population climbed.

Policy-wise, Austin has a lot in common with West Coast cities, which helps explain the huge encampments here. But Austin has an advantage that San Francisco and Los Angeles don’t: When you walk over the city line, you’re in a more typical Texas municipality, where light-touch regulation allows innovative approaches to thrive.

The outskirts of Austin are home to Community First! Village, a 51-acre community of tiny homes. The project doesn’t rely on federal money and, therefore, isn’t bound by rules imposed by Washington.

Alan Graham, who founded Community First! Village, attributes homelessness to a lack of a supportive network of friends, family, and neighbors. He seeks to rebuild that network by giving formerly homeless people the opportunity to live in a community again. The homes are intentionally designed with large front porches within a walkable community to encourage socialization among neighbors.

“The single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound catastrophic loss of family,” says Graham.

To live here, residents have to respect the law and follow rules like keeping pets leashed, keeping junk off their driveways, and keeping drug use out of the common areas. But behind closed doors? That’s their business.

“What we always wanted is for people to live the way that people want to live,” says Graham. “Here in the United States of America, we have an extraordinary number of freedoms. We don’t want people coming into our homes seeing what we do in the privacy of our own homes.”

Graham says there’s one rule above all others: You must pay rent. The monthly rent for one of these houses is between $240 and $440 depending on the size and amenities, which residents typically pay out of their monthly social security or disability benefits. Graham says that before the pandemic, they collected 99 percent of rent owed.

“It turns out that people that have skin in the game are bought into the game far more than people that don’t have skin in the game,” says Graham.

Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Graham’s nonprofit, launched Community First! Village with about a dozen homes in 2015 and has since expanded to more than 300. The goal is to reach 500 units by the end of this year to meet the growing demand, while also breaking ground on 127 acres across the street and inside Austin, an expansion underwritten by $35 million of funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act that will eventually make way for 1,400 more homes.

Community First! Village is located just outside Austin city limits. Graham says it would have been impossible to build it on the other side of the line.

“We are blessed with the reality that there is no zoning, no discretionary land use authority outside of a municipal boundary,” says Graham. “And that’s a big deal because that’s the only tool that NIMBY[s] can sink their teeth into.”

“NIMBY” stands for “not in my backyard”a term used to describe activists who lobby to block new real estate development. Within Austin city limits, developers have to contend with zoning restrictions and preservation laws which have made it hard to meet the huge increase in demand caused by wealthy professionals fleeing coastal cities.

Residents thwarted plans to rewrite the zoning code, which would’ve allowed more vacant or underutilized properties to be transformed into multifamily housing units with nearby retail. In contrast, existing strict business and residential demarcations make such mixed developments more difficult.

A common refrain among urbanists and disgruntled residents is that Austin is like San Francisco in the ’90s: Those who migrated to the city and bought houses early stand to gain from the soaring prices, but many others are getting priced out or pushed farther from the city center.

“The city of Austin itself, which is probably where the most [local] demand [for housing] would be, is hyper NIMBY,” says u rbanist Scott Beyer, who has studied the interaction between zoning laws, housing prices, and homelessness. He points out that Austin’s suburbs have stayed relatively affordable despite large population growth.

Still, many Austinites don’t appear to see the relationship between the zoning and land use changes they oppose and the fact that affordability is getting worse and worse.

But such land use restrictionsespecially zoningshaped the ability of each city we visited to respond to its homelessness problem.

Another crucial aspect was the strings attached to government funding. As the operator of a faith-based charity not reliant on federal funding, Graham is free to experiment, including by coming up with cheaper ways to build his tiny homes. Some tiny homes are 3D printed, while others are prefabricated, and still others are bare-bone shacks that don’t contain any plumbing and require residents to use shared kitchens and bathrooms.

“People want our government to be risk-free, and as a result of asking [the government] to be risk-free, it lacks innovation,” says Graham. He says the average unit in Community First! Village costs about $80,000.

Federal funding requires that homeless service providers conform to the policy approach of Housing First, which focuses on getting clients into apartments as quickly as possible. Services can then be offered as an option, but they’re not stipulated, nor is “readiness” for independent living assessed. Graham says this approach is limiting.

“[Housing First is] an important piece of the puzzle, but it can’t possibly be the only piece of that puzzle,” says Graham. “We need community first.”

But Community First! Village may have its own limitations. The pandemic put extra stress on them as an eviction moratorium made enforcing basic rules more difficult, and one resident told us safety concerns have grown along with the population of the neighborhood, raising questions about whether or not to hire a security team, which would be costly and could change the entire nature of the community.

And although they are quickly scaling up, Community First!Village only serves a fraction of Austin’s estimated 4,600 homeless population. The city of Austin’s lead homelessness agency accepts money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and is therefore subject to the same federal mandates that operators in California are.

Most concerning for many Austinites is the growing visibility of the unsheltered homeless population. In 2019, before the pandemic, the City Council repealed Austin’s 23-year-old anti-camping ordinance, which led to so much street camping that voters reinstated the ban with a 2021 referendum called Proposition B.

Austin’s combination of street camping, artificially constrained housing supply, and a network of homeless service providers hamstrung by federal guidelines has led to the city beginning to resemble some of the worst failures of the West Coast.

And that brings us to San Antonio, which blazed its own path for helping the homeless.

“We weren’t so interested in feeding someone overnight or putting them up overnight…. Our goal was to make them different people, have a different life, and be able to participate in our society,” says ?Phil Hardberger, who served as San Antonio’s mayor from 2005 to 2009, a period in which the city’s homeless population grew by about 1,000.

But he helped to reverse this trend by partnering with Valero’s founding CEO Bill Greehey to build a nonprofit homeless service provider called Haven For Hope on a 22-acre lot owned by the city. To build the campus, Greehey raised more than $100 million, mostly from the private sector, and contributed lots of his own fortune.

Today, Haven For Hope offers room and board, health care, child care, and even a kennel, as well as a comprehensive life skills program that includes job training, mental health counseling, and addiction treatment.

To live in the dorms on the main campus, residents have to agree to learn practical life skills, make it to class, attend counseling, stay clean, and continue along the path to independence.

For people unable or unwilling to follow the program, or who just need immediate assistance to get off the streets for a night or two, there’s a separate area called the Courtyard, which offers security, heat, food, laundry, and a shared indoor space with beds. The same counseling and treatment services are offered on this side, but they aren’t mandatory.

The nonprofit serves about 85 percent of San Antonio’s homeless population, serving about 7,000 people a year. According to internal reports, Haven re-houses about 1,000 clients a year. Ninety-one percent have stayed in their new homes after a year.

Kim Jefferies, Haven for Hope’s president and CEO, says that private funding has given them the flexibility to offer services better tailored to the needs of their clients.

Shelters that rely heavily on federal funding are subject to more restrictions because of the one-size-fits-all “Housing First” mandate championed by Democrat and Republican administrations.

The Housing First movement started in the 1980s and took off amid the George W. Bush administration’s “compassionate conservatism” agenda.

President Barack Obama completed the pivot to a federal Housing First policy with the HEARTH Act of 2009, which made focusing on rapid re-housing a requirement for those receiving federal funds

The result was predictable: Federal money was spent on pricier permanent supportive housing, and the use of temporary emergency shelters decreased. Facing a critical lack of beds, shelters started turning people away.

In 2018, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that enforcement of anti-camping laws in cities lacking emergency beds was cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional. With major cities lacking adequate beds and therefore the legal right to prohibit street camping, entire neighborhoods of Los Angeles and San Francisco turned to squalor.

San Antonio doesn’t allow street camping, though like in any large city, it’s possible to find encampments nestled beneath overpasses. Jefferies says they work with city officials to notify homeless individuals of their options in advance of an encampment sweep.

“And so [San Antonio doesn’t] allow [street camping]. So I think that is helpful in our success in getting people off the streets,” says Jefferies.

Beyer says that there should be “a hundred different models” for homeless provision because homelessness is complex, is caused by many different factors, and often requires different solutions. In a recent policy report he co-authored for California’s Independent Institute, Beyer analyzed some of the problems with Housing First.

“The intentions were good, but I think also the outcomes could have been quite predictable in a sense,” says Beyer. “If you’re funding people to live on the street in a state of disrepair… and you say that even despite living like this, you’re gonna get free housing… it seems like you would encourage a lot more of that behavior.”

Beyer argues that mandating Housing First has crippled policy innovation in major West Coast cities and that the nonprofit sector would benefit from more experimentation in their approaches to mitigating the problems that lead to homelessness.

“I think a lot of that innovation is getting squelched when we have a federal government that only allocates grants based on this one very specific model that we call Housing First,” says Beyer.

Jefferies estimates a Housing First approach would work for about 15 percent of the approximately 7,000 homeless individuals who come through Haven For Hope every year.

“[The other 85 percent] need different kinds of stability before they move into that model,” says Jefferies. She says that because San Antonio invested heavily in emergency shelter beds in contrast to HUD’s shift towards Housing First, the city was better able to adapt. ” The approach followed the funding, and so we can have different interventions for different people because we’re not totally reliant on the federal government to fund it.”

Three years after L.A. voters passed a $1.2 billion bond measure to help the city’s homeless population, the city had completed just 1 percent of the promised 10,000 units. And the average cost of building each apartment was about half a million dollars. At the high end, the cost of eachexceeded $800,000.

Union Rescue Mission, one of the city’s largest and oldest homeless service providers, didn’t get any of that fundingbecause it didn’t conform to the Housing First approach mandated by the state of California. Union Rescue Mission CEO Andy Bales told Reason in 2019 that city officials laughed at him for suggesting a different approach.

“Some of my counterparts who depend on [voter-approved referendum fund] money, they’re afraid to speak the truth,” says Bales. “They can’t speak the truth, otherwise they would get in great difficulty and be defunded…. I think pride and arrogance is really holding us back from doing some of the needed things we need to do to immediately solve this issue.”

But the winds have changed. In late 2021, an L.A. County supervisor appointed Bales to help oversee the county’s response to homelessness.

“Don’t be afraid of the dogmatic Housing First, permanent supportive housing people,” advises Bales. “Don’t be afraid of the NIMBY.”

There is one city in Texas where Housing First is working well.

As The New York Times reported last year, Houston has reduced its homeless count by more than 60 percent over the past decade, while placing more than 25,000 people in permanent units.

So how did America’s fourth largest city succeed by going all in on Housing First while Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland have failed so miserably?

Ana Rausch, vice president of program operations at the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, says it partially has to do with appointing a single agency as the first point of contact for any homeless person seeking help. While many cities have several organizations in this role, Rausch says this centralization makes it easier to efficiently route clients where they need to o and to track outcomes.

She says that the housing readiness approach in San Antonio, which has a metro region population about? one-third the size of Houston’s, wouldn’t scale.

“You’re basically paying to leave people homeless in a courtyard [in San Antonio],” says Rausch. “See which costs more. I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and the Housing First approach works.”

Several studies have shown that Housing First does better at keeping chronically homeless people with serious mental illness off the street than more intensive “housing readiness” interventions.

But other research has cast doubt on its effectiveness, its impact on health outcomes, and whether its results hold up over time.

Besides limiting innovation in homeless services, governments also make housing artificially expensive. Rausch says that the reason Housing First works in Houston but not in Los Angeles has everything to do with the cost of building.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, and that’s what’s happening in L.A.,” says Rausch. “They need more affordable housing. They need more physical units built, but they can’t do it because they’re in their own way.”

Houston is famous for not having zoning. Townhouses run up against multifamily apartment buildings sitting atop ground-level businesses. A crematorium neighbors high-end condominiums. Skyscrapers loom over single-family neighborhoods in a city where you just don’t have to ask much permission to build.

“We really have never cultivated this sort of NIMBY mechanism in Houston,” says Tory Gattis, an urbanist who specializes in Houston land regulation. The result of the city’s laissez faire approach is that despite massive population growth over the past decade, housing prices are stable. That’s because it’s difficult for interest groups to stop a development project.

Houston also has no urban growth boundaries, unlike its West Coast counterparts, meaning that in addition to growing upward, housing can easily spread outward to accommodate both affordable city and suburban living. Without zoning, growth boundaries, or excessive environmental review laws, neighborhood groups can’t easily block new housing projects on adjacent land, but master-planned communities and longstanding neighborhoods can create and enforce private deed restrictions to prevent homeowners from suddenly turning a single-family house into a four-story building without community input. Gattis says this is a compromise that more cities would be wise to pursue.

“Protect your single-family neighborhoods. That’s where your biggest political opposition’s going to be, and that’s what Houston’s allowed with the deed restrictions,” says Gattis. ” But then let all the rest of your land open up, whether it’s commercial or industrial. Let it go multifamily. If that’s what the market needs, let it go.”

So a major reason Texas has a lower homeless population than California traces back to zoning and construction costs. Housing First works in Houston because it’s so cheap to build. Austin is expensive like a coastal city, but the unincorporated swath of Travis County outside of city limits provided Alan Graham with a spot for his tiny home community.

What’s also working in Texas is a willingness to give local social entrepreneurs the flexibility to craft policies that best serve their homeless populations, instead of adhering to one-size-fits-all federal policies.

“The whole regime of government funding of homeless [response] I think drives out a lot of private philanthropy,” says Beyer. “I think there would be a lot of market appetite for solving homelessness from the philanthropic sector. That does not happen because people just assume the government is supposed to do it.”

Graham believes that there’s a role for government but that it shouldn’t be micromanaging through overly restrictive grants.

“We believe that government should play a subsidiary role to we, the people in mitigating these profound human issues that are out there like homelessness,” says Graham. “But we’ve abdicated this to the government as a society, and we’re reaping what we’re sowing.”

Music Credits: “Inborn” by Piotr Hummel via Artlist; “Crossing the High Desert” by Lance Conrad via Artlist; “Kill or Be Killed Showdown” by Lance Conrad via Artlist; “Hope and Heisenberg” by SPEARFISHER via Artlist; “Crystalline” by Leroy Wild via Artlist; “Diamonds” by Livingrooms via Artlist; “Deadman Pass” by The Talbott Brothers via Artlist; “Beer House” by Alex Grohl via Artlist; “Martha” by Swirling Ship via Artlist; “Wanderer” by The Talbott Brothers via Artlist; “Finding My Memories” by Yehezkel Raz via Artlist; “Railroad” by Max H. via Artlist; “Who Goes There” by Falconer via Artlist; “Ross Landing” by David Benedict via Artlist; “Country Roads” by Kick Lee via Artlist; “Grey Shadow” by ANBR via Artlist

Photo Credits: DPST/Newscom; John Marshall Mantel/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; TERRY SCHMITT/UPI/Newscom; Mike Kane/SanAntonioExpress/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Scott Coleman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Taylor Jones/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; FRANCES M. ROBERTS/Newscom; RICHARD B. LEVINE/Newscom; Mario Cantu/Cal Sport Media/Newscom; Jana Birchum/Polaris/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/Polaris/Newscom; Curt Teich Postcard Archives / Heritage Images/Newscom; Jamal A. Wilson—Pool via CNP/Newscom; Michael Ho Wai Lee/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Brittany Murray/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Wu Kaixiang / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Julie Edwards / Avalon/Newscom; David Crane/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Peter Bennett/Citizen of the Planet/Newscom; Facebook/Haven for Hope; Facebook/Coalition for the Homeless of Houston; Flickr/Eric Garcetti (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); Flickr/Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0) Editor: Danielle ThompsonGraphics: Isaac ReeseAdditional Footage and Graphics: Justin ZuckermanAudio Production: Ian KeyserCamera: Andrew Miller

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World

October 7 survivor dies two years after girlfriend shot dead by Hamas at Nova Festival

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October 11, 2025

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October 7 survivor dies two years after girlfriend shot dead by Hamas at Nova Festival

A survivor of the October 7 attacks has died, two years after his girlfriend was shot dead by Hamas gunmen at Nova Festival.

Roei Shalev, 29, has been found dead shortly after the second anniversary of the death of his 27-year-old girlfriend Mapal Adam, who was killed by Hamas gunmen when they attacked Nova Festival.

The couple had been dancing with their friend Hilly Solomon, 26, on 7 October 2023 when the sound of rocket fire drowned out the music, causing them to flee the festival grounds in their car.

As Hamas fighters closed in from all directions, the trio hid under a car, but they were spotted by gunmen and shot several times.

Roei Shalev and Mapal Adam. Pic: Instagram/@roeishalev
Image:
Roei Shalev and Mapal Adam. Pic: Instagram/@roeishalev

Mr Shalev said he waited seven “agonising” hours with two bullets in his back – with his girlfriend and his friend lying dead beside him – until the Israeli army came.

A week later, his mother took her own life.

“In just one week, I lost three of the most important women to me in the world,” Mr Shalev wrote on a fundraising page for festival survivors and their families.

More from World

“That day was the darkest I’ve ever known. In the months that followed, I struggled to cope. Flashbacks and anxiety consumed me, and sleep became a distant memory,” he added.

Now, two years after the horrifying attack, Mr Shalev was found dead in a burning car near Poleg Beach in Netanya, Israel.

Police have opened an investigation, Israeli media reports.

Shortly before his body was found, Mr Shalev had posted a note on his Instagram account, saying he “can’t go on anymore”.

“I’ve never felt such deep and burning pain and suffering in my life. It’s eating me up inside,” Mr Shavel wrote.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.

Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

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Want EV charging at your apartment, as an owner or a renter? Click here (update)

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October 11, 2025

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Want EV charging at your apartment, as an owner or a renter? Click here (update)

California apartment EV chargers

Photo: ChargePoint

EVs are great, and can unlock more transportation convenience with the ease of charging at home. But for apartment-dwellers, this can be a complicated conversation. So a nonprofit called Forth is here to help, through its Charge at Home program.

One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car in the place it spends most of its time. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.

But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.

While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.

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And as a result of this, EV ownership among apartment renters lags behind that of single-family homeowners. It’s clear that apartments are holding back people from buying EVs, and that’s bad – lots of people live in apartments, and the gas those cars use pollutes the air just as much as any other.

Certain areas where EVs have hit a point of critical mass (namely, the large California cities) have pretty good EV ownership among renters, but it could still be better. And residents are clamoring more and more for easy EV charging in apartment communities.

So, Forth, a nonprofit advocating for equitable access to clean transportation, set up a program called Charge at Home, which is meant to connect renters, apartment building owners or other decisionmakers with resources to help install chargers at multifamily properties.

The site lets you select your situation – a resident or a decisionmaker for a new or existing multifamily development – and then gives you access to tools for your specific situation, whether you be a resident and developer.

The site houses links to help design a multifamily project, find electricians, inform you about right to charge laws or available incentives, and provide case studies, among others.

Charge at Home also hosts roundtable webinars periodically, and includes a library of past webinars with the information you need.

There are a lot of considerations for each of these projects, so it can be helpful to have someone with experience to help you go over it all. Personally, when talking to friends about getting an EV, charging considerations are usually the thing that takes up the bulk of the conversation.

So if the toolkits are still too daunting for you, Charge at Home is offering free charging consultations for multifamily developers, owners, property managers and HOAs.

The charging consultations will last through at least April 2026 – but it wouldn’t hurt to get your requests in soon. Forth may still offer consultations afterwards, but it all depends on funding availability (the program was previously funded by the Department of Energy, which has taken a turn). Regardless, the website will remain up for people to submit questions and find information, whether or not free consultations stick around.

But at the very least, as Forth points out, whether a multifamily development is interested in having EV charging at this moment or not, any developer should think about having the infrastructure, conduit and capacity ready to go for future install of EV chargers, and should consider the needs of current residents who are likely already considering EVs today.

It’s going to be necessary to install this capacity at some point, and doing so earlier can help save money down the line, make your development more attractive to renters today, and allow more renters to make the switch to cleaner transportation which helps air quality and to reduce climate change, both of which harm everyone on the planet.

Head on over to Forth’s Charge at Home site to get access to all the above resources – and to sign up for a consultation before the end of April if you’re a multifamily developer, owner, property manager or HOA.

Update: This article has been updated to account for an extension in program availability.

Electrek’s Take

I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is the problem of access to consistent charging for people who don’t have their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.

There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best thing is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.

We’ve highlighted some projects before which showed how reasonable it can be to install charging for developments. Every project is going to have its complexities, but when you see projects like this condo complex that managed to install chargers for just $405 per parking spot, all of a sudden it becomes a no-brainer not to have EV charging.

But the fact is, there just aren’t enough apartment complexes out there which have EV charging. So if Forth’s Charge At Home program can help residents or landlords with that, it can go a long way towards solving the only real problem with EVs. Click here to check it out.

The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.


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The 40 jobs ‘most at risk of AI’ – and 40 it can’t touch

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October 11, 2025

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The 40 jobs 'most at risk of AI' - and 40 it can't touch

AI has stolen £120,000 from Joe Turner.

The 38-year-old writer lost 70% of his clients to chatbots in two years.

His is one of 40 job roles that AI is fast replacing, according to conversations the Money team had with industry experts, researchers, and affected workers.

Read all the latest Money news here

“It’s a betrayal,” says Turner, who earned six figures as a freelancer before the rise of generative AI.

“You’ve put your heart and soul into it for so long, and then you get replaced by a machine.”

He adds: “You always think ‘it’s never going to happen to me’.”

Joe Turner
Image:
Joe Turner

Around 85% of the tasks involved in Turner’s job could be performed by AI, according to research published by Microsoft in July that has gone largely unnoticed.

The tech giant’s analysis of 200,000 conversations with its Co-Pilot chatbot concluded it could complete at least 90% of the work carried out by historians and coders, 80% of salespeople and journalists, and 75% of DJs and data scientists.

Also in the top 40 most exposed jobs were customer service assistants (72%), financial advisers (69%) and product promoters (62%). Search the table below to see how your role fares…

Speaking to the Money team, senior Microsoft researcher Kiran Tomlinson insists the study “explores which job categories can productively use AI chatbots, not take away or replace jobs”.

Turner for one doesn’t buy this. “That’s what they want to market it as,” he says.

Experts we spoke with were just as sceptical of Microsoft’s optimism.

Read more:
‘I’ve been turned into an AI voice over and nobody told me’
Cloned voices ‘could become as common as stunt doubles’
Stars release silent album in protest at AI copyright plans

‘Replaced entirely by the tool’

“If you were to look at these jobs in three to five years, there’s a very good chance they’ve been replaced entirely,” says an AI consultant with more than a decade of experience deploying the tech in nearly 40 companies.

“Except in areas where they are either relationship-driven or very judgmental,” they add, speaking on condition of anonymity due to their commercial relationships with a range of SMEs, multibillion-pound funds and public bodies.

“These types of jobs are by nature most likely to be replaced entirely by the tool,” agrees AI researcher Xinrong Zhu, an assistant professor at Imperial College London.

“We’re living in a world where we’re witnessing a very important turning point.”

Xinrong Zhu
Image:
Xinrong Zhu

It’s a verdict echoing job cuts announced by major companies over the summer.

Buy now, pay later firm Klarna shrunk its headcount by 40% due to investments in AI and a hiring freeze, while boasting its chatbot was doing the work of 700 employees.

Microsoft itself said it was laying off 15,000 employees while investing £69bn in data centres to train AI models and reportedly using AI to save $500m in its call centres.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said he expected to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively”.

But don’t take this at face value, says the AI consultant. Just because AI will take jobs doesn’t mean it can right now: “I wouldn’t say AI is in a position that you can then generate layoffs immediately: What you tend to see in most businesses is hiring freezes.”

The UK hasn’t had a sharp decline in postings for the jobs most threatened by AI, but they grew four times slower than the least threatened jobs between 2019 and 2024, according to PwC’s AI jobs barometer.

“AI is being used as an excuse,” the consultant says.

“There’s a load of macroeconomic effects that are actually causing [job cuts].”

It’s the Money blog’s usual suspects: Increases to employer national insurance, the cost of hiring and the cost of energy – not an AI takeover.

But, they say, “that’s not to say it won’t happen next year.”

Some 78% of global businesses anticipate increasing their overall AI spending this fiscal year, a Deloitte survey found.

Approximately 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks, according to a World Economic Forum survey.

An email that changed everything

Freelancers may, then, be the canary in the coal mine.

Demand for gigs related to writing and coding fell by 21% within eight months of the release of ChatGPT, according to a study conducted last year by Zhu.

“The magnitude really surprised us,” she says.

It wouldn’t have surprised Turner.

A few months earlier, in December 2023, he received an email from a website where he’d worked for a decade.

“Do you ever use AI?” it read. “No,” he replied.

That was the last time he heard from them. Overnight, £30,000 was wiped from his annual income.

“I went on their website and I realised they had started using AI instead of me,” he says.

One by one, most of his other clients followed suit.

“It was just a complete desert,” he says of the job landscape.

If you listen to the heads of some leading AI companies, you’d be forgiven for thinking this desert is just one apocalyptic vista at the end of the working world as we know it.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, has warned AI could “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs”, while OpenAI boss Sam Altman said entire job categories would be “totally, totally gone”.

“They want to glorify the models,” says Dr Fabian Stephany, a Labour economist at the University of Oxford and fellow at Microsoft’s independent AI Economy Institute.

Impersonating a big tech boss, he continues: “‘Oh wow, look, if we can automate away 50,000 people, then that technology must be really tremendous – so you should be investing in our company!’

“I would advocate to have a bit of more of a cooled down, pragmatic approach.

“Think about it as a technology and look at how technology has been interacting with the labour market in the past.”

Fabian Stephany
Image:
Fabian Stephany

Inventions that revolutionised the workplace

Take Richard Arkwright’s invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1769, which churned out huge quantities of yarn to make cloth in some of the first factories at the start of the industrial revolution.

While putting home weavers out of a job, it increased the need for mill workers hundreds of times over, says Stephany.

Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line in 1913 had a similar impact when it reduced the time taken to make a car from 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours.

Speed lowered production costs and forecourt prices, increasing demand, sales and the number of staff hired to fulfil them.

For the same reason, the invention of the ATM in 1967 led to more bank teller jobs despite automating one of their key functions – something Microsoft was keen to point out.

“Our research shows that AI supports many tasks, particularly those involving research, writing and communication, but does not indicate it can fully perform any single occupation,” Microsoft’s Tomlinson says.

Indeed, the study shows 40 jobs where AI can perform just 10% or fewer tasks.

Tradespeople feature heavily, like painter-decorators (4%), cleaners (3%) and roofers (2%).

Surgical assistants (3%), ship engineers (5%) and nursing assistants (7%) also make the list.

But history also includes a list of the losers of technological innovation.

Replacing horses with tractors wiped 3.4 billion man hours from American farmwork annually by 1960, according to research by economic historian Professor Alan Olmstead.

Spare a thought, too, for the pinsetters once responsible for stacking bowling alleys, who were more or less eliminated by the Automatic Pinspotter unveiled in 1946.

Quantity does not mean quality, either: Arkwright’s millers faced exhausting and repetitive 13-hour shifts in extreme noise, heat and dust.

How fulfilling would working with an AI be?

“Sterile and just not interesting, uniform and bleak and surface-level and hollow” is how Turner described its work after trying AI at the request of a client.

“Cars were a solution – a car was a horse that never got tired. But if you look at AI the same way, it’s basically saying: ‘There aren’t enough rubbish books out there, we need to make more.'”

More human work, not less?

That’s not what it’s for, though, says the AI consultant.

“I don’t see an AI right now coming up with wonderful ideas for creative writing authors,” they say.

But what it’s good at is taking an author’s idea and making a first draft extremely quickly, they explain.

“Now, does that mean we have fewer authors or does that mean we have more?”

The consultant’s optimism comes from seeing AI create extra human work at some of the companies that hired them.

A landscaping firm used ChatGPT to generate personalised services to upsell to existing customers.

At a pension provider with 350,000 scheme members, AI saved “literally thousands of hours” by scanning millions of notes, PDF documents and email chains for spousal support agreements.

That might seem like work stolen from a law firm at first glance, but it likely wouldn’t have been undertaken at all without AI due to the extreme cost of manual labour, says the consultant.

The cost of starting a digital business has also shrunk dramatically, he adds, if you use AI to organise a website, workflow, marketing and employment contracts.

“You end up in a world where you could have thousands more small start-ups because the cost of failure is so much lower.”

Pic: iStock
Image:
Pic: iStock

The ‘losers of technological change’

Such a positive attitude would do little to convince veteran audio producer Christian Allen, who has lost gigs worth £7,000 to AI in the past year.

“Hasn’t anyone seen Terminator, for Christ’s sake?” says Allen, 53, whose work over the past two decades has been played on major radio stations like Classic FM and Heart FM.

“I think it could very easily take over.”

AI started by depleting requests for voiceovers in company training videos, but Allen recently lost a potential radio client who instead bought the first AI advert he’s ever heard that’s good enough for broadcast.

“It was scarily good,” says Allen, who lives near Birmingham. “No one would know.”

The cost to the client? £11.99. Voice actors would expect £1,000.

“There’s no way anybody can compete.”

Pic: iStock
Image:
Pic: iStock

Shifting sands forming another job desert?

Not according to Oxford’s Labour economist Fabian Stephany, who was keen to “challenge the dystopian narrative”.

“It is very rare for a new technology to completely replace an entire profession,” says Stephany.

The only exceptions are jobs defined by a single task without any complexity, like bowling alley pinsetters or the translators at the top of Microsoft’s table, he says.

There’s complexity in Allen’s job, like creating video and TV soundtracks and mixing audio, but he’s still nervous.

“The AI subscription can mix for you too, so that’s production houses everywhere – we’re no longer needed. That’s quite scary.”

He adds: “I won’t be doing this in 10 years’ time.”

Microsoft researcher Kiran Tomlinson says AI “may prove to be a useful tool for many occupations” and “the right balance lies in finding how to use the technology in a way that leverages its abilities while complementing human strengths and accounting for people’s preferences”.

Read more:
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Alexa, tell me what the government is doing

In January, Sir Keir Starmer said there was “barely an aspect of our society that will remain untouched” by AI in the coming years.

The technology is mentioned at least 126 times in the government’s industrial strategy for the tech sector, focusing heavily on its potential benefits.

Insufficient attention is being paid to its disruption, says Zhu. Why is Microsoft publishing reports on job exposure, but not the government? Where is the guidance on how employers and employees should adapt?

“The government should play some important role here, and they’re not,” she says.

Recalling how laid-off steelworkers were left to fend for themselves in the 20th century, Stephany warns it is “crucial to not make the mistakes of the past again”.

Allen couldn’t agree more: “All jobs under threat of AI need to be protected. Because otherwise, how the hell do people earn money?”

The government says it is putting people “at the heart” of its AI plans.

“That includes partnerships with leading tech firms to help us deliver AI skills training to 7.5 million workers, and initiatives to bring digital skills and AI learning into classrooms and communities,” a spokesperson says.

“This will provide training to people of all ages and backgrounds and is backed by £187m.”

They say “thousands of jobs” will be created by AI Growth Zones, areas earmarked for AI data centres where the state will support big tech companies with access to power and planning.

Keir Starmer announces the TechFirst programme teaching school pupils AI in June. Pic: PA
Image:
Keir Starmer announces the TechFirst programme teaching school pupils AI in June. Pic: PA

What can you do for yourself?

Workers should be concerned if they’re not trying to use AI, says the consultant.

CVs with AI skills have so far been consistently favoured by a group of 2,000 recruiters observed by Fabian Stephany in an ongoing study.

“If a worker is willing to invest in their skill set, in developing their profile, they should not be worried at all,” they say.

Almost half (45%) of global employers consider AI competency to be a core skill, according to the World Economic Forum.

LinkedIn data shows AI-related skills on member profiles rose 65% year-on-year in 2024.

Job postings on Indeed.com containing AI terms have risen by 170% since the end of June 2023 – albeit from a low starting point (1.7% to 4.6% by 31 August).

“If you’re willing to learn skills that allow you to integrate AI into the job that you’re currently doing, you will probably not only be doing fine, but you might actually have a big career boost ahead of you,” Stephany adds.

In a separate study of 10 million job vacancies in the UK, he found jobs asking for AI skills paid 23% more – a salary boost greater than that expected from a master’s degree (20%).

The best starting point is creating a free account with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, says the AI consultant.

“Log into one of them, provide it a pretty detailed description of who you are, what you do day-to-day, both in your job and potentially in your personal life, and ask it how it can help.

“Right now, that can mean that you do your job better, which gets you promoted.”

Or maybe not.

In the past few months, writer Joe Turner has seen some clients make a sheepish return.

“I see an influx of new jobs coming in and people are now requesting no AI content at all,” he says.

Clients have found its hollow tropes and generic mannerisms carry the unmistakable mark of a “soulless machine”.

“It’s called AI, but it’s not artificial intelligence. It’s just a database of words with reasoning models,” he concludes.

“It puts the words in the right order, but at the end of the day, it means nothing.”

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