[This article is adapted from Conor Dougherty's book, Read The Times review .]
It was imperative they cut a deal. Much more was at stake than just one building on one plot of land in one suburb.
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1 mile
Pleasant Hill Rd.
Deer Hill Rd.
BART station
Terraces of
Lafayette site
Mt. Diablo Blvd.
Lafayette
Reservoir
Lafayette
Lafayette
Berkeley
CALIFORNIA
Oakland
San Francisco
10 miles
America has a housing crisis. The homeownership rate for young adults is at , and about send more than half their income to the landlord. is resurgent, a million households a year, and spend at least three hours driving to and from work.
One need only look out an airplane window to see that this has nothing to do with a lack of space. It's the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today's winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing centers of technology and finance. There is, simply put, a dire shortage of housing in places where people and companies want to live — and reactionary local politics that fight every effort to add more homes.
Nearly all of the biggest challenges in America are, at some level, a housing problem. Rising home costs are a major driver of segregation, inequality, and racial and generational wealth gaps. You can't talk about education or the shrinking middle class without talking about how much it costs to live near good schools and high-paying jobs. Transportation accounts for about a third of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions, so there's no serious plan for climate change that doesn't begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work.
Nowhere is this more evident than California. It's true that the state is addressing facets of the mess, with efforts on , subsidized housing and homelessness. But the hardest remedy to implement, it turns out, is the most obvious: Build more housing.
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According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the state needs to create 3.5 million homes by 2025 — more than triple the current pace — to even dent its affordability problems. Hitting that number will require building more everything: Subsidized housing. Market-rate housing. Homes, apartments, condos and co-ops. Three hundred and fifteen apartments on prime parcels of towns like Lafayette.
