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editor at Large of Recode. You may know me as someone who finally saved up enough money to buy a new house in San Francisco. It's a three square foot house made of Legos, but in my spare time, I'm just a reporter and you're listening to Rico Decode a podcast about power change and the people you need to know around Tech and beyond were part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Today in the Red Chair is Contador, Ity and economics and housing reporter for The New York Times. He's the author of a new book about economic inequality called Golden Gates. Fighting for Housing in America. It explains the causes and effects of the housing crisis in San Francisco and asked if this city is really the model for the future of the country. Connor, welcome to Rico decodes. Thank you so much. We know each other. You've been covering a topic that's near and dear to my heart, but something I'm super interested in,

and there's lots of ways we're gonna go here. But let's start first about how you decided to do this. You've been working at the Times doing a lot of different things. Correct? You hadn't been covering this.

I was originally high. So I covered housing for 10 years for the Wall Street Journal Economics and Housing. And I was hired to cover Google. Remember at the Times and I did that for maybe all of 18 months. I probably shouldn't say this, but I was not the best corporate reporter.

I was

really proud of some of my stories, but I was never so great at getting super deep inside the company and I liked covering.

Why did you want to cover Google? It was because Google we'll talk about what is intact,

since you have no tolerance for evasion. I just wanted to get a job of the times and they offered me that job. So

I mean, I was

excited as when I took the job. I thought to myself this would be something totally new. Let's dive into it. And I was out in the Bay Area, had been in New York for 10 years, and I thought to myself, and this is a great Segway and housing. Okay, I'm here now. If you want to be in reporter in this place, you got to get in right to the of the company town. So I thought that would be a great way to do it. And it did lead me to housing and all

this other stuff because Google is related to housing. And actually, oddly enough, you may or may not know this how interested they are in housing, office and commuting and things like that. It's It's a big interest of, I think, more Sergei than Larry, which is interesting. I have many, many discussion with him about commuting and bicycles. Remember when he first dropped all the bicycles and a livable city? So it's interesting, though they many people blame them for. We'll get into that in a second.

I will say, for what it's worth. When I covered Google, I tried to interview Larry, of course, never was successful, but I did corner him at events a couple times and he always blew me off. And I asked him about different tech topics, and you always give me that. I'm bored. Look, here's you. But the one time I did ask him, ah, housing question. He just lit up and got very into it. It was the one time I asked him a question and he looked at me and really engaged and gave a long answer. So I did find that

indicative. Yeah, they've always been thinking about that. What headquarters are and in fact, in the headquarters east of nine different office types ate a quant set hut at one point in the early days of people don't call that, but they really have been that said, they've been sort of linked to the problem in DC in San Francisco. Excuse me. So talk about why you decided is obviously how is it is an enormous issue around this country. We have the housing, uh, crisis, that we have the controversy. But in San Francisco, it's a particularly unusual situation. Or maybe it isn't. Why don't you describe it? I think it's

particularly unusual in that it's the worst version of something every city has. But I One of the things I've struggled with with the book is I almost struggled. But ah, lot of people want to see San Francisco as this truly exceptional anomalous place, and it's not. It's just a version of some. It's an early and amplified version of something that is happening everywhere. I mean I did travel pretty extensively for the book went to Minneapolis, Boston, Vancouver, British Columbia, a couple other places that we have the same basic problem. And aside from the magnitude and the political culture, it is the same. So I think San Francisco is. I really do believe it is an early look at the nation's future. And when I say San Francisco, I obviously mean the whole greater. But

I think the bigger cities because I think one of the demographic trends is obviously bigger cities and how we cope with those how we cope with most people living in them. Those paint San Francisco's picture. This is a city that, let's be clear, it has limited space Now. You talked about enormous amounts of states. It has just what it has. The city

of San Francisco only does. But I mean obviously, but now lying area. So my short origin story, which I think your listeners will like, is that I was covering Google and I was talking to Jeremy Stoppelman about which, you know, his face, the CEO of the upside about what you know. His favorite topic is which is how much he hates Google and how much the government should be intervening, doing the antitrust enforcement and all that. And at the end of the universe, I often try to leave a couple minutes for some random question, too. So to see if I could keep my story ideas going, I asked him. I said,

Well, I heard your into housing and you're interested in this horrible housing crisis We have And he told me, Oh, I have given a bunch of money to this woman. Her name is so new Trials. She's a little cookie. She runs this group called Barf. The Bay Area Renters Federation. I thought, That's odd. Here's this guy who obviously had to quite a lot of money. If you really wanted to get involved in local politics in a traditional way, he's got more than enough money to do that. You have a publicly traded company and also a CZ. I'm sure you know Jeremy, he's She's not like one of these talking about singularity all the time.

He's a very serious guy, so and straight, narrow kind of guy. Uh, and I I thought that's odd. So I called Sonia up, and then I went hung out with her for a couple days and watched her kind of go to City Hall and complain about housing and all that shit, All these followers and all these young people. Really, when I say young, obviously 25 to 35 engaged in her thing and there really was something going on there as an economics reporter, I was hyper aware, maybe more than most people, that there was a ton of research, that this housing thing was a big problem. And then it had been a big problem for a long time.

Ed Glazer, who is this Harvard economist who is very famous for having called that there was a big housing crisis. I knew all his research out was out there, and the Obama administration, right around the same time I met Sonia had started to release papers on this, too. So in my mind, I thought, This is a wonderful illustration of this very wonky topic. Here's the first time I've seen someone who who's looking for housing and is well, where that there's a housing shortage. And in the past, the story had always been much more academic, say it's just a very boring very dry. So I latched onto that Eun Bi story mostly

because yes,

in my vest and my back out because it was a great way to illustrate basically academic research. And and that led me, of course, to a 1,000,000 other things

that look good ideas you be. Is this Yes, in my backyard, Very famous words. NIMBY, which is not in my backyard, don't build here. Don't do density building. And for those who don't know San Francisco, there is hardly any density building there's. It's the lowest profile city, one of them that I have ever seen, maybe some European cities. But they're a denser actually, um, and especially and they better. Ah,

public transportation throughout. But it's there's not a lot of housing. There's not enough housing. Um, and throughout California, that's an issue. I think it was with 33 million housing units. Is that correct or 35 minutes?

I don't actually know the answer. I do know that California has less per capita housing than any other state besides Utah on. That's actually an anomaly because you ties much larger families, so it really is the

worst. So what? What it is is that you don't have enough housing and then a TTE the same time you had this competition. Very wealthy people wanting to live in cities. And there's a trend of demographic trend towards young people wanting to stay in cities versus go, fleeing to the suburbs, which had been happening for years. So it's a return, essentially people with lots and lots of money. And there was the tech money, and we'll get into that in a second. So you had a situation that was sort of right for what happened. So explain what happened had these young be people saying, We gotta build here and you have this group of state local San Francisco people, often wealthy people who don't want you to build and keep it as adorable as it. ISS

San Francisco, for all its history and I've read a lot of history about the place and California generally has always is, always is perfect. People show up, and the the version that they see when they show up is perfect, and I think that that's certainly part of the place. As you well know, the actual city of San Francisco had started to become much more of a tech hub than it had ever been cos exhales force and Twitter and other companies and uber were actually being located in the city of San Francisco. This, of course, led to the tech buses because I sort of the opposite meaning that the companies that were down in the Valley we're sending buses up to get people who want Yes, they're these large double decker buses with Darth Vader tinted windows. And you see these lot You could be in a very kind of quiet neighborhood in San Francisco with just two lane streets, and this giant bus will be on the corner and you will see all these people in their Bose headphones in their backpacks. And they're casually dressed tech uniforms lined up, ready to go into these buses. And this became a very a galvanizing moment for the city because it really looked like a two tier system.

Here was these, you know, the San Francisco Public Transit is not terribly good. And here are these thes people. And of course, on top of that, you read all these stories only get amazing health care and free food and child care work and all the gyms and all these things. And here are these amazing buses. And I think that this talk about this a little bit in the book. I think this started creating the perception about people is that these people do not have a stake in this city. They they come here, they use it as a vessel, but they aren't particularly worried about its public systems. It's they don't have ah, kind of common good in it. And at the same time,

if you recall, there was also this somewhat famous viral video where a bunch of employees of some company I forget had reserved a soccer field and got into a big fight with the Latino kids in the mission who had used that soccer field for years and years and years. And it became this very intellectual argument where the the tech guys were. We reserved this online in the and the young guy was saying, We play here every Saturday. There's no reserving. So I think that there was this, fairly or unfairly. There was this reckoning over the idea that tech people were coming in directing their own systems that existed

separately in front of her Yeah, and that they felt were better. The buses solved the problem.

And I understand, obviously understand where the company's coming from there. Like we need people. They're up there. We're gonna send buses to get them. It's not our fault that this city does not have great for this region, just not a very public transit. And they're growing so fast. I mean, look how

many people, right? And we'll bypass, including they were thinking about hydrofoils their

so called God. Yeah, there was that. I think they did actually run a couple boats. It just as a test run a couple times. So So transportation is obviously shoot prominence, huge from that everybody in that region is experiencing. And I think that it led to a lot of resentment that they're not trying to solve this problem for the region the way that public goods are you, the subway or any other cities. And they're trying to solve for themselves only. And I think that became a very gobbling on top of that was obviously there were a number of studies about this that everywhere they created a tech bus stop, the rents would go up. Now this is where the embassy in comes in. Yes, in my backyard. Sonia, Who is this?

Who's not from the tech industry? She was a high school teacher, but the tech industry quickly latched on to her. And I don't just mean Jeremy. All the people who trump to meetings with their pretended to be 25 year old engineers, that sort of thing. She showed up and said, This is not a tax problem. This is a housing problem. You created all these jobs. All these people want to come here if you recall. I mean, the breast of the country was still recovering from the great recession at that time, so I think unemployment was so quite high nationally and good employment was still quite love. That remains low. So all these people were coming to the Bay Area and in her mind,

because she's from Philadelphia, which, if you've ever been to fill it up. It's a lovely city, but there are still some pretty depressed parts of it and has this morning has entire blocks of empty property, she said. Look, this is a housing problem, not attack problem, and I think that the tech industry really glommed on to that because her and we can talk about this because you said you wanted to. Kim My Cutler, a woman at TechCrunch, was now at initialized Capital. She wrote this piece called How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting and Marcus. That was all about the tech bus protests in the essential just of the piece was, This is not a bus problem.

This is a housing problem. So the resolve this kind of, let's call it backlash. And I think that a lot of the people in the tech industry liked gloms onto this partly because these were people saying, This is not your fault And they got very into history ever into economics reading about the housing shortage, reading about how the Bay Area has its long history, NIMBYism and I think what happened was people in the tech industry loved this topic partly because it was true. So I should say the research buried doesn't housing problem not, but also because this was a group of people, a movement on ideology that was saying, This is not your fault. This is the region's fault for having bad public policy. I think we've got into a more nuanced conversation. But when we're talking about the origins at the beginning, I really think partly it was people saying people were very attracted to this idea that here is ah, group that has absolved us of guilt from merely coming here.

And I truly sympathize to some of those people. You're whatever 22 years old, you go to college for computer science. You work very hard in these Mathey classes while all your friends air writing papers about you know, some easy topic, getting high and writing. I'm joking, but I was a stem major and it is much harder. I was a a physical chemistry major, and they moved to San Francisco for a good job and wherever they're from, I met this one guy. He was from some tiny little town in Kansas, and he was like, Well, San Francisco sounds like a great place and you read all this romance, and then everyone hates you merely for showing up. And I think it's hard for people who are

you to underscore their their signs all

over the place. There's all kind of scum. Some sold on the idea, and I think I understand why they were why there was a backlash, because it's not fair, either.

Let's talk about what had the impact, and then we'll get into the overall the bigger problem, which I think you talk about. Quite eloquent,

I should say so. The book kind of follows this arc of the one of the arcs. There's many arcs in the book follows Sonia and this rise and this. You'd be thinking to become very, very powerful and kind of looks at how it began at that origin, which I was there for. And then by the end of running for office and they got tons of money, C. C. I is giving them a lot of money.

All right, so we're here with Connor Jordy. He's written a book called Golden Gates, Fighting for the Housing Americans about San Francisco. But it's about our country, and we'll talk about that larger issue when we get back. This episode is brought to you by Sen Rab, a luxurious hand bike brand making super versatile bags for modern, multi faceted women. Each center of bag is hand made in Italy by Master Artisan's, using only the absolute finest materials center of bags are designed to carry your life in style. They have built in Organizer's So you're not gonna lose your keys or your pens or, God forbid your sunglasses and a lot of the designs to be worn in multiple ways, like the fan favorite maestro bag, which could be warned like a backpack, a satchel, a tote or whatever the day calls for.

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New episodes of Love It or Leave It Drop every Saturday morning. Subscribe now on Apple podcast stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. We're here with Contador ity. He's the author of Golden Gates, Fighting for Housing in America, also in New York Times Reporter, covering income inequality and issued housing around the Bay Area but around the country to. But the bakery has become sort of this flash point of of homelessness, this issue around who gets to pay for these things who can live in cities if their level cities for anybody who isn't very wealthy. Um, so let's paint the picture. So you have the tech people coming in. The rents do go up and they move in and move in, renovate. And by I Anyone who's bought a house in San Francisco knows the process is shocking in terms of when I bought a house here in D. C.

I was sort of amazed by the ease of it, like any. And they have a housing issue here, and it was sort of, you know, at one point I'm like, I'll take three or something because it's so crazy. It's such a crazy thing what you're used to in San Francisco, so there's not enough housing. The housing prices go up. What has happened? Talk about sort of paint the picture of San Francisco right now.

What happened is, for starters, it starts to feel much, much, much more like a monoculture You. So there was a great article in the San Francisco Chronicle that I think that one was the graying of San Francisco, and you can see as people buy these homes, they paint them that think it's called gentrification Gray and in San Francisco is known for having these lovely, colorful homes, and suddenly they're these gray homes. On top of that, just the prices go up two levels you cannot imagine. On top of that, there were a number of things that were there, of course, were some very, very public evictions.

There is a thing in San Francisco in the in all of California called Ellis Act evictions, which is when someone buys a place that attendant lives in and tells them You have to leave because I'm just gonna move in. This started to become a way to create condos so people would buy what were effectively apartment buildings and say, I'm gonna move in. But then they didn't really move in. They flipped them to condos. And and so across the the city, you started to see the influx of wealth wealth that kind of lived on its own. Because if you think about it, the actual number of people who work in tech is still not in San Francisco is still not that high. It's like seven or 8% or something. But the influence it has on the city and specifically it's real estate prices is way outside. I think it's like 40 or 50% of the people who buy who are buying homes and some houses go are from tech. But the actual employment is not that I on top of that, the homeless problem, which is all it should be said,

has always been a problem in Earth, since the eighties has been a problem in San Francisco, but it just got so, so, so much worse.

So talk about how that happened because there was a discernible shift in the way San Francisco homeless just exploded, and I've lived there for 20 some years. Um, and the shift was dramatic and quickly, even though there was always a homeless problem, it became something much more significant. And of course, it's gotten nationwide worldwide

attention, and it's just a simple cascading effect. You have the home prices go up and everyone moves down a notch. The, uh, the um So I'll give you an anecdote from the book I followed Ah family in Redwood City as they were displaced by a landlord. So this was a 15 year old girl. She, her mom, is a does Elder care cleans houses and movements as a janitor, so she's the woman who takes care of your grandma on the woman who cleans your house under the table and then the woman who comes in and empties trashcan as you are leaving your office. So this woman, they got an $800 raining guy bought the building, gave them an $800 increased. So they all organized to fight. This rent increase goes on for a couple months. Spoiler.

They don't win, they do get a buyout. So then I went back, as so they move out, I went back. Who moves in? Of course, throughout the fight. In the process, people say 70 from Facebook's gonna move in this. This is the only people could afford this I go in. It's another Latino family with the almost exact same job profile. The sons worked construction in the mom did house cleaning and some other things, but they had just stuffed, like eight people into this place that used to have before. So,

across the housing spectrum, you see people crowding and you see you tons of tech people into crowding into higher and departments. And so there's this cascading effect and the people at the very, very, very, very bottom are pushed out, and they just go to the streets, and I think that that is, I think it's pure and simple that there's a lot more people there. They are much, much more willing to crowd into places and kind of bulk up to compete, to meet the high rents and the people at the very bottom, I should note homeless people. This is not universally true, but is largely true. I've spent a lot of time with homeless people.

They often do not have the greatest bonds, their family ties or not superstrong. They don't seem to have the best community or friends, and so those are the people who get pushed out in. Obviously, there's a large degree of mental health and drug addiction problems amongst homeless people, but that does not explain it. The price explains it because they're, of course, lots of people struggling with substance abuse problems and mental difficulties all around the country. And they don't have horrific homeless problems all around the country.

What one of the things you write is what this suggests is a really solution will have to be sociological, which I thought this was a great part. It wasn't a p. The excerpt you had. It was a great part of the book. People have to realize that homelessness is connected to housing prices. They have to accept. It's hypocritical. Say you don't like density but are worried about climate change. They have to internalize the lesson. If they want their Children have a stable financial future, they're gonna have to make space. They're gonna have to change. It's interesting the reaction to homelessness in San Francisco. It's changed. The nature of the city has changed the relationship between people talk a little bit about that because you spend a lot of time trying really hard not to be angry at us, a citizen at the same time, to be empathetic to the people living in this tree and then and to avoid feelings of hopelessness, because that's what it sometimes feels like when you're walking in San Francisco is like, What can we do? Is there a solution?

I I totally agree with you. It's this sense of dread as you walk through the city and you feel like a horrible person all the time and, you know, it's it's interesting. I will say this quick. My colleague Tom Fuller, Thomas Fuller at The New York Times When he first showed up from Thailand, he started writing about homelessness a lot. So I'm from San Francisco, as you know, and a number of my friends complain. They said, Oh, I have noticed your new New York Times guy just discovered homelessness and they were kind of giving me a hard time about him running. And I said, Well, maybe shame on us for thinking this was normal.

I I think he's doing absolutely good job showing up and saying This is insane s Oh, I think you do start to think, Oh, this is just normal And the fact that you accept that is kind of shameful in its in itself I should say, I'm I I was certainly guilty amongst the number of people who accepted it. I think that there is a swimming of hopelessness because you don't know what to do. Do I give a dollar to somebody? Uh, is that gonna help? Do I give money to ST Anthony's that, But that obviously helps wonderful organization. That is a soup kitchen if they build a bunch of housing. But it's like high end housing. That's obviously not gonna really help the homeless situation, even though we do need to build housing in San Francisco. So I think it's I think it's this feeling of It's this complete feeling of helplessness.

And by the way, you obviously see this amongst the city as well they seem. I mean, look at Gavin Newsom, if that's the governor. But when he was mayor, now he's governor. It's just nobody knows what to dio and where you really see this is there's these Goto Oakland, which is considerably worse than San Francisco, their entire parks, that air just colonized by tense, and everybody has just come to accept it and doesn't know what to do so and I think that is where we are. I mean, what we need to do is you build a ton of support of housing, and where and how we do that is is our inaction. But that's

I don't really see. We're gonna get to solution that last part. But one of the things you talked about is this idea, and you say one need only look out. The airplane went to see there's nothing to do with the lack of space is a concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it, and says much about today's winner take all economy, that many of the cities with the most glaring it epidemics of homelessness that are growing centers of technology and finance. There is simply put a dire shortage of housing in places where people and companies wanna live and reactionary local politics that fight every effort to add more home. So to talk about that, because you have an extra pin the times about that. But it's a seat theme throughout this book. Is that people resisting? What is the obvious solution? Is build more housing?

Totally. So all to say, two things. One is the economy has changed. We all know this we have the economy is kind of buy for kid into Let's call them knowledge workers, who tend to be paid relatively well and work with their minds and then service workers, who tend to be some are paid quite well, ex surgeons and stuff. But there's this other, this entire class of, say, retail workers, people who clean your homes, walking dogs, all these sorts of things that that are not paid very well. Those people have to be next to each other in cities because intellectual workers tend to want to be near each other for all the exchange ideas and all these things, and then the service workers essentially have to be close to them because they are weighed.

Typically, exactly. They cannot remote dog walk, that sort of thing. So cities are, let's say, engines of inequality. No, I'm not saying that's bad. In a perfect world, cities have lots of opportunities for people toe move into the end and their kids to get better educated and all that. But we have to have housing for those two groups of people or the thing will fall apart and we'll get what we have today. So that's our economy around the country. We are moving in a knowledge direction that is not going to change. There is gonna be a certain amount of service of large service sector for things that robots can't do yet, and that is where we are.

So that's not changing. So accepting that reality and accepting that we need to construct our cities for that reality is step one. What we need to do is build a lot more housing and make it easier to build housing and make it easier to build different types of housing. The way we have it in the Bay Area, which is true all around the country, is true here in DC is we have, ah, whole bunch of single family home neighborhoods were relatively low density neighborhoods that are, in effect, off

limits and single family homes. One family lives in them, or

or, you know, they're duplexes and other things. There is the existing housing stock, and nothing will touch it. There were a couple projects here and there, but generally speaking, those neighborhoods are off limits. And then we have an area like South of Market, which is this former warehouse district over by the bay, where the there used to be an industrial area. When I was growing up, that is like we build a ton of condoms that have 10 million, and it's like a whole new neighborhood out of whole cloth. You see that same pattern in every city across America? There's the WARF in D. C.

There's the North Loop in Minneapolis. There's Hudson Yards in New York. All around the country. People seem to have said okay, we need to build more housing. Let's go take this one district over here that used to be some industrial district and build a ton of stuff over there and build. It is tall, is humanly possible and make a neighborhood from whole cloth that is not working because those buildings I'm nothing. You shouldn't do that. But I am saying those buildings, they're super expensive. They they're super high and require elevators once the way construction cost works. Once you add an elevator, you were in a whole other class of cost. But what they call the missing middle housing, which is housing there's middle size but also for middle income people.

That housing is essentially is not allowed. You can't build a ton of duplexes row homes. I mean, go to places like Philadelphia, where Baltimore, where you see it doesn't look super attractive right now. But where you see that they had lots of housing and affordable housing. It's not high rises everywhere. It's these dense kind of three and four story places. That is what we don't allow right now. One of the images I always think of when I actually asked at one point if this could be the cover of the book, but they didn't like it. For some reason is if you go look at this famous famous Mavis picture that everybody who's listening and people around the world No, it's the picture of the painted ladies. The painted ladies are these. As everyone knows,

they're the opening of full house there. These, I think it's four. It's five or six that are in a row in these beautiful single family homes, and you can see the San Francisco skyline now dominated by the sales France Tower behind it. And it's on Alamos, Granitsas Beautiful Park and it goes down the hill. When you look at that picture, which was again the opening of the credits of Full House, you see these five wonderful, beautiful, relatively squat homes. If you go as you know, if you go just very exactly if you go to an actually look in real life at that picture, there was, like a 10 story apartment.

It's about seven stories or 65 16. There's a giant apartment building butting up against the top most painted lady that has always cropped out of the picture because that's that's where we don't want to see. It doesn't fit our idealized view of things, or I don't know what what the reason is. But that is always cupped in the picture. That is what When San Francisco was a functional city, that is what it looked like. I had this mix of things. The neighborhood's had a lot of different kinds of types of housing and a lot of different types of people, because the the person who can live in a two story, lovely painted lady home is different than the person who could live in a apartment building right next to it, right? But those people are are linked through the economy through a different

kind of jobs, like I just living here till they also the other part you're leaving out is Alamo Square is very ha huge homeless population lives there and moves moves around it because the police keep trying to move people, which is also another picture. When you're there, tourists or they're always there, always sort of like what is happening here. I'm trying to take this beautiful shot of San Francisco, and there's tents and things like that, which again are moved daily

so we could We could talk forever about the policy stuff and how the we could start going through an alphabet soup of acronyms. The California environmental quality acted NIMBYism. Is it too hard? And bah bah bah bah! All right, but the truth is, and this is what I'm trying to get out in this book. San Francisco is just a window into. You could take that same alphabet soup apply to any other city because look, most cities in America, with the exception of possibly New York and even a little bit there if you go out to Queens and stuff has the same pattern where they've make it very, very difficult to put density next to kind of lower density neighborhoods and people don't like it. That problem that we make it very difficult to build where people already live, is what gives a sprawl. It's what gives us free ways to know our, I guess not to nowhere, but to the next suburb.

It gives us all these other things, and it was funny. I was talking to an economist, her historian, rather for the book, and he said sprawl is a political contradiction because it meaning? What he means is it is something everybody hates. And yet it also contains the conditions that makes it almost impossible to stop Because people, as much as people hates, probably would almost rather creates brawl, then solve it, which is which would mean building where they live,

right where they are.

And so we're sort of stuck in this thing. If we're going to solve climate change, if we're going to roll, if we're gonna address all these big problems we have a buy for Kate. In society housing the cost, too much emissions that air. 1/3 of them are people driving our transportation. We're gonna have to start basically addressing that people are gonna have to live closer together and that our city is going to be a little

bit more compact. All right, we're gonna talk about that when your back is One of the important things to keep in mind is there are there is systemic. And that's the issue that I think a lot of people don't get that housing has everything to do with climate change, which you were talking about, which is everything to do with sociological issues and drug addiction. and way of life, which and creates these cities that are homogeneous and aren't as interesting as they used to be. Or maybe they never were. Were here with Contador Ity, the author of Golden Gates. Fighting for Housing in America. He's also a New York Times reporter who covers these issues. Look, the Dragon Drop website templates are great. They're simple enough that anyone with a dream and 10 minutes convey build their own site, for better or worse.

But if you're someone who needs to get more hands on with domains Custom email addresses in websites, check out name dot com name dot com is built by experts for experts with features like Deanna's templates, bulk management actions, extra security features and a brand new A P I named dot com is the best place to manage your website. Project's name dot com offers dot com domains for just 8 99 and for a 25 you can transfer in your existing dot com domains. New users get free privacy protection and security features for just signing up. Right now, listeners can use the promo code, decode it, check out to get 50% off G sweet accounts for a full year that includes everything offered in Google's business. Email, productivity and collaboration. Sweet like custom business email address and APS like Doc's Dr Calendar and Hangouts Tools you can use every day to keep your team moving. That's name dot com and use d E C o D E at checkout. Hello,

this is Jesse David Fox. I'm a senior editor at Vulture, and I helped the podcast. Good one. A podcast about jokes. It's a podcast about, well, jokes. Every week I sit down with a comedian, comedy, writer or director. We lister one of their jokes and figure out how it all came

together. I don't sit down with a pen in the pad and physically write down everything. I just not my style. Turns out comedians take jokes pretty seriously. I like all Joe. Okay, that's what I do. That's what I live for. There's really nothing else I care about.

It's all very revealing. What did you sort of learn from this? What was your takeaway?

Nothing. I am not. I'm not a smart person.

Good one from Vulture and the Box Media Podcast network describe for free on apple podcasts or on your favorite podcast at you do

know to use the podcast aspirin. I'll let a great question Jesse David Fox. We're back and we're talking with Contador ity. He's the author of Golden Gates, Fighting for Housing in America. So you do cover this day today for The New York Times and you're you talk about this idea of income equality just talking about the idea of a systemic way to deal with this. One of the things you do talk about in this book is that democracy really gets hurt by this housing crisis. So pain, a larger picture of the housing crisis in America, how we live, how we're going to live together and maybe some solutions and what you think is working, Or is it sort of this lost idea that we're just gonna continue to create these bifurcated societies where I just don't know how it solves itself?

So there's a lot of different things we could talk about with income inequality and stuff, but I think the best way to solve income inequality. This is not the same against programs, although I think the best way to solve income inequality is to make it possible for people to live near ah, place where they can get a great great education. Ah, place where they can live in a thriving economy with lots of different kinds of jobs. Ah, place where they can get on the escalators to success, Which are these tech companies? Thes knowledge Cos air the industrial powerhouses of our time. And just as your chances of making it further in life were enhanced by being near a manufacturing company in the forties and fifties, being in Detroit or one of these places that was building manufactured goods thes air now our industrial powerhouses and you need to be near them. Most people need to be near them to get into the new economy.

Well, let's talk about solutions, because one of things Scott Wiener, who's my representative? I live in the Castro San Francisco pes um, or was my represented. Now he says, he's your senator, right? He was.

He's a state senator for the entire city of, by the way, I should note California State. A lot of people don't know this. California State senators represent more people than members of the

U. S. House of Representatives that that's another

crazy people. He's got more people than

he was. He was my local. He was on the City Council, and then now he's in the state. He had a bill that just failed to

talk about that. So this bill was called SB 50 and it got a ton of attention nationally. And

beside many times we've talking, I'm talking

about Try again. I'm sure the basic gist of the bill is it would make it possible it would make it possible to 4 to 8 stories are, I think, four storey buildings within 1/2 a mile of a transit stop, and also in fancy school districts and stuff

totally reasonable solution to a problem which is get people near public transit so that they can get into jobs on dhe. Create a lot more housing. So it's easy, so there's no commuting

zone. On top of that, he's targeting that missing middle housing. I was just telling about telling you about. He's not saying Let's go build a mega project in the middle of nowhere, he say are not in the middle of getting up in a place where people complain about it. Let's build a ton of mid level things in neighborhoods where people already live. And this bill people went berserk. And what was fascinating about the bill and this is something I spent a lot of time thinking about in the book is that and it all kind of came to a head in the bill is that there's two main groups that oppose a lot of the efforts to basically deregulate housing in cities. They are neighborhoods worried about gentrification, and they are kind of low density neighborhoods worried about their views and neighborhood character and the property for people rich people on Let's call the middle class people But yeah, on And And that alliance, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, is, is very, very, very powerful is powerful for a couple reasons.

It's powerful because it allows rich people to basically claim the mantle of gentrification when they're opposing a bill which in California, where people have ah hi sensitivity to appearing woke is important. On top of that, it's it's just a large number of people, a large number of representatives kind of coming together. I understand, and I know that that is politics. He's gonna have to figure that out. But I think what the difficulty shows is that people don't And we've seen this throughout our society. People don't have a faith in the future. People don't believe that if the basic problem with us B 50 is that people simply don't believe it would work. I truly think that Maur than any one issue we could identify in the bill. I think people really think all this is gonna lead to Elise a bunch of developers building a bunch of different type of stuff and we're gonna get Maur of the same. We're going to get more tech buses, Maur, Monoculture Maur and I don't For what it's worth, I think that's the case. But I It doesn't matter what I think. I just don't think people believe that it would work.

That's probably what some of the Solutions Inc rose is the state takeover local local and you're making

you're now seeing all the Democratic presidential candidates have have released housing plans where they have some kind of zoning component in it. So we're now even seeing not that this is imminent or anything, but we're now even seeing people contemplating the federal government taking over so or having a role. So yeah, this is what always happens Whenever ah level of government can't figure out a problem. People kick it up a notch and say, Let's let's have a higher power Figure it out because the more you

spread it out. One of the one of the ships was local decision making. On the ground in areas they know best was pushed locally for years.

And you will hear you will hear local mayors say we don't want more growth. We don't We don't want more people. I mean, they will flat out say that I don't think you'd ever hear governor say that jobs and prosperity or just so much more part of their They're calling card.

We'll talk about that with London Breed in in San Francisco and the various players there, she has tried to put in on one hand she's tried to put in. In the other hand, she's against certain things. It's a real It's really interesting to watch her sort of tried to navigate, explain her situation.

So London Breed is the mayor of San Francisco. She is an African American woman who grew up in public housing and is from San Francisco. She has kind of embraced this mantle of development, and she's actually now pushing a ballot measure, which we, of course, I have a lot of those in California. But basically she will put in front of voters a thing that would make it would speed without getting into the details. It would take the development process from, say, two or three years and suppose something sometimes quite a bit longer to like, say, six months. If you propose the development on a parcel and it didn't require any changes or hi variations or anything like that, you could do it and and that would probably speed up development quite a lot. We'll see if it get makes the ballot and has voters. But so she is.

She's essentially trying to end Run the border, stupid. She's trying to go around her legislator to just I say, Let's just make law through the voters because she's so frustrated with her own board, had a stymieing her at

everything, really is in San Francisco. The mayor has a lot less power than mayors of other cities, and the board tends to run everything.

Yes, well, yeah, totally. And I think that there's a level of exhaustion right now with process, and she seems to be mean. Look, you see this everywhere, right? Like s b 50 and all these things in the three times Scott winner has pushed versions of this bill. When it failed the second after it failed, the president of the Senate, Toni Atkins, says we're gonna pass something like this by the end of this year's You guys better get ready. Eso all around there is that There was a level of exhaustion right now in California with inaction. So I think that and Governor Gavin Newsom, who has traditionally been this guy who shows up with a laundry list of things I'm gonna solve health care I'm gonna solve this is his last state is state speech,

which was just last week. He did nothing but talk about homelessness and housing. So you were starting to see people at least recognized. Okay, this is the Onley problem that we should be focused on in this state right now because all of our other problems

I come from emanate

from this. California has some of the highest wages in the country. It is way outpaced the nation and every economic metric, and it has the highest poverty rate when you adjust for the cost of housing. So we have basically created poverty. Autonomy should be like a beacon for the nation. So what's working?

I want to talk about working. But explain that because now Republicans, especially Donald Trump, focused in on it. Yeah, I meant on that.

Some of what Donald Trump is doing is just mean spirited. And let's call it trolling right a lot of what they're doing. Some of that is trolling and you'll see Tucker Carlson and all these baby. So,

but a lot

of what the kind of more conservative side is saying is that some of these liberal good intentions have gone. There is some truth in that, and I I think it It annoys people that there is some truth in it because take environmentalism. There's this kind of like 19 seventies notion of environmentalism that environmentalism means great parks down the street from you in a place to walk your dog and that sort of thing. But that's not necessarily green. If you're worried about climate change and it's not green, if you're worried about sprawl, It's not right, and I think sometimes it is. It is absolutely a fair thing to say. Has that gone too far? And it is that focused on the wrong things. When that comes out of the mouth of, ah, of a person like Scott Wiener, people love it. But I guess that kind of accepted because he's this,

you know, anti death penalty raise every tax gay man who marches in the bondage parade and Francisco Reyes so. But when it comes out of the mouth of Donald Trump or or someone from his administration, they don't want to hear it. But that's just but there are. There is some truth to this idea that California has dug itself deeper into this problem than it would otherwise be. And I think that at some point we do have to reconcile with that. And it's not like anybody in the Trump administration seems to have thought this through super deeply. So I think think dismissing some of their critiques is completely appropriate. But this idea that California has overregulated housing made it too difficult to build the types of housing the middle class people could live in. There was a lot of truth to that, and we kind of have to own up to

it. So when you talk about solutions, what are they? What can happen? You have. You know, you have the political pressure from the national attention on this on this state, like here's and it's not just in in San Francisco, it's in Los Angeles. Most of the homeless people in this country live in California, which is, I think people don't realize the great majority

of the half of the unsheltered homeless, which is people who are straight up outside in their cars, under bridges or in on the sidewalk. Half about 100,000 of the 200,000

are in California, and that is because not just weather, but other.

It is because it costs a lot to live in California, pure and simple. Everything I've ever seen says that homelessness is heavily tied to the cost of housing again. It's not to say drug addiction, and these other things don't play into it. But those are just things that make it difficult for someone to hold down a job or otherwise get a toehold in a place the cost of housing ends up being the main variable because, like I said, they have people with mental difficulties and drug problems everywhere.

So when you think about solutions, what if you could wave your wonder if you could do anything, or if there's a person that you covered that you think is the right way, I tell me about it.

If I could wave my wand, I would make it much easier to build housing and build different types of housing. And I would come up with some sort of gigantic federal program, one that had the word trillion in it and start to provide a huge subsidy program for people who truly cannot afford what the market is currently building. There has not been sometime. So what? One thing that people one reason people in the anti gentrification camp do not like new housing is that it tends to be more expensive, more expensive than and so they worry that it will make housing next to it expensive as well. It was very low evidence that that's true. Nevertheless, that's the fear. But there was not some time when we built lots of brand new, lovely housing and it was affordable for everybody it has always is mostly been the case that the way we create affordable housing is you build a lot of housing and gets older and it moves down. The income scale we'd stopped doing that we haven't

done is actually the opposite now, moving back into

the way, we did not build enough housing, so we're in a deep hole. We have to get out of that hole while we're getting out of that hole. We're going to have to make housing more affordable for people who can't afford it. And this isn't just mean. There's all sorts of reasons to do this. When I was following that family as they were being displaced by this $800 rent increase, that daughter, a 15 year old girl, she lost a month of school. She was completely stressed, unable to function in any way the heartbreak and the trauma that they had for the year after the eviction was crippling. So she's If I had lost my two parents who helped me with my homework and everything like that, if I had lost a month of school, might have been difficult to catch up. I mean, I can't

even imagine you know the repercussions.

Yes, and and those air repercussions that we will feel for many, many, many years, possibly generations. So stabilising people in their home is imperative. Right now, the popular solution is rent control. That is a solution that a lot of economists have some problems with. But I don't know what to say. Other than that is this That is the main solution that is there for people. And unless we pass some gigantic tax program, which probably would be the smarter way to do it, that is one of the things we're gonna have to engage or it doesn't matter. That is the thing people are going to engage. It doesn't matter what I think. So if I could wave my magic wand, I would make it much easier to build housing. And I would enact a gigantic program at a federal level to help people who cannot afford what the market is currently building.

Is there? Is there any tech solution?

Eso One of the things that I was actually very encouraged by was there was guy I followed through the through the book and he has started a factory and this is happening in various different places where they build buildings. Really not. It's not just like a house. They build apartments on a simulant, and it's it is. It's a remarkable thing you go to this factory. It's an old that's where they used to make submarine periscopes. It's very long factoring in a naval base old naval base on Mayor Island and in Vallejo. And it starts and there's just this piece of plywood and comes up like a little conveyor belt type thing. And then it moves up to a dolly and two guys air below, putting in pipes and stuff that will be the plumbing and in somebody's up putting flooring. And it just goes and 22 steps by the end, it's this apartment that you're walking around. There's everything is there. Besides, the water doesn't work, and then they drive this out on a truck to a site.

They stack them together like Legos, and then they bolt them together, and it takes a couple more months to really make the building work. But they can actually put the whole building up in like a day. I was really encouraged by this because the main engine of prosperity for all of human existence has been making it easier to do work, whether it's animals, pulling your plough or tractors or whatever else. And construction has been one of the least exactly

call it. Art is it

is. It's one of the least productive industries, and so we need to find a way to make it actually just much easier and faster to build just the building so

decent building to where you could have a lot of things on the cheap.

And I should also say one of the things I love. And I know you love this, too, because I've listened to your show is when people start putting significant money and risk and gumption behind something that really is an audacious tech solutions on just another Twitter. It's one of the reasons, despite is some of his personal kind of quirks. I love Elon Musk. Could I think if Tesla goes bankrupt and this is offered on, we at least got a really great battery out of it, right? I mean, like, world

have. He has

audacious, and we'll have gotten something. I don't got any felonies. Yeah, And if all these investors lose money, they will still have contributed something. And I think the same way about thes housing companies that they

were putting a ton of

money behind this big idea and they will figure something out. And it's a great place to be tinkering because it's a place where we actually know that productivity is is quite low. And if they can start to move that needle, it will have a tremendous benefits of the world. I don't know that the world was having such a difficult time efficiently selling ads that we needed. I mean, I'm sure it has become more efficient. It's like 1% more if you know, So I love it when I see people put real money behind ideas that seem more space agey

and oh no, there's a better way to build a house there is. I'm spent a lot of time. I'm a real silver. But when it comes

out of the tech, when it comes out of the the phone and into the real world, I think we all find it more imaginatively

simulating that's what. And there are a lot of sources, so finish up. If you had a pick, you know what's gonna happen? Each of that cares, give me two opposing characters who you think sort of exemplify this fight for housing. Sonia's obviously one of them. Yeah,

it's funny when I finished this book and I've been doing this tour, there's all these moments where you realized like, Oh, wait, this is what the book is about. What you didn't like, realizes you were writing it, which is kind of a terrifying feeling. But also something I've heard is common. You look at cities and most of the land mass is single family homes. Those that is the dominating political force is home. It is the dominating geographical force. It is the dominating cultural force. If we're gonna change the politics, changing that dynamic is paramount. Best I can tell, the only way to do that is to take the let's call them the gentrified and the gentry fires and somehow get them on the same side,

somehow get them to create a political coalition that says we are the ones being left out right now, and we need solutions, and you're gonna have to share some of the space in this city for us. So when I think about two characters that are on the opposing sides of this. I think about Sonya and and Barf and its associate ID. Uh, Thean be movement. Yes, in my backyard and its associated people, which are tend to be younger tech people who do find but are not rich by any means. And then I think about the people who are pro testing them a dupe identification who are worried about that who feel like they're being pushed out of city. Somehow, those two groups need to find some kind of common cause because there's no the dominating force of the single family home kind of empire, if you will, is so large and so powerful that if those two groups spend all their time fixating on each other, they will never accomplish anything.

Well, it's the American dream, right? Well, I'm gonna need a new dream.

I'm not going to get rid of the dream. I'm

more saying that you need a new dress. I think

ownership, by the way, I think ownership is we can't just throw away ownership. What I'm more saying is that we need to have cities that are more dynamic and this space is changing and on and that

sort of thing when you think about movies and, you know, if you look at SciFi movies the way they portray housing, I spent a lot of time thinking about like, What do you? I actually did it. I was like, Do we need to own houses? Like because we don't own car? Because I've not owning a car. Now I rent a lot of stuff and I was like, housing. Do we actually have to? Not just rent, But is there a different way to do renting like that? Everybody doesn't need to own a home, because now it's been the It's the wealth generator. Now everybody well,

what you've also seen, though, and I think this is why the tech industry was initially a little exhausted by this thing is, you have to kind of go mix it up in local politics at a very micro level. And I think for tech executives and this industry that is so global and so large and it crosses cultures, it's very hard for them to get revved up about. I'm gonna go to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in You nor the Mountain View City Council. Right? But you're actually suddenly see that? No. Patrick Collison,

head of strike. Yes, that's

right. Gave a $1,000,000 the striped. The company give a $1,000,000 to California and B, which is a statewide organization. Jeremy, of course, gave all this money. You are actually starting to see these companies become very thoughtful and active not as much as they could be, but about the places that they actually are. Think Jeff Bezos has done some stuff in Seattle, controversial and well, but fine. I mean, I don't know that what people in Detroit did 1,000,000 years ago was not controversial either. I fair point, I I just I just think, and by the way,

I want to say one thing a lot of times in San Francisco and in other cities Tech. But let's just focus on sentences. Go for a moment is portrayed as this invading outside force. It's this thing that impose Oh, Mark Zuckerberg. He moved here from Harvard and is imposing himself. That view could like not be more wrong. This industry, or at least the conditions that created this industry, are at least a century older, probably longer, and it has been anchored in this region and has been the primary economic engine for that region for quite some time. And when you look at that region, you see institutions Stanford, the venture capital industry. Berkeley Kepler's Bookstore,

which is little bookstore in Menlo Park, where the counterculture met kind of the military industrial complex. You take Kepler's, which is with the Grateful Dead, I think met each other. And but then also were a lot of kind of computer people hung out. You mix those two things the kind of military industrial complex and park research lab and all that. And then you mix this kind of counterculture thing. You smash those things together. What do you get? You get Steve jobs, and there's so many different impossible to replicate things in this region, that emerging kind of this counterculture with this basically military spending. But now corporate spending and that is what makes the place the place. Yeah, and if it's a Frankenstein,

it's our Frankenstein, and I think that people try to portray does this outside thing. But it is our thing. That's exactly and I just feel like that is so missing and you know what it is. It's kind of the mirror image for years and years and years and years. Decades you would hear people say, Oh, we're going to create the Silicon Valley in whatever Youngstown, Ohio And it was impossible. It's impossible because of all the things I just said. But the flip side is it's impossible to get rid of it as well. It is our thing. And if you think that that place is exceptional and interesting and special, and that it has this wonderful mix of culture and ideas, those things there is fundamental to that industry as they are to the culture. And I get frustrated sometimes, but partly because I'm a native Californian and im so aware of this history and how old that industry is that I I just I think that people are gonna have to reconcile it with it as if it's their uncle, their family, rather than treating it like it's this

invader right? That is a really good way to put it. Absolutely California still the greatest place on I miss it so much when I'm out there, it's really astonishing and it's really there are so many creative solutions that could be brought to bear to this and show away for the rest of country. I think in lots of ways, in terms of how we deal with people living together of different economic levels and how we pulled everybody up. And it's it's important that it works in California. That's

my feeling. I think so. I mean, I'm a I'm kind of, Ah, a local child. You know, I'm still very provincial in my thinking escape board. I have had the same haircut since I was 10 years old. I I'm I live a couple blocks for my dad, All right, I guess I live in Oakland now, so no more. But my dad lives in every valley, and, uh so I I do think that it's funny. People will say,

Where is doing this, right? And that's the question. I get a lot and I don't have a perfect answer, but I kind of said to myself, Well, have we ever asked ourselves There's a lot of things we did first. Couldn't we do this first, too? But you know, so I tend to be optimistic because right now we're talking about this a lot, and we are exhausted by this. Where the shame we feel walking around and seeing so many homeless people. The the disappointment we have with our own monoculture. Uh, I think that people are starting to think that there must be a better way, and it's on us to find

that's a really good weight. And thank you, Connor Connor Doherty. His book is about homelessness is about housing, and it's about the way we think of our societies and how we want to build him. It's called Golden Gates. Fighting for housing in America. Thanks. Thanks for coming. You can follow me on Twitter at Cara Swisher. My executive producer, Eric Anderson, is America. America. My producer, Eric Johnson, is it? Hey, hey, s J. Connor working people find you and your book online.

I am at at Connor Jordy, which is C o N o r d o u g h e r t y. And there is a search engine called Google. And if you do Golden Gates fighting for housing in America, you will find it or

fight

in the local books. Exactly. You could go to a local bookstore that it's in all sorts

of places. All right, if you like this episode, we really appreciate if you share it with a friend and make sure to check out our other podcasts. Pivot, reset recode media and Land of the Giants Just search them in your podcasting app of choice or tap a link in the show notes. Thanks also to our editor, Joel Robbie. Thank you for listening to this episode of Rico Decode. I'll be back here on Monday tune and then.