Month: September 2026

The flash shortage has driven up prices for nearly all consumer storage devices. Fortunately, for a limited time, Nintendo Switch 2 owners have a rare opportunity to secure a high-performance Samsung P9 512GB microSD Express card for just $99.99, the original MSRP before the shortage began. Amazon’s $50 checkout discount makes this deal even more enticing, since the microSD Express card typically retails for $149.99.

The Samsung P9, one of the best microSD Express cards available, offers blazing-fast sequential read speeds of up to 800 MB/s. That performance is enough to ensure games on your Switch 2 load quickly, and gameplay stays smooth. Samsung does not explicitly state the sequential write speed; however, microSD Express cards in the 512GB class generally offer sustained write speeds of up to 300 MB/s.

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High write speeds mean faster data transfers and game installations. Still, 300 MB/s is more than enough for most Switch 2 owners to install large games and updates with little waiting time. In normal usage, the Switch 2 reads more data than it writes, so high read speeds are always a plus.

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The Samsung P9 512GB is an incredible steal at $99.99, especially since Amazon typically lists it for $149.99. In fact, $99.99 is the lowest price this card has reached in the past three months, and it’s a rare event given the ongoing flash shortage. Even Samsung’s own website currently sells this exact card for a staggering $199.99, making Amazon’s current offer stand out even more.

Deals like this are few and far between, especially for a microSD Express card of this caliber and capacity. If you are running out of space on your Switch 2 or want to prepare for the wave of incoming AAA titles, the Samsung P9 512GB is a smart investment since you are paying 20 cents per GB, the lowest price available right now. Act fast before it’s gone.

If you’re trying to buy a home, affordability is probably what keeps you up at night. And as you watch mortgage rates tick up again lately, it’s fair to wonder if you should just hit pause and wait for them to go down.

For now, though, they’re headed the other way. Mortgage News Daily data shows how rates have risen this year (see graph below):

And if you’re wondering why? There are actually a number of reasons. 

Mortgage rates are impacted by the situation overseas, economic data, inflation numbers, oil prices, and even decisions from the Federal Reserve (who recently decided to hike their Fed Funds Rate – which often affects mortgage rates too). As Danielle Hale, Chief Economist at Realtor.com, explains:

“The pressure on mortgage rates was here even before the Fed rate hike, and it doesn’t show signs of relenting. . .”

Now, that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. But, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. While you can’t control where rates go from here, you absolutely can control several things that shape the rate you actually get. 

So where should you focus? Let’s walk through it.

Work on Your Credit Score

Your credit score plays a big role in the rate you qualify for, and even a small improvement can make a real difference in your monthly payment. As Freddie Mac puts it:

“Generally, the higher your credit score the more options will be available to you, including better loan terms and a lower interest rate.“

So, make sure you do what you can to keep your credit score up. If you’re not sure where your score stands right now, or how to improve it, talk to a trusted loan officer.

Explore Your Loan Options

The type and term of your loan both affect your rate. Conventional, FHA, VA, and USDA loans each come with their own requirements and rates, and your term (15, 20, or 30 years) changes both your payment and the total interest you’ll pay. The structure matters, too. A fixed-rate loan holds the same rate over time, while an adjustable-rate loan usually starts lower and can move later on. Bankrate explains it this way:

“. . . rates on fixed-rate loans are typically higher than introductory rates on adjustable-rate loans because the fixed-rate lender takes on the risk that rates could increase during the loan’s term. Likewise, government-backed FHA, VA and USDA loans sometimes have lower rates because they have a government guarantee or insurance that cuts the lender’s risk.“

It’s important to explore your options with a lender to see what makes the most sense for you. Just be sure to balance your goals, your possible rate, and any potential tradeoffs before making any decision. You may even want to talk to multiple lenders to see how the options vary. 

Consider a Newly Built Home

Another path to a lower rate comes down to the kind of home you buy. Many builders are buying down mortgage rates, which lowers your monthly payment. It’s just one way they’re trying to attract buyers and get their homes sold.

According to Realtor.com, buyers of newly built homes landed a lower average rate last quarter than buyers of existing homes (see graph below):

If a lower rate is your goal, it may be worth asking your agent to show you some new build communities that are offering this type of incentive locally.

Bottom Line

You can’t control where mortgage rates go, but you can control your credit, your loan, and the kind of home you buy. Working with a trusted lender can help you lock in the best rate you qualify for. And when you’re ready to make a move that fits your budget, connect with a local real estate agent.

Using AI instead of getting legal advice from an actual human is only something you should consider as a last resort.

“Cautiously I say no, it’s not a bad idea,” said attorney Ronald Languedoc, a partner at Himmelstein Gribben and Joseph who specializes in tenant law. He said that if you are representing yourself in housing court, consulting a chatbot is an option if you can’t get a lawyer or want to do some initial research to find out if you have a case, but turning to a real lawyer is always a better bet. (Free legal assistance is available to low-income New Yorkers facing eviction through NYC’s Right to Counsel.)

However, you should understand that the more you rely on AI research, the greater the likelihood that you will be led down the wrong path and served incorrect information, Languedoc said. “It may not be that effective to use if you don’t know how to frame the question.”

[Editor’s note: Realty Bites tackles your NYC rental questions. Have a query for our experts? Drop us an email. We respect all requests for anonymity.]

Chatbots are trained to be agreeable, which could mean an AI model might bake your faulty assumptions into its responses. Models can generate fake citations or cases as supporting evidence, so it’s important to double check any information by reading the case law yourself. AI chatbots may also misinterpret what a case says or lack the nuance for understanding which cases are relevant to your legal issue. 

Some cases are most likely too complicated for large language model chatbots, especially cases involving NYC’s rent regulation or rent stabilization rules, Languedoc said. 

Other pitfalls to watch for

A judge can sanction you for using AI if your filings cite nonexistent cases or laws. A group of NYCHA tenants learned this the hard way in 2025, when a judge said he would deny an injunction to protect their homes from demolition because their AI-generated brief referenced cases that didn’t exist. 

“Judges have been getting harder and harder on attorneys and even tenants who submit papers to the court based on AI research that they haven’t checked, and it turns out to be inaccurate,” Languedoc said. 

Tenant attorney Altagracia Pierre-Outerbridge, founder of Outerbridge Law and a Brick sponsor, said that AI often misses when it instructs a tenant on how to address a court. That could lead to you inadvertently irritating the judge responsible for your case.

Pierre-Outerbridge said that practiced attorneys know the housing court judges as individuals, including what arguments won’t convince them. “AI doesn’t know the humans,” she said. The false confidence you get from your AI research may make you appear arrogant, which won’t endear you to lawyers or court officials. 

Using AI to prepare for your meeting with a lawyer

Sometimes tenants arrive at attorney consults armed with pages of AI-generated responses, but those take time for your lawyer to go through, which could end up costing you money.

“If the information is correct, then we already know it. If it’s incorrect then it’s going to waste my time,” Outerbridge-Pierre said. 

Languedoc said it can be frustrating for attorneys, who sometimes feel like AI is acting as an unhelpful third party in his discussions with a client. “You wonder if the client is really being better served or not,” he said.

However, these tools can be useful for parsing your own records or summarizing them, Pierre-Outerbridge said. AI can allow you to quickly combine data points into a digestible format such as a timeline.

“It’s good if you don’t want to look at your email for three years worth of messages about leaks,” she said. “It’s good if you have a lot of information and you want to tie it up.”

Dust buildup is one of the primary causes of performance throttling and it is highly recommended to clean your PC as part of its regular maintenance. One of the easiest ways to keep your system dust-free is to invest in a powerful air duster. Right now the Wolfbox MF60 is currently available at a 32% discount on Amazon, bringing the price down from $49.99 to just $33.99.

Cooling fans within your PC case or laptop end up pulling in a lot of dust, lint, and even small debris that can clog heatsinks, radiators, and various other components. This results in inefficient heat dissipation that can lead to hotter components and drop in performance. While compressed air cans work well, a high-powered electric air duster is a much better option in the long run.

If you’re on the lookout for a convenient way to keep your PC clean without relying on disposable compressed air cans, the Wolfbox MF60 is definitely worth considering. At its discounted price of $33.99, it’s a practical addition to your PC maintenance toolkit, especially if you regularly clean your PC, laptop or other electronics.

Searching for an apartment in New York City is always challenging—even more so if you’ve ever been involved in a housing court case in the past. This can land you on the dreaded tenant “blacklist,” with the possibility of being shunned by prospective landlords.  

But thanks to changes to New York’s rent laws in 2019, landlords can no longer refuse to rent to someone solely based on housing court data. These changes matter for many tenants facing eviction or seeking an affordable place to live.

Read on to learn how the tenant blacklist affects NYC renters.

[Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article was published in September 2025. We are presenting it again with updated information for September 2026.]

What is the tenant blacklist? 

If you end up in NYC housing court for any reason, your name will typically come up in court data searched by tenant screening bureaus, known as TSBs. The collected data is often called the tenant blacklist, even though it isn’t actually a list. Instead, companies gather this public information and provide it, along with credit reports, to landlords when they screen tenants during the rental application process.

How can you end up on a tenant blacklist?

One lingering consequence of the pandemic is that it drove thousands of tenants into legal disputes with their landlords, leaving more New Yorkers with a housing court record in their rental history.

Another reason you could end up in housing court is nonpayment of rent, including withholding rent to force your landlord to make repairs—an essential tenant right.

The problem is the housing court record doesn’t tell the whole story. It shows that a tenant had a dispute with a landlord, but not necessarily why the case was brought, who was in the wrong, or how it was ultimately resolved. In other words, the tenant could end up flagged simply for being in housing court—even when they had a legitimate reason for being there. 

And unlike information reported by consumer reporting agencies, which is subject to time limits under the the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, housing court data is not limited to any particular time period. That means it could potentially remain part of the publicly available record indefinitely. 

How do you get off a rental blacklist?

Landlords can’t refuse to rent if they find out you have a complicated tenant-landlord history. When this law changed in 2019, the intention was to ensure renters would feel confident bringing legal actions against a negligent landlords. Landlords who use housing court information to screen incoming tenants now face a fine of up to $1,000 if the attorney general investigates a complaint. 

Despite the legal protection, if you think your name will come up in a NYC housing court search—either erroneously or not—there are valid reasons to try to get your name removed.

Attorney James B. Fishman, a partner at FishmanLaw Group, said it’s still possible a landlord will come up with another reason to reject you if they see your name in housing court data. He added that the law preventing discrimination for involvement in housing court only applies in New York State, so if you move elsewhere, your record is available to an out-of-state landlord.

“If you are interested in formalizing an agreement with your landlord about moving out of your apartment, be sure that it does not permit the landlord to commence a housing court proceeding unless you fail to honor the agreement,” Fishman said.

According to tenant attorney Sam Himmelstein, a partner at Himmelstein Gribben & Joseph (now retired), if the relationship between the former landlord and tenant is cordial, the settlement terms can include a condition that the landlord provide a letter of recommendation and a positive reference. You can attach this letter to future rental applications. 

How do you avoid the tenant blacklist?

If you have a lawsuit pending and an attorney lined up, you may be able to contact the landlord’s attorney and ask them to list you only as John or Jane Doe instead of your real name so the housing court information remains anonymous. According to Himmelstein, most landlords will agree to do so. 

In addition to being anonymous, you might be able to get the other side to sign an out-of-court settlement agreement whereby the landlord would only file a court case if you breach the settlement agreement. “That way, there wouldn’t even be a filing, which is the safest scenario,” he said. It can be harder to get landlords to sign such an agreement, but most will still do it, Himmelstein said. 

Instead of taking a case to housing court, another route is a tenant-initiated housing part action. This is where you sue your landlord for failing to comply with housing law, typically this is done for cases involving building repairs. A housing part action is pretty straightforward: A tenant fills out a form to request an apartment inspection for violations. The city sends an inspector, and the landlord can face steep fines if violations are found. If the court finds in the tenant’s favor, the landlord must make the repairs by a specific time.

What are my rights as a renter? 

Banning the use of publicly available data is problematic. For starters, anyone can access this information. Landlords still want to screen tenants, and some may think the benefit of weeding out troublemakers is worth the risk if they get caught. 

In fact, Fishman said landlords will use pretexts other than a housing court case to deny someone an apartment and avoid violating the law. “As a result, these tenants cannot show that they’ve been damaged by an inaccurate credit report and therefore cannot sue under the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act,” he explained. 

The law doesn’t allow a tenant to sue a landlord for using court data to deny an application, but the Attorney General has made moves to crack down on tenant blacklisting. A settlement against Clipper Equity, a real estate company that denied applicants with past housing court records, was a recent effort to eliminate the practice. If you think you have been discriminated against in this way, you can file a complaint with the Attorney General’s office. 

If you have served time, a 2025 law that makes it illegal for most landlords and brokers to turn down renter applications based solely on conviction history. The Fair Chance for Housing Act (FCHA) aims to prevent housing discrimination against renters who have a criminal conviction and done their sentence, a bias that contributes to housing instability and homelessness. For more, read: “New law aims to give NYC renters who served time a fair chance at housing.”

What information can NY landlords ask for? 

New York landlords and property managers have been forced to adjust their screening processes and should no longer request eviction or housing court information. Instead, they will likely raise other standards, like minimum credit scores or income-to-rent ratios, to offset their risks.

Most NYC landlords require a photo ID, your last two pay stubs, three months of bank statements, and two years of tax returns, plus a letter of employment on company letterhead stating your job title, length of employment, salary, and any expected bonus. If you are self-employed, you’ll need a letter from your accountant, proof of any other funds like stocks or bonds, a reference letter from a previous landlord if applicable, and contact information for prior landlords. You may also be asked for personal or professional, reference letters. Check out “Need to rent in NYC? Here’s what to do before you even start looking at apartments” for more guidance. 

When an increasingly pricey ground lease at their Upper East Side condop began to raise monthly costs and undermine property prices, shareholders at The Azure decided to renegotiate it. The 105-unit building is one of a relatively small number of New York City co-ops and condos built on leased land. 

In a land-lease building, the underlying land is owned by a landlord and leased to the building, with the ground rent passed on to shareholders or unit owners through their monthly maintenance or common charges. The lease sets the terms, including the length of the agreement and the rent increases over time.

When Max Strongin bought his $3.4 million four-bedroom apartment at The Azure in 2012, he knew the building sat on land owned by the New York City Educational Construction Fund (ECF), a public benefit corporation created to help fund new schools in mixed-use buildings. Because of the social mission tied to The Azure’s development, Strongin saw the city’s involvement in the building as a form of protection against massive price increases.

“I understood what I was getting into,” he said. He is now president of the board and has friends in Battery Park City, where many of the buildings sit on land owned and leased by the Battery Park City Authority.  

20 percent increase in maintenance

What he didn’t anticipate was that maintenance would increase by 20 percent in one year as a tax perk expired, while uncertainty over a looming 2030 reset for the ground rent would affect sale prices of units in the building. 

“We think the building was underperforming by around 32 percent in terms of price per square foot,” said Alexander Boriskin, an agent at Douglas Elliman who has done deals in the building. 

The pandemic added to the building’s woes. According to Strongin, some shareholders sold at a loss because they could not afford the monthly payments. “It began to look pretty dire,” he said. 

This prompted the board to investigate whether the ground lease could be renegotiated—something that doesn’t happen often.

“It’s pretty rare,” said Matthew Eiben, an attorney at law firm Rosenberg & Estis, who has experience with land leases but was not involved in the lease renegotiation at The Azure. 

It matters who owns the land

Land leases can run for a period of 50 to 99 years. In 2024, a change in state law gave land-lease co-ops more flexibility to renew their ground leases before the end of the term. This prevents shareholders from being in limbo in the last 30 years of the lease, unable to sell because of uncertainty over the building’s future in the next few decades. That’s because when a ground lease ends, questions arise about whether it can be renewed or whether the building reverts to being a rental building.

“There needs to be reliability and people need to know what they are buying into,” Eiben said. 

Co-ops on city, state, or federal land—like The Azure—are exempt from this law and that is largely because a government entity has different objectives from a private landlord. “They are not looking for litigation and maximizing profits,” Eiben said. 

That’s a very different setup from buildings such as Carnegie House, where lawsuits have been filed because the ground lease was acquired by private investors who wanted to hike the annual ground rent by 450 percent to $25 million. Earlier this month, the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court overturned that rent increase on appeal, citing an arbitrator’s communications with the landlord’s attorney and finding an appearance of partiality.

Convincing the owner of a shared interest

ECF’s mission is to build schools, not maximize profits. The board used that distinction to make its case for renegotiating the lease. The lease term was not due to expire, but the 2030 market reset on rent was a sticking point. 

“It could have been 30 percent or 40 percent—but even if it was five percent, the point was, no one knew,” Strongin said. 

Ground leases typically give landlords significant leverage. “Even if they are not going to exert that control to the maximum amount permitted by the law they still want it as an option,” Eiben said. ECF wasn’t initially receptive to the board’s requests but negotiations finally started moving when the condop retained an attorney. 

The board’s strategy was to show ECF that uncertainty was as bad for the landlord as it was for shareholders. If apartments became harder to sell, shareholders could default and the building’s financial position could deteriorate. 

“We were able to convince ECF that this wasn’t just an issue for us but for them as well,” Strongin said. “Just like we want to maintain fair value for our units, the last thing they want is people going into default and the building to have a financial crisis.” 

Reaching a deal with a predictable payment schedule

Negotiations with ECF took three years and the end result is a ground lease running to 2082 where payments increase at a fixed rate. Shareholders at The Azure don’t pay traditional property taxes and instead make Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) to the city. With the renegotiated lease, the combined ground rent and PILOTs now appreciate annually at 3.7 percent. 

“It is super simplified with no uncertainty,” Strongin said. 

At the end of the lease shareholders have an option to purchase the land or renew the lease for another 50 years. The agreement also provides some tax efficiency, with around 50 percent of the monthly payments being tax deductible.

Waiting for the payoff 

The co-op spent $100,000 on legal fees, and while the board considers the renegotiation a success, it has yet to see an impact on sales prices. “There’s a ton of value for a buyer in this building and at the same time sellers should be getting more money for these apartments,” Boriskin said.

Strongin bought in The Azure because he loved the apartment and was willing to roll the dice on a land-lease building. He also knew he’d be paying far more for a comparable condo. “We were happy to take it as it was,” he said. “I don’t think any of us thought the market reaction would be so negative.”

A land-lease buyer’s checklist

His experience offers a checklist for buyers considering a land-lease building. First, find out who owns the land and understand their objectives. A government entity, nonprofit or private investor may have very different reasons for owning the ground lease.

Next, look at when the lease expires and how rent is calculated. A market reset can create a very different risk from a lease with predictable annual increases. When a land lease comes to an end there may be questions about what happens to the building. Finding out whether the lease can be renewed or renegotiated before expiration is also important, and whether the building has an option to purchase the land.

Also consider how the lease could affect financing and resale. If a building has only 10 or 20 years left on its land lease, buyers may be harder to find and lenders may be reluctant to finance the purchase. 

“Either purchasers might not be interested or, if they are, they may not be able to get a loan,” Eiben said.

Less than two weeks after Google released a mapping of the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, we’ve seen enthusiasts put the structure to work everywhere from turning a fruit fly into a day trader to teaching it parallel parking. Now, one Balatro fan says they trained the structure with an algorithm to play the game, with the win rate currently sitting at a cozy 20%.

The player shared a sped-up video of the model apparently playing the game. Based on the video, the player chose the lowest difficulty (White Stake) and the default Red Deck. We’ve already seen OpenAI’s GPT-6 ‘Astra’ model beating the game with the Black Deck on Gold Stack difficulty, which is generally considered the hardest combination in the game.