Search This Blog

Thursday, May 21, 2026

TD Bank Launches Agentic AI to Streamline Real Estate Secured Lending

 Toronto-Dominion Bank is launching its first agentic artificial intelligence model to automate and streamline the application process for mortgages and home equity lines of credit.

The use of the autonomous AI model is a first step by the Canadian bank to leverage agentic AI to begin what it describes as an end-to-end transformation of its real estate secured lending operations.

Canada's biggest lenders are adopting AI in an effort to accelerate growth. TD, Canada's second largest bank by market value, has been working to cut costs from its operations and automate processes, and has embarked on efforts to deploy technology such as AI at scale.

TD said the agentic AI model it developed uses autonomous agents to create application summary memos by classifying client documents, extracting key information, calculating client income and validating figures against select policy requirements. It can perform consent checks and search for any discrepancies before generating a summary for underwriters.

Early results indicate that agentic AI is reducing the process from an average of 15 hours to an average of less than three minutes, while also providing more accurate results, it said. It is part of a push by the bank that aims to combine advanced machine intelligence with human expertise to deliver faster, simpler and more personalized services and a goal of generating 1 billion Canadian dollars (US$728 million) in annual value from AI in the coming years.

TD said the integration of agentic AI will be overseen by its Trustworthy AI team, which evaluates AI models on markers including privacy, security, fairness and accountability before they come into contact with humans. The team will continue to monitor models after they are deployed, it said.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202605215498/td-bank-launches-agentic-ai-to-streamline-real-estate-secured-lending

NYC tenant from hell sued for torturing neighbors in ritzy enclave, spewing vile abuse

 So much for the sanctity of home.

The owners of an Upper East Side rental are suing a resident for upwards of $1.5 million in damages as they look to oust her for continued harassment and abuse of neighbors, passersby and staff. 

East 77 Owners filed a complaint against tenant Layla Al-Marzooqi, an artist who lives in Apartment 1B at the five-story, 10-unit 436 E. 77th St. after she verbally accosted neighboring tenants in the hallways and on the sidewalk, screamed inside her apartment for consecutive hours, harassed the superintendent, and posted a threatening sign on her front door, according to court documents recently filed in New York State Supreme Court. 

Layla Al-Marzooqi has been agitating her neighbors, a lawsuit claims.@VonNachtblau/Faceboook

“She wasn’t always the nicest person to deal with but I could deal with her. It was fine,” building managing agent Matthew Goodman with Eric Goodman Realty told The Post.

But in April, “something flipped,” he said.

“It just kept escalating. We were hoping it was a random incident and it would stop. It has been absolute chaos,” he said.

Goodman said the property’s owners — a family — speak through him.

When Eric Goodman Realty began managing No. 436 and the two adjoining buildings, which have separate entrances but all share a laundry room, in 2022, Al-Marzooqi was already living in a studio apartment in one of them, No. 440, Goodman said.

He said he had no problem upgrading Al-Marzooqi — who didn’t respond to requests for comment — to a one-bedroom dwelling in November 2024 in No. 436, because while she was “a little difficult,” she was “never rude or threatening.” Her rent started at $3,000 per month.

But then on April 12, Al-Marzooqi, “directed a stream of obscenities at a neighboring tenant in the hallway,” the suit claims.

The exterior of 436 E. 77th St., where the allegedly problematic tenant has lived for several years.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Neighbors say that Al-Marzooqi has been hurling slurs inside and in front of the building.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

“She cursed me out in the hallway for no apparent reason other than my girlfriend’s dog was over and she hates dogs,” the neighbor told The Post.

“A few days later, she was screaming all day so [Goodman] said a checkup was warranted by the police. I called, and then after the police left, she posted on her Facebook and called out my apartment number and basically told me to die.

“From then on, I started noticing her all day screaming. And she had been screaming at people walking their dogs down the street, and just in general.”

The same month, a tenant reported to management that Al-Marzooqi’s four hours of screaming without pause made it so she was “unable to hear her own television, that she was unable to think and that she had become frightened,” court documents say.

And this was not an isolated incident.

In addition, in April, Al-Marzooqi allegedly affixed a placard to her door that reads, “DEATH To you beyond below around above this Apartment Space,” visible to everyone passing through the common hallway. 

Also, as seen in the court documents, Al-Marzooqi has posted racist and homophobic comments which identify and tag the plaintiffs “by name and association” and accuse them of criminality on a public Facebook page.

She posted on Facebook art depicting a swastika with the Star of David, set against an American flag. Finally, Al-Marzooqi has scared off prospective tenants and existing tenants have asked to break their leases as a result of her conduct, the suit claims.

Al-Marzooqi allegedly posted a threatening placard on her front door.
According to court documents, she posted art and verbiage that upset her neighbors.

Tenants have reported fearing for their safety and have made many written complaints to management.

One tenant wrote, “As I was trying to leave the building the tenant was screaming at me, construction workers across the street, basically anyone that crossed her path,” per an email submitted in court documents.

The building terminated Al-Marzooqi’s lease, effective May 14 on the grounds that her “conduct constitutes a nuisance.”

Al-Marzooqi has not moved out, per Goodman.

The owners’ attorney said she intends to start a housing court proceeding on Thursday to get Al-Marzooqi out.

https://nypost.com/2026/05/21/real-estate/nyc-building-sues-tenant-allegedly-harassing-neighbors/

Over half of LA’s homeless are from out of town

 Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions of dollars in city and county spending, LA’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs and feces. 

City leaders have made elaborate promises about managing the homeless problem, but few seem to have asked a simple question: Where, exactly, are these people coming from?

There is a reason for that. In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corp. reported that 41% of the street homeless surveyed across three LA neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — were “last housed” somewhere other than LA County.

Tents lining a street in Los Angeles' Skid Row, with a bus, buildings, and construction cranes visible in the background.
Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population.Apu Gomes for California Post

Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that the out-of-town homeless are flooding LA is a “myth.” 

In 2021, LAHSA stopped publishing previous-location data. In 2025, RAND removed the metric from the organization’s annual report and included it in a separate, lesser-read “annex.”

We asked LAHSA and RAND why they buried this data. LAHSA said it stopped publishing previous-location figures because of respondents’ “varying interpretations of the question.” RAND claimed that it moved the data to the annex “due to a need to save costs on publishing,” and confirmed that the data would remain there in the group’s upcoming report.

Another reason might be that the massive migration of homeless people to LA violates progressive pieties — and some would rather suppress those data than face their implications. (In response to this accusation, LAHSA said it stopped publishing results for the previous-location question “solely due to the statistical uncertainty,” but noted that the “question is in the queue for revision and validation”; RAND again cited “scarce resources” and the need to “streamline the main report.”)

We decided to get the information ourselves.

We spent two days recreating RAND’s 2024 study of LA’s homeless population, using a slightly larger sample size to ensure precision. We approached people on the streets of the same three neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row — and, after identifying ourselves, asked more than 200 homeless people a simple question: “Where are you from, originally?”

Homeless encampment on Silverlake Blvd near the 101 freeway in Los Angeles.
LA’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs and feces. Andy Johnstone for California Post

The results were astounding: 64% of the LA homeless said they were from outside the city of Los Angeles, and 53% said they were from outside LA County — a significant increase compared with the LAHSA and RAND studies. 

Nearly 40% told us they were from other states, mostly from states that voted for President Trump in 2024. Six percent told us that they were from other countries, including Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.

Several of these non-LA residents were candid, describing their migration to the city for its fair weather or generous services.

In Hollywood, a young woman said that after being a foster child in New York, she served in the Marine Corps, and had just arrived in LA days before. Proudly pointing to a full set of clean, straight teeth, she said that she did not use drugs. Holding a plastic bottle of vodka, she said she was drinking to cope with the pain of living on the streets where, she said, she has already been raped.

On Skid Row, we encountered a young man as he was about to administer intravenous drugs. He told us that he came to Los Angeles from a small town in upstate New York for sobriety treatment but had departed the facility due to concerns about the program director’s “shady” activities. He would not elaborate and returned to his drug preparation.

Later, we encountered an earnest-looking elderly black woman sitting primly on her suitcase outside of a Skid Row shelter. She told us that she had purchased her own Greyhound ticket from Washington, DC at a cost of $379. She seemed to be in shock.

The homeless respond to incentives. They flock to places where it is easy to camp, do drugs, and commit crimes, and where the government provides housing, benefits, and drug paraphernalia. That’s exactly what LA has done. As a result, there is a “magnet effect” that continuously attracts the homeless from around the world.

The implications of our survey are clear: Just building housing won’t solve Los Angeles’ homelessness problem. The wrong kind of housing program might even make it worse. Giving more homeless people a permanent home, with no strings attached, simply inspires nonresidents to come here.

The real way to solve Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis is to reverse the polarity of the magnet: Enforce drug and camping laws, mandate treatment, and insist on clean and orderly streets. The only alternative is lawlessness — the end result of an approach that has turned the City of Angels into an open-air homeless encampment.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.

https://nypost.com/2026/05/21/opinion/more-than-half-of-las-homeless-are-from-out-of-town/

Trump-backed housing bill clears House after GOP defies Senate pressure campaign

 The House passed a sweeping housing bill backed by President Donald Trump on Wednesday, handing Republicans a potential affordability win ahead of November’s midterms. 

Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly 396-13 to send the bipartisan measure aimed at boosting housing supply and homeownership to the Senate, where it will need final sign-off before being signed into law by the president.

"The White House supports the House’s housing bill thanks to the changes that were made," a White House official told Fox News Digital. The president’s support is a major victory for House GOP leadership, who defied a pressure campaign from the Senate to pass the upper chamber’s rival housing bill without any changes.

The amended House bill's future remains uncertain in the Senate, where it will need to overcome a 60-vote threshold and potential frustration over the lower chamber's modifications.

The final House bill struck out a controversial provision in the Senate-passed measure that required single-family homes owned by large investors for the purpose of renting to be sold off within seven years. 

Critics argued the measure could reduce housing supply and would hurt the build-to-rent industry, which provides rental options for Americans priced out of homeownership.

The package preserved a ban on large institutional investors from buying new single-family homes. That provision is a top priority of the Trump administration, as well as leading progressives, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who argues it would help individual homebuyers compete with well-funded investors.

Large institutional investors own just a sliver of the nation’s housing stock.

Seven in 10 voters said they would support a ban on large investors owning more than 350 homes from purchasing more, according to a May survey commissioned by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Support dipped among some supporters when respondents were told the provision could reduce the supply of rental homes.

"This bill prioritizes American families by expanding homeownership, enhancing affordability, reducing burdensome regulations that drive up costs, and increasing housing supply nationwide," House Financial Services Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., said in a statement. "Importantly, it delivers on President Trump’s call to limit institutional investors from competing with the American people as they seek to purchase a home."

Still, the bill faced resistance from some conservatives over an unrelated provision regulating central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

Thirteen conservative lawmakers associated with the House Freedom Caucus voted against the bipartisan housing measure over concerns about language temporarily banning CBDCs, which they argue would open the door to unchecked financial surveillance.

GOP privacy hawks have long pushed for a permanent ban and have argued that a short-term prohibition would permit the Federal Reserve to issue a digital token after it expires in 2030.

"A temporary ban is the worst of both worlds: political cover today, a clear runway tomorrow," Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Reporter this week. "Make it permanent, or take it out."

GOP leadership has pointed to the housing bill as part of Republicans’ broader push to address cost-of-living issues ahead of the midterm elections.

"Increased housing costs and lack of quality supply are two issues that impact nearly every American family," House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said at a news conference on Wednesday, adding that the House measure is a "strong bipartisan package that will put more American families into homes."

"This is something that every American in this country is going to be happy to see, to have lower housing costs," House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-backed-housing-bill-clears-house-after-gop-defies-senate-pressure-campaign