S.F. native rethinks roots of gentrification
Journalist, raised in Noe Valley, offers firsthand analysis of city’s soaring housing costs in book
As much as the narrative about modern San
Francisco has revolved around drastic physical change, Conor Dougherty notices more the glaring lack of it. While certain parts of the city have indeed been altered, Dougherty, who lives in Oakland, doesn’t see much difference in places like Noe
Valley, where he was raised and where his parents still live in his childhood home.
This longterm stasis gave him a firsthand look at the reality of the housing crisis — that without more housing, the city and the Bay Area have only become astronomically more expensive. In his new book, “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in
America,” Dougherty, a reporter for the New York
Times, follows various people — the unwitting leader of the YIMBY movement, the city planner of an East Bay suburb, a family displaced by private speculators — caught up in the crisis, while examining the decades of policy and societal change that have led us here.
The author spoke with The Chronicle about the complex realities of housing, the primary obstacles we face and why the term “gentrifier” is unproductive.
Q: There are many assumptions around the housing crisis that your book shatters. What is the most common misconception in how we think about housing?
A: One misconception is how displacement works. A lot of people just assume that when someone gets priced out of an affordable apartment — basically, an investor comes in, buys the apartment and then jacks the rent up — that the person who is going to move in is going to be a tech employee. That is not always the case, it’s even not mostly the case. A lot of times what happens is basically lowcost housing becomes midcost housing, expensive housing becomes more expensive housing, but not astronomically expensive housing. A lot of times, when tenants get displaced, they’re replaced by other tenants in similarly situated professions. Sometimes there’s this misconception that gentrification moves in a linear line, and I just don’t think it does.
Q: Gentrification is entangled in this long arc of policy decisions that led to our modern predicament. This starts with a massive postwar redevelopment effort in California in the ’50s that displaced black neighborhoods and set off a gradually profound chain of events.
A: Redevelopment has a bad name, for good reason, but what I found when I started researching the history of it more is that it’s not like a bunch of people in the 1950s were like, “How do we go destroy a bunch of black neighborhoods?” Maybe there were some people like that, but urban housing did need to be rebuilt then. A lot of people wanted it to be rebuilt. The question was for whom and how.
Over time, people started to really worry about stopping freeways, stopping runaway development. And those fights were good. They should’ve stopped the freeway over Golden Gate Park. But over time, it kind of became, “Let’s stop everything, or let’s make everything as difficult as humanly possible because we don’t want another Geary Boulevard and another Embarcadero Freeway.” So there was so much bad development that developers couldn’t essentially be trusted anymore and we had this overreaction.
Q: That overreaction led to a lot of zoning and landuse regulation that heavily impedes any development. But even now, opening up that regulation is still often opposed by those like NIMBYs, even though there seems to be a consensus that building more housing is necessary.
A: If we want to build stuff where people already live, it’s going to be harder, and sometimes for good reason. It’s a pain in the ass when people build things near you. It’s quite disruptive. It’s not like these are hollow complaints. But if we’re going to be serious about building more density, reducing driving, making it easier for more people to live near jobs, I think that we’re going to have to buy into it. What the mayor is doing with this ballot initiative and what Scott Wiener did with SB35, I think that philosophically those are positive steps because they kind of invert the idea of inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning basically says, I’m going to put you through all these hurdles to build your thing, and one of those hurdles is you have to have 20% of your units, whatever it is (as affordable, subsidized units). Instead, this philosophy is: I will relieve you of a lot of those hurdles if you will reach a certain total (of affordable units).
Q: Alongside NIMBYs, and sometimes in alliance with them, antigentrification activists often oppose development outside of affordable housing. Do you agree with this stance?
A: If we’re going to solve the housing problem, we are going to need less scarcity. So any policy that results in scarcity persisting is not going to work. I don’t think it’s possible to build housing for just some people. Do I agree with the idea that radically affordable housing is what we should primarily focus on? Yes ... (but) the affordable housing system and the marketrate systems are inextricably tied together. People may not like that, but it’s reality. The same construction unions that build marketrate housing build affordable housing. Often the same developers built them. The same banks financed them. We also use marketrate housing to fund affordable housing.
If we want to build affordable housing, which we do, the policy toolkit, aside from subsidizing it, is not going to be that much different from the policy toolkit for marketrate housing. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s all sorts of other things we can do with community land trusts and all these other things, like the Moms 4 Housing plan. Those are all great plans, but they all involve raising money. Q: The Moms 4 Housing movement resulted in the sale of a house to the Oakland Community Land Trust, but it was mainly public pressure that forced owners to make a less profitable decision. Do you see this case as leading toward something bigger? A: My only question is how you scale that model so that it helps tens of thousands of people. And the best answer is start thinking like an investor. Sister Cristina (a character in the book who raises money to buy properties and dedicate them toward affordable housing) managed to get a building back because she was the highest bidder. That is expensive. This is why Moms 4 Housing is so great. People who do philanthropy and other things like that might see this as an option now. In that sense, bringing attention to community land trusts — nobody can do that enough. Also, I don’t see why affordable funds that go toward building shouldn’t go toward buying. I don’t see any reason why community land trusts shouldn’t be happening more. The only way to do it is to either use public money or philanthropic money.
Another thing we could do — this would really freak people out — is we could use public land. There’s nothing stopping the city of San Francisco from redeveloping some of its own buildings. If we’re really going to think radically and revolutionary, then we have to think about things that haven’t been done before. There is nothing preventing us from using public assets more effectively. There’s all sorts of stuff you could do, but it would never fundamentally change the rub, which is that the neighbors would flip out. I think that we could find enough money to solve this problem, if we can find the will to solve the problem.
Q: The book focuses a lot on the YIMBY movement, which early on was dogmatically probuilding at all levels. That initial philosophy might be seen as key to solving the housing crisis. On the other hand, they are also accused of being agents of gentrification. Do you see that claim as valid?
A: Nobody gets to choose who is and is not a gentrifier. People who move to a place that doesn’t have enough housing, wherever they’re from, are inevitably going to contribute to that. Whether or not you want to put them into a political bucket that you generally associate with gentrification, they are all contributing.
Gentrification is a huge problem, but it is ultimately a problem of scarcity, and I think it is sometimes disingenuous for people to show up to San Francisco three, four, five, even 10 years ago and anoint themselves warriors of gentrification but not participants in it. Ultimately, this is a math problem.
Q: It seems defining the lines around that label is beside the point.
A: If what we want is for there to be more equity and more opportunity and affordability, creating a framework where some people are gentrifiers and some people aren’t detracts from the conversation.
The real enemy in this whole process is apathy. Even though the YIMBY movement has obviously grown, the number of people who show up to a Board of Supervisors meeting is still pretty small. The number of people who care at all about housing policy is still pretty small. The vast majority of people are people who show up, go live their lives and just kind of say, “It’s not my problem.”
Q: How do you then look toward the future of this crisis?
A: The ethos that many of these younger people have absorbed, which is that they want to solve this problem and that they are willing to make big sacrifices in how cities and neighborhoods look to do it — that is a force that can’t really be stopped at this point. It may not happen this year. And it may not happen the year after that, but it’s going to happen. The Baby Boomers built a world in their image, and it’s safe to say the Millennials will do the same thing. What that will look like, I think we’re getting indications right now: It will be more dense, it will be less carcentric. There’s a lot more young adults in the world, and they are going to vote and they are going to push policies, and they’re going to eventually win.