Golden Gates Quotes

“zoning says a lot about who we are and who we are becoming. At least at the local level, zoning is democracy, and democracy is zoning.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“NIMBYism is so entrenched and rooted in nostalgia that you could propose new apartments on an abandoned lot and still have someone protest the building on the grounds that the abandoned lot “was the first place I got fingerbanged.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“Frieden used phrases like “arrogant,” “self-serving,” and “moral righteousness” to characterize the Bay Area’s land policies, and used example after example to call into question the region’s already-well-established reputation for progressive social policy.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“People who lived in trailers had an effective rent of $1,500 a month: one $50 ticket per day times thirty days.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“Two of Ed Glaeser’s former students published a paper that argued antigrowth land-use policies had raised housing costs to the point that zoning rules were now stunting American migration and raising inequality by making it prohibitively expensive for people who didn’t have a high-paying job or family money to move to cities where the best-paying jobs were growing fastest.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“Although local hostility to growth has attracted some national attention, very few reporters or researchers have connected it to the rising cost of new homes,” he”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“When something in society goes so wrong, that something is often a product of one very large agreement instead of the various small disagreements that consume the political sphere. Looming over the fights about which administration is to blame for housing becoming so unstable and what percentage increase this or that program is entitled to sits the inconsistency of America spending about $70 billion a year subsidizing homeownership through tax breaks like deferred taxes on capital gains and the mortgage interest deduction (MID), which allows homeowners to deduct the interest on their home loan from their federal income taxes. Together these tax breaks amount to a vast upper-middle-class welfare program that encourages people to buy bigger and more expensive houses, but because their biggest beneficiaries are residents of high-cost cities in deep blue redoubts like New York and California, even otherwise liberal politicians fight any attempt to reduce them. These programs are also entitlements that live on budgetary autopilot, meaning people get the tax breaks no matter how much they cost the government. Contrast that with programs like Section 8 rental vouchers, which cost about $20 billion a year, have been shown to be highly effective at reducing homelessness, and cost far less than the morally repugnant alternative of letting people live in tents and rot on sidewalks, consuming police resources and using the emergency room as a public hospital. That program has to be continually re-upped by Congress, and unlike middle-class homeowner programs, when the money runs out, it’s gone. This is why many big cities either have decades-long lines for rental vouchers or have closed those lines indefinitely on account of excess demand. The message of this dichotomy, which has persisted for decades regardless of which party is in charge and despite the mountains of evidence showing just how well these vouchers work, is that America is willing to subsidize as much debt as homeowners can gorge themselves on but that poor renters, the majority of whom live in market-rate apartments, are a penny-ante side issue unworthy of being prioritized.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“But this wasn’t so much inconsistency as an example of how voters were theoretically for civil rights at a vague national level yet would immediately draw the line when they were asked to desegregate their own city or neighborhood.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“Richard Nixon, then the vice president, highlighted a six-room model ranch house to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. “Soviet propaganda had been telling Russians in advance that the ranch house they would see at the U.S. exhibition was no more typical of workers’ homes in the U.S. than the Taj Mahal was typical in India or Buckingham Palace in Britain,” according to a Time magazine story.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“brothers reduced house building to a twenty-seven-step process in which single-task, unskilled and un-unionized workers only painted or only tiled or only hammered. They also vertically integrated their company to take control of their own concrete and timber production.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“had few other choices. And it was her “build everything” position, and SF BARF’s comfort with for-profit development generally, that put Sonja and her group in conflict with the city’s nonprofit establishment, which tended to look skeptically on any building that wasn’t 100 percent subsidized and tarred privately built apartments as “market-rate luxury housing.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“obvious reason—maybe because it’s small and in an old building that sits next to a truck depot. Actually, it refers to subsidized buildings that are built with help from the federal government and have apartments that are restricted to people who make below their area’s median income. You can’t find these places on Craigslist. People find them by demonstrating they have a middle to low annual income and then apply for one of a relative handful”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“name on a years-long list or a chance to enter a housing lottery that they have almost no chance of winning. Policy wonks referred to it as capital A Affordable Housing to make it clear that these units are part of a government program and not the naturally cheap apartments that most people imagine them to be.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“Developers claim to buy and sell land in a “free market,” even though the prices they pay and charge are dictated by how close a piece of land is to socially constructed goods and community institutions, and of course other people.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“To watch San Francisco politics is to watch a pair of twins argue passionately about which is better looking and has superior DNA.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“She also had a tendency to dismiss well-meaning but politically inviable ideas with phrases like “this is nothing but useless virtue signaling.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“A long-held theme of civil rights is big victories followed by crushing losses.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“America’s largest metro areas now had about thirty-seven affordable homes and apartments for every hundred very-low‐income renter households.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“Detroit was a hive of speculative investment and audacious start-up founders like Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, the Dodge brothers, and David Dunbar Buick.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

“the Bay Area region had created about eight new jobs for every new housing unit, way beyond the figure of one and a half jobs per housing unit that planners considered healthy.”
― Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America