A readable, eye-opening exploration of “what is fast becoming a national housing crisis.”
A New York Times economics reporter illuminates why affordable housing is scarce for tens of millions of Americans, with a focus on the San Francisco metro area.
As Dougherty explains in his first book, the cost of buying a single-family home or even renting a small apartment in a convenient, desirable location is one of the most pervasive conundrums facing Americans today. Perhaps no other phenomenon drives income inequality as starkly as housing. In addition, the price and location of housing affects quality of education from preschool through high school; exposure to clean air and drinkable water; racial and ethnic segregation; crime rates; and, perhaps most significantly, the availability of employment at a livable wage. While Dougherty provides plenty of macro-level research about housing across the nation—and especially in San Francisco—the major strength of the narrative occurs at the micro level. The author located individual players on various sides of housing debates, and he compares and contrasts their advocacy from diverse perspectives. The most memorable protagonist is Sonja Trauss, a young Bay Area resident who surprised everybody, including herself, by emerging as the leader of an aggressive, innovative affordable-housing coalition, the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation (SF BARF). As Dougherty notes, Trauss never opposed expensive homes for the wealthy as long as low-income residents could find affordable rental units that were at least somewhat convenient to their places of employment. If Trauss is considered a hero, the author understands that few of those battling her should be considered fully evil villains. What occurred to cause the unconscionable housing gap, writes the author, “was less a calculated conspiracy than it was best-laid plans.” After all, zoning restrictions and other factors can be viewed as one person’s protection—or another’s exclusion. The narrative will be especially poignant and thought-provoking for readers who rely on nannies, home health aides, construction workers, landscapers, and other low-paid occupations—where will they reside?
A readable, eye-opening exploration of “what is fast becoming a national housing crisis.”Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56021-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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