Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

Author: Conor Dougherty

Brand: Penguin Press

Color: Silver

Binding: hardcover

Number Of Pages: 288

Release Date: 18-02-2020

Part Number: 9780525560210

Details: Product Description


A stunning, deeply reported investigation into the housing crisis spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay area, where fleets of private buses Ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood Shanti where the homeless make their homes. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation's future has become a cautionary tale. With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, new York Times journalist Conor dougherty chronicles America's housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking readers inside the activist uprisings that have risen in tandem with housing costs. To tell this new story of housing, dougherty follows a struggling math teacher who builds a political movement dedicated to ending single-family-house neighborhoods. A teenaged girl who leads her apartment complex against their rent-raising landlord. A nun who tries to outmaneuver private equity investors by amassing a multimillion-dollar portfolio of affordable homes. A suburban bureaucrat who roguishly embraces density in response to the threat of climate change. A developer who manufactures homeless housing on an assembly line. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Golden Gates captures a vast political realignment during a moment of rapid technological and social Change.


Review


“[I] seriously admir[ed
Golden Gates]. It focuses on the acute shortage of affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area—a topic you might expect to read about dutifully, not for pleasure. But Dougherty has a gift for making complex policy problems both clear and compellingly readable, and for rendering his characters with unsentimental sympathy.”
—Jonathan Franzen, author of Crossroads

“A tour de force. It’s a rare book that mixes careful, nuanced reporting, painless economics lessons, interesting history of California, and pitch‐​perfect humor, but Dougherty has written one.”
—Cato Institute

“Dougherty, Bay Area native and an economics reporter for
The New York Times, is the exact right person to unpack the causes and consequences of housing cost insanity.
Golden Gates is a beautifully written piece of long-form journalism, as Dougherty takes us beyond the macroeconomic and policy forces that undergird the SF area housing crisis and introduces us to the people trying to solve a likely unsolvable problem.” —
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

“Dougherty investigates and interviews residents who share their own stories that prove that some gates may not ever be open for all—and that must change.”
—Gina Vaynshteyn, Apartment Therapy’s Must-Read Books of 2020

“[A] striking book about the history and politics of the dire housing shortage in San Francisco. [Dougherty] nimbly, and with significant humanity, covers a lot of ground.”
—Time

“Skillfully exploring everything from the yes in my backyard (YIMBY) movement, which promotes more housing development, to anti-gentrification activism, the normalization of homelessness, and the factors that have made it so prohibitively expensive to build anything new . . . [
Golden Gates] look[s] squarely at the politics of trying to respond to this disaster. By examining the inertia and ineffectiveness of political leaders who largely agree on what needs to be done, [Dougherty] makes a sobering case for how and why our politics have failed. While not so much a book of specific policy prescriptions,
Golden Gates helps clarify why we have a housing crisis in the first place.”
—Rachel M. Cohen, The Nation

“The Bay Area’s housing crisis is about more than exorbitant prices, and its multifaceted nature is reflected in the variety of stories Dougherty tells.”
—Sasha Perigo,

EAN: 9780525560210

Package Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches

Languages: English