Cross Word

The Struggle for Affordable Living in America

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 88

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Is America's housing crisis a ticking time bomb? Join us as we welcome James Burling, author of the thought-provoking book "Nowhere to Live," to uncover the staggering statistics and alarming realities facing millions of Americans. With many individuals spending more than half their income on housing and states like California battling a severe shortage of homes, this episode promises to reveal the foundational role of private property rights in American liberty and how modern regulations are throttling our ability to build and afford homes.

Discover how zoning laws, once tools for socio-economic exclusion, continue to shape our neighborhoods and property values. Burling sheds light on the morally and economically inefficient practices of early 20th-century zoning laws, upheld by the Supreme Court, which still influence today's housing landscape. Learn about the pivotal steps states like California and Oregon are taking to create more inclusive zoning policies that aim to promote economic equity and social justice for all, particularly for younger generations who bear the brunt of these outdated regulations.

Finally, we tackle the multifaceted barriers to housing development, from restrictive zoning laws to stringent environmental regulations. Burling draws parallels to the higher education sector, highlighting how increased funding without addressing underlying constraints only leads to soaring costs. The conversation questions whether extreme environmental viewpoints should always prevail over the urgent human need for affordable housing. By exploring potential solutions and the importance of prioritizing human needs, this episode is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of America's housing market.

Speaker 1:

You are listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhoun, and today we have a great guest with a topic that is hot, hot, hot. It is James Burling. He has written a book called Nowhere to Live and it is about the housing crisis in America. It is Skyhorse Publishing that you can find the book. You might think, why housing? How can that be an interesting book? But this is a really readable book about the prescient problem of housing. Actually, the auspicious timing of it could not be better, with Kamala Harris and Trump all talking about housing right now. So welcome James Burling.

Speaker 2:

Hey, it's great to be with you, Michelle.

Speaker 1:

James Burling hails to us today from Sacramento, california. He has worked with the Pacific Legal Foundation since 1983, litigating cases from Alaska to Florida. He is a member of the Federalist Society's Environmental Law and Property Rights Practice Group Executive Committee, a member of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and an honorary member of Owners Council of America and an organization that is comprised of eminent domain attorneys who represent property owners. He is a real estate lawyer extraordinaire, a property lawyer extraordinaire. He has actually argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. So we are so lucky to be able to talk to him on this subject. And, james Burling, let's open with what are we looking at? With a housing problem in the United States? Both of the political candidates have called it a crisis. What makes it a crisis? Give us some numbers on this one.

Speaker 2:

Well, we're talking about people being able to afford or not be able to afford the housing they have right now. A rule of thumb traditionally has been that a person should spend no more than about a third of his or her income on housing. That's the rule of thumb, whether that's rent or mortgage and expenses. But today more and more people are spending over half of their income on housing and rent. And when you take into account the cost of housing, you add in medical food transportation housing, you add in medical food transportation. People are in severe crisis. They just cannot afford places to live.

Speaker 2:

Young people starting out today and working people simply cannot find affordable housing in large parts of the country right now. We're looking at areas like California. It's roughly 2 million housing units short of where we should be. For supply and demand, we should be building in California about 200,000 housing units a year. We're building less than half of that. Nationwide there's a housing shortage of around 7 million homes. We should be building hundreds of thousands of homes a year, but today, in the 1990s, we're building fewer homes than we built in the 1960s and early 1970s, when our population was only two-thirds of what it is today as the supply and demand disparity grow more and more with each year. We're having higher and higher prices and less and less affordability. And now, you see, the crisis has finally hit our streets, with people living on the streets and in their cars and places where most of them would never have thought they would have ended up. But that's where we are today, so that's why everybody is agreeing this has reached crisis proportions.

Speaker 1:

Okay, your book deals with private property, and so I want to kind of go to the back of your book to start this conversation. Give us a sketch of what you mean by private property, because that is so central to your book and that is so central to this argument of housing crisis. What is private property and how do we constitutionally look at private property? Because we're going to assume that when you buy a house, you're buying a piece of property, or even if it's an apartment, that is your private property, in your name.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, private property is a fundamental right, a fundamental aspect of who we are as Americans, and we're British citizens, or other parts of the world as well. And the key thing about private property remembers and we're talking more than just a house, more than your rights in an apartment, more than your automobile, but we're dealing with a entity the private that is fundamental to all of our other liberties. The founding fathers were quite clear on this. They followed from the philosopher John Locke, who wrote that government is instituted to that our rights and property and our other liberties are fundamentally interdependent. You cannot have ones without the other. For example, if the government owned the printing presses, would the press really be free? If the government owned the churches, would our churches be free? And if the government owned all our housing, would we be free? Would we be able to argue when the government does something wrong? That government did something wrong if they control our lives and our liberties and our property that way? So property rights are really fundamental and in my book I go back to some of the origins of property rights in America and I talk about the day when, if you own land, you could pretty much decide what you wanted to do with it. You could cut trees from it, you could build a farm, you could build a building, you could build homes, and you could do that so long as you didn't have any negative impact on your neighbors, that you weren't causing a nuisance by whatever you wanted to do on your lap.

Speaker 2:

But especially in the last century, those property rights have been diminished and the ability of an individual to determine what he or she can do with his or her property has been severely diminished.

Speaker 2:

We have all kinds of rules and regulations that have come in on top of our property rights. We no longer get to decide if we want to build homes and property. That is now something that the neighbors have a say in. It's the local government, the federal government has a say in, depending on what kind of regulations we're looking at. So, as our property rights are more and more constrained, the ability of people to build homes to meet supply and which meets the build supply to meet demand, is also more and more constrained. On top of that, we have regulations dealing with what we can charge for the property, what we can get for rents, who we can sell it to. All these regulations come into place and some regulations can make sense when we're talking about health and safety, but overall we have this overarching regulatory regime that is causing a severe constraint on the people to build supply, to build the homes near where people want to live. As a result, prices go up and up and up and housing becomes less and less affordable.

Speaker 1:

You mentioned 100 years. You said this has actually been a century in the making and you go back and trace and actually it began. I think it was like 1910 in Baltimore when they first came out, when I guess I used they, but when the city council first came out with zoning. Why has zoning been so pernicious to private property rights in the United States in the last century?

Speaker 2:

So when people think about zoning today they generally think oh, that's nice, it keeps my neighborhood nice, it keeps big factories from moving in next door to me. But the origins of zoning are much more pernicious than that. Zoning was used in the beginning and up to the present day to exclude minority populations and working class populations from many neighborhoods. And in 1910, this is where I begin the story of zoning there was a Yale, educated attorney named George McMatch and his school teacher wife when they decided to build, to buy a home, a three-story brick row house in Utah Place, baltimore, maryland. It was a nice neighborhood. They were prosperous, up-and-coming attorneys and schoolteacher wife and they thought they had it made and they wanted to buy a home which reflected their success in American life and they bought the home. Within several days, local youths rioted in front of their house, took stones and rocks and broke every single window in their home and the skylight. Why? Why did they have their homes broken? I think you're beginning to guess. Because George McMeshen and his wife were all black and the neighborhood was all white and his wife were all black and the neighborhood was all white.

Speaker 2:

And Baltimore city fathers, within short order, passed the nation's first zoning law. The zoning law made it a crime for a black person to move into a white neighborhood under threat of a fine equivalent to $3,000 in today's money and or up to a year in jail for moving into the wrong neighborhood. This ordinance proved to be wildly popular in southern states and the states bordering the north and south and it was adopted nationwide because people wanted to stop and I quote from the New York Times, which had a Christmas Day story in 1910 on this to stop the Negro invasion of nice white neighborhoods by African-Americans and that was the rationale behind the earliest zoning in America. Now in time, that particular ordinance was struck down. When a similar copycat ordinance was passed in Louisville, kentucky, the Supreme Court took a case that had been brought by a white real estate agent. A similar copycat ordinance was passed in Louisville, kentucky, the Supreme Court took a case that had been brought by a white real estate dealer and the black head of the NAACP a very new organization at that time, until 1917. And they decided to challenge the law. Their challenge got to the Supreme Court and what they argued wasn't that it was equal protection violation because this is the time of Jim Crow which had been upheld by the Supreme Court in some horrific cases, but they decided it was a violation of economic rights, a violation of the property rights of property owners, and the court agreed and it struck down that law because it was a violation of property rights. Now, the court agreed and it struck down that law because it was a violation of property rights.

Speaker 2:

Now, after that, a few years later, other cities began to adopt what they call economic zone, which didn't exclude the basis people on the basis of race, but instead on the basis of flex, that is, they kept out multifamily housing, apartments and all kinds of places that the people could otherwise afford who were working class or minority populations.

Speaker 2:

It was done exclusively to do this. For that reason, apartments were known to house immigrants and minority populations and in the early 1910s and 1920srants were somebody who didn't want living near you and, as a result, the Supreme Court upheld that. Saying that, look, building an apartment building in a residential neighborhood is a nuisance. It's like a pig in a parlor. Of course, a pig often referred to somebody from Poland at the time, but be that as it may, the Supreme Court upheld economic zoning and ever since we've had zoning throughout America that serves to exclude working class and minority people who cannot afford to live in large homes or large single one acre, two acre, whatever the minimum op size is asked. So the basis of zoning in America is rather pernicious and it's something that I hope that I exposed in my book Nowhere to Live, so people really realize how we got to where we are.

Speaker 1:

I tell you you really do. And it's really interesting also how you explain zoning and how you explain zoning through the court system to the zoning that happens today and there is not a homeowner out there, that is, at least, if they're not, they have to be honest with themselves and they understand that they're going to try to keep an apartment building out of their single family home neighborhood or they're going to try to keep multifamily dwellings out because we're so afraid that that property value it will be devalued because so much of our wealth is now tied in to home ownership. But when I first opened the chapter and you talked about, you know, a kind of racial zoning, I think it really still is very much in play in the United States and it's couched with home values and keeping home values up and wealth creation. So, and your book does a really good job of showing that- yeah, it is.

Speaker 2:

There is the idea that we own our homes in our suburban neighborhoods and if these homes get invaded by multifamily whether they're duplexes, triplexes, small apartments or even larger apartments somehow our property values will decrease. Economic studies have really said that that's not really the case. When you do have upzoning, that is, allowing more units in an area, the price doesn't go down. People can actually get more value out of their property, sometimes converting a single family a lot, into multifamily, a triplex or a duplex or that kind of thing. So it's probably an overblown fear, but it is a fear that many people have and books have been written about this fear and why people will vote to keep their exclusive zoning in place. And so I guess the two responses to that one is economically it's not as valuable to have that single family zoning as people think, and I mentioned that in some of the studies that I cite in my book. Although my book doesn't go deep into economics or not a lot of economics, there are economic graphs and that kind of thing in Forum North, so don't worry about that. But also I think there's a fundamental moral issue involved that we are told, and Ezekiel and Matthew, to love thy neighbor as ourselves, and my neighbor isn't just somebody who looks just like me and has a job just like me. My neighbor is everybody, right, whether it's a Samaritan or the recent immigrant or somebody whose ancestors were brought over in a slave ship. These are all our neighbors and we have to look hard at ourselves and understand that.

Speaker 2:

The legal system of zoning that we have today, which excludes large swaths of our population, is wrong from a moral standpoint and it makes no economic sense either. Even if you think the zoning is going to preserve the value of your home, think about your children and new working people starting out. They can't afford to live in our neighborhoods anymore. I have children in California. My adult son is in his mid-30s. He has a very good job, but he can't afford a home in Southern California. He doesn't have to earn three times what he earns right now in order to do that and, like I said, he's got a good job. What he has instead of his own home is three roommates. Right, and that is what is facing many young people today because of our exclusionary policies. And if we care about not only ourselves, but of our children and their children, we really have to reform the system that we have today.

Speaker 1:

It's very interesting. The Catholic bishops of the United States are very, very interested in this of roommates, because if you have to have three or four roommates, chances are you're not going to be able to get married, you're not going to be able to create a family. So it's not only hurting us economically, it's hurting us demographically and it's hurting us morally. One of the things that really struck me in reading your book is how hyper-local zoning is. There is no, there's federal mandates, and we'll get into that, but most of this that comes is at the county level or the state level, so there really is very few overall federal solutions that are available to resolve this dilemma.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's really not a federal government issue. I mean, we do have proposals from the federal government to do this. That the other thing that is generally not very well taken at the local level. But this is really an issue at the local community, the local county level and the state level. That is the appropriate place for me to all that. I know that it's difficult to do this on a county by county, state by state area.

Speaker 2:

Now there have been statewide solutions that have been proposed, basically California and Oregon, which essentially limits the ability to have large swath of family zoning if a community is not meeting its fair share of affordable housing. This zoning is designed to exclude populations who are working class, poor minorities and they have to have a place to live. And if they're all shunted into the urban ghettos, that's a horrible solution for a whole number of reasons, for the societal ills that causes, and people should be able to buy affordable housing in communities where they want to live, near where they work, where they've grown up, that kind of thing. So zoning is a local problem and it's going to have to be solved, I think, largely at the local and state level to have to be solved, I think, largely at the local and state level.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. One of the things that one of the presidential candidates is talking about is rent control. Let's talk about how damaging rent control has been to housing almost across the board throughout the United States and really across the world and I'm not doing red and blue politics here, that's not my thing, but this has been brought up by one of the presidential candidates. The other candidates talk about moving immigrants in and solving a housing problem. So I mean, both of them have got some policy issues to talk about, right.

Speaker 2:

Yes, indeed, let's talk about rent control.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, let me start with rent control, and I start with a little antidote that I, and there's an economist named Assar Lindbeck who wrote a number of years ago that the most effective way to destroy a city other than bombing in a war is through rent control. And I also have a quote from one of the chief ministers of North Vietnam who said you know, the Americans couldn't destroy Hanoi through bombing in the war, but we nearly destroyed Hanoi by charging too little for rents. But we've learned, because rent control, while it seems really nice superficially on the surface, oh, we're going to keep rents low for people, but that creates such a serious distortion in the economics of housing that it ultimately causes prices of housing to go up. Why is that? Because rent control serves as a severe disincentive for people to build new rental housing, because if they figured that there's going to be rent control, then, whether it is rent control, it's much harder to get a return on the investment and you might as well put your money into some other kind of investment than trying to build rental houses in a rent-controlled market. And there are all kinds of studies. Economists are almost universal agreement that rent control causes the cost of housing to go up, not down. There may be some people that are benefited from rent control those who live in rent control departments but everybody else is hurt.

Speaker 2:

And I talk about a study that we at Pacific Legal Foundation did a number of years ago and my book Nowhere to Live talks about this in some detail where we had an economist compare rent-controlled jurisdictions in cities in California with neighboring non-rent-controlled jurisdictions in California and we looked at who is living in these two communities rent-controlled here, non-rent-controlled next door and in every single case the people living in the rent-controlled communities were whiter, richer, better educated, with a better job and demographically more prosperous in all respects. Now why is that? Why are people in a rent-controlled community better off? Because they have the greater stability in life. They can take advantage of rent control by being able to stay in the same place for a significant period of time, whereas in people in the non-rent-controlled communities they are less stable, they have to move in and out more frequently, and so you have rent control not really helping the people that it is supposed to help those that are economically and socially disadvantaged. So rent control is bad in a number of rounds and a number of reasons.

Speaker 2:

And my final thing that I talk about in my book is a recent example. St Paul, minnesota, adopted rent control. Minnesota adopted rent control and within days of that passing, there were building projects for housing. Sticks and bricks were coming out of the ground, rent control was passed, the equipment was pulled off the projects, the workers were called off the projects and the projects were abandoned because the owners realized they could not make a profit in a regime that limited the rent to only 3% a year. Look, nobody wants to raise rent. Everybody would like to have low rents, but buildings don't pay for themselves. They have to be paid through from decent and fair rents.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that your book also brings out is and you're talking about rent control and housing construction I own rental property. I don't want anybody to tell me how much I have to pay for the rent. I mean, I let the market what the market bears on that rental property, which I think is right. But I wouldn't invest in that rental property if I didn't think I could get a fair market value for it. Right, it just wouldn't make sense. Why would you do it? But in constructing new homes, one of the things that you really bring out is affordable housing and how a lot of that onus is put on the people that are actually constructing homes. People go into business to make money and they're having to absorb the cost. Explain a little bit about that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's something that is coming across different parts of the country. It started in California, put us in other states across the country as well, and it's called inclusionary zoning or affordable housing mandates, and the idea is that if you build a certain number of homes say 10 homes you have to set aside 10 to 15% of those homes sometimes 20% of the homes for affordable housing, which means that you have to sell or rent those at below market rates. Only people at a certain level of the median income or the poverty line can afford those homes, paying only 30% of their income for a home, whether it's rental or purchase, and what that has the effect of doing is those people buying the other 80% or 90% of the market rate housing have to subsidize the people in the affordable housing subsidized units. So you're paying a lot more and economic studies have shown that this causes the overall prices to go up. If a community wants to support housing for poor people, that should be a broad base tax, just not on the people who are moving into the homes.

Speaker 2:

Today, these affordable housing mandates and politicians find them very convenient because the people buying the new homes generally are not yet voters and so they don't have a vote against the city council for doing this, but it really is a highly inefficient and unfair way of putting the burden of affordable housing on the purchasers of new homes. So that's something I talk about in my book. I actually litigate. We've litigated some of these cases. Talk about the cases that we add stories behind these cases, but it is really the wrong solution to a vexing problem.

Speaker 1:

You just mentioned a possible solution. You talked about a broad-based tax on the local level. A broad-based tax, would that be through a community that they would raise taxes 2% to 3% right, or half a percent.

Speaker 2:

I think that it would be more fair than just taxing a small minority of new homeowners. But I'm really not sure that a broad-based tax is the best solution either, because you put more money into the housing market. Whether it is one of the president's candidates idea of giving $25,000 for new homebuyers or a California $150,000 for new homebuyers, or money floating around from a new tax, that's not going to actually solve our housing problems unless it is accompanied by new construction. We need new construction. If you simply put more money into a sector of the economy, prices will rise but we won't have any new supply. You know there's an analogy with higher education.

Speaker 2:

When the federal government started putting all kinds of money into federal education higher education everything was great. We replaced old dormitories with new little palaces. We have all sorts of fancy buildings and an army of bureaucrats to oversee everything. Prices on higher education have gone up and up and up. We know the student debt prices now as a result. But we really haven't gotten more for our money, because putting money into something, if it's only putting money into the existing supply, it's going to cause the prices to go up. So, with housing, we really need to focus on building more homes and essentially letting the market build more homes without all the constraints that we have, whether it's zoning rules or environmental rules or litigation abuse, all these other things that restrict the new supply of housing. That's where I'd like to focus. Yeah, I say a broad-based tax. Fine, that's kind of a Band-Aid approach but not a real solution.

Speaker 1:

What about a tax incentive for home construction? I think Vice President Harris has come out with it. Do you think that is a possible solution?

Speaker 2:

You know I have some hesitation about tax rejiggering the tax system because the tax system is so. Building housing it's that they can't build housing in so many areas of the country that are off limits because of zoning, because of wetlands restrictions, because of habitat conservation reasons. You can't build here, there or anywhere else you can't build. If it's going to have an impact on the viewshed, along transportation corridors, you can't build. If it's going to affect agriculture land, you can't build. What's going to affect agriculture land, you can't build. If it's going to be on a hillside, it may affect somebody's view. All these restrictions, you can have all the tax incentives in the world. People will still be able to build then on the same limited supply of land and the same regulatory constraints that we have.

Speaker 1:

One of the shocking things in your book was one of the first chapters or your introduction, where you have Senator Mike Lee writing your introduction that we have. One of the shocking things in your book was one of the first chapters, where are your introduction, where you have Senator Mike Lee writing your introduction and he actually says he lives in Utah on something like 60 acres and how difficult it is to find property to build in Utah. And I'm an East Coaster and I think of that Great West as just being nothing. But you know miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles of open land. So I looked at that I thought, huh, that's interesting. And you show how regulations, how environmental, how just all the crazy regulations that really we have the land but no one can build on it because of this exclusionary zoning. Yeah, there is lots and lots of land out there.

Speaker 2:

We have the land, but no one can build on it because of this exclusionary zoning. Yeah, there is lots and lots of land out there Now in the West. So much of it is owned by the federal to some degree state governments and once it's under federal land it's virtually psychosanct and you can't touch it. But you have a lot of private land too that you cannot build on because of habitat conservation restrictions, because of wetland restrictions, because of zoning restrictions. So you know, mike Lee, talking about living on 60 acres. There are communities in California where you cannot build a home on anything less than 160 acres. There are communities in California that, if it's used for agriculture, you can't build at all unless the building is going to support agriculture. So you have large areas that are off limits to land. Marin County, north of San Francisco, you have more cows than people, ruben, and San Francisco is densely populated as the epicenter of the housing crisis in California, and yet you have areas immediately to the north where cows have more land than people have.

Speaker 1:

Incredible. Both presidential candidates have said they want to open up federal land to build on. Do you believe them?

Speaker 2:

You know, I see it. I believe it when I see it, because I go back a few years and I remember there were proposals in the Reagan administration to open up federal lands for development, give it to the states for development, and that ran into such a buzzsaw of opposition from the environmentalists that it never saw the light of day. I think that if we start talking about opening up federal lands or federal surplus lands, what they call them you know, maybe you can tweak it a little bit an acre here, an acre there. You know, maybe you can tweak it a little bit an acre here, an acre there but the amount of land that we actually need, I would love to see that happen.

Speaker 2:

I wish the candidate success but frankly, knowing what's happened in the past and the environmental community really is still dead set against housing pretty much anywhere I talk in my book about an example of Tejon Ranch north of Los Angeles, where there have been over 20 years of litigation for environmentalists. Now they're claiming the big article in the New York Times a couple of days ago saying well, the lawsuits now are based on fire hazards, as I talk about in my book. But really the environmentalists don't really care about fire hazards. They just want to stop building period and I think you're going to see the same thing on federal land the very strong environmental ethic to stop building anywhere.

Speaker 1:

What I'm hearing you say, and from reading your book, is that the way to get this done is we have to have a will to build housing. There's no single solution. We have to have a commitment, city by city, locality by locality, to commit to building housing and a federal government, whatever incentive they provide or don't provide. It really does come down to do we want to solve this problem, as you said? Do we want to solve this problem for our grandchildren? Well, what do you call it? The snail darter or the darter snail, the?

Speaker 2:

snail darter right.

Speaker 1:

The snail darter. All right, although the snail darter, I'm sure he is precious, I'm sure that is a precious little fish. But where's our priority? Is it more important that the snail darter roams free or that a family has affordable housing where they can have a generous family, where they can raise and live and become part of a community I just and live and become part of a community? I just it's, don't you think?

Speaker 2:

in a lot of ways, it's a question of priorities and and your question is one that I wish a lot of people would face and ask themselves All right, we have all these strong environmental protections, which are basically a good, but we've also had a severe lack of housing, affordable housing, which is not a good thing, and we have to look at the balance. We have to ask ourselves in each and every case will development make sense? Will the human needs outweigh, in some cases, the environmental needs or vice versa? But that's a debate we should be having, and having those discussions Right now. There is no debate. If there is any environmental reason for not building, that will prevail.

Speaker 2:

In the snail darter case, the Supreme Court said look, under the Endangered Species Act we have to protect the species for whatever the cost end quote. And that sort of extreme view whatever the cost is part of the reasoning, part of the ethics that has caused us to get into the problems that we are into today. We have to say no, not whatever the cost. We have to look at what the costs are and decide for ourselves, for this generation and for the next generation. Are the costs your thing?

Speaker 2:

We probably thought for a long time protecting the environment was pretty much a cost-free proposition. You know, taxes were being paid for having places off-limits for building. We did not have an army of only a small army of federal bureaucrats to oversee these lands that are off-limits to building. But now we're realizing that there are costs to not build it and the costs are higher and higher prices. People without places to live, and if you talk about the environment inherently the environment of the snail darter versus the environment of people living on the streets in San Francisco, los Angeles and pretty much every major metropolitan area they probably have the worst environmental conditions of anybody anywhere, and these are the people we really need to be concerned with, as well as the environmental amenities that we enjoy.

Speaker 1:

I tell you, people need to look at what's happening to the governments over here in Europe, where they prioritized environmentalism over humanism, over people, and there are some bad things coming. There's some extreme things coming out as people are very, very angry because of these environmental regulations, these environmental rules, and there's there's. You know, what you said you said is so correct is that you know there's a cost. None of this is free, and until we start prioritizing the human being, the human family, private property, community building, then we are going to be stuck in this do loop of not in you. The phrase you use constantly is not my backyard housing, right, I know it's a big problem, but I'm not going to solve that problem in my community. I don't want that in my community.

Speaker 2:

And, as I said, there is a moral ethic that we recognize. This is everybody's problem. You mentioned this kind of the backlash that may be developing in Europe and parts of America as well. People are getting re-recognition, if you will, a more profound understanding of the property rights and individual rights that are being destroyed by our current policies. And if we want to get out of the housing crisis, we have to really stand up to some of the extreme environmental viewpoints and stand up for those in our own communities that say, no, we want to keep everything as it is, just fine. We don't want any more people moving into our communities and we certainly don't want people who might be working class or who may be minority populations. But that kind of ethic we have to recognize. That is what we are doing. It's not directly, certainly indirectly, with our current policies and it is time to change those. We must.

Speaker 1:

We have to. It sounds like it's critical. One last thing, just kind of your opinion with the passing of the Chevron deference or the ruling on the Chevron deference from the Supreme Court, do you think that's going to have any effect on a lot of these agencies that are preventing housing and permitting and zoning? Do you think that is a possibility? I couldn't help but think about that.

Speaker 2:

I could step back a little bit. People might not be familiar with Chevron deference or the recent Supreme Court, but there was a doctrine that came up out of the Supreme Court about 40 years ago that said if an agency is interpreting a statute, the agency's interpretation should be given great deference and not second-guessed by the courts. It sounded great at first, but what agencies began to realize is that we can expand our jurisdiction well beyond what the statute says. We can say well, the statute says we have to do good things to protect air quality. Well, now we can interpret that to mean pretty much everything. We can mandate electric vehicles everywhere, because that's going to protect air quality, and you're going well beyond what the statute said.

Speaker 2:

And so this last term the Supreme Court said in a case dealing with herring fishermen off the East Coast and who is going to pay for the observers on the boats?

Speaker 2:

The statute wasn't clear and the Supreme Court finally, after 40 years, overturned the Chevron deference doctrine and said courts should no longer simply defer to the agency's interpretation of what its authority is. So we have all kinds of rules and regulations that agencies have adopted based on very ambiguous or loose or sometimes non-existent language and statutes. A lot of these regulations have made building homes much more difficult. So yes, michelle, I think that we are going to see a lot of courts taking another very careful look at a lot of these regulations and perhaps overturning some of them. I mean, we have a long way to go and I could spend an hour just talking about what some recent courts have done with this new Supreme Court ruling what they haven't done Now fascinating link to a lawyer but the bottom line is there's a lot of litigation to go, but there is, in my opinion, some hope that some of the extreme regulations that federal agencies have adopted without good statutory authority may be limited in their deadings.

Speaker 1:

Very good, very good. This has been an excellent conversation and, to my listeners, I really encourage you to read this book Nowhere to Live Property law. It may sound dry, but James Burling writes it in a way that it absorbs you into the story and it really you walk away and you're a little bit smarter. And especially now, that little bit smarter is really, really important, especially as our potential presidents. Both of them are talking about housing issues and they've recognized that it is a crisis. So maybe there is some hope in both of them recognizing the fact that there is a crisis, and maybe this is some hope in both of them recognizing the fact that there is a crisis, and maybe this is the beginning of starting to speak, you know, cogently and smartly.

Speaker 1:

And you know, go to your local city council meetings and see what they're doing. That's, I mean, and you know what. That's always an afternoon of fun anyway. So that's always a dinner and a show. Local politics is forget the national politics. Local politics is where it's at. So that's always a dinner and a show. Local politics is forget the national politics. Local politics is where it's at. So, but I really want to thank you for taking your time out of your busy schedule to talk to me.

Speaker 2:

It's been a pleasure. I've really enjoyed this.

Speaker 1:

All right, thank you very much. You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and we have had the great opportunity to talk to James S Burling, author of Nowhere to Live the Hidden Story of America's Housing Crisis, published by Skyhorse. You can find me and my podcast at michellemacklinsquarespacecom and please like and subscribe, and if you have a book out there that you would like me to interview the author, please contact me. Thank you, have a great week.