It is early in the morning of July 18, 2023, in Beard Brook Park, Modesto, California. Dew still clings to the tall grass. Christine Chavez is twenty-seven years old — a daughter, a sister, a human being with a name, a laugh, a story. She is asleep. Not in a bed; she has not had a bed in a long time. She sleeps in the grass, because the grass is the only place this rich, proud, morally so talkative society has left for her.

Then the mower comes. The driver, a city employee who means no harm, does not see her. The grass is tall. What happens in the following seconds, piety forbids us to describe. Let it suffice to say: days later, her family was still finding in that park what the city had overlooked. The police called it a tragic accident. And so it was — in the final link of a long chain. Every link before it was a decision.

One can file this story away as misfortune, and that is precisely what happened: a footnote in the local news, a case number, a condolence. But whoever stops at the footnote has not read the story. For the real question is not why a mower was running. The real question is: why was a young woman sleeping in the grass of a public park, in one of the wealthiest states of the richest nation in the history of the world?

The answer is uncomfortable because it strikes no one who feels guilty, and many who consider themselves innocent. Christine Chavez was homeless in California — that land where a modest home costs a fortune, where hundreds of thousands live without a roof, and where for decades it has been prevented, systematically, thoroughly and with the best of manners, that what people need for living gets built.

This prevention has a name. It sounds harmless, almost cute: NIMBYism. Not In My Back Yard. It is the first of the three crises this series describes. And like all real crises, it is no natural disaster. It is the work of human hands.

The NIMBYist is not a monster. He is, on the contrary, usually an exceedingly cultivated person. He owns a house in a good location; he loves his view, his quiet, the character of his neighborhood. And whenever housing is to be built near him — housing for nurses, teachers, young families, for the Christines of this world — he discovers his heart for things he otherwise scarcely notices: a rare lizard, the streetscape, the shadows cast, the traffic, the groundwater.

His weapons are not torches and pitchforks but objections, assessments, hearings, lawsuits. Every one of these weapons was once forged for a good purpose: environmental review was meant to protect rivers, public participation to prevent arbitrariness. In the hands of organized obstruction, however, they become something else: an arsenal with which any project can be delayed by years and made costlier by millions — until the builder gives up and the lot stays empty. Tidily empty. Genteelly empty.

Thus has arisen, in California but by no means only there, a paradoxical landscape: endless carpets of single-family homes whose owners are millionaires on paper, surrounded by tent encampments under freeway overpasses. The former owe their wealth in considerable part to the very scarcity that costs the latter the roof over their heads. That is not polemic. That is price formation.

One need not be an economist to follow the math. Where more people want to live than there are homes, prices rise — until the weakest fall out of the market. First out of the apartment, then out of the room, then out of a friend\'s garage, then onto the couch, then into the car, then into the tent. And at last into the tall grass of a park.

Each of these stages has names and faces. The single mother at the register who commutes three hours because she cannot afford the city she works in. The young tradesman still living in his childhood bedroom at thirty. The pensioner whose rent grows faster than her pension, and who calculates anew each month how much longer it can go on. None of them are statistics. They are the quiet victims of a politics that considers itself compassionate because it so enjoys talking about compassion.

For that is the bitter point: the very milieus that fight every building permit carry the word solidarity most often on their lips. They donate to the food bank and block the shelter. They lament homelessness and litigate against housing. They love humanity and merely cannot bear the neighbors it might send them.

Whoever wishes to grasp the dimension of this crisis needs only a handful of figures — and must force himself, at every one of them, not to grow numb. Well over a hundred thousand people live without housing in California alone, more than in any other state; a large share of them sleep not in shelters but outside — in tents, cars, doorways, parks. At the same time, a modest house in the coastal cities costs a multiple of what a family can ever assemble by honest work, and whoever wants to build often waits longer for permits than the construction itself would take.

These numbers are not fate. There is no lack of land: the state is vast, its cities are spread wide, its construction industry would be capable. There is a lack of permission. Decade after decade, less was built than people arrived — not because one could not, but because one was not allowed — and every year of obstruction has added another layer to the mountain. A housing shortage of this size can no longer be administered away. It can only be built away.

And let the sequence be understood: first comes the scarcity, then the desperation, then the tent, then the destitution with everything it brings in its train. Whoever wrinkles his nose at the camps and their stranded inhabitants confuses cause and effect: it was not the weakness of these people that created the camps, but the strength of the obstructors.

To the obstruction from below is added the price-driving from above. In the name of the climate — a concern we do not dispute deserves seriousness — a machinery of levies, certificates and mandates has arisen that makes heating, driving, building and therefore living ever more expensive. Whoever pays may carry on as before; whoever cannot pay must cut back. In its structure this resembles, to an astonishing degree, the sale of indulgences of the late Middle Ages: the sin remains, it is merely priced.

Yet the historical indulgence trade was, in one respect, more social than its modern revival. With the money of the faithful, at least St. Peter\'s Basilica was built — an edifice open to this day to everyone, beggar and prince alike. But where do the billions of the new penance payments flow? Into funds, agencies, consulting structures and subsidy stages whose doors remain closed to the ordinary citizen. He finances cathedrals he will never enter — and when, exhausted, he sinks down at their walls, they send him the enforcement patrol.

There is a stratum in this crisis that feels little of any of it: well provided for, well connected, drawing secure incomes from public coffers or protected positions, residing in neighborhoods whose inviolability it organizes itself. From there one can preach renunciation splendidly — the renunciation of others. From there, every criticism of the obstruction machine looks like ingratitude, every complaint about the rents like entitlement.

We do not wish to demonize these people; many of them sincerely believe they are doing right. But we may name what their decisions bring about: they have created a system in which the existing is protected and the necessary is prevented — and in which the costs of this order are passed downward until they reach those who have no lawyer, no objection, no voice. A young woman in the tall grass.

It would be cheap now to hunt for scapegoats. The driver of that mower carries, since that morning, a weight heavier than any verdict could impose; he too is a victim of this chain. The individual homeowner who signs an objection kills no one. The clerk who orders an environmental review does her duty. Precisely this is what makes the crisis so insidious: it consists of a thousand small, individually forgivable acts whose sum is unforgivable.

Our anger therefore is aimed at no person but at an order — an order that rewards the No and punishes the Yes, that hands the propertied every veto and does not even grant the home-seeker a place on a waiting list. And our compassion belongs to those whom this order grinds down: the displaced, the commuting, the freezing. To them we owe more than candles and concern. We owe them homes.

That it can be done differently is no conjecture — elsewhere it is everyday life. Look at Tokyo: one of the largest metropolises on earth, coveted, dense, expensive at its center — and yet without the housing misery of Western coastal cities, because building law there applies nationwide, is predictable, and grants the neighbor no veto over another\'s property. Buildings rise, come down, rise again; the city breathes, and rents remain within reach of normal incomes. Look at Houston, which does without the usual clearance-by-prohibition and answers a growing population year after year with new housing instead of new waiting lists.

Nothing about these places is paradise, and not every one of their rules is fit for export. But they prove the one sentence the obstructors cannot get around: where those who bear responsibility may build, those who have little will, in the end, also dwell. The housing question is not a question of money — more money is in play than ever. It is a question of permission.

The social-libertarian idea begins where obstruction ends: with the right of a person to build on his own land what harms no one — and with the duty of the community not to smother that right in procedure. We want freedom to build under clear, few, reliable rules instead of a thicket in which only the wealthy are hunters and everyone else is prey. We want objections to be a reasoned exception, not a free hobby. We want climate policy that serves people instead of milking them — with technology, competition and honest accounting instead of levies that seep away into the apparatus.

Our Success Accord names the principles; our positions in the Observer elaborate them: property obliges not to obstruction but to responsibility. A society that permits its land to be built on and its citizens to dwell has no tent camps to administer — it renders them unnecessary. That is no utopia. It is lived normality wherever building has not been declared a crime.

Ask of every rule, every procedure, every right of objection just one thing: does it help homes get built — or does it prevent them? What prevents must be justified, time-limited and, in doubt, struck. Permits need deadlines after which the silence of the offices counts as Yes. Objections need a cost risk for whoever abuses them. And the municipalities that create housing should share in its yield — so that saying Yes finally pays again.

None of this is radical. Radical is the condition we have grown used to: that in the richest commonwealths in history, dwelling has become a privilege. Let those who defend that condition henceforth carry the burden of proof — not the young family, not the builder, not the woman in the park.

Christine Chavez received no monuments. No square bears her name, no law. The city, one reads, has revised its mowing procedures. The tall grass is now cut earlier. One could despair at that: a society whose chief lesson from the death of a young woman is to keep the lawn shorter has not understood the lesson.

We draw a different one. A society that cannot give its weary a bed has broken its first promise — the promise that diligence and decency lead to a place in its midst. That promise we intend to renew: with homes instead of waiting lists, with Yes instead of No, with an order that builds roofs for the weak instead of guarding views for the sated. Until then, Christine\'s name stands over this crisis — a warning of where genteel obstruction leads when no one stays its hand.

Think freely. Act justly. Cooperate meaningfully, and good will follow.