This is the Cater Daily podcast for Thursday, December 19th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If you want to understand better the housing crisis that has emerged in the United States,

author Jim Burling suggests taking a look at the long history of government policies,

court cases, and political manipulation. He walks through

the sometimes shameful history of government laying the groundwork for our crisis. In his new book,

Nowhere to Live, the hidden story of America's housing crisis. We talked about the book in Phoenix

in August. In a lot of discussions about housing,

we're really talking about, you know,

fairly minor reforms that might have a big impact

on housing production.

And, but we're not talking about what the ideal situation is.

And so for me, at least, and tell me where you disagree, you know, the ideal situation for housing, but land use more broadly is the only possible justification or any government intervention into people's property

might be the immediate, obvious imposition that the use of that property that they'd like to put it to

infringes upon some right that exists for neighbors,

or people far away, potentially. But that's not how zoning gets done. That's not how land use

decisions are made. They're often very, can be capricious to the extent that local governments

have a great deal of discretion in approving or not approving projects. So how close am I to your

ideal situation when it comes to how land use and housing ought to be regulated.

You're getting very close to that because traditionally in this country, you could use your

land for any non-nucent purpose and it was your choice to decide what could be done with land.

For example, if you wanted to farm your land, you could do that.

...