The New York Times, February 14, 2020: Where America’s Fight for Housing Is an All-Out War
GOLDEN GATES
Fighting for Housing in America
By Conor Dougherty
In California, more than 100,000 people sleep on the streets. The tent cities in Los Angeles’s skid row have distinct neighborhoods, and across from a homelessness center, the bodies on the sidewalk are four rows deep. Trailers line the streets near Google’s Mountain View headquarters, and in Modesto, a woman sleeping in a cardboard box was crushed to death by a front loader that came to clear her encampment away.
It’s hard to overstate how dire California’s housing crisis is. To combat it, policymakers must consider a complicated intersection of issues, including the displacement of vulnerable populations, maintaining the character of neighborhoods, the environment, affordability. But there’s only one answer: more housing. To end the crisis, 3.5 million new homes must be built. However, as Conor Dougherty shows in “Golden Gates,” his study of the housing shortage plaguing San Francisco, America’s most prosperous city, the Bay Area is beset by hypocritical homeowners and the paradoxes of progressivism. Too often the important issues aren’t so much weighed as weaponized in the war against new development. Dougherty has covered this quagmire extensively for The New York Times, and “Golden Gates” 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.
