Review:
Golden Gates, by Conor Dougherty
| Publisher: |
Penguin |
| Copyright: |
2020 |
| ISBN: |
0-525-56022-X |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
249 |
This review, for reasons that will hopefully become clear later, starts
with a personal digression.
I have been interested in political theory my entire life. That sounds
like something admirable, or at least neutral. It's not. "Interested"
means that I have opinions that are generally stronger than my depth of
knowledge warrants. "Interested" means that I like thinking about and
casting judgment on how politics should be done without doing the work of
politics myself. And "political theory" is different than politics in
important ways, not the least of which is that political actions have
rarely been a direct danger to me or my family. I have the luxury of
arguing about politics as a theory.
In short, I'm at high risk of being one of those people who has an opinion
about everything and shares it on Twitter.
I'm still in the process (to be honest, near the beginning of the process)
of making something useful out of that interest. I've had some success
when I become enough a part of a community that I can do some of the
political work, understand the arguments at a level deeper than theory,
and have to deal with the consequences of my own opinions. But those
communities have been on-line and relatively low stakes. For the big
political problems, the ones that involve governments and taxes and laws,
those that decide who gets medical treatment and income support and who
doesn't, to ever improve, more people like me need to learn enough about
the practical details that we can do the real work of fixing them, rather
than only making our native (and generally privileged) communities better
for ourselves.
I haven't found my path helping with that work yet. But I do have a
concrete, challenging, local political question that makes me coldly
furious: housing policy. Hence this book.
Golden Gates is about housing policy in the notoriously underbuilt
and therefore incredibly expensive San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.
I wanted to deepen that emotional reaction to the failures of housing
policy with facts and analysis.
Golden Gates does provide some of
that. But this also turns out to be a book about the translation of
political theory into practice, about the messiness and conflict that
results, and about the difficult process of measuring success. It's also
a book about how substantial agreement on the basics of necessary
political change can still founder on the shoals of prioritization,
tribalism, and people who are interested in political theory.
In short, it's a book about the difficulty of changing the world instead
of arguing about how to change it.
This is not a direct analysis of housing policy, although Dougherty
provides the basics as background. Rather, it's the story of the
political fight over housing told primarily through two lenses: Sonja
Trauss, founder of BARF (the Bay Area Renters' Federation); and a Redwood
City apartment complex, the people who fought its rent increases, and the
nun who eventually purchased it. Around that framework, Dougherty writes
about the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the history of
California's Proposition 13, a fight over a development in Lafayette, the
logistics challenge of constructing sufficient housing even when approved,
and the political career of Scott Wiener, the hated opponent of every city
fighting for the continued ability to arbitrarily veto any new housing.
One of the things
Golden Gates helped clarify for me is that there
are three core interest groups that have to be part of any discussion of
Bay Area housing: homeowners who want to limit or eliminate local change,
renters who are vulnerable to gentrification and redevelopment, and the
people who want to live in that area and can't (which includes people who
want to move there, but more sympathetically includes all the people who
work there but can't afford to live locally, such as teachers, day care
workers, food service workers, and, well, just about anyone who doesn't
work in tech). (As with any political classification, statements about
collectives may not apply to individuals; there are numerous people who
appear to fall into one group but who vote in alignment with another.)
Dougherty makes it clear that housing policy is intractable in part
because the policies that most clearly help one of those three groups hurt
the other two.
As advertised by the subtitle, Dougherty's focus is on the fight for more
housing. Those who already own homes whose values have been inflated by
artificial scarcity, or who want to preserve such stratified living
conditions as low-density, large-lot single-family dwellings within short
mass-transit commute of one of the densest cities in the United States,
don't get a lot of sympathy or focus here except as opponents. I
understand this choice; I also don't have much sympathy. But I do wish
that Dougherty had spent more time discussing the unsustainable promise
that California has implicitly made to homeowners: housing may be
impossibly expensive, but if you can manage to reach that pinnacle of
financial success, the ongoing value of your home is guaranteed. He does
mention this in passing, but I don't think he puts enough emphasis on the
impact that a single huge, illiquid investment that is heavily encouraged
by government policy has on people's attitude towards anything that
jeopardizes that investment.
The bulk of this book focuses on the two factions trying to make housing
cheaper: Sonja Trauss and others who are pushing for construction of more
housing, and tenant groups trying to manage the price of existing housing
for those who have to rent. The tragedy of Bay Area housing is that even
the faintest connection of housing to the economic principle of supply and
demand implies that the long-term goals of those two groups align.
Building more housing will decrease the cost of housing, at least if you
build enough of it over a long enough period of time. But in the short
term, particularly given the amount of Bay Area land pre-emptively
excluded from housing by environmental protection and the actions of the
existing homeowners, building more housing usually means tearing down
cheap lower-density housing and replacing it with expensive higher-density
housing. And that destroys people's lives.
I'll admit my natural sympathy is with Trauss on pure economic grounds.
There simply aren't enough places to live in the Bay Area, and the number
of people in the area will not decrease. To the marginal extent that
growth even slows, that's another tale of misery involving "super
commutes" of over 90 minutes each way. But the most affecting part of
this book was the detailed look at what redevelopment looks like for the
people who thought they had housing, and how it disrupts and destroys
existing communities. It's impossible to read those stories and not be
moved. But it's equally impossible to not be moved by the stories of
people who live in their cars during the week, going home only on weekends
because they have to live too far away from their jobs to commute.
This is exactly the kind of politics that I lose when I take a superficial
interest in political theory. Even when I feel confident in a guiding
principle, the hard part of real-world politics is bringing real people
with you in the implementation and mitigating the damage that any choice
of implementation will cause. There are a lot of details, and those
details matter. Without the right balance between addressing a long-term
deficit and providing short-term protection and relief, an attempt to
alleviate unsustainable long-term misery creates more short-term misery
for those least able to afford it. And while I personally may have less
sympathy for the relatively well-off who have clawed their way into their
own mortgage, being cavalier with their goals and their financial needs is
both poor ethics and poor politics. Mobilizing political opponents who
have resources and vote locally isn't a winning strategy.
Dougherty is a reporter, not a housing or public policy expert, so
Golden Gates poses problems and tells stories rather than describes
solutions. This book didn't lead me to a brilliant plan for fixing the
Bay Area housing crunch, or hand me a roadmap for how to get effectively
involved in local politics. What it did do is tell stories about what
political approaches have worked, how they've worked, what change they've
created, and the limitations of that change. Solving political problems
is work. That work requires understanding people and balancing concerns,
which in turn requires a lot of empathy, a lot of communication, and
sometimes finding a way to make unlikely allies.
I'm not sure how broad the appeal of this book will be outside of those
who live in the region. Some aspects of the fight for housing generalize,
but the Bay Area (and I suspect every region) has properties specific to
it or to the state of California. It has also reached an extreme of
housing shortage that is rivaled in the United States only by New York
City, which changes the nature of the solutions. But if you want to
seriously engage with Bay Area housing policy, knowing the background
explained here is nearly mandatory. There are some flaws I wish
Dougherty would have talked more about traffic and transit policy,
although I realize that could be another book but this is an important
story told well.
If this somewhat narrow topic is within your interests, highly
recommended.
Rating: 8 out of 10
The 
For way too long now something I had meant to start was a little series about tips, tricks, tools, and toys. I had mentioned the idea a few times to a friend or two, and generally received a thumbs up or a go for it . But it takes a little to get over the humb and get going. And it turns out that last week s 
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during April 2020 (
A