Can Kanye West solve L.A.’s housing crisis? Not if city bureaucrats have their way

This past summer, the well-known performer, Kanye West, began work on a new low-income housing community in Los Angeles—on his own property and on his own dime—to address the city’s affordable housing crisis and in his words, “break the barriers that separate classes.”

Instead of allowing Kanye to try to help people the city was failing, city officials shut down Kanye’s project because he didn’t get the proper government permits.

As Phillip Bader suggests, Kanye’s foiled attempt at housing construction illustrates the importance of property rights to address the need for affordable housing.

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The Hill: Feds clear farmer to plow, then slap him with millions in fines

Following government rules is often a tough-enough task. But when federal agencies secretly move their own rules’ goalposts and then threaten millions of dollars in fines for noncompliance, it can be devastating.

Just ask Jack LaPant, a California farmer who faces ruinous civil penalties for farming practices he was told he was perfectly within the law to undertake. 

Paige Gilliard details Jack’s property rights injustice in her op-ed for The Hill.

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Family sues to stop Indiana’s beachfront land grab

Randy and Kimberley Pavlock built their small family home along Indiana’s Lake Michigan shoreline with their own hands, on private beachfront property that’s been in the family for generations.

Nobody questioned the Pavlocks’ or their neighbors’ private ownership of the beach for all those years. But in a sweeping decision in 2018, the Indiana Supreme Court declared that the Pavlocks and other lakefront owners had never actually owned the beach.  

Because the court cannot take property without paying for it, the Pavlocks are fighting back.

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