This is Now: Conor Dougherty on Housing

Organizer: Kepler's Literary Foundation

We all know, in a deeply personal way, that the Bay Area is embroiled in a housing crisis. Is the entire country destined to follow suit? Oakland-based New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty is nationally regarded for his work on housing scarcity and the national economy. This ideal reporter blends propulsive storytelling and boots-on-the-ground investigation with the new Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.

Owning a spacious home used to be an attainable American Dream... now the ability or inability to acquire living space is the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more apparent than San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.

In his sweeping account, Dougherty follows a struggling math teacher who builds a political movement dedicated to ending single-family-house neighborhoods. A teenaged girl who leads her apartment complex against their rent-raising landlord. A nun who tries to outmaneuver private equity investors by amassing a multimillion-dollar portfolio of affordable homes. A suburban bureaucrat who roguishly embraces density in response to the threat of climate change. A developer who manufactures homeless housing on an assembly line.

In an interview by Angie Coiro for our This is Now series, Kepler's Literary Foundation invites you to hear Conor Dougherty reveal the mechanics behind the most vital part of our lives: a home to return to at the end of each day. What lays ahead in the housing crisis?

“Golden Gates is a terrific work of explanatory journalism. If you want to understand the colliding forces that have turned the San Francisco Bay Area into a housing powder keg and threaten to engulf many more cities across the country, you need to read this book.”—John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood