“Dougherty, Bay Area native and an economics reporter for The New York Times, is the exact right person to unpack the causes and consequences of housing cost insanity. 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 But Dougherty has a gift for making complex policy problems both clear and compellingly readable, and for rendering his characters with unsentimental sympathy.” -Jonathan Franzen, author of Crossroads It focuses on the acute shortage of affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area-a topic you might expect to read about dutifully, not for pleasure. 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 movements that have risen in tandem with housing costs. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale. 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. 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.

Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity.

“Tells the story of housing in all its complexity.” -NPR Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.A Planetizen Top Urban Planning Book of 2020.Runner-Up General Nonfiction: San Francisco Book Festival.

Named A Must-Read Book of 2020 by Apartment Therapy.Named one of the 10 Best Business Books of 2020 by Fortune.Named a top 30 must-read Book of 2020 by the New York Post.Finalist for The New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

California Book Award Silver Medal in Nonfiction.A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

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