With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty chronicles America’s housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking listeners inside the activist movements that have risen in tandem with housing costs.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.
The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties of the homeless. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. “Tells the story of housing in all its complexity.” (NPR) Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.A Planetizen Top Urban Planning Book of 2020.Runner-Up General Nonfiction: San Francisco Book Festival.Named A Must-Read Book of 2020 by Apartment Therapy.Named one of the 10 Best Business Books of 2020 by Fortune.Named a top 30 must-read Book of 2020 by the New York Post.Finalist for The New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.California Book Award Silver Medal in Nonfiction.A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
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