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.

Look at Dougherty’s chapter on the semirural Bay Area suburb of Lafayette. In 2011, it went nuclear over a proposal to build 14 buildings and 315 apartments. The developer, Dennis O’Brien, knew how protectionist Lafayette was; like so many other suburbs and cities within cities (Lakewood, Beverly Hills), Lafayette had incorporated, as Dougherty writes, expressly to “wrest land-use power from the county” — of Contra Costa — “and put a stop to growth.” It worked. While Lafayette’s population more than tripled between 1950 and 1965 (from 5,000 to 19,000), after its incorporation in 1968 it has stayed steady at 25,000. Residents decried O’Brien’s proposed project on the grounds of aesthetics, traffic congestion, protecting the school system and carcinogenic construction dust.

But O’Brien had been building in the Bay Area since the 1960s, and he had a plan. He notified the city that he intended to offer below-market rents and that if Lafayette opposed him, he would sue under the Housing Accountability Act. This was a forgotten law that Jerry Brown had signed at the end of his first tenure as governor in 1982. It allowed cities to be sued for thwarting high-density development.