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For months, activists in Boulder, Colorado, have been trying to place an initiative on the ballot overturning their city’s restrictions on unrelated people living in the same house. The city initially told them they had until August to qualify for the ballot. But last Friday, officials announced that the deadline for submitting signatures was actually back in June.

These activists’ last hope is for the Boulder City Council to place their initiative on the ballot itself. But they believe this body is hostile to their reform. Indeed, the ballot initiative process was designed to bypass it.

“The City Attorney’s office and the City Clerk’s office has in so many ways given us bad information. They’ve done it on their website. They’ve done it in email. They’ve done it over the phone, on Zoom calls, in public council meetings,” says Chelsea Castellano, an organizer for the Bedrooms Are For People campaign. “There are so many instances where they’ve given us the date of August 5 to submit our signatures. A rational person would presume that it would be accurate.”

The city’s admittedly inaccurate advice jeopardizes a reform that could immediately expand Boulder’s supply of rental housing in the middle of a pandemic-induced recession when millions of Americans are struggling to afford shelter.

On Sunday, Gov. Jared Polis issued an executive order asking cities to suspend or repeal their occupancy limits for unrelated people as part of a broader effort to prevent evictions during COVID-19.

“It’s important now because if somebody isn’t living in that kind of situation they might be homeless,” said the Democratic governor, according to the Denver Post. “The same type of people who complain about extra cars in the street or too many people living in a nearby house also generally complain about the homeless.”

As in many cities, Boulder’s zoning code limits residential housing to family members plus a certain number of unrelated roomers. How many unrelated individuals are allowed to live in a home is determined by how a property is zoned, with most of the city’s residential housing capped at either three or four unrelated people.

The city manager can impose fines of up to $1,000 for violating Boulder’s land use code, including its occupancy limits. The city attorney can also purse fines of up to $2,000 per violation of the land use code. Municipal courts are allowed to impose additional fines that would deprive a landlord of any profits earned by opening rooms to excess renters.

“These current laws are discriminatory because they regulate people based on who they are, and not what they do,” says Nick Grossman, another Bedrooms Are For People activist. “They are regulating a class of people that are unrelated by blood or marriage and preventing them from having equal access and [housing] options.”

Grossman and Castellano tell Reason that tenants are often evicted by fine-fearing landlords for violating the city’s occupancy cap. The law often forces property owners to leave rooms vacant, they add.

Occupancy limits for unrelated people “should raise constitutional issues, but they’ve been broadly blessed by the Supreme Court,” says Anthony Sanders, an attorney at the Institute for Justice. A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, upheld such laws as a valid use of local government’s powers to regulate land use.

Some state courts have struck down some of these laws, Sanders adds, but they remain common in college towns such as Boulder, where neighbors often worry about their street being overrun by young partiers.

Sanders says courts should reconsider this precedent, arguing that restrictions on property rights should be tightly focused on preventing actual harms. Blanket bans or caps on unrelated people living in the same house don’t meet that standard, he says.

But without a new precedent, activists are left to work within the democratic process to change these laws. Hence the Bedrooms Are For People campaign.

Their initiative, if passed, would amend the city’s charter to repeal Boulder’s limits on unrelated people living together. It would instead impose an occupancy limit of one person per bedroom, plus one additional person. Homes with fewer than four bedrooms would be allowed a maximum number of four occupants.

In March they submitted their petition to the city, and later that month they received permission to start collecting signatures. Bizarrely, no one seemed to know when exactly these signatures had to be turned to the City Clerk’s office, which is responsible for verifying them.

Boulder’s charter gives campaigns a maximum of 180 days to collect signatures. It also requires that signatures be submitted to the city within 150 calendar days of the November election, which would have been June 5 this year.

Meanwhile, the state rules governing municipal elections are both more forgiving and more restrictive. Campaigns have up until 90 days before an election to submit signatures, which this year would mean August 5. State law, however, gives campaigns only 90 days to collect signatures.

The question befuddling everybody was whether state or local law should decide how long the Bedrooms Are For People campaign had to collect signatures, and when they had to turn them in.

To resolve these conflicting deadlines and give campaigns as much time as possible to collect signatures, the city published election guidelines stating that charter amendment petitions—including the Bedrooms Are For People petition—had 180 days to collect signatures, in compliance with the more permissive city deadline. They also didn’t have to submit these signatures until August 5, in compliance with state law.

A breakdown of approved petitions published by the city also listed August 5 as the date that Bedrooms are for People had to submit signatures.

That decision wasn’t without controversy, with opponents of the Bedrooms Are For People initiative threatening a lawsuit if the reformers were given until August to get their signatures in.

In late May, Boulder Beat reports, City Attorney Thomas Carr advised the campaign that the only way to completely avoid a lawsuit would be collect all the signatures they need within the 90 days allotted by state law, meaning signatures would have been due in late June. That deadline, Castellano argued at the time, was impossible for their campaign to meet, given the limits the pandemic had placed on the activists’ ability to collect signatures.

Carr nevertheless concluded that Boulder’s charter should take precedence, and that any lawsuit trying to toss out signatures for not meeting the earlier state deadline wouldn’t succeed. He also advised the Bedrooms Are For People campaign to seek independent legal advice.

This apparently did little to clarify things.

So last Friday, Carr sent an email to the Boulder City Council’s “hotline” mailing list stating that the city’s charter had the final say over when signatures had to be submitted.

That meant petitioners had 180 days to collect signatures, as opposed to the 90 days allowed by state law. Unfortunately for the Bedrooms Are For People campaign, it also meant those signatures were due back on June 5, as the city’s charter demands, not the state’s deadline of August 5.

Carr acknowledges that the city gave inaccurate guidance to the Bedrooms Are For People campaign, as well as to a campaign to enact ranked-choice voting for mayoral elections.

In the interest of fairness, Carr issued nonbinding recommendations that the City Clerk review all signatures submitted before August 5, and that, if the campaigns meet their signature goals, the city council vote to place their initiatives on the ballot.

“These are not small mistakes. This is over 50 people collecting signatures since the day the stay-at-home order lifted,” says Castellano, saying city staff has resigned for far less in the past. The idea of leaving it to the city council to decide what to decide whether their ballot initiative will go to voters this November is totally unacceptable, she argues. The “whole point of this process is to circumvent the city council,” Castellano says. “Because we wouldn’t need to do this if we felt like our elected representatives were representing this issue properly.”

According to Castellano, the campaign has collected almost 6,000 signatures so far, putting it well on its way to meeting that now-defunct August 5 deadline.

Bedrooms Are For People is now evaluating its legal options, hoping to find a way to get the initiative on the ballot without having to go through City Council.

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“Our mass culture is driven by screened entertainment,” the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson told The Wall Street Journal last week, “so there’s a tendency to tell stories in a way that looks good on screens. I think there is an overreliance on dystopia that is fundamentally driven by art direction and production design.”

The result, Stephenson argued, is that we’ve

gotten used to a particular way of thinking about dystopia—and that’s not what we’ve got, right? We’ve ended up with something that is very non-cinematic. With few exceptions, anywhere in the world affected by Covid-19, you can go out and walk down the street, drive around, look at stuff. And aside from the fact that there aren’t as many people out and a lot of people are wearing masks, nothing looks different. There are no collapsed buildings or crashed trains or any of the other visual markers that you would see in a movie to tell you that a disaster has happened here.

Is it possible to make a cinematic take on a non-cinematic disaster? I can think of one movie that tried: The New World, Jean-Luc Godard’s 20-minute contribution to the otherwise forgettable 1963 anthology film Ro.Go.Pa.G.

I’m not a huge Godard fan, but I like some of his ’60s movies, and this short is probably the best of those. It imagines a post-apocalyptic Paris that looks almost exactly like the pre-apocalyptic city; the differences are in how people behave. The results are eerie and odd, playing like a subtly surreal episode of The Twilight Zone. Here’s the first half…

…and here’s the rest:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another installment with a French New Wave connection, go here.)

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In March, schools around the globe went online in a manner of days. Professors, who had never used distance learning, were suddenly forced to take a crash-course in Zoom and other similar tools. Students, for the most part, were understanding. But I think everyone would agree that the pedagogy from the Spring 2020 semester was not ideal.

The Fall 2020 semester will better. Professors will have now had a full semester of Zooming under their belts. And, they can spend the summer adapting their classes to an online environment–either synchronous or asynchronous. Some professors may decide to generate their own content.

I define the word content very broadly. That word can refer to videos, where the professor is on the screen. It can refer to “narrated” powerpoints, where the professor narrates slides. It can refer to a recorded podcast, where there is only audio, and the professor is speaking. In my mind,”content” refers to anything more than the printed word: either spoken audio or recorded video.

Professors should be very cautious before developing their own content. And I offer this advice after having spent nearly two years and $100,000 on developing my own content for constitutional law. Developing high-quality content is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. No content may be better for students than weak content. And professors would better spend their time preparing assessments (both summative and formative), and scheduling one-on-one visits with students, than generating content.

Let me explain. The central element of being a professor is writing. That is what we do. We can write articles. We can prepare powerpoint slides (a form of writing). We can compile examinations. The other central element of being a professors is speaking. We present papers. We lecture. We engage in Socratic dialogues. We engage in respectful, pithy discourse during faculty meetings. (Or at least we should). And so on.

Generating content is completely divorced from how professors usually write and speak. It is not enough to write a script and read it aloud, the same way you would read from lecture notes. You have to generate a script that is geared towards the format of a student listening to a podcast or watching a video. Here are two useful tips.

First, sentences must be short. Long, winding sentences with different clauses may work well enough in print. (I avoid, at all costs, long sentences.) Readers can jump around a long sentence if they get lost. But when you are listening to a recording, you are not going to rewind if you lose your place. Short sentences give the brain a chance to process a thought before you move on. For audible content, periods are your friends. Semicolons are your enemies. (How many of you would have put a semicolon after friends? You see!). And never use an em-dash. That punctuation cannot be readily converted to the spoken word. Use a period and move on.

Second, place subjects at the beginning of sentences. Legal prose often buries subjects at the end of a sentence. You may read 20 words before you figure out what the sentence is about. That approach doesn’t work for recording. Let the reader know up front why she is reading the sentence.

So far, I have only offered tips about style. The substance is even harder. Students crave simplicity. The law is not simple. Often, when you distill a complicated concept into a few sentences for a podcast, you leave stuff out. And you know it. When you start to prepare your own content, you will agonize about what to leave in, and what to omit. The process becomes so painful. Writing a script for a podcast is different than creating a powerpoint. You cannot simply read long blocks of text, as you would include a blockquote on a slide. People will tune out. Striking the right balance is very, very difficult.

These tips concern the preparation of the script. But there is an even bigger challenge: delivering it. Most people do not know how they sound when they speak. It is very difficult to listen to a recording of yourself. I do so all the time to help improve my diction. Indeed, I took classes for nearly a year to help slow down my New York pace. I would routinely rewatch my classes, radio interviews, and TV hits. It wasn’t easy. I’ve gotten better, but I occasionally revert back to old habits.

When you speak in a live class, and stumble or slur words, students are forgiving. But when students hear hard-to-understand speech on a recording, the reaction is different. They may ask, “Why didn’t the professor record another take?” Of course, you may have recorded a dozen takes, and that was your best one. But the students will never know it. The margin of error for recordings is so much lower than for live speech. Plus, static and other clicks become very noticeable on most microphones. Editing bad parts out of audio often makes the problem worse.

So far, I have only discussed the spoken word. Recording video is much, much more difficult. Here, I repeat several of the lessons I offered about recording zoom (See here and here). Professors, in general, have poor eye contact. In a large class, it is not a big deal. But with a camera, poor eye contact can create a huge disconnect. You need to maintain direct eye contact with the lens. If you start to move your eyes around, it looks shifty. Keep in mind if you are reading from notes, you will constantly have to move your head up and down. The ideal solution is a teleprompter that goes over or behind the camera. But most professors do not have that setup. And reading from a teleprompter is harder than it looks.

You may need to record several takes before you get the video right. It is tough to stop mid-sentence. You may have to start at the beginning of a paragraph to avoid an awkward break. For example, when Randy and I were in studio, it would take about an hour to record enough content for a five-minute video. We did two full takes from start to finish, and then recorded individual sentences over and over again. And, it is tough to monitor your own speech. When Randy was behind camera, I carefully monitored his speech. If I heard any glitches, I would ask him to start again. And he did the same when I was behind camera. If you decide to generate your own content, you should have someone in the room to raise their hand if there any glitches.

Finally, editing video content is tough. I would not suggest you learn how to use Adobe Premier, or any similar tool. Those products have steep learning curves. I spent several years editing video before law school, and I still don’t feel qualified to make my own content. There are some online tools that let you mix together videos. But precise editing is hard.

The hardest part of creating a video is to develop engaging visuals. It is very, very boring to watch a static shot of a professor at a podium for any length of time. Likewise, I find narrated powerpoints to be soporific. I know professors use both of these approaches. They may be effective in a pinch. But in my mind they add little value. Students would be better reading a script in their head than trying to follow along as a professor reads a script. There is no intrinsic value to have audio or video. Students can use a narrator feature, just as effectively. Most smartphones and devices have this feature.

When Randy and I developed the script for our videos, we used a rule of thumb: the visual had to change every 8 to 10 seconds. In other words, we would not show the same visual for more than 10 seconds. We would cut to a photo, a video, text on the screen, or a different camera angle. Indeed, while writing the scripts, I would deliberately write sentences or clauses that matched up with specific graphical cuts. That process was immensely difficult. But it created engaging and entertaining videos that keep the viewer hooked. It is not possible to develop this sort of content alone over the summer. I am very cautious if professors attempt to go it alone.

***

So far I have offered only caution. What should professors do? Do what you do best. Focus on written material. Distribute written summaries that students can read. Write sample questions and model answers. Give frequent assessments. And go over those assessments. Schedule one-on-one sessions with students. Provide a benefit that cannot be given over Zoom or other asynchronous measures.

Professors have limited time. Generating content is not a prudent use of that time.

Next week I will share some modules for constitutional law classes.

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