Conor Dougherty

Everything could be luxury housing
Protections for tenants for being cleansed
Hard left
The filtering fallacy
Sf - about people who live here vs invaders
No less immune to global forces
BARF no way to stop what was happening - entitled arrogance
Veneer of social justice
Libertarian fuckboy
Sarah mexana
America’s radioactive

Not building those new power stations
No industry
The destruction of California
The good intention of stopping sprawl
Ceqa
Jerry brown era of limits
Behind the facade of cultural hype
The home voter hypothesis

Prop 13
Lakewood and Compton

Rental vouchers vs mortgage interest deduction

Lytec credits
827 hill
Exclusionary zoning v displacement
Affordable housing can only live in 20 percent of city

Patronizing tone about voters in the trauss election campaign… (mer)

To be honest, I wish I'd liked this book. Why and how housing markets in the US have so quickly become unaffordable to so many people is a ripe topic for everyone, and it's clear that the San Francisco Bay Area is a prime example. Plus the author clearly did his homework on understanding the household-level scale of people that work hard and want to contribute to their communities but are outmatched by profit-seeking parties that are exponentially wealthier. And as a bonus, the topic has much relevance for both my professional and personal lives, as an urban planner in a very-high-cost market that can't afford a down payment on a house even after 10+ years of continuous professional employment and diligent savings.

Unfortunately, this title used a hyper-fixation on a handful of personalities and local elections as a vehicle for that story, and it didn't work for me. Yes, it's important what outspoken activists that are running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors propose to do about housing affordability. And yes, it matters how local communities organize to oppose the well-funded real estate lobby. But the most salient parts of what will become of housing politics in San Francisco and places like it were totally left out. Most important example: the person that actually won the election! We heard nothing about them or what their governance eventually did or didn't contribute to solving this problem, because that crucial part of the book was instead a minute-by-minute depiction of what the losing challenger did after the polls closed on Election Night. This needed an editor with a sense of what contributes to the book's overall point.… (mer)