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Golden Gates
- Fighting for Housing in America
- Narrated by: Conor Dougherty
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
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Golden Gates
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Publisher's Summary
A Time 100 Must-Read Book of 2020 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • California Book Award Silver Medal in Nonfiction • Finalist for The New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism • Named a top 30 must-read Book of 2020 by the New York Post • Named one of the 10 Best Business Books of 2020 by Fortune • Named A Must-Read Book of 2020 by Apartment Therapy • Runner-Up General Nonfiction: San Francisco Book Festival • A Planetizen Top Urban Planning Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice
“Tells the story of housing in all its complexity.” (NPR)
Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. 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. 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. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale.
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.
What the critics say
"The cost of buying a single-family home or even renting a small apartment in a convenient, desirable location is one of the most pervasive conundrums facing Americans today. Perhaps no other phenomenon drives income inequality as starkly as housing.... While Dougherty provides plenty of macro-level research about housing across the nation - and especially in San Francisco - the major strength of the narrative occurs at the micro level...poignant and thought-provoking.... A readable, eye-opening exploration." (Kirkus)
"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 best-selling author of Bad Blood)
"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)