Vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, came out in 2016—a few months before Donald Trump won a surprising presidential victory thanks in part to widespread support from within the Appalachian hollers that Vance wrote about. Although he grew up in southwestern Ohio, Vance's family was from the mountains of hard-scrabble eastern Kentucky.

"Elegy" offers a thought-provoking account of the difficulty poor people face as they try to transcend their circumstances. "How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children?" he asked. The movie was less compelling, but it reinforced that point.

Trump recently said the book was about society's unfair treatment of working class men and women, but that suggests he never read it. Actually, the book focused on the ways poor people often sabotage their fleeting opportunities and blame others for their predicament. Vance went on to become a Marine, attend Ohio State, and earn a law degree from Yale.

My wife devoured the book—and was particularly moved by Vance's depictions of his awkward attempts to fit in among his classmates. She also grew up in a small coal town in Appalachia. Her lumberman father died young, leaving a wife and six daughters to subsist on government aid. Like Vance, she received a scholarship. When I met her at George Washington University, she had never taken a taxi, been in an elevator, or dined at a fancy restaurant.

Unfortunately, author Vance seems far different from vice-presidential nominee Vance. Power is tempting, but Donna and I have nevertheless cringed as he has espoused positions that seem at odds with his book's central point. Instead of recognizing that the American Dream is alive and well—and all of her sisters have lived successful lives—he now blames outsiders for the plight of the working class.

Vance also pitches big-government economic "populist" ideas and engages in nativism. His critics have pointed to his apparent hypocrisy. After all, he's a middle-class Midwestern suburbanite who attended an Ivy League school, married the daughter of immigrants, and is backed by Bay Area techies. I suspect his embrace of an ideology explains this shift more than raw ambition.

Tell-tale signs come from his speech at the Republican National Convention: "America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. … (W)hen we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms." He said that generations of Kentuckians died in wars and are buried in his family's cemetery, noting that, "People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their homes."

I've read myriad critiques on some of Vance's statements, including noxious ones blasting childless cat ladies. That's basically right-wing edge-lording. But the fiercest critique comes in an Atlantic column addressing Vance's "insult to America." Writer Jessica Gavora recalls her dad's harrowing escape from Czechoslovakia after Soviet forces overran it: "My dad came here for a reason, and it wasn't the dirt of a graveyard."

I agree with Gavora, but then again my dad fled Nazi Germany and my maternal grandparents fled Russian pogroms. Almost all of the immigrants I meet—around here they're mostly from Latin America, Russia, and India—are among the most patriotic people I meet. My wife's Appalachian ancestors hailed from Poland before heading to work in the Pennsylvania coal fields. And what's this about requiring them to submit to "our terms"?

Vance's statement defines the central dividing line between paleo-conservatives such as Patrick Buchanan—and classical liberals such Ronald Reagan. The former believe America is a nation built by and for a specific people. They dislike free markets, which are corrosive of their cultural preferences. They want to vastly limit immigration. They have no problem with big government as long as they control it.

By contrast, classical liberals believe America is based on the universal idea of freedom and economic opportunity. They focus on reducing the size and power of government—and creating opportunities for everyone wherever they or their ancestors were born. Classical liberals may want an orderly immigration process, but they're more interested in turning immigrants into Americans than sending them home.

Classical liberals—and I count myself among them—view free trade as a wonder, not a threat. And while I'm a long-time critic of America's endless foreign interventions and wars, I care (unlike Vance) about what happens in Ukraine. We believe in liberty for everyone, not just members of our clan.

The Democratic Party is hostile to freedom and progress in its own unique and terrifying ways. But I wish the Vance who wrote "Hillbilly Elegy"—rather than paleo-conservative changeling we now see on display—were the one on the GOP ticket to make that case.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post J.D. Vance Has Changed a Lot Since the Days of <em>Hillbilly Elegy</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

While christening a new UCLA technology and research center in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom let loose with some fairly typical rhetoric about California's leading-edge role in tech development: "California is the epicenter of global innovation—from the creation of the internet to the dominance of artificial intelligence, humanity's future happens here first."

Yet for the so-called epicenter of innovation, our state certainly doesn't give innovators a lot of room to experiment with new ideas. California lawmakers and regulators are so intent on limiting and controlling any promising new development that we've instead become the poster child for Ronald Reagan's famous quotation: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

Maybe Newsom and the Democratic Legislature haven't noticed, but California has been facing a tech exodus, as many prominent firms leave for states that give them more elbow room to create the next wave of promising innovations. Given the state's dependence on capital gains revenue, it's one reason we're now facing a $45-billion or more budget deficit.

On the good news front, Crunchbase reports that the San Francisco Bay Area may be experiencing a tech resurgence based around artificial intelligence systems, with the region receiving "more than 50 percent of all global venture funding for AI-related startups." But will the state kill that boom before it takes off? Based on the latest actions of the legislature, the answer is "probably."

The Senate Appropriations Committee recently gave the go-ahead to Senate Bill 915, which would "prioritize local control in the decision to deploy autonomous vehicle services." In addition to gaining all the many state approvals, robo-taxi firms would also have to deal with exploding local regulations.

The legislation has been amended to apply to the 15 largest cities and it would forbid localities from banning self-driving cars, but that doesn't ameliorate my concern. This technology is rolling out mainly in big cities anyway. It's easy to kill a technology without outright banning it by, say, forcing these companies to face dramatically different driving rules in every different city where they go.

Like all cutting-edge innovations, self-driving cars strike many of us as an ominous and dangerous development. But most new cars already have various self-driving features (lane assist, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring). And computers are almost certainly better drivers than people. Nearly 43,000 Americans die in car crashes each year, almost all of them at the hands of human drivers. Widespread A.V. use could save thousands of lives, per research from RAND.

AVs offer fabulous benefits for disabled people, the elderly, and others who cannot or choose not to drive. Yet federal, state, and local officials are worried about a few minor and inevitable problems that have popped up as this technology experiences growing pains—e.g., minor accidents and concerns about traffic violations (as if ordinary drivers don't also sometimes violate traffic laws).

One advocate for S.B. 915 expressed concern about robo-taxis getting stuck at a tricky turn—as if that's a good excuse to add a pointless mish-mash of local regulations to the mix. Ironically, AV development is one area where state regulators have taken an admirably low-key approach. In March, the California Public Utilities Commission gave Waymo, the Alphabet company's driverless-car division, the ability to expand operations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles region and even drive on freeways up to 65 mph. But even when the state takes a sensible approach, the locals want to step in to gum up the works.

And SB 915 isn't the only example of the California Legislature's kneejerk hostility to innovation. Many states are trying to regulate artificial intelligence technology, but California's Senate Bill 1047, which passed out of the Senate and has moved to the Assembly, is easily the most far-reaching example. The bill would create a new state regulatory division to regulate A.I. We all know how effective the state's bureaucrats are at handling complex matters—as well as the impact of lawsuit-promoting statutes.

Basically, the measure forces A.I. developers to mitigate every conceivable harm from their technology by engaging "in speculative fiction about imagined threats of machines run amok, computer models spun out of control, and other nightmare scenarios for which there is no basis in reality," opined an opposition letter from the pro-tech Chamber of Progress. The group rightly fears that the measure undermines California's leading-edge role in the tech sector.

Last week, I wrote about the legislature's effort to limit A.I. technology in a simple, real-world application—self-checkout lanes. Under the guise of helping stores battle retail theft, Senate Bill 1446 is a union concoction designed to limit the use of this technology to protect union grocery jobs.

So, yes, California has been the epicenter of global innovation, but it's apparently not going to continue being so for long. Let's hope Newsom heeds his own words and gets out the veto pen.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California's Regulations Might Steer Self-Driving Innovations to Other States appeared first on Reason.com.

There's yet another attempt to revive California's shuttered redevelopment agencies—those crony-capitalist abominations that abused eminent domain, ran up debt without a public vote, and distorted development decisions at the local level. This year's redevelopment effort is renamed the Reconnecting Communities Redevelopment Act, but a cute new name doesn't hide redevelopment's sordid history.

It's oddly delusional even by Capitol standards to revive these tax-draining agencies when the state lacks sufficient revenues to meet its current spending. Last year, Assemblymember David Alvarez (D–Chula Vista) proposed recreating the agencies largely as they existed before Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature eliminated them in 2011 to help plug a gaping budget hole. It died in committee, the victim of a budget deficit estimated at around $32 billion.

Alvarez is back this year with Assembly Bill 2945 even though the current deficit is estimated at around $45 billion or higher. The state dissolved the agencies 12 years ago. Since then, lawmakers have passed measures that bring back modest portions of redevelopment—such as Infrastructure Finance Districts that use tax-increment financing to pay for limited infrastructure-related developments.

However, broader redevelopment revivals have failed—and likely will do so again. AB 2945 passed through committee but is headed toward rocky terrain. In 2019, former Gov. Brown threw shade on that year's revival effort: "A lot of people wanted to see it go, and it did free up almost $2 billion a year for schools. And if people want to bring it back they're going to take billions from the schools, and I would assume those people who care about the California public schools will fight that very hard."

Brown was spot on. As much as I'd like to think that free market arguments against redevelopment swayed lawmakers, the real bill killer came from the powerful California Teachers Association. The teachers' union clearly wouldn't ignore efforts to tap their funding sources. Sure the state backfilled those lost education dollars, but California doesn't have the spare cash to do that in the face of its remarkably large deficit.

As a refresher, California created redevelopment agencies in the 1940s to help rebuild inner-city slums. The basic redevelopment financial structure allows city governments to float bonds to pay for infrastructure related to urban-renewal projects. Cities gained the resulting increase in property taxes—called the tax increment—under the thinking that the projects spur gains in property values. That money then paid off the bonds.

By declaring an area blighted, agencies could unilaterally divert property tax revenues from traditional public services toward these privately built projects. Cities could declare virtually anything blighted (too little urbanization or too much of it, buildings with chipping paint, excessive vacant lots, insufficient tax revenue in the area, etc.) and then seek out developers to build new shopping centers or venues, or whatever is preferred in City Hall.

Traditional urban renewal projects caused their share of widely known problems, namely the obliteration of neighborhoods to make way for the above-mentioned developments. I strongly support Proposition 13, which keeps Californians from being taxed out of their homes. But after it limited tax revenues, localities came up with creative means to bolster their tax base. They learned that redevelopment could subsidize auto malls, shopping centers, and hotels that brought in additional sales taxes, so it quickly became a tax-grabbing scheme rather than an urban renewal tool.

Most noxiously, redevelopment law gave cities the power to invoke eminent domain—a property-taking power they used and abused early and often. They bulldozed neighborhoods, drove small businesses off of their land, and bullied people who lacked the resources to fight back. Often, the envisioned projects never materialized, leaving cities with vacant lots. There were some arguably successful projects, but the process worked as one would expect when the government gains unchecked power to take and redistribute property.

Redevelopment advocates claim that California needs to restore these agencies because of the housing crisis. They had set aside 20 percent of their tax increment toward affordable housing, but the state has since stepped up funding of such housing. It's a topic for another day, but because of the various union and environmental rules that come with subsidies, these projects cost far more than market-rate alternatives and haven't made a dent in the state's housing shortfalls. So adding more such spending isn't the answer.

And redevelopment exacerbated the housing crisis by teaching cities to view land-use decisions through a fiscal lens. With redevelopment, cities preferred commercial projects that brought in their sought-after sales-tax bonanza over housing developments. The best way to boost housing supply is to reduce regulations and fees—not give cities an incentive to choose big-box stores over new neighborhoods.

I know it's hard to let go of a shuttered government program, but it's time for lawmakers to move on. There's no conceivable reason to recreate these disastrous agencies.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Lawmakers Might Resurrect Failed 'Urban Renewal' Program appeared first on Reason.com.

When arguing about whether the Treasury needed to take urgent action to deal with soaring federal debt in the 1980s, the late former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Herb Stein coined Stein's Law. It was simple and obvious: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

I hate to pick nits with such an esteemed economist, but I'll offer Greenhut's Corollary: "Never underestimate politicians' ability to kick the can down the road." In 1986, federal debt was $2.1 trillion. In 2024, the debt is $34 trillion. Debt spending of this magnitude cannot go on forever, but it can fester for a long time and cause economic damage in the process. But, yes, it probably will stop eventually.

I thought of Stein's oft-cited quip when pondering California's pension crisis. A recent CalMatters report reminds us the state never has gotten its pension debt under control and that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature keep making the problem worse: "More generous-than-expected raises for California state workers are nudging up the cost of public employee pensions."

Back to my corollary: The report adds that Newsom "sidesteps the growing cost of CalPERS pensions" by using an accounting gimmick. The California Public Employees' Retirement System is only 72 percent funded, which means it only has 72 cents on the dollar to pay for the promised pensions—and they are one of the state's senior obligations. If the state budget ever collapses, government retirees are at the top of the list to get paid.

Per CalMatters, the Legislative Analyst's Office questions whether Newsom's shifting of funds from paying down CalPERS debt toward funding next year's pension costs runs afoul of Proposition 2, the 2014 ballot measure requiring the state to pay down certain debts. But let's not get too deeply into the weeds. The point: Even as the state's pension debt continues to spiral, Newsom and the Legislature won't tackle the problem head on.

Peruse the state legislative website and you'll find lawmakers fixated on every miniscule concern—concert ticket monopolies, landlord pet policies, healthcare wages, social-media age-verification policies—but nothing dealing with pension costs. The reason is obvious. The state's public employee unions rule the roost in the state Capitol and lawmakers better not touch their pensions.

Most normal people find pension reform to be mind-numbing. I'm not particularly normal, having written a

While most Californians will depend on Social Security and meager savings for their Golden Years, the state's public employees will retire at ages 50-57 with 60 to 90 percent of their final years' inflated pay. If you think that we're "all in it together," then peruse the total compensation numbers on Transparent California. You'll find the average local firefighter earns well over $200,000 a year and pages of police sergeants with packages in the 400s and above.

This comes at a cost: fewer public employees providing services, higher taxpayer-funded debt, and higher taxes. Note the large number of local tax measures on every ballot. Officials sell them as ways to improve public safety, upgrade parks, provide affordable housing, and fix the roads. But money is fungible. The growth in pension costs is fueling these tax grabs. These costs are "crowding out" spending on public services.

A dozen years ago, pension reformers predicted, a la Stein, that this could not go on forever. Some believed the state's then $30-billion-plus deficit would lead to fundamental budgetary changes. Local governments and voters—even in liberal jurisdictions such as San Jose—passed pension-reform measures that reduced pension formulas (or limited pensionable pay) in the face of budget cutbacks. But they ultimately lost every battle.

The courts rebuked San Jose's measure based on the California Rule, which refers to a series of court interpretations claiming that governments can't reduce pensions even going forward unless they provide something of equal or greater value in return. The California Supreme Court sidestepped that issue when it had a chance to change the rule. A union-friendly state agency derailed San Diego's effort at reform.

In the end, Gov. Jerry Brown passed a useful but exceedingly modest pension reform law and spearheaded large tax increases to fix the budget deficit he faced. The pension reform movement lost steam. As usual, the unions flexed their muscle in the Capitol, in the courts, and in the state's administrative agencies. Reformers tried and failed—and since then talk about serious reform has been verboten in Sacramento.

Can this go on forever? Probably not. The pension problem isn't going away, but neither is the power of the unions or the desire of the state's leaders to delay the reckoning for another day.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California's Leaders Still Ignoring State Pension Debt appeared first on Reason.com.

Modern public-education history is littered with novel education theories that have failed so spectacularly that the terms are now used as pejoratives. For instance, when I was in elementary school in the 1960s, the "New Math" focused on teaching abstractions rather than fundamentals. You can find reams of research documenting its failure decades later, but the evidence was recognized almost immediately.

That then-new approach "ignored completely the fact that mathematics is a cumulative development and that it is practically impossible to learn the newer creations if one does not know the older ones," according to Morris Kline's 1973 "Common Core," a set of educational standards embraced by California and 39 other states in 2010. On hindsight, it also deserves a failing grade.

"Despite the theory's intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality," read a 2021 Brookings Institution report. "The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers' flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students." Don't get me started on some of the loopier ones: pass-fail grading, the replacement of phonics with whole-language learning, and Social Emotional Learning (SEL).

"Education in the United States has lurched from fad to fad for the better part of a century, finding ever-ingenious ways to underperform preceding generations," explained investigative reporter Joe Herring in a 2022 piece reviewing some of them. Apparently, there isn't enough productive employment for education PhDs, so they spend their time dreaming up big experiments to improve education rather than focusing on the obvious ones.

The process gains life as evidence pours in about the latest underperformance. And the latest data certainly is impressive, albeit in a depressing way. Following COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, traditional public schools (and California's in particular) couldn't rise to the occasion. Teachers' unions slowed re-openings. Test scores plummeted, especially for poor and minority students. Many students checked out permanently, as soaring chronic absentee rates prove.

Always eager to embrace easy-button solutions rather than, say, ideas that promote competitiveness and excellence, our school bureaucracies are on to some "innovative" ideas that have a ballpark-zero chance of improving educational outcomes. The new ones are based around the concept of equity. As with every education reform fad, they sound OK in the elevator pitch. Who doesn't support equity? But they will create a mess that further impedes student progress.

For instance, some Bay Area schools have approved "equity grading." It's strange to focus on grading rather than teaching, but the details are even stranger. The Mercury News reports that one district removed "the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were 'reasonably attempted.'" It also eliminated extra credit for class participation. EG offers students "multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework's impact on a student's grade." Now it will be almost impossible to get an A or an F.

It brings to mind Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." Parents rightly worry that the new grading system will promote slacking. Why work extra hard when you won't be able to get an A? Why try to improve when you won't get worse than a C? It will create a false sense of equity—and make it tougher for colleges to recognize the best students.

Education theorists and consultants who promote this nonsense claim that it will encourage students and teachers to focus entirely on the mastery of material rather than surrounding fluff. They say it will better prepare students for the work world. Yet a lot of that so-called fluff—class participation, completing homework, handing in assignments on time—contribute mightily to such mastery.

Regarding the work world, ask my editor what he thinks if I miss my deadlines and still expect a paycheck. "Supporters of mastery-based grading say it could promote equity," notes an Education Next article. But will it improve learning and test scores? One needn't be a math whiz to know the answer.

State education officials also have jumped on the equity bandwagon. The California State Board of Education last year approved a new 1,000-page math framework that, as Education Week reported, "aims to put meaning-making at the center of the math classroom" and "encourages teachers to make math culturally relevant and accessible for all students." The framework isn't binding on districts, but it will influence everything from textbooks to teaching standards.

I'm not sure how to make mathematical computations more meaningful and relevant, but I suppose someone will write a book about its failures in a few years. Meanwhile, many parents know what succeeds: competition. But providing additional schooling options would pressure school bureaucracies and jobs-protecting teachers' unions to improve, and to them that's not a tolerable outcome.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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What do the state's insurance and housing crises have in common? Obviously, homeowner policies have an impact on housing costs, but I'm referring to something different, namely the concept of open-ended risk. Insurers are exiting the market because state policies limit their ability to price policies to reflect the risk of a major wildfire season. They rather pull out of California than risk the destruction of their assets.

I'd argue the same thing is happening in the rental market, thanks to a fusillade of pro-tenant laws that subject landlords to an incalculable level of risk. Landlords have freely entered the business and understand the various ups and downs. They can calculate the costs of mortgages, taxes, insurance, and maintenance. They expect to, say, replace carpets and paint between tenants. They know the cost of the eviction process in those instances where it's necessary.

But the Legislature's anti-property-rights crusade—done in the name of protecting tenants in a tight housing market—has not only increased those easily calculated costs, but also the costs that are potentially devastating. It's one thing to realize it might require x-number of legal fees to remove a bad tenant and quite another to wrap one's head around the possibility of someone staying in a rent-controlled unit forever.

And it's impossible to calculate the emotional drain of, say, fighting with highly sophisticated squatters who have illegally moved into your temporarily vacant home, exerted some right—and are going to strip the place to its studs while you scurry for a legal remedy. I know plenty of would-be landlords who wouldn't dream of renting out their home for those reasons. Most mom-and-pop landlords I know are discussing an exit strategy.

That's reducing needed rental inventory. Why does San Francisco, which has some of the strictest tenant laws in the country, have 52,000-plus vacant rental units? Some of the explanations are ordinary (units are in process of renovation or are on the market), but a major one often is overlooked—especially by city politicians who recently passed an Empty Homes Tax that essentially blames property owners for the situation.

Many owners are afraid if they let strangers rent their units they'll never be able to reclaim them. They rather forego $3,300 a month in rent than take that potentially devastating risk. That's because the risk is not calculable. Investors can navigate their way around costs they understand (extra property taxes, higher insurance rates) but will exit if the risks are too high.

We've seen the news stories. Someone moves into a short-term rental then refuses to leave. In Oakland, a group of organized homeless women commandeered a vacant house. In Los Angeles, alleged squatters turned an empty mansion into a party house. If housing is a "human right," then owners no longer have a right to their property.

The number of incidents has soared, so much so that one entrepreneur has started a business helping landlords retake their own properties. In a sane society, no one should have to worry about this. Other states have passed (or are considering) laws to expedite the removal of these home invaders, but California requires an overly drawn-out process, leaving owners at the mercy of progressive judges.

Does that situation make you more or less likely to invest in rental properties? What's your tolerance for risk? Same questions regarding Assembly Bill 2216 by Matt Haney (D–San Francisco) that's moving through the Legislature. It requires landlords to accept pets and forbids them from charging extra rent or security deposits. Landlords can expect obvious costs (carpet cleaning, various repair costs), but they can't calculate the less-obvious ones.

The landlords would not be allowed to ask tenants if they plan to have a household pet until after they've accepted the application. They would be allowed to impose "reasonable conditions" on the pets, but "reasonable" is ill defined. For instance, the bill refers to "common household pets" but is not limited to cats and dogs. Apparently, that means a tenant could have large aquariums with heat lamps that can cause incredible damage. There's no limit (beyond local ordinances) on the number of pets. It keeps owners from dealing with tenant pet disputes.

Sure, the Assembly analysis explains that a "reasonable condition" includes the right to limit potentially dangerous pets, but it does not allow a prohibition based on breeds, such as Pit Bulls and Rottweilers. Yet insurers typically use a list of potentially vicious breeds that they forbid owners from allowing. If a landlord allows such a breed and it mauls a neighbor, the landlord won't be covered. If this bill becomes law, lawmakers will force landlords to accept an unlimited amount of risk.

I love pets, but don't be surprised when landlords exit the business and invest their money into, say, a mutual fund that doesn't bite toddlers or call them about unplugging a clogged toilet.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Is Trying To Drive Landlords Out of Business appeared first on Reason.com.

Surveys consistently show that owning a home is one of the keys to overall happiness, which no doubt explains why debates about housing prices are so emotional—and so dominant in the Legislature and at city councils. Thanks to low supply and the resulting price surges, many Californians now struggle to buy homes. The nationwide homeownership rate is nearly 66 percent, but that number is only around 55 percent in California.

Obviously, homeownership comes with drawbacks. Replacing a roof or repairing a foundation is expensive. It's harder to take a new job in another city if you've got to first sell your home. But owning a home allows you to design it to your tastes. You're not living in fear the landlord will sell it. You get tax breaks and can build equity over time. You can settle in and become part of the community. The feds have long viewed homeownership as a key to economic stability.

A brewing battle in Northern California 60 miles east of San Francisco in exurban Solano County will determine whether our state is serious about building new housing. It will also show whether YIMBYs—the Yes In My Back Yarders who promote housing construction—are true to their own rhetoric, or are just the urban version of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders) who oppose any construction they don't like.

People often have the misconception that home prices are so high in the Bay Area because urbanization has limited places to build. In reality, there's seemingly endless open land throughout the eight-county region—but government growth controls are limiting opportunity for development. For instance, across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, 84 percent of the land is off limits to development. No wonder the population is only 260,000—and home prices are absurd.

It's the same story throughout the area. Growth-control measures in Alameda County have assured that one sees nothing but lovely empty hillsides on the drive to Oakland, but they have scuttled development plans and assured million-dollar median home prices. Solano is home to some major suburbs but is dominated by vast tracts of ranchland (and wind farms) as one heads eastward to the Sacramento County line. I love the open spaces, but it's an ideal spot for a new city.

That's exactly what savvy venture capitalists from the Bay Area are planning. Beginning in 2017, a group called Flannery Associates has quietly purchased 50,000 acres—in a move that echoes the Walt Disney Co.'s secretive purchase of swampland around Orlando in the 1960s as it pursued the construction of Disney World and eventually Epcot Center. Big dreams require bold action, especially if one wants to build an entirely new city in regulation-choked, growth-controlled California.

The project has become the biggest thing in Solano County in perhaps forever, which makes the proposal's name, California Forever, apropos. A New York Times article in August turned local buzz into a statewide controversy. It described the idea as follows: "Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation, and dense urban life."

California Forever representatives have been holding the usual array of public meetings, as they prepare for a November countywide ballot initiative that's necessary to rezone the land from agricultural uses. That's necessary because in 2008 county voters overwhelmingly passed the Orwellian-named Orderly Growth Initiative—a common type of NIMBY open-space measure that has paved (actually, not paved) the way for the state's housing crisis.

The Press Democrat reports that the initiative campaign is off to a "bumpy start," which isn't surprising for a project of this scale. It's also not surprising that some locals take a burn at the idea of tech moguls from the Bay Area helicoptering into a somewhat rural area and imposing their big ideas on them.

Fortune magazine reported that, "The Silicon Valley billionaires' Astroturf city being built from scratch is running headlong into a NIMBY backlash." Ironically, it's not only NIMBYs who are a problem. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the proposal has divided YIMBYs. "It's sprawl with a prettier face and prettier name," one YIMBY activist told the newspaper.

I've found many YIMBY critiques on social media, which is odd given the plan is filled with the latest urbanist concepts. "All cities were once 'new' cities," California Forever notes. It's also spot on when it explains that "we will never, ever come close to solving our housing affordability challenges through infill alone." But many YIMBYs aren't so much about building housing, but shoehorning us into tiny apartments along bus lines.

The project certainly is shaking up the housing debate across the state—and might determine whether new generations will be able to take part in the American Dream.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post A Brand New City in Northern California Will Show if the State Is Serious About Housing Solutions appeared first on Reason.com.

When COVID-19 shuttered virtually everything in 2020 and forced public schools to begin distance learning, those schools responded with the agility one would expect from a decrepit battleship forced to make a quick change of course in the face of an unexpected enemy. In other words, the state's hulking K-12 system barely responded at all, even as small and nimble private and charter schools quickly adapted to the new reality.

I remember news stories about public schools unable to set up even the most basic Zoom classes, of teachers who had no idea what they were supposed to do—and then of unions and administrators resisting efforts to re-start classroom teaching even after the rest of society was getting back to normal. Instead of re-ordering procedures to help kids stay current on their schoolwork, the school establishment mainly whined about not having enough money.

Anyone who needs a reminder about why government bureaucracies are incapable of providing quality public services need only look at the resulting disaster. A Stanford University study found, "a substantial decline in student learning in both English language arts/literacy (ELA) and mathematics between the 2018–19 and 2021–22 academic years." Those are the general figures, but the results for poor and minority students were a travesty.

California's lowest-income students already fared second to last in the nation in 2018, before anyone had even heard of coronavirus. After the pandemic closures, the study found that only 16 percent of Black students met or exceeded state math standards—a number that was below 10 percent for English learners. And then there are the appalling truancy numbers: Nearly a third of the state's K-12 students were chronically absent during the ruckus.

We heard rumblings of a "parent revolt," which manifested itself in some high-profile school board elections. But, again, it's hard to turn around a giant ship—especially one that for years has been taking in water. In the private sector, unhappy customers take their business elsewhere. With government agencies, the process for making change is daunting. Booting bad school board members is a start, but there are so many obstacles to improving matters at the classroom level.

A recent settlement has been touted as a way to force the state to enact meaningful reforms that might improve achievement after several parents had filed a lawsuit against the state. "The change in the delivery of education left many already-underserved students functionally unable to attend school," they noted in their complaint. "The state continues to refuse to step up and meet its constitutional obligation to ensure basic educational equality or indeed any education at all."

The agreement earmarks $2 billion in remaining COVID funds to pay for tutoring, counseling, and after-school activities, CalMatters reported. I applaud the agreement, but have limited expectations. Mainly, as the publication noted, "the case has drawn attention to the magnitude of the learning loss during the pandemic." How much more drawing attention do we need? And more than 40 percent of the state budget goes to K-14 education, so a little more money won't institute the change we need.

I also take issue with CalMatter's description of the "herculean efforts by school staff to keep students engaged." I'm sure many teachers and administrators tried their best, but Hercules succeeded at completing his nearly impossible 12 labors—and most public schools failed to complete even the most elementary educational tasks.

Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-dominated Legislature have been taking aim at one reform that has enabled many ill-served students get a quality education. At the behest of teachers' unions, they restricted the growth of charter schools. Empowered by the new laws, Los Angeles Unified School District this month "passed a sweeping policy that will limit when charters can operate on district-owned campuses," the Los Angeles Times reported.

That above-mentioned Stanford study noted that dismal test scores "should sound a loudly screaming alarm: The task of transforming our schools can no longer be delayed." Yet warning sirens have been sounding for years and the public-school establishment continues in the wrong union-dictated direction.

The latest lawsuit echoes the Vergara decision, a 2014 Los Angeles case that initially tossed teacher-employment protections including tenure. The court found that these firing restrictions leave "grossly ineffective teachers" in the classroom. The impact, which disproportionately harms lower-income students, "shocks the conscience," it added. Higher courts eventually overturned the ruling. The state didn't heed the alarm bells. They mainly energized teachers' unions, which feared the impact on their protected employment.

So here we are again. How much more evidence do we need? California's poorly served public school students need more than a few more dollars diverted to tutoring programs. We need to airlift them off a sinking ship and into competitive educational vessels. Quite frankly, with the money the state spends on education, every student could have a room on a luxury cruise liner.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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