A PLF series on America’s housing crisis, syndicated by Southern California News Group
Editor’s Note: Below are excerpts from a column series on housing written by Jim Burling, vice president at Pacific Legal Foundation, and published across Southern California News Group outlets.
Nowhere to Live? No Hiding from Bad Government Policies
In the mid-1800s, slum housing in cities like New York had no air, no light, no water, no electricity, no gas, and no toilets. Thousands of cramped tenement apartments had no outside windows for light and air — only a doorway leading to a common, unlit interior hallway and stairwell. Water was from a well in a courtyard, perilously close to the pit for the buckets of waste from the apartments. The tenants froze in winter and sweltered in summer. Disease spread through overcrowded buildings as plagues of cholera, typhoid and yellow fever wiped out thousands.
In time, the city piped in water from upstate aqueducts and forced the dwellings to connect to fresh water and a centralized sewer system. In time, the slums, while never ideal, were not the hellholes of the 19th century.
Today, we face a new housing crisis: While most housing meets at least minimal standards of health and safety, homes and apartments are increasingly unaffordable. Instead of packing people into tenements, we push them onto the streets, sheltered only by thin nylon tents, makeshift lean-tos, and — for the lucky — automobiles and trailers parked wherever their owners can find a space. We have substituted one Hell for another.
Read the full column in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
America’s first zoning law was about race
The causes of our housing crisis didn’t just happen by accident — they were built on purpose. In the first installment of this series, we saw how misguided government policies have made decent housing unaffordable and unattainable for too many Americans. But to fully understand how we got here, we have to go back to the beginning — to the first zoning law in the United States. It wasn’t about green space or infrastructure. It was about race.
On a warm June day in 1910, a Yale-educated lawyer named George McMechen and his schoolteacher wife moved into their newly purchased home in Baltimore’s Eutaw Place neighborhood. Then all hell broke loose. Local youths rioted in front of their house, smashing every window and skylight. The “problem”? Eutaw Place was an all-white neighborhood — and George and his wife were black.
But what happened to George McMechen was hardly the worst thing that unfolded in Baltimore in 1910. In response to the pleas from white Baltimoreans fearful of what the New York Times labeled “the Negro Invasion,” the city narrowly passed the nation’s first zoning law. From that point on, no black resident could move into a white neighborhood — and, in a cynical hat-tip to equality, vice versa.
Read the full column in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
The roots of today’s housing crisis lie in a 1926 Supreme Court ruling
After the Supreme Court struck down Louisville’s Baltimore-style racial zoning law in 1917, the notion that local governments could mandate that neighborhoods be segregated by race seemed dead. All people, white and black alike, had a property right to buy and sell homes from and to whom they wished and where they wanted. The lawsuit striking down racial zoning was the NAACP’s first great success.
But the victory of rights in property against the desire to prevent the wrong class of person from moving next door was short-lived. Shortly before the Louisville ordinance was found unconstitutional, another method called “comprehensive zoning” was developed, which would achieve similar results without any explicit racial restrictions. First seen in two cities on opposite coasts — Berkeley, California, and New York City — this style of zoning segregated areas not by race but by use, which was often based on the economics of racial and class segregation. Berkeley residents passed their ordinance to stop an African-American dance hall, while in New York, merchants along Fifth Avenue felt threatened by Jewish garment factories and the proliferation of tenement housing.
In 1922, Euclid, Ohio, a sleepy suburb of Cleveland, adopted its version of comprehensive zoning — a measure that would face a legal challenge that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. At the time, Euclid was largely undeveloped but stood in the path of Cleveland’s expanding footprint. The city fathers did not want any more industry and especially did not want the march of apartment buildings — and their immigrant factory workers — to invade the town. Most of the town, therefore, was zoned for large-lot residential use. That made it practically impossible for minority and immigrant working-class people to live in Euclid.
Read the full column in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Bull-dozed: How eminent domain erased working class neighborhoods
On May 8, 1959, Los Angeles deputies dragged a 37-year-old World War II widow named Aurora Vargas out of her home at 1771 Malvina Avenue in Chavez Ravine and detained her. Her mother threw rocks at the deputies. Children cried. The rest of the family was escorted out.
Minutes later, the waiting bulldozers were fired up, and her home was smashed to pieces.
Aurora’s family home had been taken by involuntary eminent domain so her Latino neighborhood could be razed. The first plan for the site was for public housing. Although the residents were to be given first dibs on the new housing, many objected. The people had deep ties to their neighborhood, which had been established in the 1840s and was home to over 1,000 families. As Aurora’s father recounted, “My family and I fought every way we knew how to stay in our home in Chavez Ravine. Police had to carry my daughter, Aurora Vargas, from our house… we lost our home and our land, but we didn’t lose our pride because we fought with everything we had.”
Read the full story in The Orange County Register
How urban renewal schemes destroyed working-class neighborhoods
The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Berman v. Parker, which upheld the destruction of a working-class neighborhood for the benefit of redevelopment, paved the way for the destruction of working-class neighborhoods across America. But it took decades for the American public to catch on. Only after Kelo v. City of New London did Americans begin to understand the consequences of allowing any government to seize anyone’s property for virtually any so-called public purpose.
But that doesn’t explain why so many local governments were so anxious to jump on the redevelopment bandwagon and impose urban renewal on so many neighborhoods. The answer lies in the fact that poor communities don’t generate a lot of tax dollars — instead, they are often a burden on the public treasury.
Read the full story in The Orange County Register
How environmental laws are killing America’s housing supply
Over the past 50 years, the population of the United States has ballooned from 210 million to 340 million. And yet we are building far fewer homes than we were a half-century ago. In 1973, over two million homes and apartments were built compared to only 1.4 million in 2023. Economists estimate that nationally, we need five million more homes. And just to keep up with existing population trends, we need to build an additional two million homes per year. Since we’re not even close, more people are chasing fewer homes, and prices are going up, up, and further up.
It’s tough enough to find land zoned to allow affordable housing to be built. But even where zoning allows it, homes aren’t being built. The double-whammy of environmental regulations and environmental litigation has been destroying housing opportunities for a half-century.
Read the full story in The Orange County Register
Rent control makes California’s housing crisis worse
In the 1960s, the free-market economist Assar Linbeck described rent control as “the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities — except for bombing.” In 1989, Communist Vietnam’s foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, implied that rent control was worse than bombing when he said, “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents.” In a 1990 survey of 464 economists spread across the political spectrum, 93 percent agreed that a “ceiling on rent reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”
Read the full story in The Orange County Register
Stop the permit extortion: How hidden fees make housing unaffordable
Seventy-two-year-old George Sheetz is not a rich man. He is not a greedy developer. But to officials in California’s El Dorado County, he is an ATM. In July 2016, Sheetz applied for a permit to place a modest 1,854-square-foot manufactured home for his family on a rural 10-acre lot on Fort Jim Road, just east of Sacramento. His simple goal was to live in a home away from the city where he and his wife could raise their grandson.
Read the full story in The Orange County Register
