San Francisco Mayor London Breed has been facing controversy since she endorsed making sobriety a requirement for receiving public assistance. City Supervisor Dean Preston, for one, was appalled by the proposal, condemning it for being an idea one would find in Republican states such as Texas, which is one of a handful of states that impose mandatory drug screening for welfare recipients.
Most policy discussions about homelessness invariably focus on how to address the “root cause.” This is reasonable enough. If we attack the root of a problem, we expect the branches to wither and die. Presumably, then, we need only to identify the root cause of homelessness to design an effective policy solution. But is there a root cause?
A new law in California — called the ‘Yes in God’s Backyard’ law — makes it easier for churches and other religious institutions to build housing on their properties. Chris Calton, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Oakland, California-based Independent Institute, joins host Keli‘i Akina of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii to talk about that and other zoning reforms that the Golden State has recently adopted — and that Hawai’i policymakers should consider.
California’s housing crisis has residents cheering the recent passage of state Sen. Scott Weiner’s (D–San Francisco) Senate Bill 4, and not without reason. The bill seeks to make it easier to build affordable homes on land owned by religious and nonprofit higher-education institutions, leading the bill’s supporters to nickname it the “YIGBY” bill—“Yes in God’s Backyard.”
Research Fellow Christopher Calton Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle