Steve Lopez is a California native, an award winning L.A. He grew up in the Bay Area and lives with his family in Oakland. He previously spent a decade in New York covering housing and the economy for The Wall Street Journal. (Penguin Press)Ĭonor Dougherty is an economics reporter at The New York Times. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Golden Gates captures a vast political realignment during a moment of rapid technological and social change. With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty chronicles America's housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking readers inside the activist uprisings that have risen in tandem with housing costs.

The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation's future has become a cautionary tale. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties where the homeless make their homes.

Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Joining Conor in conversation is Steve Lopez from the Los Angeles Times.

Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty