Posts tagged “california”

The Report Was Always Going to Win

Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]

Fourteen Propositions -- California 2026

Before getting to what's actually on it, the ballot itself deserves a harder look than it usually gets. California's initiative process was built in 1911 as a check on a legislature the Progressive movement considered captured by the railroads — […]

Owning Essential

Ask most Californians to name the law that actually decides what gets built in their state — a subdivision, a transmission line, a warehouse, a corner grocery's expansion — and the California Environmental Quality Act is unlikely to come up. […]

Stewardship of Loneliness

In August 2026, California's Governor's Office announced it had identified a psychological condition afflicting a large share of the state's population, and that it was standing up an apparatus to manage it. […]

Five Centuries Under One Crown

Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen *Quercus* species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]

Labor Organization

[An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government](/posts/an-industrial-park-from-a-bloated-government) already traced what California's government has become in plain fiscal terms: a general fund that roughly doubled in a decade, a single-year surplus larger than most states' entire budgets, a swing into tens […]

Proposition 45 and the Two Kinds of Delay

California voters decide on November 3 whether to rewrite how the state's signature environmental law actually works in practice, and the honest answer to what it would do for social liberty is not a clean yes or no. Proposition 45 […]

An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government

A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along […]

By Right

Imperial County, California, sits over a groundwater basin that took millennia to fill, in a region already contesting every acre-foot of Colorado River allocation it has left. In early 2026, a developer proposed a data center there just under a […]

Questions About the Directions of Modern California Housing Policy

In September 2021, Gavin Newsom signed two bills that did something California zoning law had not done in the better part of a century: they told a single-family homeowner that the city could no longer stop them from adding a second unit, or a third, or a fourth, to their own lot […]