Affordable housing in California's Coastal Zone: A tale of state authority vs. local autonomy
Abstract This article examines the efforts of the California Coastal Commission to pursue simultaneously goals of environmental quality and affordable housing in the same state‐imposed regulatory program. The authors conclude that the Commission made substantial progress toward realizing both ends. However, the coastal body fell victim to its own successes, and housing was removed from its jurisdiction. As the Coastal Commission exercised its authority, opposition grew in strength and numbers. Key opponents included local government, which lost land‐use regulatory power to the Commission, the building industry, whose relationships with coastal localities were disrupted, and local property owners, whose land was restricted to uses other than the most profitable one.
Saving California's Coast: The Coastal Zone Initiative and Its Aftermath
Abstract In 1972 California's voters gave control over nearly all construction along the state's 1,000‐mile coastline to powerful state and regional boards. These boards will administer a permit system for three years, then submit a plan to the Legislature for the future preservation and development of the coast. The permit zone includes a wide variety of natural environments and possible uses, including open water, large tracts of undeveloped land, beach towns and resorts, and some of the nation's most valuable urban‐land. In the boards’ brief existence, the coastal regulators have acted on more than 5,000 permits, including controversial issues of beach access, density, agricultural preservation, power‐plant siting, and growth inducement.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.