Suddenly, housing was on the national agenda.Īnyone seeking a political remedy to the housing problem would do well to read Conor Dougherty’s “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America,” a painstakingly researched and penetrating analysis of the economic and political forces behind America’s most dysfunctional housing market: San Francisco. Large homeless camps were sprouting up near the centers of once-affordable cities, from Austin, Texas, to Minneapolis to Seattle. Rents had jumped so high in some cities that teachers, firefighters and schoolteachers could no longer afford to live near their work. That changed abruptly over the past year, as the consequences of the nation’s affordable housing crisis became too visible to ignore.

The fact that America’s urban landscape was undergoing a radical shift - in which millions of young and middle-class Americans were being priced out of large cities because of runaway housing prices - was still overshadowed by more immediate concerns, like rising health care costs and the loss of factory jobs. For much of the past two decades, the question of how to resolve America’s acute shortage of affordable housing has been strikingly absent from the dominant national discourse.Įven after a trillion dollars in bad mortgages nearly blew up the nation’s financial system, presidential candidates in the 20 elections did not release detailed housing plans.

Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty