golden gates fighting for housing in america

“I believe, regrettably, that this will require some sort of state or federal action that leaves local governments with wide discretion over land-use decisions but still requires each community to accept its fair share of regional housing needs,” he told his fellow economics graduates during his speech.Ī few months later, Sonja Trauss was born in Philadelphia. In terms of policy, however, very little changed. Katz, a University of California, Berkeley, senior who is now a labor economist at Harvard, echoed the Times’ sentiment with a commencement speech that bewailed the Bay Area’s growing housing-supply problems and drew on research that Katz had done with a Berkeley professor named Kenneth Rosen. In 1981, a New York Times headline blared: “Changing San Francisco Is Foreseen as a Haven for Wealthy and Childless.” That same year, Lawrence F. Frieden’s book inspired economists and the press to study and talk about the nation’s growing housing shortage. “They are unorganized, and probably unorganizable.”Īnd for decades it was true: unorganized and unorganizable. “The review process is highly political, and the people with the greatest stake in its outcome-housing consumers-play no part in it,” he wrote about local housing policies. The first prominent mention of it came two years after the 1977 Time article, when an MIT planning professor named Bernard Frieden published a book called The Environmental Protection Hustle, which was one of the first works to identify not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiment as an obstacle to constructing new homes. This problem has been vexing policy makers since the very beginning of the housing shortage. Read: This is what happens after a neighborhood gets gentrified In many of the country’s most economically vibrant areas, existing homeowners-who have a financial stake of their own-pressure their local governments into blocking any new construction. But it’s crucial to solving the housing-affordability crisis gripping much of the country. Organizing people who don’t yet live somewhere is a seemingly impossible task. People who lose when new housing is blocked don’t even know that they themselves are victims. Aside from developers-whose financial stake in getting houses and apartments built looks like a conflict of interest-the members of a pro-housing political constituency are difficult to identify. This article is adapted from Conor Dougherty’s recent book.īut, as the 1977 Time cover shows, the lack of moderately priced housing, while never as severe as it is now, is a decades-old problem-and a problem that has resisted myriad efforts to solve it.

Golden gates fighting for housing in america