August 28, 2024 • 33 mins
Jim Burling, VP of Legal Affairs at Pacific Legal Foundation, has been litigating property rights, environmental, and land-use cases for over 40 years - and just wrote a brand new book Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Warning the following podcast might be too truthful for most liberals.
Listener discretion is therefore advised. Welcome to the Tea Party
Power Hour. I am your host, Mark Gillar. Today we're
going to be talking to Jim Birling. He's the vice
(00:23):
president of Legal Affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation and
has been litigating property rights, environmental and land use cases
for over forty years. He has a brand new book
out called Nowhere to Live, The Hidden Story of America's
Housing Crisis.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Jim, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's nice to be with you all right.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Now, here's something we don't talk about enough, and that
is the homeless situation and the unaffordable cost of housing
in America just seems to be getting worse and worse.
I know that I have family living in the Austin area,
and it seems like everybody from California is coming to
(01:08):
Austin to try to find affordable housing. Did you take
a really big picture look at this? How far back
in America's history?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Jim?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Do we have to go to understand why we have
the homeless crisis that we have now and the affordable
housing crisis that we have now?
Speaker 4 (01:28):
I think you have to go about a century back
and look at the history from that time to the
present time and see what we've had to just summarize
is a one failed government policy after another that has
restricted the ability to build for people to build homes
near where people want to live. It used to be
(01:48):
you could take your property and decide to build homes
on that as long as you weren't harming your neighbors,
you could do that. But that's become increasingly difficult to
do and in some cases just at impossible, and California
is one of the epicenters of places where it is very.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Very difficult to build homes.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
If you want to build some homes, first of all,
you have to realize that there's so much of the
land that is off limits to building because of environmental restrictions,
whether that be for a habitat or some plant or bug,
could be wetlands makes it off limits. And then if
you find a place, we have large parts of California
(02:29):
with large lot zoning, meaning you can only build one
home on one acre or ten acres, or even one
hundred and sixty acres in some places, which makes it
just impossible to find a place to build housing. But
if you do find a place to build hasing, you're
going to be sued as sure as nightfall is day.
You're going to be sued by various not in my
(02:50):
backyard types, environmental types, and others. Everybody trying to stop projects.
So when it becomes so difficult to build homes, supply
diminishes to the man continues to rise.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
As a result, prices go up.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
And up and up, and we just cannot build the
houses that people need anymore. And so what California does
is export our housing costs to places like Austin and
Texas and North Carolina wherever, because it's a little easier
to build homes than other areas. And it is in
California at quite and large. We have over centuries worth
(03:25):
of failed government policies.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Wow, it goes back much further than I thought it would.
And it's not always just tells as I have a
friend who's a pastor who was wanting to build a
church in Austin, and they at first told him he
couldn't do it because of some bird that occupied that land,
and they said it only occupied that particular piece of land.
And fortunately for him, they eventually discovered that the bird
(03:50):
also lived in other nearby areas, and so he was
allowed to build his church. But it's you know, it
seems really ridiculous in some cases. Now you said, it
goes all the way back for a century. And I'm
wondering how much the Civil War and the sudden freedom
(04:11):
of blacks and racism plays into all of this.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I think it plays a large part of it. And
I talk about in my book Nowhere to Live the
hidden story of America's housing crisis, the story of George mcmahin.
George mcmanshin was a Yale educated attorney and he and
his schoolteacher wife bought a house and a nice subdivision
or a nice area of Baltimore, nice brick row house, and.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
He was ready to move in, but the local.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Youth decided to throw rocks at his house and they
broke every single window in the three story row house
that he bought. Why because the neighborhood was all white
and George mcmashen and his family were all black. As
a result of the mob, the city fathers in Baltimore
passed the nation's first zoning law, which made it illegal
(05:02):
for a black person to move into a white neighborhood
under penalty of a fine which would be equivalent to
three thousand dollars in today's dollars, and up to a
year in jail for moving into the wrong neighborhood. Now,
that ordinance spread far and wide across the Southern States
and the states between the north and the south of
(05:22):
the border States, and eventually it made its way to
the US Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court said it
was a violation of property owners rights to sell their
property to whom they wanted. It was an economic right
that had been violated. The court struck it down, but
only a few years later, cities started passing what it's
(05:42):
called economic zoning, which essentially banned multi family housing from
large parts of the country in order to keep immigrants
and minority populations out. So this tendency to zone and
then over zone to exclude people has been one of
the things why it's so difficul cultifying places to build
housing that new families and working families can afford.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
In the Metching case, I remember they were breaking the windows,
they were breaking the skylights. They absolutely didn't want them there.
And I think I recall from the book mcmeen saying
something along the lines of he didn't locate there because
he wanted to co mingle with whites. He said he
would have found Yeah, he thought, as.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
You know, I don't want to I don't want to
deal with white people. There is you know, I object
to them, just like they object to me. But this
is a nice area of Baltimore, and I want a
nice house. And as an American citizen, he said, I
have a right to be there. And indeed he was right.
All American citizens are equal under the law, and that's
the way it should be. No, no one person should
(06:47):
be favored over another.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, he felt he deserved to be able to live
in a house that his purse could afford. I believe
is the way he worded it in your book. And
that's absolutely absolute. Now you mentioned in the book. Well,
let's let's go here first a how bad is America's
affordable housing, shortage problem and homeless problem compared to other countries.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Well, you know, surprisingly, we're better off than a lot
of other countries. A lot of other countries have terrible
slums too. A lot of other countries housing is very expensive,
and you have many more people renting. But ironically, the
new York Times, not known as a bastard of conservatism,
compared a homeless camp in California to a home to
(07:42):
a slum a one of these shanty towns in Mexico
and found the conditions in Mexico were much better than
those in the California homeless camp. At least the ones
in Mexico had some running water, and they had a
way of dealing with sanitation, and it was a better
condition than California. So I tell people that if we
(08:03):
don't allow ourselves to build enough homes, we're going to
end up worse than a third world country as far
as our housing situation, where only the rich can afford
new homes and everybody else is going to be, you know,
housing challenged. The rule of thumb is that you should
spend no more than the third of your income one housing,
(08:24):
whether that be for a mortgage or rent. But more
and more people, especially new families starting out, and especially
working class people, are spending well over a half of
their of their income one housing, and that's untenable when
you consider that the price of food is going up,
the price of medical care is often going up, and
(08:44):
every gasoline is going up. So everything costs more, but
housing especially costs a lot more.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
How do we compare to homelessness in the past in
the United States where you talked about the hobos and
the hooter vills and such.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
We have had times of housing shortages during severe economic dislocations,
such as the Great Depression. But those hoovervilles, those homeless
camps were different in kind and tender than what we
have today. They had their own internal rules and regulations.
Some of them banned alcohol, for example, and they certainly
(09:24):
never considered drugs of any kind to be on these
housing villages, and they police themselves. But now when you
look at a typical homeless camp, it's chaotic.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yes, the people living.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
There say, we all care for each other, but a
great number of them are even either mentally ill, because
we no longer have the institutions to care for our
mentally ill or their addicts, and we no longer require
people to get treatment if they're addicted and living on
the streets, and it just makes things worse and worse.
So they used to have some kind of order to
(09:57):
the homeless camps, and it was a temporary thing. We
were able to build our way out of the housing
problems of the Great Depression. But we're not showing the
signs that we can easily build our way out of
today's housing crisis because it continues to be so difficult
to build housing where people want to live.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I had a gentleman on my show a couple of
months ago, and he name of the book was Crooked Smiles.
He had actually lived on the streets for ten years,
ten years, and the conditions were horrific. I mean, there
were so many mentally ill people. He lost track of
the number of people he saw that were stabbed, you know,
(10:38):
the runaway prostitution, everything was just absolutely horrible. And we,
you know, as people who are fortunate enough to have
homes in nice areas, we just kind of think, oh, yeah,
there's a homeless population. These people don't have any place
to go, so they put up a tent er. In
this guy's case, he actually ruled himself up in a
piece of carpet on the streets. And I don't think
(11:02):
most people have an idea of just how bad it
is on the on the streets, and maybe that helps
us sort of look past it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
I don't know, but the condition, yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
I mean, we've become yeah, we become immune to it.
We sort of pretend it's not happening. But in some
parts of the country, you can't pretend it's not happening
because it's causing businesses closed down, it destroys existing neighborhoods,
and the response from the powers it be, the politicians,
local and state politicians is abismo in some states. So
(11:36):
the problem is increasing. But when I first was my
started practicing law over forty years ago in Sacramento, California,
I never saw homeless people in the camps. I never
saw them down in the rivers, which are nice environments
for hiking. I never saw that kind of thing. But
it's slowly but surely increasing. Now. Year after year, the
(11:57):
homeless camps become larger and larger and more and more desperate.
And in my book I Nowhere to Live, I talk
about the statistics of that. You know, hundreds of thousands
of people in this country. There are enough homeless people
that are on shelter they could fill an entire medium
sized city.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
In this country.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
And so, yes, we have severe problems, and I don't
think that our politicians are.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Faced up to it.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
All they talk about is having I'll have another government
program which will only cost people more money, and government
does a terrible job at building and maintaining hasing.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's hard to believe that once beautiful city like say
San Francisco, now has a problem with you know, druggies
laying down on the streets with needles all around them.
People are defecating at people's front doors. I think you
even had an experience with that. It's just hard to
imagine that we've let things slip that much. And I
(12:52):
know in the book you said that half of America's
homeless live in California. Why do you think that's specifically
happening in California? I know, I know we're talking about
you know, government over regulations. Is that the case there?
Speaker 4 (13:04):
Or Well, in a way, it's the most difficult state
in the country to build new housings, So our disparity
between supply and demand is greater than almost anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
So the prices are much higher than anywhere else. So
people who would.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Otherwise be on the margins are now living in their cars.
People would otherwise live in their cars are living on
tents in the streets. Also in California, it's a there's
a areas that where the drug addicts will tell you,
you know, California is the best place in the world
to be. It's the climate's nice. They give me free needles,
I can get free food.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
You can go.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Shoplifting for anything up to nine hundred and fifty bucks
and get a traffic ticket which you could ignore if
the police even bother to rate the ticket anywhere, which
they don't. And some places I get, you know, I
get a place I can put my tent in, and
you know, it's a great place to be a drug
addict to some drug addicts California have said on the record,
(14:02):
So we make it very easy in California to be homeless.
There are no consequences if we find a shelter for somebody.
We don't require any kind of treatment for their drug
addiction or their mental illness. So California is a kind
of has been described as a Disneyland for drug addicts.
And so yeah, that's why we have half the country's
(14:24):
population of the homeless. But if we could just you know,
have the politicians deal it in a realistic way, we
could begin to get ourselves out of this mess.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I mentioned the gentleman who lived on the streets and
was homeless, you know, for ten years. He spent some
of that time in California, and you know, I remember just,
you know, kind of being so naive about all of this.
I said, oh my god, how did you find food eat?
You know, did you have to you know, eat out
of trash cans? I mean, how bad was it? I mean,
did you eat rotten food? And he goes, oh, oh no, no, no,
(15:00):
food was easy. And I found it interesting that you
just said that too. You know, there's that you can
get food, it's not it's not a problem there. So, uh,
we see that in California, but again, it's happening all
over the United States in bigger cities. You mentioned, you know,
the over regulation. But let's let's get specific. Is it
(15:22):
is it just the supply and demand of housing, supply
chain issues, government regulations.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
I think firstually all of it is, or a vast
majority of it is the inability of the difficulty of
building homes. In large parts of the country, you have
large areas of land that have been taken off limits
to home building because they are habitat for some species
or another. You mentioned a bird earlier. It's it's the
same thing all across the country. Not just Austin. There
(15:52):
are wetlands restrictions on areas that don't look anything like that,
a wetland that you just dry land that gets you know,
moste once a year. You also have environmental regulations that
enable people to bring a lawsuit. In my book Know
Where to Live, the Hidden Story of America's Housing Crisis,
I talk about developments in California where it's taken over
(16:15):
twenty years to get nothing built. Somebody owned over a
ranch of over a couple hundred thousand acres. They agreed
to give nearly two hundred thousand acres and conservation easements
if they could build on the rest. As soon as
I started the process of building on the rest, they
got sued again and again and again.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Every time one lawsuit is over another. So if it
takes twenty years.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
For a major developer to build a home, you know
what about for the rest of the people. And in
my book Know Where to Live, I talk about.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
The rest of us.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Talk about a couple up in priests like Idaho that
have been fighting almost twenty years with the EPA for
the permission to build on their property. And these cases
just go on and on and on.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
So WHINNI. I'm so difficult to build.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
People give up and they say, well, you know, I
can invest in the stock market, I can do a
lot of other things that I money. Then bang my
head against the wall trying to build homes.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
I'm in the Brian Cault Station area in central Texas,
which is just a few miles from Texas A and
M University, and this is so hard for me to
imagine because in the subdivision where I am, there is
building all around. It's this whole you know, joint city area.
Brian could Station is one big construction project, and it's
hard for me to imagine. Well, I guess if I
(17:34):
go to Austin, but even in Austin, I mean in
the area more accurately, in the area surrounding Austin, there
is so much building going on. And then you have
you have more big companies moving in there. You know,
Elon Musk going in and I think Samsung building just
outside of Austin and Taylor, Texas, and they're gonna need
(17:56):
thousands and thousands of more homes because of that, and
the home somehow, even if they're not all being built
in Austin proper are getting built fairly close, and it's
it's just it's almost a foreign concept for someone like
myself in a small Texas town where the again the
whole by city area is just one big housing development,
(18:19):
to imagine that this is going on in other places.
What are some of the worst places in the United
States in terms of trying to get houses built? Mentioned California,
are there others.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
It's very difficult to get new housing built in some
of the northeastern states, Oregon, also Washington, also Washington State.
That is, basically the coastal cities, coastal states are the
ones where it's the most difficult to build homes. And these,
of course are the reasons why you're building so many
homes in Texas, because there's a huge demand in Texas
(18:54):
and the politics is not as nearly unfriendly to home
building as it is in other parts of the country.
So people are moving from California, They're moving from the
coastal cities in the.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
East coast or the West coast.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
And descending on Florida, descending on Texas, sometimes in North Carolina, Tennessee,
other states where it's much more favorable to build homes
and much easier to do that. But even with all
those homes being built, we still have a nationwide shortage.
Depending on who you ask, we're short between four and
seven million housing units that should be built each year.
(19:31):
We should build more homes than we are building, because
homes become old, obsolescent, obsolete, They get destroyed in hurricanes, fires, tornadoes,
and floods, and so we need to build a lot
more homes. And it's nice to hear that there are
some places like Texas where they're still building a lot
of homes. But you're beginning to see prices go up
(19:54):
pretty high dramatically in Texas as well, because Texas seems
to be the great place to move to if you
want to live in an affordable house, and eventually that's going
to equalize. Right.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
It's a mobile market, so people will move with.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
Their feet, even out of nice areas like Silicon Valley, California,
where the wages are all you'd rather move to Texas
where the wages might be a little lower, but housing
costs or lower. So you have so many people chasing
homes in Texas, the price is going to go up.
So you know, no state is an island, and what
happens in one state affects every other state.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
My son and my daughter in law married a couple
of years ago, and at that time they were shopping
for homes in the Austin area, and my wife and
I went out with the one day to do that,
and everyone that we bumped into was either coming from
California or coming from outside the United States. We almost
bumped into no fellow Texans while we were doing that.
(20:55):
So yeah, the word is definitely out that if you
want to affordable home, come to Texas. But then again,
in the Austin area, I mean, the prices are going up, up, up,
but they're still relatively inexpensive compared to California. Jim, we
need to take a quick break to do a little
business with America and we will be right back, and
(21:37):
we are back with the Tea Party Power Hour. Our
guest today is mister Jim Burling. Jim, one of the
hot topics for the coming presidential election is illegal immigration.
What kind of stresses does the current illegal immigration problem
place on the housing market here in the United States.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Yeah, it does have some impact because for a long time,
even before we had the mass input or increase in
illegal immigration, we had a very tight supply and demand relationship.
We weren't having enough supply to meet demand, and as
a result, costs, especially costs for new families and working
(22:21):
class families, was going up dramatically.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
And when you have that kind of.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Very tight relationship between supply and demand, any shock to
either supply or to demand is going to cause a
substantial increase in prices. They're going to jump up more
than you might otherwise expect. And when you have a
increase in demand, as immigration has been causing in recent years,
that is going to have a outsize influence on the prices.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
So yeah, it is having an impact, you know.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
In my book Nowhere to Live, the Hidden Story of
America's has in crisis, I talk about the late eighteen
hundreds New York City, which at that time had a
massive influx of immigration. You had people from all over
Europe coming to America and they were living in these
terrible tenements in New York City, where we had many
(23:14):
families crowded into little apartments without running water. People would
literally have to go down a few flights of stairs
of the bucket of water to bring that up, and
they take their waist down and dump it in the
pit toilet in the courtyard of the building they lived in.
They had no ventilation, they had no air and I
mean no windows, just a stairwell in the center that
(23:35):
might have had a skylight running down for several floors.
And these are horrible conditions. But we did manage to
get out of that problem. We built our way out
of a building in New York City and in the
environs wats and lots of houses, so we had the
ability of getting out of any impact that the immigration
(23:57):
immigration has caused on demand and for housing by building more.
I mean, I'm this is I'm not going to get
into the other solutions to the immigration problem. That's a
whole other series of books I guess that I have
not written. But I can tell you when you talk
about demand, yes, impacts on demand will cause prices to
(24:19):
go up. But the way to do that if you
can't deal the demand is at least deal with the
supply and allow enough new houses to be built.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
The tenement houses in New York that you that you
wrote about, I mean, this was a different type of discrimination.
It wasn't discrimination against blacks, but it was discrimination against
various European settlers. I'm half Sicilian, so obviously, that's an
issue that I've heard about before. I know how we
were treated. I knew the places that our people lived
(24:50):
in New York City, and they were horrible. As you said,
there were absolutely no windows, and you know, you drop
some kind of a disease in there, like colera, and
it's gonna you know, spread like the pandmic of twenty twenty.
But that was a case of a new group of
people being discriminated against from Europe.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Correct.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You know, absolutely Europeans coming into America were penniless. They
desperately wanted jobs, they wanted a place to live, and
the only people that would rent to them were these
owners of these tenements slums in parts of New York City.
They and the immigrants actually ended up spending more per
(25:30):
square foot for some of these slums than they would
have if they'd been allowed to live elsewhere. But people
would not rent to the Italians, to the Eastern Europeans,
to the Germans. And in my book Nowhere to Live,
I talk about how they were treated and how they
were viewed. There is a great so called reformer called
Jacob Rice who wrote this, who wrote this book on
(25:52):
how the Other Half lives and he describes the tenement,
so then excuse me. He describes the people that lived
in these tenements and how they were in every ethnic
slur that you could imagine he leveled against them, and
it was rather astonishing and appalling.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
But that's the way people view things at that time.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
It well, yeah, they definitely thought that the inhabitants of
these tenement projects were subhuman, almost, I mean, incapable of
mixing with you know, the European wave that had come
before them. One of the things that's been really making
the news in the last year or so is the
(26:34):
fact that there are people that are squatting. And you know,
especially if you've got some wealthy person, they've got numerous
houses and they only check on one every few years.
That's a prime target for squatters. Obviously that's a symptom
of the disease that you're talking about. But just I
think a lot of people would be interested in knowing
(26:55):
what exact rights do these squatters have. If a squatter
takes over one of your spare homes, what do you do?
Or if you go out of town to take care
of a sick relative and you come back and there's
a squatter there, you know what protections do they have
and what protection does the actual homeowner have, So.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
The homeowner and some of these cases are properties that
are in foreclosure a relative dies and they don't make
their mortgages anymore, or the house has to be vacant
for a while. But when somebody moves into a house
illegally and they're squatting, the first thing most people do
is call the police. The police will come out is
a squatter has any kind of sophistication, and many of
(27:36):
them do, because our organized squatting teams in a lot
of cities that look for for closed property, look for
property that people aren't.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Living in, and they'll move in.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
They even will charge somebody a little bit of money
to move into one of these bandit's so called abandoned
but not really abandoned places. And the police will show
up and squatter will wave a piece of paper said well, no,
I'm ready here, this is my lease, and it could
be totally usually as totally bogus, but the police at
that time have to throw up their hands and say, well,
(28:11):
this isn't a criminal matter, it's a civil matter. You
have to go to housing court and evict this person
and attending what jurisdiction you're in, that could be a
very long time. It could take years to get rid
of a squatter in New York City.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
If a squatter can claim that.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
They have lived in a property for thirty days, they
are entitled to the rights of a tenant, even if
they haven't paid rent, and it takes a long time
to get rid of them.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Well, you've done a great job of telling us about
the problem. You've taken us back a full century to
show us how this problem came about. I guess my
most important question for you is going to be how
do we get out of this? If Kamala Harris or
Donald Trump, after winning the election in November, came to
(28:58):
Jim Berling and said, a gym, that's you're right. Read
your book. This housing thing is out of control. I'm
going to make you the housings are for America. What
do you do to fix this?
Speaker 4 (29:12):
Well, first of all, what I would not do is
come up with more government programs. Because of my book
Nowhere to Live points out we are where we are
today because of one government failure after another. So to
the idea of rint control that Kamala Harris and Joe
Biden have proposed. That's horrible. That would reduce the supply
of housing even further, and it would reduce the.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Quality of the housing that we have.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
I would get let government get out of the way,
let people build homes.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Where people want to live.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So I would ease up on some of the really
ridiculous zoning regulations that some communities have where you can't
build anything but a single family home and a very
large lot, and by large lot, in some communities it's
much more than an acre ten acres forty acres one
hundred and sixty acres for a single home, simply designed
to keep new home building from happening. I would also
(30:05):
reduce the environmental restrictions, make it more balanced so that
human needs are taken into account in addition to the
needs of the environment. I would limit the amount of
lawsuits that can be filed to stop housing. It won't
be this serial, never ending cereal of one lawsuit after
another after another. I would reform eminent domain, which has
(30:29):
gotten better since the Keilod decision, but still people lose
their homes to eminent domain.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
I like to see a stop put to that.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
So a number of things with the bottom line is
that there should be less government rather than more government,
and certainly not the proposals to throw lots and lots
of money. I mean, Pimmy Kamala Harris talks about putting
in a twenty five thousand dollars freebie.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
For new home buyers.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
All that would do without if that that won't increase supply,
but it will increase because then you have all that
money shoveled into a sector of the economy, Prices will
go up even more than they are now. And that's
a horrible idea that makes taxpayers who can barely afford
housing anyway to pay for somebody else's house. So I
get rid of those kind of programs, and I would
(31:18):
allow more own building, period.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
I just thought of one more question I wanted to
ask you. One of the things that we hear, especially
on the right, all the time is how Agenda twenty
one is going to take away private property rights. The
left says it does no such thing. The right says,
we're all going to be controlled by the United Nations
at some point, they're going to control our property rights.
To this Agenda twenty one. Thing you do mention, you
(31:41):
do mention environmentalism in the book. What's your opinion on
Agenda twenty one? Is it really a threat to private
property rights?
Speaker 4 (31:49):
I think we have enough home grown threats that Agenda
twenty one is kind of a convenient shorthand for talking
about threats in general. I don't see any international plot.
What I really see is a destruction of property rights
for over a century already in this country. Where as
I said it as I said earlier, that it used
(32:10):
to be you could take place of land, build what
you wanted to do on it without if you didn't
cause a harm to your neighbors.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
You can't do that anymore.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
Our property rights have already been a significant degree diminished
and taken away by government. So in end of twenty
one is just kind of, in my opinion, more of
the same. But I'm less fearful of some international body
than I am of a state or local body infringing
on my property rights.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
And now the most important question of all, where can
people get a copy of your book Know Where to
Live The Hidden Story of America's Housing Crisis?
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (32:46):
I would start to our website, Nowhere to Live dot
org is a good place to learn about the book,
or Amazon, any of the major booksellers could get it.
It's published by Skyhorse Publishing, which is an new print
Assimon and Schuster, so it's up there.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Oh yeah, and Skyhorse has been and of course they
acquired Regnory and they've been putting out some great books
and it's great. I want to thank Skyhorse for giving
a voice to people like yourself who might not get
it from all publishers. So but at any rate, James,
it's been an absolute pleasure of having you here today.
To anyone who wants to really understand the homeless problem,
(33:25):
the affordable housing shortage problem. This is your book. I
highly recommend it, and Jim, don't be a stranger. Come
back and visit with us sometime.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Well.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
I enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I did too, Thank you, sir. Have a great day.
All right by.
Speaker 4 (33:42):
You've been listening to the Tea Party Power Hour with
Mark gla
Warning the following podcast might be too truthful for most liberals.
Listener discretion is therefore advised. Welcome to the Tea Party
Power Hour. I am your host, Mark Gillar. Today we're
going to be talking to Jim Birling. He's the vice
(00:23):
president of Legal Affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation and
has been litigating property rights, environmental and land use cases
for over forty years. He has a brand new book
out called Nowhere to Live, The Hidden Story of America's
Housing Crisis.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Jim, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's nice to be with you all right.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Now, here's something we don't talk about enough, and that
is the homeless situation and the unaffordable cost of housing
in America just seems to be getting worse and worse.
I know that I have family living in the Austin area,
and it seems like everybody from California is coming to
(01:08):
Austin to try to find affordable housing. Did you take
a really big picture look at this? How far back
in America's history?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Jim?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Do we have to go to understand why we have
the homeless crisis that we have now and the affordable
housing crisis that we have now?
Speaker 4 (01:28):
I think you have to go about a century back
and look at the history from that time to the
present time and see what we've had to just summarize
is a one failed government policy after another that has
restricted the ability to build for people to build homes
near where people want to live. It used to be
(01:48):
you could take your property and decide to build homes
on that as long as you weren't harming your neighbors,
you could do that. But that's become increasingly difficult to
do and in some cases just at impossible, and California
is one of the epicenters of places where it is very.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Very difficult to build homes.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
If you want to build some homes, first of all,
you have to realize that there's so much of the
land that is off limits to building because of environmental restrictions,
whether that be for a habitat or some plant or bug,
could be wetlands makes it off limits. And then if
you find a place, we have large parts of California
(02:29):
with large lot zoning, meaning you can only build one
home on one acre or ten acres, or even one
hundred and sixty acres in some places, which makes it
just impossible to find a place to build housing. But
if you do find a place to build hasing, you're
going to be sued as sure as nightfall is day.
You're going to be sued by various not in my
(02:50):
backyard types, environmental types, and others. Everybody trying to stop projects.
So when it becomes so difficult to build homes, supply
diminishes to the man continues to rise.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
As a result, prices go up.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
And up and up, and we just cannot build the
houses that people need anymore. And so what California does
is export our housing costs to places like Austin and
Texas and North Carolina wherever, because it's a little easier
to build homes than other areas. And it is in
California at quite and large. We have over centuries worth
(03:25):
of failed government policies.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Wow, it goes back much further than I thought it would.
And it's not always just tells as I have a
friend who's a pastor who was wanting to build a
church in Austin, and they at first told him he
couldn't do it because of some bird that occupied that land,
and they said it only occupied that particular piece of land.
And fortunately for him, they eventually discovered that the bird
(03:50):
also lived in other nearby areas, and so he was
allowed to build his church. But it's you know, it
seems really ridiculous in some cases. Now you said, it
goes all the way back for a century. And I'm
wondering how much the Civil War and the sudden freedom
(04:11):
of blacks and racism plays into all of this.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I think it plays a large part of it. And
I talk about in my book Nowhere to Live the
hidden story of America's housing crisis, the story of George mcmahin.
George mcmanshin was a Yale educated attorney and he and
his schoolteacher wife bought a house and a nice subdivision
or a nice area of Baltimore, nice brick row house, and.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
He was ready to move in, but the local.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Youth decided to throw rocks at his house and they
broke every single window in the three story row house
that he bought. Why because the neighborhood was all white
and George mcmashen and his family were all black. As
a result of the mob, the city fathers in Baltimore
passed the nation's first zoning law, which made it illegal
(05:02):
for a black person to move into a white neighborhood
under penalty of a fine which would be equivalent to
three thousand dollars in today's dollars, and up to a
year in jail for moving into the wrong neighborhood. Now,
that ordinance spread far and wide across the Southern States
and the states between the north and the south of
(05:22):
the border States, and eventually it made its way to
the US Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court said it
was a violation of property owners rights to sell their
property to whom they wanted. It was an economic right
that had been violated. The court struck it down, but
only a few years later, cities started passing what it's
(05:42):
called economic zoning, which essentially banned multi family housing from
large parts of the country in order to keep immigrants
and minority populations out. So this tendency to zone and
then over zone to exclude people has been one of
the things why it's so difficul cultifying places to build
housing that new families and working families can afford.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
In the Metching case, I remember they were breaking the windows,
they were breaking the skylights. They absolutely didn't want them there.
And I think I recall from the book mcmeen saying
something along the lines of he didn't locate there because
he wanted to co mingle with whites. He said he
would have found Yeah, he thought, as.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
You know, I don't want to I don't want to
deal with white people. There is you know, I object
to them, just like they object to me. But this
is a nice area of Baltimore, and I want a
nice house. And as an American citizen, he said, I
have a right to be there. And indeed he was right.
All American citizens are equal under the law, and that's
the way it should be. No, no one person should
(06:47):
be favored over another.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, he felt he deserved to be able to live
in a house that his purse could afford. I believe
is the way he worded it in your book. And
that's absolutely absolute. Now you mentioned in the book. Well,
let's let's go here first a how bad is America's
affordable housing, shortage problem and homeless problem compared to other countries.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Well, you know, surprisingly, we're better off than a lot
of other countries. A lot of other countries have terrible
slums too. A lot of other countries housing is very expensive,
and you have many more people renting. But ironically, the
new York Times, not known as a bastard of conservatism,
compared a homeless camp in California to a home to
(07:42):
a slum a one of these shanty towns in Mexico
and found the conditions in Mexico were much better than
those in the California homeless camp. At least the ones
in Mexico had some running water, and they had a
way of dealing with sanitation, and it was a better
condition than California. So I tell people that if we
(08:03):
don't allow ourselves to build enough homes, we're going to
end up worse than a third world country as far
as our housing situation, where only the rich can afford
new homes and everybody else is going to be, you know,
housing challenged. The rule of thumb is that you should
spend no more than the third of your income one housing,
(08:24):
whether that be for a mortgage or rent. But more
and more people, especially new families starting out, and especially
working class people, are spending well over a half of
their of their income one housing, and that's untenable when
you consider that the price of food is going up,
the price of medical care is often going up, and
(08:44):
every gasoline is going up. So everything costs more, but
housing especially costs a lot more.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
How do we compare to homelessness in the past in
the United States where you talked about the hobos and
the hooter vills and such.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
We have had times of housing shortages during severe economic dislocations,
such as the Great Depression. But those hoovervilles, those homeless
camps were different in kind and tender than what we
have today. They had their own internal rules and regulations.
Some of them banned alcohol, for example, and they certainly
(09:24):
never considered drugs of any kind to be on these
housing villages, and they police themselves. But now when you
look at a typical homeless camp, it's chaotic.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yes, the people living.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
There say, we all care for each other, but a
great number of them are even either mentally ill, because
we no longer have the institutions to care for our
mentally ill or their addicts, and we no longer require
people to get treatment if they're addicted and living on
the streets, and it just makes things worse and worse.
So they used to have some kind of order to
(09:57):
the homeless camps, and it was a temporary thing. We
were able to build our way out of the housing
problems of the Great Depression. But we're not showing the
signs that we can easily build our way out of
today's housing crisis because it continues to be so difficult
to build housing where people want to live.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I had a gentleman on my show a couple of
months ago, and he name of the book was Crooked Smiles.
He had actually lived on the streets for ten years,
ten years, and the conditions were horrific. I mean, there
were so many mentally ill people. He lost track of
the number of people he saw that were stabbed, you know,
(10:38):
the runaway prostitution, everything was just absolutely horrible. And we,
you know, as people who are fortunate enough to have
homes in nice areas, we just kind of think, oh, yeah,
there's a homeless population. These people don't have any place
to go, so they put up a tent er. In
this guy's case, he actually ruled himself up in a
piece of carpet on the streets. And I don't think
(11:02):
most people have an idea of just how bad it
is on the on the streets, and maybe that helps
us sort of look past it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
I don't know, but the condition, yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
I mean, we've become yeah, we become immune to it.
We sort of pretend it's not happening. But in some
parts of the country, you can't pretend it's not happening
because it's causing businesses closed down, it destroys existing neighborhoods,
and the response from the powers it be, the politicians,
local and state politicians is abismo in some states. So
(11:36):
the problem is increasing. But when I first was my
started practicing law over forty years ago in Sacramento, California,
I never saw homeless people in the camps. I never
saw them down in the rivers, which are nice environments
for hiking. I never saw that kind of thing. But
it's slowly but surely increasing. Now. Year after year, the
(11:57):
homeless camps become larger and larger and more and more desperate.
And in my book I Nowhere to Live, I talk
about the statistics of that. You know, hundreds of thousands
of people in this country. There are enough homeless people
that are on shelter they could fill an entire medium
sized city.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
In this country.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
And so, yes, we have severe problems, and I don't
think that our politicians are.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Faced up to it.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
All they talk about is having I'll have another government
program which will only cost people more money, and government
does a terrible job at building and maintaining hasing.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's hard to believe that once beautiful city like say
San Francisco, now has a problem with you know, druggies
laying down on the streets with needles all around them.
People are defecating at people's front doors. I think you
even had an experience with that. It's just hard to
imagine that we've let things slip that much. And I
(12:52):
know in the book you said that half of America's
homeless live in California. Why do you think that's specifically
happening in California? I know, I know we're talking about
you know, government over regulations. Is that the case there?
Speaker 4 (13:04):
Or Well, in a way, it's the most difficult state
in the country to build new housings, So our disparity
between supply and demand is greater than almost anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
So the prices are much higher than anywhere else. So
people who would.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Otherwise be on the margins are now living in their cars.
People would otherwise live in their cars are living on
tents in the streets. Also in California, it's a there's
a areas that where the drug addicts will tell you,
you know, California is the best place in the world
to be. It's the climate's nice. They give me free needles,
I can get free food.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
You can go.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Shoplifting for anything up to nine hundred and fifty bucks
and get a traffic ticket which you could ignore if
the police even bother to rate the ticket anywhere, which
they don't. And some places I get, you know, I
get a place I can put my tent in, and
you know, it's a great place to be a drug
addict to some drug addicts California have said on the record,
(14:02):
So we make it very easy in California to be homeless.
There are no consequences if we find a shelter for somebody.
We don't require any kind of treatment for their drug
addiction or their mental illness. So California is a kind
of has been described as a Disneyland for drug addicts.
And so yeah, that's why we have half the country's
(14:24):
population of the homeless. But if we could just you know,
have the politicians deal it in a realistic way, we
could begin to get ourselves out of this mess.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I mentioned the gentleman who lived on the streets and
was homeless, you know, for ten years. He spent some
of that time in California, and you know, I remember just,
you know, kind of being so naive about all of this.
I said, oh my god, how did you find food eat?
You know, did you have to you know, eat out
of trash cans? I mean, how bad was it? I mean,
did you eat rotten food? And he goes, oh, oh no, no, no,
(15:00):
food was easy. And I found it interesting that you
just said that too. You know, there's that you can
get food, it's not it's not a problem there. So, uh,
we see that in California, but again, it's happening all
over the United States in bigger cities. You mentioned, you know,
the over regulation. But let's let's get specific. Is it
(15:22):
is it just the supply and demand of housing, supply
chain issues, government regulations.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
I think firstually all of it is, or a vast
majority of it is the inability of the difficulty of
building homes. In large parts of the country, you have
large areas of land that have been taken off limits
to home building because they are habitat for some species
or another. You mentioned a bird earlier. It's it's the
same thing all across the country. Not just Austin. There
(15:52):
are wetlands restrictions on areas that don't look anything like that,
a wetland that you just dry land that gets you know,
moste once a year. You also have environmental regulations that
enable people to bring a lawsuit. In my book Know
Where to Live, the Hidden Story of America's Housing Crisis,
I talk about developments in California where it's taken over
(16:15):
twenty years to get nothing built. Somebody owned over a
ranch of over a couple hundred thousand acres. They agreed
to give nearly two hundred thousand acres and conservation easements
if they could build on the rest. As soon as
I started the process of building on the rest, they
got sued again and again and again.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Every time one lawsuit is over another. So if it
takes twenty years.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
For a major developer to build a home, you know
what about for the rest of the people. And in
my book Know Where to Live, I talk about.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
The rest of us.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Talk about a couple up in priests like Idaho that
have been fighting almost twenty years with the EPA for
the permission to build on their property. And these cases
just go on and on and on.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
So WHINNI. I'm so difficult to build.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
People give up and they say, well, you know, I
can invest in the stock market, I can do a
lot of other things that I money. Then bang my
head against the wall trying to build homes.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
I'm in the Brian Cault Station area in central Texas,
which is just a few miles from Texas A and
M University, and this is so hard for me to
imagine because in the subdivision where I am, there is
building all around. It's this whole you know, joint city area.
Brian could Station is one big construction project, and it's
hard for me to imagine. Well, I guess if I
(17:34):
go to Austin, but even in Austin, I mean in
the area more accurately, in the area surrounding Austin, there
is so much building going on. And then you have
you have more big companies moving in there. You know,
Elon Musk going in and I think Samsung building just
outside of Austin and Taylor, Texas, and they're gonna need
(17:56):
thousands and thousands of more homes because of that, and
the home somehow, even if they're not all being built
in Austin proper are getting built fairly close, and it's
it's just it's almost a foreign concept for someone like
myself in a small Texas town where the again the
whole by city area is just one big housing development,
(18:19):
to imagine that this is going on in other places.
What are some of the worst places in the United
States in terms of trying to get houses built? Mentioned California,
are there others.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
It's very difficult to get new housing built in some
of the northeastern states, Oregon, also Washington, also Washington State.
That is, basically the coastal cities, coastal states are the
ones where it's the most difficult to build homes. And these,
of course are the reasons why you're building so many
homes in Texas, because there's a huge demand in Texas
(18:54):
and the politics is not as nearly unfriendly to home
building as it is in other parts of the country.
So people are moving from California, They're moving from the
coastal cities in the.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
East coast or the West coast.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
And descending on Florida, descending on Texas, sometimes in North Carolina, Tennessee,
other states where it's much more favorable to build homes
and much easier to do that. But even with all
those homes being built, we still have a nationwide shortage.
Depending on who you ask, we're short between four and
seven million housing units that should be built each year.
(19:31):
We should build more homes than we are building, because
homes become old, obsolescent, obsolete, They get destroyed in hurricanes, fires, tornadoes,
and floods, and so we need to build a lot
more homes. And it's nice to hear that there are
some places like Texas where they're still building a lot
of homes. But you're beginning to see prices go up
(19:54):
pretty high dramatically in Texas as well, because Texas seems
to be the great place to move to if you
want to live in an affordable house, and eventually that's going
to equalize. Right.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
It's a mobile market, so people will move with.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
Their feet, even out of nice areas like Silicon Valley, California,
where the wages are all you'd rather move to Texas
where the wages might be a little lower, but housing
costs or lower. So you have so many people chasing
homes in Texas, the price is going to go up.
So you know, no state is an island, and what
happens in one state affects every other state.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
My son and my daughter in law married a couple
of years ago, and at that time they were shopping
for homes in the Austin area, and my wife and
I went out with the one day to do that,
and everyone that we bumped into was either coming from
California or coming from outside the United States. We almost
bumped into no fellow Texans while we were doing that.
(20:55):
So yeah, the word is definitely out that if you
want to affordable home, come to Texas. But then again,
in the Austin area, I mean, the prices are going up, up, up,
but they're still relatively inexpensive compared to California. Jim, we
need to take a quick break to do a little
business with America and we will be right back, and
(21:37):
we are back with the Tea Party Power Hour. Our
guest today is mister Jim Burling. Jim, one of the
hot topics for the coming presidential election is illegal immigration.
What kind of stresses does the current illegal immigration problem
place on the housing market here in the United States.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Yeah, it does have some impact because for a long time,
even before we had the mass input or increase in
illegal immigration, we had a very tight supply and demand relationship.
We weren't having enough supply to meet demand, and as
a result, costs, especially costs for new families and working
(22:21):
class families, was going up dramatically.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
And when you have that kind of.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Very tight relationship between supply and demand, any shock to
either supply or to demand is going to cause a
substantial increase in prices. They're going to jump up more
than you might otherwise expect. And when you have a
increase in demand, as immigration has been causing in recent years,
that is going to have a outsize influence on the prices.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
So yeah, it is having an impact, you know.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
In my book Nowhere to Live, the Hidden Story of
America's has in crisis, I talk about the late eighteen
hundreds New York City, which at that time had a
massive influx of immigration. You had people from all over
Europe coming to America and they were living in these
terrible tenements in New York City, where we had many
(23:14):
families crowded into little apartments without running water. People would
literally have to go down a few flights of stairs
of the bucket of water to bring that up, and
they take their waist down and dump it in the
pit toilet in the courtyard of the building they lived in.
They had no ventilation, they had no air and I
mean no windows, just a stairwell in the center that
(23:35):
might have had a skylight running down for several floors.
And these are horrible conditions. But we did manage to
get out of that problem. We built our way out
of a building in New York City and in the
environs wats and lots of houses, so we had the
ability of getting out of any impact that the immigration
(23:57):
immigration has caused on demand and for housing by building more.
I mean, I'm this is I'm not going to get
into the other solutions to the immigration problem. That's a
whole other series of books I guess that I have
not written. But I can tell you when you talk
about demand, yes, impacts on demand will cause prices to
(24:19):
go up. But the way to do that if you
can't deal the demand is at least deal with the
supply and allow enough new houses to be built.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
The tenement houses in New York that you that you
wrote about, I mean, this was a different type of discrimination.
It wasn't discrimination against blacks, but it was discrimination against
various European settlers. I'm half Sicilian, so obviously, that's an
issue that I've heard about before. I know how we
were treated. I knew the places that our people lived
(24:50):
in New York City, and they were horrible. As you said,
there were absolutely no windows, and you know, you drop
some kind of a disease in there, like colera, and
it's gonna you know, spread like the pandmic of twenty twenty.
But that was a case of a new group of
people being discriminated against from Europe.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Correct.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You know, absolutely Europeans coming into America were penniless. They
desperately wanted jobs, they wanted a place to live, and
the only people that would rent to them were these
owners of these tenements slums in parts of New York City.
They and the immigrants actually ended up spending more per
(25:30):
square foot for some of these slums than they would
have if they'd been allowed to live elsewhere. But people
would not rent to the Italians, to the Eastern Europeans,
to the Germans. And in my book Nowhere to Live,
I talk about how they were treated and how they
were viewed. There is a great so called reformer called
Jacob Rice who wrote this, who wrote this book on
(25:52):
how the Other Half lives and he describes the tenement,
so then excuse me. He describes the people that lived
in these tenements and how they were in every ethnic
slur that you could imagine he leveled against them, and
it was rather astonishing and appalling.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
But that's the way people view things at that time.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
It well, yeah, they definitely thought that the inhabitants of
these tenement projects were subhuman, almost, I mean, incapable of
mixing with you know, the European wave that had come
before them. One of the things that's been really making
the news in the last year or so is the
(26:34):
fact that there are people that are squatting. And you know,
especially if you've got some wealthy person, they've got numerous
houses and they only check on one every few years.
That's a prime target for squatters. Obviously that's a symptom
of the disease that you're talking about. But just I
think a lot of people would be interested in knowing
(26:55):
what exact rights do these squatters have. If a squatter
takes over one of your spare homes, what do you do?
Or if you go out of town to take care
of a sick relative and you come back and there's
a squatter there, you know what protections do they have
and what protection does the actual homeowner have, So.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
The homeowner and some of these cases are properties that
are in foreclosure a relative dies and they don't make
their mortgages anymore, or the house has to be vacant
for a while. But when somebody moves into a house
illegally and they're squatting, the first thing most people do
is call the police. The police will come out is
a squatter has any kind of sophistication, and many of
(27:36):
them do, because our organized squatting teams in a lot
of cities that look for for closed property, look for
property that people aren't.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Living in, and they'll move in.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
They even will charge somebody a little bit of money
to move into one of these bandit's so called abandoned
but not really abandoned places. And the police will show
up and squatter will wave a piece of paper said well, no,
I'm ready here, this is my lease, and it could
be totally usually as totally bogus, but the police at
that time have to throw up their hands and say, well,
(28:11):
this isn't a criminal matter, it's a civil matter. You
have to go to housing court and evict this person
and attending what jurisdiction you're in, that could be a
very long time. It could take years to get rid
of a squatter in New York City.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
If a squatter can claim that.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
They have lived in a property for thirty days, they
are entitled to the rights of a tenant, even if
they haven't paid rent, and it takes a long time
to get rid of them.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Well, you've done a great job of telling us about
the problem. You've taken us back a full century to
show us how this problem came about. I guess my
most important question for you is going to be how
do we get out of this? If Kamala Harris or
Donald Trump, after winning the election in November, came to
(28:58):
Jim Berling and said, a gym, that's you're right. Read
your book. This housing thing is out of control. I'm
going to make you the housings are for America. What
do you do to fix this?
Speaker 4 (29:12):
Well, first of all, what I would not do is
come up with more government programs. Because of my book
Nowhere to Live points out we are where we are
today because of one government failure after another. So to
the idea of rint control that Kamala Harris and Joe
Biden have proposed. That's horrible. That would reduce the supply
of housing even further, and it would reduce the.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Quality of the housing that we have.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
I would get let government get out of the way,
let people build homes.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
Where people want to live.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So I would ease up on some of the really
ridiculous zoning regulations that some communities have where you can't
build anything but a single family home and a very
large lot, and by large lot, in some communities it's
much more than an acre ten acres forty acres one
hundred and sixty acres for a single home, simply designed
to keep new home building from happening. I would also
(30:05):
reduce the environmental restrictions, make it more balanced so that
human needs are taken into account in addition to the
needs of the environment. I would limit the amount of
lawsuits that can be filed to stop housing. It won't
be this serial, never ending cereal of one lawsuit after
another after another. I would reform eminent domain, which has
(30:29):
gotten better since the Keilod decision, but still people lose
their homes to eminent domain.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
I like to see a stop put to that.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
So a number of things with the bottom line is
that there should be less government rather than more government,
and certainly not the proposals to throw lots and lots
of money. I mean, Pimmy Kamala Harris talks about putting
in a twenty five thousand dollars freebie.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
For new home buyers.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
All that would do without if that that won't increase supply,
but it will increase because then you have all that
money shoveled into a sector of the economy, Prices will
go up even more than they are now. And that's
a horrible idea that makes taxpayers who can barely afford
housing anyway to pay for somebody else's house. So I
get rid of those kind of programs, and I would
(31:18):
allow more own building, period.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
I just thought of one more question I wanted to
ask you. One of the things that we hear, especially
on the right, all the time is how Agenda twenty
one is going to take away private property rights. The
left says it does no such thing. The right says,
we're all going to be controlled by the United Nations
at some point, they're going to control our property rights.
To this Agenda twenty one. Thing you do mention, you
(31:41):
do mention environmentalism in the book. What's your opinion on
Agenda twenty one? Is it really a threat to private
property rights?
Speaker 4 (31:49):
I think we have enough home grown threats that Agenda
twenty one is kind of a convenient shorthand for talking
about threats in general. I don't see any international plot.
What I really see is a destruction of property rights
for over a century already in this country. Where as
I said it as I said earlier, that it used
(32:10):
to be you could take place of land, build what
you wanted to do on it without if you didn't
cause a harm to your neighbors.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
You can't do that anymore.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
Our property rights have already been a significant degree diminished
and taken away by government. So in end of twenty
one is just kind of, in my opinion, more of
the same. But I'm less fearful of some international body
than I am of a state or local body infringing
on my property rights.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
And now the most important question of all, where can
people get a copy of your book Know Where to
Live The Hidden Story of America's Housing Crisis?
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (32:46):
I would start to our website, Nowhere to Live dot
org is a good place to learn about the book,
or Amazon, any of the major booksellers could get it.
It's published by Skyhorse Publishing, which is an new print
Assimon and Schuster, so it's up there.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Oh yeah, and Skyhorse has been and of course they
acquired Regnory and they've been putting out some great books
and it's great. I want to thank Skyhorse for giving
a voice to people like yourself who might not get
it from all publishers. So but at any rate, James,
it's been an absolute pleasure of having you here today.
To anyone who wants to really understand the homeless problem,
(33:25):
the affordable housing shortage problem. This is your book. I
highly recommend it, and Jim, don't be a stranger. Come
back and visit with us sometime.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Well.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
I enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I did too, Thank you, sir. Have a great day.
All right by.
Speaker 4 (33:42):
You've been listening to the Tea Party Power Hour with
Mark gla
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