Golden gates : fighting for housing in America / Conor Dougherty.

"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 where the homeless make their homes. 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 readers inside the activist uprisings that have risen in tandem with housing costs. To tell this new story of housing, Dougherty follows a struggling math teacher who builds a political movement dedicated to ending single-family-house neighborhoods. A teenage 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 housing for the homeless on an assembly line. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Golden Gates captures a vast political realignment during a moment of rapid technological and social change."-- Jacket.

"Cities are the engines of economic progress and the places that give birth to ideas that shape our lives. For generations, arriving in a major city was the first step toward the American Dream. But as housing costs skyrocket in job-rich cities across the nation, that door to opportunity is swinging shut. No place has felt this more acutely than the San Francisco Bay Area, where the mansions of tech billionaires stand streets away from encampments of cardboard. With riveting block-by-block reporting, New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty parses the history and economic forces that underlie the crisis from its epicenter. As rising rents and home prices have spread across the country, massive movements against single-family zoning and for tenants' rights have followed"-- Provided by publisher.