If you ask any Californian to describe the Ellis Act and the Costa-Hawkins Act, you’re at least as likely to get a blank stare as an informed exegesis on two state laws that have had—and are continuing to have—a destructive effect on the supply of affordable housing in the state’s urban areas. That’s too bad,

I recently finished reading Citizen, Simon Schama’s long, densely detailed history of the French Revolution. I came to the book by way of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, a novel that views the French Revolution through the lives of three historical figures who played major roles in that turbulent upheaval. Mantel, author of