The Solution to Expensive Housing Is More Housing.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

By Conor Dougherty

288 pp.; Penguin Press, 2020

Finally, a book by a New York Times reporter who understands the crucial link between restrictions on the supply of housing and the price of housing! Golden Gates, by economics reporter Conor Dougherty, is a tour de force. It's a rare book that mixes careful, nuanced reporting, painless economics lessons, interesting history of California, and pitch-perfect humor, but Dougherty of important players. First is a colorful has written one.

Dougherty, who was a housing reporter for the Wall Street Journal for a decade, must have learned a lot in that job. He knows and understands the economics literature on the connection between supply and price, as evidenced by his treatment of the pathbreaking work of Harvard's Ed Glaeser and Wharton's Joseph Gyourko. (See "Zoning's Steep Price," Fall 2002.) Furthermore, Dougherty understands that when more luxury housing is built, that frees up housing that is then sold to people slightly lower on the wealth scale, and on down. He also understands the negative consequences of rent control.

That's not to say that I agree with everything in the book. In particular, the author underplays both the bad consequences of rent control and the good that would result from massive housing deregulation. But those defects are way more than offset by his understanding of the harm done by restrictions on building.

Activists and economists / Early in the book, Dougherty introduces a number of important players. First is a colorful character named Sonja Trauss, a teacher in the East Bay who dropped out of the doctoral economics program at Washington University in St. Louis, emerging with a master's degree. Trauss started San Francisco Bay Area Renters' Federation, an organization that favors allowing more housing to be built. She was an early advocate of YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), the opposite of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). As Dougherty puts it, "Sonja was for anything and everything, so long as it was built tall and fast and had people living in it." Trauss later became a full time activist for the cause of more housing, and Dougherty tracks her movements carefully.

Trauss has a way with words and Dougherty has a keen ear for those words. She understands 19th-century writer Frederic Bastiat's point about the unseen consequences of government regulation. At a hearing in the East Bay city of Lafayette, she pointed out that many of the people who would be...