A Modest Proposal

I remember during my first year of teaching that I had one rule in my classroom: don't misbehave. Unsurprisingly, my students found that rule confoundingly difficult to follow. In years subsequent, I defined the rule a bit better: turn your homework in on time, be in the classroom before the bell, don't talk when I'm talking, do what I tell you to do promptly. Again, unsurprisingly, compliance with my rules got a lot better. I made it easy to be "on the right side of the rule."

Anyone who has read much of this blog knows that I am not some small-government ideologue. I don't want to shrink government out of some hostility to the common good, and I do not believe that freedom and the size of government are inversely proportionate or correlative. I do, however, believe that if you want people to follow the law, people should be able to simply and easily understand the law.

In particular, I am talking about the Fair Housing laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The law says that buildings must be designed and built such that they are handicap accessible. Who knows what that means? I sincerely doubt that there are any developers out there today (who are not named Donald Trump) who want to stick it to people simply because of their disabilities. However, if you are a developer, chances are that you're not a general contractor or an architect. You hire these functions out.

If an architect designs a building to local building code, and the contractor builds the building to local building code, doesn't it seem as though the building ought to pass muster with respect to handicap accessibility? Should the developer really have to hire one more "consultant" to "opine" as to whether the building complies with the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act? Don't you think that passing local building code, passing inspection, and properly getting your permits ought to shield you from charges, after the fact, that the building does not comply with the FHA, ADA, etc?

As it presently sits, the answer is that a developer can fully comply with every local zoning law, get all the proper permits, pass inspection, and still get hit with a big nasty lawsuit for failure to follow the Fair Housing Act and its Americans with Disabilities requirements, all because the architect and contractor built the building according to what the law requires. Any guess on what this does for the cost of housing or the willingness of developers to build multi-family housing? Anyone wonder why the cost of housing has soared past inflation in the past 50 years? Perhaps this has something to do with it (though admittedly, the cost of housing is a very complicated story that involves many moving parts).

Again, I tend to default to simplicity. I've said until I'm blue in the face that if your policy ideas are so great, you shouldn't have to lie about them (see Trump, Donald; Ryan, Paul; Price, Tom). Along those lines, if laws are important enough to enforce, shouldn't they be important enough to be written in such a manner as those against whom enforcement is sought actually have the opportunity to understand what the law requires and how to comply with it? Stated another way, if you want people to comply with a rule, you should tell them what the rule requires.