Nowhere to Live

How did housing become so expensive in the United States? As the housing shortage deepens, more Americans are looking for answers to this question. Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis by James S. Burling, a property rights attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, provides perhaps the most comprehensive answer to this question to date. 

Nowhere to Live tackles the mystery of housing costs in the United States, with a few chapters devoted to policies that are peculiar to California. Burling does an excellent job of explaining complex topics, conveying his arguments through historical narrative and illustrative, emotionally compelling anecdotes that are often pulled from Pacific Legal Foundation cases. Throughout the book, he constantly reinforces the position he presents in the introduction: “The bottom line is that we need less interference with the free market in housing, not more” (xxviii).

The book is divided into eight parts. Part I, which encompasses a third of the book, is devoted to zoning. Part II discusses the destruction of working-class homes during the post-war urban renewal movement, with special focus on eminent domain and tax increment financing. Part III explains the role environmental policy plays in constraining the housing supply, and Parts IV and V cover rent control and affordable-housing mandates, respectively. Part VI, which is only ten pages long, considers deinstitutionalization (a subject that seems shoehorned into a book that is otherwise devoted to housing costs, rather than homelessness). The final sections of the book return to housing with recommendations for how to solve the crisis, with Part VII emphasizing the general solution of property rights and Part VIII offering more specific policy recommendations. 

One of Burling’s greatest strengths is his ability to provide new information on widely discussed topics. In his overview of the Euclid case that upheld the legality of zoning, for example, he highlights the majority opinion’s diatribe against apartments, which had no relevance to the case. Zoning policies make apartment complexes especially difficult to build, and the judicial digression in Euclid reveals that this was the desired outcome of the policy at the outset. 

Burling also covers some underappreciated contributors to the housing shortage, such as rent control, which even some pro-housing groups support. Using powerful comparisons of rent-control cities to bomb-damaged cities, he demolishes any notion that regulating rent is a pro-housing policy—though his discussion is somewhat marred by the misspelling of the relatively well-known housing reformer Jacob Riis as “Joseph Ris” (202).

Also worth highlighting is Burling’s section on property rights. He begins by surveying the basic history of and arguments for property rights, essentially establishing that all policy reforms that would facilitate more housing would necessarily move us closer to the Lockean ideal. Property rights, in other words, are the foundation of housing reform.

Next Nowhere to Live turns to the more esoteric subject of regulatory takings, a concept that is scarcely understood outside of the legal profession. Regulatory takings are policies that limit what people can do with their property but stop short of confiscation. This concept gets at the crucial but underrecognized distinction between private property and property rights, which is particularly relevant to states like California where state and local governments—much like the fascist regimes of World War II Europe—recognize property titles while exercising virtually total regulatory control over what people can and cannot do with their property.

There is little to critique in Nowhere to Live, but it does have its shortcomings. As is common among legal scholars, Burling perhaps places too much agency with the judiciary. This may be why his discussion of permitting policies seems incomplete, as he focuses solely on the problems that have made their way into the courts. Similarly, in a book that is intended to explain high housing costs, he gives little attention to the NIMBY phenomenon, and none to labor unions. 

Burling’s overview of eminent domain makes a questionable distinction between how eminent domain is exercised today compared with the past. He writes that in early America, “the notion of a forced-government transfer of land from one private owner to another owner was unthinkable” (126–27), but this is entirely untrue. In fact, it was not uncommon for early state government to delegate the power of eminent domain directly to private corporations in their charters. This does not detract from Burling’s damning exposé of eminent domain abuses, but it does remind us that they are nothing new. 

Minor quibbles aside, Nowhere to Live offers an impressively thorough and accessible overview of the housing crisis. James Burling’s book stands apart from other works on housing for many reasons, but none more important than the compelling case he makes for free market solutions to the housing shortage. Government policy created the housing crisis, and only by returning to the principle of private property rights can we solve it.