Golden Gates, Conor Dougherty

Golden Gates:  Fighting for housing in America by Conor Dougherty is another take on the difficulty for the poor to find housing from a Wall Street Journal and New York Times author.

Started: 6/24/2020

Completed: 6/28/2020

Recommendation: Recommended if you are interested in San Francisco

Recommended By:  Nobody

Review:

Given the subtitle, I really thought this was going to use San Francisco as a foil to talk about housing in America in general.  Not so.  This is a brief history of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement in San Francisco with the occasional drift into other California cities.

Maybe how journalists write books

I am beginning to notice that when a journalist writes a book it often reads like a series of long columns.  Journalists focus on events and get caught in the sequence.  To make the book seem less like a series of columns, they tend to mix up the order of the events, but this just adds a little to the confusion.  I see it like this...the journalist covered events A, B, and C.  In the lead up to A, however, "a" happened which seemed to be of no consequence, but it tied to "b" which resulted in B and it was only because A and B happened that C happened:

...a...A-----+

   |         |

   |   ......C...

   |         |

  .b.....B---+

So, the journalist deals with this in the book by starting with C and providing the lead up to C which takes us back to A and the lead up to A takes us back to "a" which ties into "b" that leads to B which gets us back to C again.  This happens then repeatedly through out the book.

I think that it must be editors who help journalists figure out how to do this, but I'm not sure.  My gut is that a journalist would prefer to crank through the material in the order it happened tying in the pieces as they go.  In this book, I can almost see where the editor made the cuts and the author tried to awkwardly tie the pieces back together with segues instead of surrendering to the march of time.  The book stumbles over time instead of integrating a series of only mildly related events into a coherent whole.

And now back to the review

There is a large cast of characters who appear and then disappear in the book without any seeming impact on the whole book.  I think that this is because so-and-so said thus-and-such and the important thing was not the person, but what that person said.  It feels like the author wants to make sure that the attribution is made, but cares little for the person.

It was oddly misogynistic to refer to one person (who is tracked throughout the book) as having acquired a ring and a bump in her belly to indicate she was married and starting a family. 

One cool thing that this author does is grab short phrases from community meetings and slap them atop each other one after the other.  This grabs the sense of the meeting without the need for the author to describe it.  It feels authentic.  It is an excellent technique and, I'm sure, quite hard to do well.

In the end, while this is an interesting story, I'm not sure how applicable it is to the rest of America.  The epilogue is literally an after thought that tries to draw tendrils across the country, but truly succeeds in suggesting that there are different stories everywhere and no real coherent approach (maybe that is the point, but, if so, the book loses its value by only looking at one).