As part of their role as anchor institutions rooted in place, hospitals have invested in communities for decades. While past efforts have been piecemeal, hospitals are now driving strategies to finance, build, and preserve affordable housing. This article looks at why and how hospitals have contributed to housing preservation strategies in order to highlight new opportunities to address California’s worsening housing crisis.
Since 1980, California has had an ambitious planning framework on the books to make local governments accommodate their fair share of regionally needed housing. The framework long relied, however, on a rickety and complicated conveyor belt for converting regional housing targets into actual production. Superintending the conveyor belt was an administrative entity, the Department of Housing and Community Development, whose rules had no legal effect, and whose judgments about the adequacy of a local government’s housing plan received virtually no deference from the courts. This Article contends that the Department’s position has been fundamentally transformed by a series of individually modest but complementary bills enacted from 2017 to 2019.
Occasionally during his presidency, Donald Trump has suggested that he cares deeply about clean air and water, even as he expresses deep skepticism about climate change. But the specifics of Trump’s deregulatory approach tell a different story. The Trump administration has undertaken a series of regulatory moves to weaken the analytical foundation for clean air and water regulations. These moves seek to eliminate or undercut precisely those regulations that bring the biggest health benefits. The clean air regulations under the Clean Air Act, which account for the overwhelming majority of all quantified and monetized benefits of all federal regulation, are under significant threat.
As evidenced by the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, corporations cheat on environmental regulations. Such scandals have created a surge in the academic literature in a wide range of areas, including corporate law, administrative law, and deterrence theory. This Article furthers that literature by focusing on one particular area of corporate cheating—the ability to learn of the cheating in the first place. Detecting corporate cheating requires significant information about corporate behavior, activity, and output. Indeed, most agencies have broad statutory authority to collect such information from corporations, through targeted records requests and inspection.