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Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty
Published in February 2020
Whenever I hear from a colleague that they are taking an academic job in California, my question to them is always the same. "How are you going to afford the housing?"
Increasingly, the question of housing costs for academics is not limited to residents of the Golden State. The cost to purchase or rent a house or an apartment in close proximity to a growing number of urban colleges and universities has skyrocketed in recent years.
How do faculty or staff who are not independently wealthy afford to live in reasonable commuting distance from schools in Boston or NYC or D.C. or Seattle or Portland or Miami? Even previously affordable university cities, such as Austin and Denver and Philadelphia and Atlanta and Chicago and Minneapolis and Nashville and Baltimore and Dallas and Charleston, have seen their housing costs increase.
The best place to understand why housing prices have so far outstripped wage growth, and why housing demand has grown faster than supply in cities with good jobs (including academic jobs), is to study Northern California. Nowhere have housing prices, and rental costs, increased more rapidly than in San Francisco and its surrounding towns.
Conor 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. Golden Gates is a beautifully written piece of long-form journalism, as Dougherty takes us beyond the macroeconomic and policy forces that undergird the SF area housing crisis and introduces us to the people trying to solve a likely unsolvable problem.
In Golden Gates, we meet activists agitating for more building (the YIMBYs -- for yes in my backyard), politicians fighting for and against more affordable housing, and builders struggling to bring down building costs. (We learn in Golden Gates why it is usually more expensive to build no-frills state-subsidized affordable housing than high-end and amenity-rich market-rate housing.)
One of the take-home messages of Golden Gates is that, absent a concerted government policy to create affordable housing, that there is little probability that the housing cost crisis will abate. Too many people are moving to the Bay Area to take the good jobs that are created directly or indirectly by the technology sector, while too few new single-family homes or rental units are coming on the market to serve this influx.
While reading Golden Gates, I kept thinking about if colleges and universities located in superstar urban areas are going to be forced to put faculty/staff housing at the top of their agendas. (Of if they already have?)
Will housing prices drive big increases in academic telecommuting? Will universities build more housing units for their faculty and staff? What other books can you recommend about the economics and politics of housing costs? How have rising housing and rental prices impacted your academic career choices and actions?
What are you reading?
