(Disclosure: Dougherty and I have submitted a session proposal for the California American Planning Association conference to discuss our respective books.)ĭougherty’s is an exceedingly contemporary history, and it is largely a narrative history. It was most certainly a pivotal moment in the YIMBY movement, and Dougherty provides an intimate, nuanced look at the origin of the movement and of the successes and failures it has experienced since then. The YIMBYtown conference-which Dougherty describes, accurately, as “full of beer and the excitement of several dozen people who thought they are the only person in the world thinking something and were now at a national conference of People Like Them”- appears a few dozen pages into Golden Gates. I didn’t expect, though, that it would be memorialized in print quite so soon.
I think some of us hoped that history was being made at what was arguably the first official confab of grassroots housing advocates in any of our lifetimes. That meeting took place at a rooftop bar in Boulder, Colo., where we were both attending the first-ever YIMBYtown conference (which I covered for Next City). He makes good on that prospect in his recent, unusually timely book Golden Gates: The Fight for Housing in America. Either way, he struck me then, and now, as ideally suited to pound the pavement for stories of California’s housing crisis.
The first time I met Conor Dougherty, I’m not sure if he told me that he grew up as a skateboarder in the East Bay or whether I just assumed that he grew up as a skateboarder in the East Bay.
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