YouSaid · the spoken record

Conor Dougherty

lines on the record: 109
first: 2020-02-28
most recent: 2020-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am at Connor Doherty, which is C-O-N-O-R-D-O-U-G-H-E-R-T-Y. And there is a search engine called Google, and if you do Golden Gates fighting for housing in America, you will find it”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where is doing this right? And that's a question I get a lot. I don't have a perfect answer, but I kind of say to myself, well Have we ever asked ourselves? There's a lot of things we did first. Couldn't we do this first too? But I tend to be optimistic because right now we're talking about this a lot and we are exhausted by this. The shame we feel walking around and seeing so many homeless people, the disappointment we have with our own monoculture, I think that people are starting to think that there must be a better way. And it's on us to find it.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so too. I mean, I'm kind of a local child. I'm still very provincial in my thinking. I skateboard. I have had the same haircut since I was 10 years old. I live a couple blocks from my dad, or I guess I live in Oakland now, so no more. But my dad lives in Noe Valley. So I do think that it's funny people will say,”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. That is a really good way to put it. Absolutely. California is still the greatest place on Earth. I miss it so much when I'm out there. It's really astonishing. And it's really, there are so many creative solutions that could be brought to bear to this and show away for the rest of the country, I think, in lots of ways in terms of how we deal with people living together of different economic levels and how we pull everybody up. And it's important that it works in California. That's my feeling.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's impossible because of all the things I just said. But the flip side is it's impossible to get rid of it as well It is our thing. And if you think that that place is exceptional and interesting and special and that it has this wonderful mix of culture and ideas, those things, they are as fundamental to that industry as they are to the culture. And I get frustrated sometimes, partly because I'm a native Californian and I'm so aware of this history and how old that industry is. That I think that people are going to have to reconcile it with it as if it's their uncle, their family, rather than treating it like it's this invader.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just feel like that is so missing. And you know what it is? It's kind of the mirror image. For years and years and years and years, decades, you would hear people say, We're going to create the Silicon Valley in whatever Youngstown, Ohio, or something. And it was impossible.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if it's a Frankenstein, it's our Frankenstein. And I think that people try to portray it as this outside thing, but it is our thing.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You see institutions, Stanford, the venture capital industry, Berkeley, Kepler's bookstore, which is a little bookstore in Menlo Park where the counterculture met the military-industrial complex. You take Kepler's, which is where the Grateful Dead, I think, met each other, but then also where a lot of kind of computer people hung out, you mix those two things, the kind of military industrial complex and park research lab and all that. And then you mix this kind of counterculture thing. smash those things together, what do you get? You get Steve Jobs. And there are so many different impossible to replicate things in this region that are merging kind of this counterculture with this. Basically, military spending, but now corporate spending. And that is what makes the place the place”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I just think, and by the way, I want to say one thing. A lot of times in San Francisco and in other cities, tech, but let's just focus on San Francisco for a moment, is portrayed as this invading outside force. It's this thing that imposes, oh, Mark Zuckerberg, he moved here from Harvard and is imposing himself. That view could not be more wrong. This industry, or at least the conditions that created this industry, are at least a century old, they're probably longer. And it has been anchored in this region. It has been the primary economic engine for that region for quite some time. And when you look at that region,”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thoughtful and active, not as much as they could be, but about the places that they actually are. I think Jeff Bezos has done some stuff in Seattle.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the hashtag gave a million dollar, or the stripe the company gave a million dollars to California EMB, which is a statewide organization. Jeremy, of course, gave all this money. You are actually starting to see these companies become very...”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For everybody. Well, what you've also seen, though, and I think this is why the tech industry was initially a little exhausted by this thing, is you have to kind of go mix it up in local politics at a very micro level. And I think for tech executives and this industry that is so global and so large and it crosses cultures, it's very hard for them to get revved up about I'm going to go to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and or the Mountain View City Council, right? But you're actually starting to see that now Patrick Collison.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about movies, and if you look at sci-fi movies, the way they portray housing, I spent a lot of time thinking about, I actually the other day I was like, do we need to own houses? Because we don't own cars, you know, because I'm not owning a car now. I rent a lot of stuff. And I was like, what about housing? Do we actually have to not just rent, but is there a different way to do renting? Like that you, and everybody doesn't need to own a home. Because now it's been the wealth generator now for everybody.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm more saying is that we need to have cities that are more dynamic and the space is changing and that sort of thing.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need a new dream. I'm not saying we need to get rid of the dream. I'm more saying that ownership, by the way, I think ownership is, we can't just throw away ownership.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us So, when I think about two characters that are on the opposing sides of this, I think about Sonia and Barf and its associated movement, yes, in my backyard and its associated people, which are tend to be younger tech people who do fine but are not rich by any means. And then I think about the people who are protesting them. Those two groups need to find some kind of common cause because there's no, the dominating force of the single family home kind of empire, if you will, is so large and so Powerful that if those two groups spend all their time fixating on each other, they will never accomplish anything.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best I can tell, the only way to do that is to take the, let's call them the gentrified and the gentrifiers and somehow get them on the same side, somehow get them to create a political coalition that says we are the ones being left out right now and we need solutions and you're going to have to share some of the space in this city.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny. When I finished this book and I've been doing this tour, there's all these moments where you realize like, oh, wait, this is what the book is about. You didn't realize as you were writing it, which is kind of a terrifying feeling, but also something I've heard is common. You look at cities and most of the landmass is single-family homes. That is the dominating political force. Yes, the dominating home. It is the dominating geographical force. It is the dominating cultural force. If we're going to change the politics, changing that dynamic is paramount.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it comes out of the tech, when it comes out of the phone and into the real world, I think we all find it. More imaginatively simulating”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the same way about these housing companies that they're putting a ton of money behind this big idea, and they will figure something out. And it's a great place to be tinkering because it's a place where we actually know. That productivity is quite low. And if they can start to move that needle, it will have a tremendous benefit to the world. I don't know that the world was having such a difficult time efficiently selling ads that we needed. I mean, I'm sure it has become more efficient, but it's like 1% more efficient. I love it when I see people put real money behind ideas that seem More space agey and oh no, there's a better way to build a house”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a good way. We'll have gotten something out of that. And if all these investors. Yeah. And if all these investors lose money, they will still have contributed something.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I should also say, one of the things I love, and I know you love this too, because I've listened to your show, is when people start putting significant money and risk and gumption behind something that really is an audacious tech solution, it's not just another Twitter. That's one of the reasons, despite some of his... Personal kind of quirks. I love Elon Musk because I think If Tesla goes bankrupt, and this is all for naught, we at least got a really great battery out of it.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the end, it's this apartment that you're walking around. Everything is there besides the water, it doesn't work. And then they drive this out on a truck to a site. They stack them together like Legos, and then they bolt them together. And it takes a couple more months to really make the building work, but they can actually put the whole building up in like a day. I was really encouraged by this because the main engine of prosperity for all of human existence has been making it easier to do work, whether it's animals pulling your plow or tractors or whatever else. Construction has been one of the least. I call it artisanal. It is. It's one of the least productive industries. And so we need to find a way to make it actually just much easier and faster”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In various different places where they build buildings, really, it's not just like a house. They build apartments on an assembly line and it's a remarkable thing. You go to this factory and it's an old, it's where they used to make submarine periscopes. So it's a very long factory in a naval base, old naval base on Mare Island and in Vallejo. And it starts, and there's just this piece of plywood and it comes up like a little conveyor belt type thing, and then it moves up to a dolly and two guys are below putting in pipes and stuff that'll be the plumbing and somebody's up putting flooring and it just goes in 22 steps”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things that I, that was actually very Encouraged by there was a guy I followed through the book and he has started a factory and this is happening”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The popular solution is rent control. That is a solution that a lot of economists have some problems with, but I don't know what to say other than that. That is the main solution that is there for people. And unless we pass some gigantic tax program, which probably would be the smarter way to do it, that is one of the things we're going to have to engage. Or it doesn't matter. That is the thing people are going to engage. It doesn't matter what I think. So if I could wave my WAGIC wand, I would make it much easier to build housing and I would enact a gigantic program at a federal level to help people who cannot afford what the market is currently building.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are now moving back into those areas. Exactly. So we did not build enough housing, so we're in a deep hole. We have to get out of that hole. While we are getting out of that hole, we are going to have to make housing more affordable for people who can't afford it. And this isn't just, I mean, there's all sorts of reasons to do this. When I was following that family as they were being displaced by this $800 rent increase, that daughter, a 15-year-old girl, she lost a month of school. She was completely stressed, unable to function in any way. The heartbreak and the trauma that they had for the year after the eviction was crippling. So if I had lost him, I had two parents who helped me with my homework and everything like that. If I had lost them at school, it might have been difficult to catch up. I mean, I can't even imagine. No, the repercussions are massive. And those are repercussions that we will feel for many, many, many years, possibly generations. So stabilizing people in their home is imperative. Right now,”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I could wave my wand, I would make it much easier to build housing and build different types of housing, and I would come up with some sort of gigantic federal Start to provide a huge subsidy program for people who truly cannot afford what the market is currently building. There has not been some time. So one thing that people, one reason people in the anti-gentrification camp do not like new housing is that it tends to be more expensive, more expensive than, and so they worry that it will make housing next to it expensive as well. There's very little evidence that that's true. Nevertheless, that's the fear. But there was not some time when we built lots of brand new lovely housing and it was affordable for everybody. It has always mostly been the case that the way we create affordable housing is we build a lot of housing. It gets older and it moves down the income scale. We stopped doing that. We haven't done.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is because it costs a lot to live in California, pure and simple. Everything I've ever seen says that homelessness is heavily tied to the cost of housing. Again, it's not to say drug addiction and these other things don't play into it, but those are just things that make it difficult for someone to hold down a job or otherwise. To hold in a place Cost of housing ends up being the main variable because, like I said, they have people with mental difficulties and drug problems everywhere.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Half of the unsheltered homeless, which is people who are straight up outside in their cars or underbridges or on the sidewalk, half about 100,000 of the 200,000 are in California.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That California has overregulated housing made it too difficult to build the types of housing the middle class people could live in there was a lot of truth to that and we kind of have to own up to it”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't love it, but I guess they kind of accept it because he's this, you know, anti-death penalty, raise every tax gay man who marches in the bondage parade in San Francisco. But when it comes out of the mouth of Donald Trump or someone from his administration, they don't want to hear it. But that's just, but there is some truth to this idea that California has dug itself deeper into this problem than it would otherwise be. And I think that at some point we do have to reconcile with that. And it's not like anybody in the Trump administration seems to have thought this through super deeply. So I think dismissing some of their critiques is completely appropriate. But this idea”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take environmentalism. There's this kind of 1970s notion of environmentalism that environmentalism means great parks down the street from you and a place to walk your dog and that sort of thing. But that's not necessarily green if you're worried about climate change. And it's not green if you're worried about sprawl. It's not right. And I think sometimes it is absolutely a fair thing to say, has that gone too far? And is that focused on the wrong things? When that comes out of the mouth of a person like Scott Weener,”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of what Donald Trump is doing is just mean-spirited and let's call it trolling, right? So a lot of what they're doing, some of that is trolling, and you'll see Tucker Carlson and others. But a lot of what the kind of more conservative side is saying is that some of these liberal good intentions have gone there is some truth in that. And I think it annoys people that there is some truth in it.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have basically created poverty from an economy that should be like a beacon for the nation. And so you asked what's working.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Emanate from this. I mean, California has some of the highest wages in the country. It is way outpaced the nation in every economic metric and it has the highest poverty rate when you adjust for the cost of housing.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditionally been this guy who shows up with a laundry list of things I'm going to solve healthcare, I'm going to solve this, I'm going to solve his last state of state speech, which was just last week, he did nothing but talk about homelessness and housing. So you were starting to see people at least recognize, okay, this is the only problem. That we should be focused on in this state right now because all of our other problems.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, yeah, totally. And I think that there's a level of exhaustion right now with process, and she seems to be, I mean, look, you see this everywhere, right? Like SB50 and all these things in the three times Scott Wiener has pushed versions of this bill, when it failed The second after it failed, the president of the Senate, Tony Atkins, says. We're going to pass something like this by the end of this year, so you guys better get ready. So all around. There was a level of exhaustion right now in California with inaction. So I think that, and Governor Gavin Newsom, who has”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Development process from say two or three years, sometimes quite a bit longer to say six months. If you proposed a development on a parcel and it didn't require any changes or height variations or anything like that, you could just do it. That would probably speed up development quite a lot. We'll see if it makes the ballot and has voters. She's essentially trying to end run the board of superound her legislator to just say, let's just make law through the voters because she's so frustrated with her own board kind of stymieing her at every real.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, London Breed is the mayor of San Francisco. She is an African American woman who grew up in public housing and is from San Francisco. She has kind of embraced this mantle of development and she's actually now pushing a ballot measure, which we of course have a lot of those in California, but basically she will put in front of voters a thing that would make it, would speed without getting into the details. It would take the...”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll talk about that with London Breed in San Francisco and the various players there. She has tried to put in, on one hand, she's tried to put in, on the other hand, she's against certain things. It's really interesting to watch her sort of try to navigate, explain her situation”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you will hear local mayors say we don't want more growth. We don't want more people. I mean, they will flat out say that. I don't think you'd ever hear a governor say that because jobs and prosperity are just so much more part of their calling card”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're seeing decision making. You're now seeing all the Democratic presidential candidates have released housing plans where they have some kind of zoning component in it. So we're now even seeing, not that this is imminent or anything, but we're now even seeing people contemplating the federal government taking over or having a role. So yeah, this is what always happens. Whenever a level of government can't figure out a problem.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All this is going to lead to a bunch of developers building a bunch of different type of stuff, and we're going to get more of the same. We're going to get more tech buses, more monoculture, more. And I don't, for what it's worth, think that's the case, but it doesn't matter what I think. I just don't think people believe that it would work. And that's the problem.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that alliance, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, is very, very, very powerful. It's powerful for a couple reasons. It's powerful because it allows rich people to basically claim the mantle of gentrification when they're opposing a bill, which in California where people have a high sensitivity to appearing woke is important. On top of that, it's just a large number of people and a large number of representatives kind of coming together. I understand, and that is politics. He's going to have to figure that out. But I think what the difficulty shows is that people don't, and we've seen this throughout our society, people don't have a faith in the future. The basic problem with SB50 is that people simply don't believe it would work. I truly think that more than any... One issue we could identify.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neighborhoods worried about gentrification and they are kind of low density neighborhoods worried about their views and neighborhood character and property values. So rich people and poor people rich people, and let's call it the middle class people, but yeah, yeah, yeah”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on top of that, he's targeting that missing middle housing I was just telling about. He's not saying, let's go build a mega project in the middle of nowhere. Or not in the middle of nowhere, but in a place where people won't complain about it, let's build a ton of mid-level things in neighborhoods where people already live. And this bill went berserk. And what was fascinating about the bill, and this is something I spent a lot of time thinking about in the book, is that, and it all kind of came to a head in the bill, is that there's two main groups that oppose efforts to basically deregulate housing in cities.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have talked about it. He's going to try again, I'm sure. The basic gist of the bill is it would make it possible that four to eight story, or I think four-story buildings within a half a mile of a transit stop and also in fancy school districts and stuff.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solutions because He's your state senator. He's a state senator. Right. He was my. He's the state senator for the entire city of the way. California, a lot of people don't know this. California state senators represent more people than members of the U.S. House representatives. Oh, we know that.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let's talk about solutions because one of the things Scott Wiener, who's my representative, I live in the Castro San Francisco, or was my representative. Now he's, oh, I guess he's your state senator. Right. He's a state senator.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT