The White Problem in Planning
GO LDE N GATE S: Fighting for Housing in America
AUTHOR/ CONOR DOUGHERTY Review by Nora Louise Schwaller
There is no state where an individual working a full-time minimumwage job can afford a one-bedroom housing unit without paying in excess of 30% of their income, the standard benchmark for affordability. While stagnant wage growth has contributed to this issue, an increasing imbalance between supply and demand in the housing market is a major feature of the problem. In Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, Conor Dougherty focuses on the evergrowing housing shortage by sharing stories from those living in the cities of the Bay Area, California. In doing this, Dougherty lends insight into the economics, laws, history, and human experiences behind the rising housing prices and reasons why ‘The Rent is Too Damn High’. Dougherty is well suited to this task. He is both a Bay Area native and current resident. He works as an economics reporter for the New York Times, focusing on the West Coast, real estate, and wage stagnation. His experience allows him to write with both the sober perspective of a researcher and the insight of someone who has lived in the midst of this evolving crisis. This background gives him credible authority to note that he has never seen it quite so bad. In San Francisco, the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is $2,650. Dougherty delves into the history of how we got here with clear-sighted nuance. The real-life characters in his book veer to polarized ends of the debate (e.g., affordable housing advocates who don’t want to see developers make a profit, or local residents who use racist dog-whistle comments to discuss the “horrors” of new housing construction). However, Dougherty balances the risks of displacement and homelessness with the practicalities of having the means to make money in and from a competitive housing market. In doing so, he gives fair consideration to those who often become the local villains of housing scarcity – the techies in their Google Buses, the developers, and suburban natives – by contextualizing them in the biases and incentive structures of local governments that often limit dense construction.
Island Press, 2019. 235 Pages.
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Dougherty anchors his book with Sonja Trauss, the founder of the Yes in My Back Yard (YIMBY) activism movement. The book
