The death of longtime Oak Park Heights Mayor Mary McComber last month left an opening on the city council and necessitated a change in leadership.

Former Deputy Mayor Chuck Dougherty is now mayor, and council member Mike Runk has been appointed deputy mayor.

Oak Park Heights Deputy Mayor Chuck Dougherty, left, is now mayor following the May 26 death of longtime Mayor Mary McComber, right. Mike Runk has been appointed deputy mayor. (Courtesy photos)

The council is accepting applications from candidates interested in filling the vacant city council seat. The deadline for applying is July 3; applications can be found on the city’s website or at City Hall.

The appointed council member will serve until a special election in November 2026; Dougherty will serve as mayor until a special election at the same time.

Both special elections would be for a two-year term to finish McComber’s and Dougherty’s remaining terms, said City Administrator Jacob Rife.

Dougherty has served on the council since 2013. Prior to that, he served on both the parks commission and the planning commission.

“I am honored and grateful for the trust the Oak Park Heights City Council has placed in me by appointing me as mayor of our city,” Dougherty said. “Mayor McComber left some big shoes to fill, but in this time of transition, I am committed to providing steady leadership and ensuring continuity for our community.”

McComber, 71, died May 26 at her home in Oak Park Heights of complications related to Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She served for 12 years on the Oak Park Heights City Council before running for mayor in 2012.

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By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer

MCCLEAN, Va. (AP) — The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage eased for the third week in a row, a welcome trend for prospective homebuyers at a time when elevated borrowing costs remain a drag on the housing market.

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The long-term rate fell to 6.81% from 6.84% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.87%.

Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also fell. The average rate eased to 5.96% from 5.97% last week. A year ago, it was 6.13%, according to Freddie Mac.

Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations for the economy and inflation. The key barometer is the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans.

The 10-year Treasury yield was at 4.35% at midday Wednesday, down from 4.58% just a few weeks ago.

The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has remained relatively close to its high so far this year of just above 7%, set in mid-January. The 30-year rate’s low point this year was in early April when it briefly dipped to 6.62%.

With the latest decline, the average rate is now back to where it was in mid-May, reflecting a recent pullback in bond yields.

High mortgage rates can add hundreds of dollars a month in costs for borrowers and reduce their purchasing power. That’s helped keep the U.S. housing market in a sales slump that dates back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from the rock-bottom lows they reached during the pandemic.

Last year, sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank to their lowest level in nearly 30 years. Sales remain weak this year, most recently dampening the spring homebuying season.

Elevated borrowing costs are also squeezing the new-home market. Homebuilders broke ground on fewer homes last month than economists expected, the government reported Wednesday.

A closely watched measure of homebuilder sentiment sank this month to its third-lowest reading since 2012, reflecting builders’ worries over the impact that mortgage rates and economic uncertainty are chilling demand for new homes.

By FARNOUSH AMIRI

NEW YORK (AP) — The streets of Tehran are empty, businesses closed, communications patchy at best. With no bona fide bomb shelters open to the public, panicked masses spend restless nights on the floors of metro stations as strikes boom overhead.

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Iran’s leader rejects call to surrender, saying US intervention would cause ‘irreparable damage’

Iran’s leader rejects call to surrender, saying US intervention would cause ‘irreparable damage’

Today in History: June 18, War of 1812 begins

This is Iran’s capital city, just under a week into a fierce Israeli blitz to destroy the country’s nuclear program and its military capabilities. After knocking out much of Iran’s air defense system, Israel says its warplanes have free rein over the city’s skies. U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday told Tehran’s roughly 10 million residents to evacuate “immediately.”

Thousands have fled, spending hours in gridlock as they head toward the suburbs, the Caspian Sea, or even Armenia or Turkey. But others — those elderly and infirm — are stuck in high-rise apartment buildings. Their relatives fret: what to do?

Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300, a human rights group says. State media, also a target of bombardment, have stopped reporting on the attacks, leaving Iranians in the dark. There are few visible signs of state authority: Police appear largely undercover, air raid sirens are unreliable, and there’s scant information on what to do in case of attack.

Shirin, 49, who lives in the southern part of Tehran, said every call or text to friends and family in recent days has felt like it could be the last.

“We don’t know if tomorrow we will be alive,” she said.

Many Iranians feel conflicted. Some support Israel’s targeting of Iranian political and military officials they see as repressive. Others staunchly defend the Islamic Republic and retaliatory strikes on Israel. Then, there are those who oppose Iran’s rulers — but still don’t want to see their country bombed.

To stay, or to go?

The Associated Press interviewed five people in Iran and one Iranian American in the U.S. over the phone. All spoke either on the condition of anonymity or only allowed their first names to be used, for fear of retribution from the state against them or their families.

Most of the calls ended abruptly and within minutes, cutting off conversations as people grew nervous — or because the connection dropped. Iran’s government has acknowledged disrupting internet access. It says it’s to protect the country, though that has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world.

Iranians in the diaspora wait anxiously for news from relatives. One, an Iranian American human rights researcher in the U.S., said he last heard from relatives when some were trying to flee Tehran earlier in the week. He believes that lack of gas and traffic prevented them from leaving.

The most heartbreaking interaction, he said, was when his older cousins — with whom he grew up in Iran — told him “we don’t know where to go. If we die, we die.”

“Their sense was just despair,” he said.

Some families have made the decision to split up.

A 23-year-old Afghan refugee who has lived in Iran for four years said he stayed behind in Tehran but sent his wife and newborn son out of the city after a strike Monday hit a nearby pharmacy.

“It was a very bad shock for them,” he said.

Some, like Shirin, said fleeing was not an option. The apartment buildings in Tehran are towering and dense. Her father has Alzheimer’s and needs an ambulance to move. Her mother’s severe arthritis would make even a short trip extremely painful.

Still, hoping escape might be possible, she spent the last several days trying to gather their medications. Her brother waited at a gas station until 3 a.m., only to be turned away when the fuel ran out. As of Monday, gas was being rationed to under 20 liters (5 gallons) per driver at stations across Iran after an Israeli strike set fire to the world’s largest gas field.

Some people, like Arshia, said they are just tired.

“I don’t want to go in traffic for 40 hours, 30 hours, 20 hours, just to get to somewhere that might get bombed eventually,” he said.

The 22-year-old has been staying in the house with his parents since the initial Israeli strike. He said his once-lively neighborhood of Saadat Abad in northwestern Tehran is now a ghost town. Schools are closed. Very few people even step outside to walk their dogs. Most local stores have run out of drinking water and cooking oil. Others closed.

Still, Arshia said the prospect of finding a new place is too daunting.

“We don’t have the resources to leave at the moment,” he said.

Residents are on their own

No air raid sirens went off as Israeli strikes began pounding Tehran before dawn Friday. For many, it was an early sign civilians would have to go it alone.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran was a low-slung city, many homes had basements to shelter in, and there were air raid drills and sirens. Now the capital is packed with close-built high-rise apartments without shelters.

“It’s a kind of failing of the past that they didn’t build shelters,” said a 29-year-old Tehran resident who left the city Monday. “Even though we’ve been under the shadow of a war, as long as I can remember.”

Her friend’s boyfriend was killed while going to the store.

“You don’t really expect your boyfriend — or your anyone, really — to leave the house and never return when they just went out for a routine normal shopping trip,” she said.

Those who choose to relocate do so without help from the government. The state has said it is opening mosques, schools and metro stations for use as shelters. Some are closed, others overcrowded.

Hundreds crammed into one Tehran metro station Friday night. Small family groups lay on the floor. One student, a refugee from another country, said she spent 12 hours in the station with her relatives.

“Everyone there was panicking because of the situation,” she said. “Everyone doesn’t know what will happen next, if there is war in the future and what they should do. People think nowhere is safe for them.”

Soon after leaving the station, she saw that Israel had warned a swath of Tehran to evacuate.

“For immigrant communities, this is so hard to live in this kind of situation,” she said, explaining she feels like she has nowhere to escape to — especially not her home country, which she asked not be identified.

Fear of Iran mingles with fear of Israel

For Shirin, the hostilities are bittersweet. Despite being against the theocracy and its treatment of women, the idea that Israel may determine the future does not sit well with her.

“As much as we want the end of this regime, we didn’t want it to come at the hands of a foreign government,” she said. “We would have preferred that if there were to be a change, it would be the result of a people’s movement in Iran.”

Meanwhile, the 29-year-old who left Tehran had an even more basic message for those outside Iran:

“I just want people to remember that whatever is happening here, it’s not routine business for us. People’s lives here — people’s livelihoods — feel as important to them as they feel to anyone in any other place. How would you feel if your city or your country was under bombardment by another country, and people were dying left and right?”

“We are kind of like, this can’t be happening. This can’t be my life.”

“Racial impact studies don’t block or delay rezonings. They simply pull together data that’s already publicly available,” the authors write. “What the backlash reveals is how uncomfortable some developers are with giving communities the tools to demand more from a broken status quo.”

A Manhattan community board meeting in 2018. The authors are calling for better trainings for boards across the city around how to evaluate racial impact studies when weighing in on new development proposals. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

When New Yorkers hear plans of a new development or rezoning in their neighborhoods, residents always ask the same question: Will it drive up rents? Will longtime residents—especially communities of color—get pushed out?

For decades, there was no requirement for the city to provide data to directly answer those questions. That changed in 2021, after years of organizing by housing justice advocates like the Racial Impact Study Coalition (RISC), when New York created new tools to confront the racial impacts of land use decisions.

Racial impact studies—more formally known as Racial Equity Reports (RER)—are now mandated for inclusion in certain land use applications to show a project’s potential effects on local housing affordability, displacement risk, and job access. Public data tools, managed by city agencies, were also created to help residents and decision-makers understand neighborhood trends and where displacement risk is highest.

These tools marked a milestone in the city’s zoning history. But nearly four years later, a new report from the Pratt Center finds that these tools are being underused and under-supported—putting their promise at risk. “Making the Most Out of Racial Equity Reports” analyzed over 50 RERs and interviewed community board members and elected officials. The findings are clear: many boards have received no training, and some have not even heard of the tools. Applicants often fail to present racial impact studies during public review. And for many residents, parsing the data remains confusing and inaccessible due to lack of training.

In this vacuum, some opponents are seizing the opportunity to discredit the legislation entirely. Earlier this year, an op-ed in The Real Deal went so far as to call racial impact studies “apartment killers.” That framing is not only false—it’s dangerous.

Racial impact studies don’t block or delay rezonings. They simply pull together data that’s already publicly available. Developers can prepare the report themselves, but many hire consultants—a cost of just a few thousand dollars—for projects worth millions. What the backlash reveals is how uncomfortable some developers are with giving communities the tools to demand more from a broken status quo.

Let’s be clear: RERs aren’t what’s holding back housing production. Neither is community input. New York’s housing challenges are complex—shaped by decades of policy decisions, market forces, and systemic inequities. But instead of grappling with those underlying issues, some recent conversations have focused on cutting back public review to speed up approvals, as seen in the mayor’s Charter Revision Commission hearings.

 This push on the public review process is happening right alongside broader efforts by the city to accelerate new housing development—and change is coming fast. That’s a risky tradeoff. If we’re serious about equitable growth, we should be strengthening our anti-displacement tools, not sidelining them from the conversation. That means making sure these tools actually work for the people they were meant to serve.

 It starts with training community board members—something the city still hasn’t done—on how to use RERs. It means improving the existing data tools to make it easier for residents to navigate. And it requires holding developers accountable for presenting their RERs as part of public review for discussion, not just submitting them as a technicality.

These are exactly the moments when communities need clear, accessible, and well-supported tools to shape development—before it reshapes them.

 But tools are only as useful as the investment we make in their implementation. These reports were never meant to sit on a shelf. They were meant to inform decisions, start conversations, and empower local advocacy. That only happens if we give communities the resources to use them.

No tool is perfect. RERs won’t solve our housing crisis alone. But they represent a meaningful step toward transparency and a foundation for accountability in a land use system that has too often overlooked racial impact. Community members fought hard to win these tools, and the city took an important first step by creating them. Now, the challenge is to ensure they’re used effectively, with the training, visibility, and support needed to meet their full potential.

Tara Duvivier is a senior planner at the Pratt Center for Community Development. Eve Baron is the chairperson of Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment in the School of Architecture. 

The post Opinion: The Promise—and Pushback—on NYC’s Racial Impact Studies appeared first on City Limits.