How To Solve a Housing Crisis
Nowhere To Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis, by James S. Burling, Skyhorse Publishing, 408 pages, $32.99
James Burling, with 40 years’ experience litigating property rights cases for the Pacific Legal Foundation, enriches the housing debate in three ways in his book Nowhere To Live. First, he reminds us of the crucial importance of private property ownership to a free and flourishing society. Second, he reviews a long history of efforts to interfere with the housing market. And third, he offers perspicacious recommendations for sensible and achievable improvements.
Burling’s first service forcefully restates the argument that any “solution” to a housing crisis cannot be allowed to extinguish historic property rights in land. He points out that John Locke’s prescription for a free society requires that we have rights to use, trade, exclude, and bequeath what we own. He recognizes the need for the common law of nuisance: “use your property so as not to injure that of another.” And if the government exercises its power to confiscate privately held land for public use, he reminds us, the government is constitutionally required to pay the owner just compensation.
Burling then moves to the “dystopian reality” caused by government’s efforts to meddle in land and housing markets: “Unless and until we free up the pent-up desires of Americans to build new homes, America’s housing crisis will grow worse, especially in large urban areas…even those who can afford a place to live are often forced to spend a disproportionate share of their income on housing….Nationally, just to replace aging or destroyed housing stock, one million homes must be built each year. Another million must be built to keep up with population growth.”
How have we reached this pass? Burling offers a highly readable account of the foolish—and racist—history of exclusionary residential zoning, in a chapter subtitled “America’s Obsession with Quiet Places Where Yards Are Wide and People (of Color) Are Few.” When the Supreme Court struck down explicitly racial zoning in Louisville in 1917, city planners and their la
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