Jerry W. P. Schauffler, longtime Pacific Legal Foundation trustee, former Board of Trustees chair, and Bay Area developer, passed away in the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of 93. He was PLF’s longest-serving Board member.
There is a particular kind of person who understands what it takes to make a home—who has spent decades thinking about how to make a neighborhood take shape and who might live there. Jerry Schauffler was that kind of person. For six decades he worked as a Bay Area developer and for thirty-three years he sat on the Board of Pacific Legal Foundation, defending, among other things, the right to build and own a home.
Jerry founded WSI Builders in 1974 and spent the following decades creating residential communities across the East Bay. His signature project was Magee Ranch in Danville, California, a 540-acre, paradise-like neighborhood with over 250 homes built around rolling green hills and a thousand oak trees. SWA, the architecture design firm that WSI Builders worked with on the project, marveled to see how much the surrounding community supported Magee. “In a region where the concept of NIMBY or ‘Not-In-My-Backyard’ is a prime planning precept, it is unusual to have every neighboring homeowner group support the project unanimously at the City Council hearing,” SWA wrote. Jerry knew how to crack that code. He understood how and where to build houses so they seem like they were always meant to be there: true and permanent homes.
Three Decades of Steady Guidance
Jerry joined PLF’s Board of Trustees in 1990 and served until 2023—a span of thirty-three years that made him the organization’s longest-serving Board member. He chaired the Board from 1994 to 1996.
Bob Connors, current chair of PLF’s Board of Trustees, recalled that it was Jerry (“always charming, thoughtful, and quietly persuasive”) who interviewed him for the Board. He said:
Jerry was a steady and thoughtful presence whose leadership helped guide Pacific Legal Foundation for more than three decades. He possessed a unique ability to ask the right questions, encourage sound judgment, and support others in their service to the organization. Never one to seek recognition, Jerry grounded his work in integrity and an unwavering commitment to PLF’s mission. His influence endures in the strength, stability, and character of the Board he helped shape.
Fellow trustee George Kimball put it plainly: “He was a wonderful gentleman, gracious to all, thoughtful in his observations and devoted to the Foundation and its work.”
For PLF’s attorneys and staff, Jerry was a crucial voice: He knew firsthand what the freedom to build means for Americans’ future. He spent his career navigating the permits, regulations, delays, and costs that PLF fights every day in court. He knew exactly what was at stake.
Ultimately, a home is where you live with people you love. Jerry’s love for his family was evident in the way he lived his life. He is survived by his wife Barbara, with whom he shared sixty-three years and raised two daughters. In his obituary, his family remembers him filling his home “with creativity, warmth, and hospitality”—a legacy as beautiful and lasting as the many homes Jerry built.
At Pacific Legal Foundation, we believe that property rights are the foundation of liberty—that the freedom to own, build, and put land to productive use is inseparable from the freedom to chart one’s own course in life. Jerry Schauffler understood that, not as a legal theory but as a practical truth, forged over decades of building homes in California, one of the most regulated states in the nation. PLF, and the Board he helped shape, will carry Jerry’s influence long into the future.
