Penguin Publishing Group Golden Gates

“[I] seriously admir[ed Golden Gates]. It focuses on the acute shortage of affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area—a topic you might expect to read about dutifully, not for pleasure. But Dougherty has a gift for making complex policy problems both clear and compellingly readable, and for rendering his characters with unsentimental sympathy.” —Jonathan Franzen, author of Crossroads “A tour de force. It’s a rare book that mixes careful, nuanced reporting, painless economics lessons, interesting history of California, and pitch‐​perfect humor, but Dougherty has written one.” —Cato Institute “Dougherty; Bay Area native and an economics reporter for The New York Times, is the exact right person to unpack the causes and consequences of housing cost insanity. Golden Gates is a beautifully written piece of long-form journalism, as Dougherty takes us beyond the macroeconomic and policy forces that undergird the SF area housing crisis and introduces us to the people trying to solve a likely unsolvable problem.” — Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed “Dougherty investigates and interviews residents who share their own stories that prove that some gates may not ever be open for all—and that must change.” —Gina Vaynshteyn, Apartment Therapy’s Must-Read Books of 2020 “[A] striking book about the history and politics of the dire housing shortage in San Francisco. [Dougherty] nimbly, and with significant humanity, covers a lot of ground.” —Time “Skillfully exploring everything from the yes in my backyard (YIMBY) movement, which promotes more housing development, to anti-gentrification activism, the normalization of homelessness, and the factors that have made it so prohibitively expensive to build anything new . . . [ Golden Gates] look[s] squarely at the politics of trying to respond to this disaster. By examining the inertia and ineffectiveness of political leaders who largely agree on what needs to be done, [Dougherty] makes a sobering case for how and why our politics have failed. While not so much a book of specific policy prescriptions, Golden Gates helps clarify why we have a housing crisis in the first place.” —Rachel M. Cohen, The Nation “The Bay Area’s housing crisis is about more than exorbitant prices, and its multifaceted nature is reflected in the variety of stories Dougherty tells.” —Sasha Perigo, Curbed “Deeply reported and complete . . . The beat-by-beat developments of California’s decades-long growth of income inequality are presented with sharp detail and an even, measured tone. Like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (also excellent, and a great pairing with this book), Golden Gates makes a broader argument by staying very tight on the story of a series of people, rather than policy.” — Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves “Sweeping . . . a subtle appeal against tribalism.” — The New Yorker “For a compelling and accessible overview of [California's] housing crisis, there is no better book than Conor Dougherty’s Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in... ...