Earlier this week, the Federalist Society held a webinar on “The California Wildfires and America’s Housing Shortage.” I have posted the video below.
The participants were M. Nolan Gray (nationally recognized housing expert and author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It), Jennifer Hernandez (prominent California land-use lawyer), and myself. It is notable that experts with widely divergent political views (Gray seems to be a political moderate, Hernandez is on the left, and I am a libertarian) largely agreed that a combination of exclusionary zoning and regulatory restrictions on building are impeding post-fire reconstruction and exacerbating a housing crisis that was already severe before the fires. Gray warns that, if regulatory barriers are not cut back, much of the destroyed area might still be in ruins years from now. Sadly, that is exactly what has happened in Maui, where only 3 of 2000 burnt-out homes have been rebuilt some 18 months after a devastating fire hit that area. In Pacific Palisades, only four rebuilding permits have been issued some 75 days after the end of the fire there, which destroyed 6800 structures.
I previously wrote about how exclusionary zoning exacerbated the impact of the fire and makes recovery more difficult here. In a recent Texas Law Review article my coauthor Josh Braver and I argue that zoning restrictions on housing construction violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. For a summary of our argument, see our June 2024 article in the Atlantic.
