Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty
In 2014, a nervous young woman living in Oakland stood in front of a microphone in the middle of an almost eight-hour long meeting of the San Francisco Planning Commission. “I’m Sonja Trauss,” she said when her turn came to speak about the proposed new building in the run-down Tenderloin neighborhood. “I’m just a member of the public, and I’m here because there is a housing shortage in San Francisco.”
In his new book Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, the New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty delivers the first major book treatment of how Trauss helped spark the rise of YIMBY-ism, a movement in favor of more housing and development in order to ameliorate the rise of homelessness and lack of affordable housing.
At the beginning, it was not clear that Trauss would be able to find a constituency for her activism. New housing inevitably means construction noise, increased traffic , and lower property values for homeowners.
But in the Bay Area, where San Francisco has added eight to ten new jobs for every new unit of housing since the Great Recession, and where homeowners in upper middle class suburbs fight tooth and nail against new construction, the housing crisis had grown to such a magnitude that the unorganized, many of them young millennials, have finally gotten organized. Dougherty details in granular scope their victories — like winning the election of several allies to the state legislature — and defeats, including a punishing loss when Trauss ran for supervisor in San Francisco.
The housing crisis has many facets, which Dougherty admirably chooses to explore. His time spent with a nun-turned-real-estate investor attempting to stave off evictions of poor people is heartrending, although his chapter on prefabricated housing is less interesting — more of an extended “what if” than a promising avenue for change.
The questions of what gets built where — and who lives where — are not just at the center of local politics, but at the center of our lived experiences. In his treatment of the first, Dougherty offers a work as good as the previous standard on San Francisco politics, Richard E. DeLeon’s 1992 book Left Coast City. But in Dougherty’s rendering of how a new generation of city dwellers has come to the realization that something is deeply wrong with how our housing system works and that it falls to them to fix it, his book has no equal. Get your copy. —Scott Lucas
