Dougherty also introduces teenage tenant Stephanie Hernandez and her mom Sandy whose fight to defend their apartment in the face of a 45% rent increase illustrates one of the central realities of the housing shortage.You’ll meet Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, housing developers Rick Holliday and Dennis O’Brien, and Scott Wiener, the six-foot-seven California State Senator from San Francisco who has become the point person for housing reform legislation in Sacramento.Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty (2020) 388 pages ★★★★★ If you live in this area, you may be familiar with some of the people Dougherty highlights: It’s a lively account focusing on individual people (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) who are playing key roles in addressing the challenge of homelessness.

But if you want to know how to sort through the myths and misconceptions about housing and homelessness in America, a great place to start is Conor Dougherty’s outstanding new book, Golden Gates.ĭougherty’s book is no dry academic treatise. Here - I’m writing from Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco - you’re likely to hear any one of a number of explanations for how things have gotten so bad. And nowhere is it more severe than in California’s metropolitan cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The problem has been half a century in the making, but it’s gotten far, far worse during the past decade.

Walk around almost any big American city long enough and you run the risk of tripping over some homeless person sprawled on the sidewalk.

Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty