Solving the Housing Crisis – Mark Pulliam

James Burling has been litigating property rights for over 40 years at the Pacific Legal Foundation ( PLF ), a public interest law firm headquartered in California .

Burling's book, Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis , is a wide-ranging examination of the various ways government regulation has reduced the amount of housing in America , contributing to the current affordability crisis.

Nowhere to Live is peppered with jarring references to “racial justice,” “class segregation” against poor people, “privilege” and similar leftist idioms.

For Burling, zoning has become the obsession that Moby Dick was for Captain Ahab . Burling poo-poos the correlation between low-income housing and crime, going so far as to invoke the character Silas Lynch from The Birth of a Nation .

Many urban areas fit Burling ’s description of “our dystopian reality,” but homelessness isn’t caused by zoning laws, he says.

Building more houses and apartments isn't going to eliminate squalid tent cities serving as open-air drug dens and ersatz lunatic asylums.