CAFACTS
Community Association Industry Facts & News
Prepared by Clifford J. Treese, CIRMS®
President, Association Consulting, Inc.
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SPECIAL FOCUS
► Global Concerns About the Dollar
Treese Notes: This Special Focus is different. Read it for what you will. Part One is from the Peterson Foundation and it expresses concerns about the dollar, but it is brief in its format. Part Two is from the Federal Reserve and it is less pessimistic, but it does have several Charts and Tables that might give a sense of the U.S. dollar and other currencies.
Part One: The U.S. Dollar Is the World’s Reserve Currency. Why Does That Matter?
The U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency for the world’s financial system — but what does that mean, and why is it important to the United States’ public finances?
The U.S. dollar has served as the world’s primary reserve currency for more than 80 years — a privileged status that carries with it significant benefits for our domestic economy. The country's unsustainable fiscal outlook, however, threatens to diminish the dollar’s standing, which would have damaging fiscal and economic consequences for the United States.
What Is a Reserve Currency?
Reserve currencies are safe and stable currencies held by central banks and investors across the world as part of their official exchange reserves. Reserve currencies are distinguished by their ability to maintain value and be easily transacted. They have historically been based in countries that have large domestic economies, stable governments, sound macroeconomic and fiscal policies, and large, open financial markets.
Reserve currencies are easily convertible and are used to anchor the value of other currencies; holding them allows countries to weather economic shocks, service debts, moderate the value of their own currencies, and support domestic companies' purchase of imports. While the U.S. dollar is the most held and most important global reserve currency, there are several other currencies that also serve as reserves, albeit with much lower volume, including the British pound.
Part Two: The International Role of the U.S. Dollar – 2025 Edition
For most of the last century, the preeminent role of the U.S. dollar in the global economy has been supported by the size and strength of the U.S. economy, its stability and openness to trade and capital flows, and strong property rights and the rule of law. As a result, the depth and liquidity of U.S. financial markets is unmatched, and there is a large supply of extremely safe dollar-denominated assets.
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SOCIETY, FINANCE & HOUSING
► Mapped: The Salary Needed to Afford Rent Across America
Treese Notes: Click on the title above to see a full map of the U.S. and the salaries needed in each state.
Treese Notes: See this other mapping exercise: Poverty nationwide and in your neighborhood/
► Housing in Two Parts
Part 1: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-June 2026
The key story for existing homes are:
Part 2: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-June 2026
The Case-Shiller National Index increased 0.7% YoY in March and will likely be about the same in the April report (based on other data).
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RISK MANAGEMENT & INSURANCE
► Colorado becomes first US state to implement comprehensive requirements for EV battery recycling
Colorado has become the first US state to make automakers and battery manufacturers responsible for managing batteries at the end of their useful lives. The Colorado General Assembly passed Senate Bill 26-003, which expands the state’s Battery Stewardship Act to include electrified vehicle batteries, in May. Governor Jared Polis signed the bill into law in early June.
As Bill Pierce reports in EVinfo.net, the new law builds on Senate Bill 25-163, which created an “extended producer responsibility framework” for portable and medium-format batteries. The measure is intended to create a structured pathway for battery reuse, recycling and disposal.
Under the new law, manufacturers are required to collect unwanted propulsion batteries from secondary handlers, such as automotive dismantlers and solid-waste facilities, at no cost to those companies.
► Study: More Investment Needed in Prescribed Burns, Forest Thinning
Researchers at UC Davis found that fuel treatments — including forest thinning, prescribed burns and removal of excess vegetation — can prevent billions of dollars in damage while also reducing wildfire severity. As firefighters continue to work to contain the Putah Fire, an escaped prescribed that has charred more than 800 acres, a study published by UC Davis researchers found that greater investment in treatments such as prescribed burns may be needed to effectively reduce wildfire damage.
The researchers found that underused strategies known as fuel treatments — including forest thinning, prescribed burns and removal of excess vegetation — can prevent billions of dollars in damage while also reducing wildfire severity.
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SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE ENVIRONMENT
► Cleaning pesticides from your fruits and veggies
Pesticides on your produce can be easily removed with common kitchen ingredients.
Blueberries are nutritious, delicious and — if unwashed — probably coated in a film of pesticide residue.
The squidgy berries were highlighted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in this year’s “Dirty Dozen” analysis, an annual look at which fruits and vegetables have the highest amounts of pesticide residue, based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Alongside the blueberries were spinach, kale, strawberries, grapes, nectarines, peaches, cherries, apples, blackberries, pears and potatoes.
To do a basic wash, put produce under running water for 20 seconds or soak it in water for 15 to 20 minutes. For firmer items, such as cucumbers and melons, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends scrubbing their surfaces with a clean produce brush. But this kind of washing cannot guarantee produce will be completely rid of pesticide residue.
So what to do? According to EWG’s guide to washing produce, adding a little baking soda or vinegar to water and soaking produce for five to 10 minutes can help break down certain pesticides and may be more effective than water alone.
► The CNN-Perplexity Lawsuit Is Not Just Another AI Copyright Case
CNN recently filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, alleging that the company copied more than 17,000 CNN articles, videos, and images to power its AI search products without permission or compensation. The case arrives amid a broader wave of AI copyright litigation, and the instinct among policymakers is likely to treat it as more of the same. That instinct is wrong, and treating this case as equivalent to other training-data lawsuits could lead to poor policy in either direction.
Publisher copyright claims should not be used to broadly constrain AI development. However, this CNN case is legally distinct from the training-data lawsuits filed against OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, and that distinction matters. Those cases center on whether using publicly available content to train AI models constitutes fair use.
CNN alleges something different. It claims that Perplexity’s products reproduce CNN’s journalism in near-verbatim form and in real time through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a technique that pulls live content from specific websites or databases to answer Internet search queries and reduce AI “hallucinations.”
As a result, Perplexity may be delivering content that is identical or substantially similar to material CNN reserves for both visitors and paying subscribers, without directing users to CNN.com. The good news is that existing copyright law already addresses this issue. Congress does not need to wait for a new legal doctrine to emerge — the necessary legal tools are already in place.
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WORLD
► Where do migrants live, and where were they born?
Treese Notes: Click on the title above to view a live, interactive version of a graphic.
An interactive tool that helps us see where migrants were born, and where they live now. In 2024, around 280 million people lived in a different country from the one in which they were born. That’s around 3.5% of the global population.
Where were these international migrants born, and where did they move to?
At Our World in Data, we built a graphing tool called the Grapher, designed to be flexible enough to visualize thousands of very different metrics. Unfortunately, it isn’t able to show flows between countries. My colleague Sophia Mersmann has now built a specific interactive visualization that is optimized for this country-to-country data.
► Efforts to Save Kelp Forests from Ocean Warming Are Ramping Up
Kelp forests are biodiversity hotspots teeming with a colorful variety of seaweeds, sponges, crustaceans, and other small ocean animals, many of them found nowhere else. At one time, vast kelp beds grew in nutrient-rich shallow waters along roughly a third of the world’s coastlines, where they helped to reduce the strength of waves, minimized coastal erosion, and provided shelter to fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals.
Today, however, many kelp forests are on life support, victims of water pollution from terrestrial agriculture and coastal development, bottom trawling for fish, and an explosion of kelp-devouring urchins, like those the Haida volunteers are collecting as part of an eradication program. But perhaps the most important driver of kelp decline is the rapid warming of the ocean.
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BOOK REVIEW / ESSAY
► Taking a Risk: Mary Shelley Writes Frankenstein and Percey Shelley Backs Her Up
Read Percy Shelley's review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Treese Notes: Mary Shelley was eighteen in the summer of 1816 when she was vacationing in the Swiss Alps with Percy Shelley (then her lover) and Lord Byron “who suggested that they pass the time by each writing their own ghost story.
“Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated,” mused Mary, and the rest is literary history.” Two years later Frankenstein was published.” She had to publish this anonymously because women did not write books --- see an early review below.
Just to give Mary Shelley a little more background: “Her parents were two of the most notorious radicals of her day: her mother, who died of complications 11 days after her birth, was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; her father was the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin. He may have been a proponent of anarchism but he upheld many contemporary conventions at home. Once Mary eloped with Percy at the age of 16, for example, the former apostle of free love cut off his daughter until she was respectably married.”
Early Review: Returning to an early review of Frankenstein, one of the typical misogynistic comments: “The writer [Mary Shelly] of it [Frankenstein] is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”
Here is Frankenstein free online
Percey Shelley wrote a great review of Frankenstein for his wife as then the unknown author: “The novel of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is undoubtedly, as a mere story, one of the most original and complete productions of the age. We debate with ourselves in wonder as we read it, what could have been the series of thoughts, what could have been the peculiar experiences that awakened them, which conducted in the author’s mind, to the astonishing combination of motives and incidents and the startling catastrophe which compose this tale … it is conducted throughout with a firm and steady hand. The interest gradually accumulates, and advances towards the conclusion with the accelerated rapidity of a rock rolled down a mountain. . .”
Unfortunately, the review was unpublished until 1832, ten years after Percey Sheley’s drowning death in the Gulf of La Spezia.
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