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63
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
56/100Critics
43/100Scholars
90/100Author:
Conor Dougherty
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
February 18, 2020
New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty parses the history and economic forces that underlie our national housing crisis from its epicenter in San Francisco, profiling activists with San Francisco Bay Area Renters' Federation, politicians, and developers. As rising rents and home prices have spread across the country, massive movements against single-family zoning and for tenants' rights have followed.
What The Reviewers Say
Though the entire book builds toward [Sonja] Trauss’s political ascent, Dougherty ends with a tear-filled post-election party. Despite Dougherty’s compelling reporting on SFBARF and Trauss, his book’s ending feels less than satisfying. Perhaps a lack of resolution to Golden Gates is fitting for such a seemingly intractable problem as affordable housing. Dougherty was the right reporter in the right place to capture the human stories at the heart of this dreadful irony. Despite its setbacks, SFBARF may be the start of a political breakthrough—or it might just leave us with more luxury housing and vomiting anarchists..
... is both an empathetic portrait of all sides — legislators, developers, pro-housing and anti-gentrification activists — as well as a masterly primer on the fight for new construction in California.
Golden Gates , a new book on the housing crisis by New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty, dives straight into these problems, 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.
The story of activist turned candidate for local office Sonja Trauss bookends this well-reported and well-documented, not to mention fascinating, treatment of a topic that Dougherty convincingly argues is critical to equity and stability in America.
