Summary of Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Planning Commission in San Francisco was bombarded with comments from an angry young woman named Sonja Trauss who supported every project under consideration, as well as more housing in general.
#2 Sonja Trauss, a high school math teacher, spoke at a city meeting in favor of housing, claiming to be just a member of the public. She was actually a grad school dropout who had moved to the Bay Area because she was too embarrassed to go back home and explain why she didn’t have a PhD.
#3 Sonja had never had a stable career, having graduated from law school and then dropping out. She’d been a bike messenger, a window washer, and a legal aide. She’d spent a year organizing friends and sewing spandex costumes as part of the founding of a thirty-person comedy troupe.
#4 In San Francisco, Sonja lived in a house with cheap artist and musician roommates, who turned the place into a subcultural melting pot. The Bay Area’s tech boom in the 1990s was defined by political activism and the struggle of just being there.

Sujets

• Sociology
• Urban

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 09 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669352716
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Planning Commission in San Francisco was bombarded with comments from an angry young woman named Sonja Trauss who supported every project under consideration, as well as more housing in general.

#2

Sonja Trauss, a high school math teacher, spoke at a city meeting in favor of housing, claiming to be just a member of the public. She was actually a grad school dropout who had moved to the Bay Area because she was too embarrassed to go back home and explain why she didn’t have a PhD.

#3

Sonja had never had a stable career, having graduated from law school and then dropping out. She’d been a bike messenger, a window washer, and a legal aide. She’d spent a year organizing friends and sewing spandex costumes as part of the founding of a thirty-person comedy troupe.

#4

In San Francisco, Sonja lived in a house with cheap artist and musician roommates, who turned the place into a subcultural melting pot. The Bay Area’s tech boom in the 1990s was defined by political activism and the struggle of just being there.

#5

The problem was not too many jobs, but too little housing. Sonja grew up in a three-story house in Germantown with enough rooms to test your vocabulary, and she found it shocking how flat Bay Area cities seemed given how much it cost to live there.

#6

American cities are shaped by zoning and land-use rules, which were designed to separate what can be built where. These rules are so central to how American cities look and operate that they have become a sort of geographic DNA that forms our opinion of what is proper and right.

#7

The Fairfax was a stately brick building with portico balconies and an arched entryway that was advertised for a most discriminating class of prospective tenants. But by the mid-1980s, it was in the hands of a pair of debt-burdened investors who presided over an ignominious period of burned-out lightbulbs and unanswered tenant complaints.

#8

When Sonja and her boyfriend went out in San Francisco to protest the exorbitant cost of housing, they would loudly agree that the Bay Area didn’t have enough housing. The bus protesters were right to be angry about rent, but they were focusing on the wrong things.

#9

It is easy to blame local politicians for creating the perfect conditions for punitive housing costs and a frenzied market, but this is what they have done. It is hard to hold them accountable when you consider that behind each job is someone like Sonja, a local teacher.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Sonja Trauss’s campaign was a prime example of how housing affordability can be improved through local policies. Frieden’s book The Environmental Protection Hustle was a 1979 critique of the Bay Area’s land policies that could raise housing costs for entry-level buyers.

#2

For years, newspapers have run headlines about the American Dream becoming an American nightmare, and how the Bay Area isn’t planning on building enough houses to accommodate its growing population.

#3

As the 1960s drew to a close, America was in the midst of a vast realignment that was fundamentally altering where we live, how we work, and the structure of our families. The early markers were all there.

#4

There is an arc to technological progress, and it goes something like this. A group of people start playing around with a new invention that has the potential to make them and society richer by solving a big problem that currently requires a lot of work. Investors rush in, companies compete like mad, a handful of those companies win, and jobs that once required a large labor force are either automated by machinery or moved to cheaper places.

#5

The golden age of cities is when companies want to be located at the beginning of a technological leap. This is because cities are where people want to be when they are struggling to figure something out, and they want to be around similarly occupied people.

#6

All of these trends met in the dense confines of cities, where tech and finance workers sought the face-to-face contact that fuels creativity, and lower-paying service professions sought the higher-paid employees who could afford massages, gym classes, and frequent restaurant meals.