The San Diego Union-Tribune : From hospitals to homelessness
Half a century ago, more than half a million people were warehoused in giant institutional psychiatric hospitals across the United States, where the care ranged from decent to indifferent to atrocious. To combat the shoddy treatment of patients, reforms started to be implemented. We began to take the rights of those we put away seriously. The gr ...
The San Diego Union-Tribune : Stop the permit extortion
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 l ...
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 de ...
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 ...
The San Diego Union-Tribune : 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 u ...
The San Diego Union-Tribune : Bulldozed
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 ...
The Orange County Register : 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 ...
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 ...
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 electri ...