Two reading highlights and one viewing highlight.
The 2 Reasons California’s YIMBY Reforms Are Failing
by Christian Britschgi, Reason, January 30, 2024.
Excerpt:
So, what’s going on? Why haven’t other YIMBY housing laws kicked off a boom in new duplexes and transit-adjacent apartments as they have with ADUs?
I’d boil it down to two basic problems. Firstly, many YIMBY reforms have focused on handing down better bureaucratic mandates to local governments who have no interest in reforming their own housing laws. Secondly, the Legislature lards down what could be productive housing laws with endless interest group carveouts and handouts.
This is so typical government. Start out with a good idea and then marble it with all kinds of legislators’ preferences for how other people should be living their lives.
ACLU Sues Ronald McDonald House for Refusing To House People Convicted of Assault
by Christian Britschgi, Reason, January 31, 2024.
Excerpt:
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the Legal Action Center (LAC) are suing Ronald McDonald House Charities and its Hudson Valley chapter, for not providing discounted housing to people with felony assault convictions, a policy they say is a violation of the Fair Housing Act and New York human rights law.
“Government agencies have long warned housing providers that unjustified and unnecessary blanket bans from housing based on criminal history disproportionately harm Black and Latine people and are unlawful,” said Amanda Meyer, an ACLU attorney in a press release.
Ancient Civilizations Expert CANCELLED over “Forbidden Discovery” | Elizabeth Weiss • 182
Julian Dorey, February 1, 2024.
This interview is almost 3 hours long. I’m about halfway through, playing it at 1.5 speed. The way the San Jose State University bureaucracy and many in the anthropology profession went after her for doing her work is just disgusting. HT to my Hoover colleague John Cochrane.
Elizabeth tells her story well, and with some genuine humor: that, in itself, is impressive, given how they put her through the ringer.
The pic above is of Elizabeth in the interview.
READER COMMENTS
Peter
Feb 4 2024 at 1:35pm
On the housing thing, statements like this drive me crazy “Critics have long argued that the disparate impact standard often leaves housing providers guessing at what policies of theirs might end up being illegal.”.
Or maybe, just maybe, housing providers should do just that and simply provide housing in line with their stated objective and quit writing policies that aren’t supportive of that. They wouldn’t have this problem then.
I used to work in a homeless shelter. The public complained routinely about the homeless and how they should be arrested for not taking advantage of them while each year providing more and more money to expand shelter capacity. And yet the problem wasn’t capacity, it’s that shelters exclude people with convictions which is a significant, maybe the majority, of homeless people. That is what people fail to grasp in that most of the people that need help are convicts yet we exclude them from social support services.
In this case, RMD is there to provide temporary lodging for poor people whose family is undergoing medical treatment, hard stop, that is where the policy should end. Then they don’t have to worry about “are all my other policies which exists purely to deny housing contrary to my mission statement legal”. They are in this boat because decided to act contrary to there own creed.
Generally I’m sold on the right to privately discriminate but since that ship sailed, I’m all for expanding out protected categories to include “people with a criminal record”. As a former case manager it always made me angry that I had to advise homeless people to lie on the intake form simply so we could provide them the service the public was paying us to do because they didn’t have a car insurance once twenty years ago (because in my state that’s not a administrative infraction like parking but an actual crime). But you know, criminals.
MarkW
Feb 4 2024 at 5:05pm
I think cases of academics being canceled are going to become increasingly rare (perhaps they already have), but for a unfortunate reason. Soon, the older academics who don’t agree with the current identity-politics orthodoxy will all have either intentionally or inadvertently ‘outed’ themselves and been pushed out of their fields (as Elizabeth Weiss did and has been) or they will have been cowed into submission and will keep their heads down until they age out. In either case, they’ll steadily be replaced by young faculty for whom the group-think comes naturally.  And those folks be with us another generation or more.
At the same time, the number of graduating seniors in the US is set to decline, and the reputation of higher education is cratering with a large segment of the public and maybe, too, with international students (whether or not it’s because of that or because of increasing tensions, the number of Chinese nationals coming to study here has already dropped about 25% I think). All-in-all, it’s not looking so great for American higher ed.
Bill Conerly
Feb 4 2024 at 8:41pm
Re Weiss, is a synopsis readily available?
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