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

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“For people to live near a place where they can get a great education, a place where they can live in a thriving economy with lots of different kinds of jobs, a place where they can get on the escalators to success, which are these tech companies, these knowledge companies are the industrial powerhouses of our time. And just as your chances of making it further in life were enhanced by being near a manufacturing company in the 40s and 50s, being in Detroit or one of these places that was building manufactured goods, these are now our industrial powerhouses and you need to be near them Most people need to be near them to get into the new economy.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's a lot of different things we could talk about with income inequality and stuff, but I think the best way to solve income inequality, this is not the same against programs or all these sorts of things, I think the best way to solve income inequality is to make it possible”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back and we're talking with Connor Doherty. He's the author of Golden Gates fighting for housing in America. So you do cover this day today for the New York Times, and you talk about this idea of income macaulay. You're just talking about the idea of a systemic way to deal with this. One of the things you do talk about in this book is that democracy really gets hurt by this housing crisis. So paint a larger picture of the housing crisis in America and how we live, how we're going to live together, and maybe some solutions. And what you think is working? Or is it sort of this lost idea that we're just going to continue to create these bifurcated societies where I just don't know how it solves itself?”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, we're going to talk about that when you get back because one of the important things to keep in mind is they're systemic, and that's the issue that I think a lot of people don't get, that housing has everything to do with climate change, which you were talking about, which has everything to do with sociological issues and drug addiction and way of life, which creates these cities that are homogeneous and aren't as interesting as they used to be, or maybe they never were. We're here with Connor Doherty, the author of Golden Gates, Fighting for Housing in America. He's also a New York Times reporter who covers these issues.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to have to start basically addressing that people are going to have to live closer together and that our cities are going to have to be a little bit more compact.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we're sort of stuck in this thing. If we're going to solve climate change, if we're going to, if we're going to address all these big problems we have a bifurcated society, housing that costs too much, emissions that are a third of them are people are transportation.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What he means is it is something everybody hates, and yet it also contains the conditions that makes it almost impossible to stop because people, as much as people hate sprawl, they would almost rather create sprawl than solve it, which would mean building where they live. Right.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So we could talk forever about the policy stuff and how we could start going through an alphabet soup of acronyms, the California Environmental Quality Act. Has this same pattern where they make it very, very difficult to put density next to kind of lower density neighborhoods. And people don't like it. That problem that we make it very difficult to build where people already live is what gives us sprawl. It's what gives us free ways to know, or I guess not to know where, but to the next suburb, it gives us all these other things. And it was funny. I was talking to an economist. Historian rather for the book. And he said sprawl is a political contradiction because it means.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other part you're leaving out is Alamo Square is very huge homeless population lives there and moves around it because the police keep trying to move people, which is also another picture when you're there. And tourists are there. They're always sort of like, what is happening here? I'm trying to take this beautiful shot of San Francisco and there's tents and things like that, which again are moved daily.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But those people are linked through the economy, through different kinds of jobs, like I just said. They're living next to each other.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. If you go to and actually look in real life at that picture, there is like a 10 story apartment. It's about seven stories. There's six, five, six stories. There's a giant apartment building butting up against the top most painted lady. That has always cropped out of the picture because that's where we don't want to see. It doesn't fit our idealized view of things, or I don't know what the reason is, but that has always cropped out of the picture. That is what when San Francisco was a functional city, that is what it looked like. It had this mix of things. The neighborhoods had a lot of different kinds of types of housing and a lot of different types of people because the person who can live in a two-story lovely painted lady home is different than the person who can live in an apartment building right next to it.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually asked at one point if this could be the cover of the book, but they didn't like it for some reasonous Mavis picture that everybody who's listening and people around the world know it's the picture of the painted ladies. The painted ladies are these, as everyone knows, they are the opening of full house. They are these, I think it's five or six homes that are in a row. There's these beautiful single-family homes. And you can see the San Francisco skyline now dominated by the Salesforce Tower behind it. And it's on Alamos Granlinson. It's beautiful park and it goes down a hill. When you look at that picture, which was again the opening of the credits of Full House, you see these five wonderful, beautiful, relatively squat homes. If you go, as you know, if you go just where you're”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what they call the missing middle housing, which is housing that is middle sized, but also for middle income people, that housing is not allowed. You can't build a ton of duplexes, row homes. I mean, go to places like Philadelphia or Baltimore where you see It doesn't look super attractive right now, but where you see that they had lots of housing and affordable housing, it's not high rises everywhere. It's these dense kind of three and four story places. That is what we don't allow right now. One of the images I always think of”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is like we build a ton of condos that have 10 million, and it's like a whole new neighborhood out of whole cloth. You see that same pattern in every city across America. There's the warfare in D.C., there's the North Loop in Minneapolis, there's Hudson Yards in New York, all around the country. People seem to have said, okay, we need to build more housing. Let's go take this one district over here that used to be some industrial district and build a ton of stuff over there and build it as tall as humanly possible and make a neighborhood from whole cloth. That is not working because those buildings, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but I am saying those buildings are super expensive, they're super high and require elevators, the way construction cost works, once you add an elevator, you are in a whole other class of cost.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or, you know, there are duplexes and other things. There was the existing housing stock and nothing will touch it. There are a couple projects here and there, but generally speaking, those neighborhoods are off limits. And then we have an area like South America, which is this former warehouse district over by the bay where there used to be an industrial area when I was growing up.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not changing. So accepting that reality and accepting that we need to construct our cities for that reality is step one. What we need to do is build a lot more housing and make it easier to build housing and make it easier to build different types of housing. The way we have it in the Bay Area, which is true all around the country, is true here in DC, is we have a whole bunch of single family home neighborhoods or relatively low density neighborhoods that are in effect off limits.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To get better educated and all that. But we have to have housing for those two groups of people, or else the thing will fall apart and we'll get what we have today. So that's our economy around the country. We are moving in a knowledge direction that is not going to change. There is going to be a certain amount of service, a large service sector for things that robots can't do yet. And that is where we are.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about that because you had an excerpt in the Times about that. Totally. So I'll just say two things. One is the economy has changed. We all know this. We have the economy has kind of bifurcated into, let's call them knowledge workers who tend to be paid relatively well and work with their minds. And then service workers who tend to, some are paid quite well, like surgeons and stuff, but there's this other class of, say, retail workers, people who clean your homes, walk your dogs, all these sorts of things that are not paid very well. Those people have to be next to each other in cities because intellectual workers tend to want to be near each other for all to exchange ideas and all these things. And then the service workers essentially have to be close to them because they are typically, exactly. They cannot remote dog walk, that sort of thing. So cities are, let's say, engines of inequality. Now, I'm not saying that's bad. In a perfect world, cities have lots of opportunities for people to move into their kids.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to get to solutions, the last part, but one of the things you talked about is this idea, and you say one need only look at the airplane window to see there's nothing to do with the lack of space, there's a concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today's winter 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. Can you talk about that? Because you had an excerpt in the Times about that, but it's a theme throughout this book, is that people resisting what is the obvious solution is build more housing.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's this complete feeling of helplessness. And by the way, you obviously see this amongst the city as well. They seem, I mean, look at Gavin Newsom, that's the governor, but when he was mayor, now when he was governor, nobody knows what to do. And where you really see this is there's these go to Oakland, which is considerably worse than San Francisco. Their entire parks that are just colonized by tents and everybody has just come to accept it and doesn't know. What to do. And I think that is where we are. I mean, what we need to do is just build a ton of supportive housing and where and how we do that is our inaction. But I don't really see.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I totally agree with you. It's this sense of dread as you walk through the city and you feel like a horrible person all the time. You know, it's interesting. I will say this real quick. My colleague Tom Fuller, Thomas Fuller at the New York Times, when he first showed up from Thailand, he started writing about homelessness a lot. So I'm from San Francisco, as you know. And a number of my friends complained. They said, oh, I've noticed your new New York Times guide just discovered homelessness. And they were kind of giving me a hard time about him writing. And I said. Well, maybe shame on us for thinking this was normal. I think he's doing absolutely a good job.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting the reaction to homelessness in San Francisco. It's changed the nature of the city. It's changed the relationship between people. Talk a little bit about that because you spend a lot of time trying really hard not to be angry at us as a citizen at the same time to be empathetic to the people living in this tree and to avoid feelings of hopelessness because that's what it sometimes feels like when you're walking in San Francisco is like what can we do? Is there a solution?”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things you write is what this suggests is a real solution will have to be sociological, which I thought this was a great part. It was in the excerpt you had. It was a great part of the book. People have to realize that homelessness is connected to housing prices. They have to accept it's hypocritical say you don't like density but are worried about climate change. They have to internalize the lesson if they want their children to have a stable financial future. They're going to have to make space. They're going to have to change.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are much, much more willing to crowd into places and kind of bulk up to compete to meet the higher rents. And the people at the very bottom, I should note homeless people, this is not universally true, but it is largely true. I've spent a lot of time with homeless people. They often do not have the greatest bonds. Their family ties are not super strong. They don't seem to have the best community or friends. And so those are the people who get pushed out. Obviously, there's a large degree of mental health and drug addiction problems amongst homeless people, but that does not explain it. The price explains it because there are, of course, lots of people struggling with substance abuse problems and mental difficulties all around the country, and they don't have horrific homeless problems all around the country.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, throughout the fight and the process, people say somebody from Facebook's going to move in. This is the only people who could afford this. I go in, it's another Latino family with the almost the exact same job profile, the sons worked construction in the mom, did house cleaning and some other things. But they had just stuffed like eight people into this place that used to have four. Across the housing spectrum, you see people crowding in. You see tons of tech people crowding into higher end apartments. And so there's this cascading effect. And the people at the very, very, very, very bottom are pushed out and they just go to the streets. And I think that that is, I think it's pure and simple that there's a lot more people.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's just a simple cascading effect. You have the home prices go up and everyone moves down a notch. So I'll give you an anecdote from the book. I followed a family in Redwood City as they were displaced by a landlord. So this was a 15-year-old girl. Her mom is who does elder care, cleans houses, and mullins as a janitor. So she's the woman who takes care of your grandma, the woman who cleans your house under the table, and then the woman who comes in and empties trash can as you are leaving your office. So this woman, they got an $800 rent increase. The guy bought the building, gave them an $800 rent increase. So they all organize to fight this rent increase. It goes on for a couple months. Spoiler, they don't win. They do get a buyout. So then I went back so they move out. I went back. Who moves it?”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So talk about how that happened because there was a discernible shift in the way San Francisco homeless just exploded. And I've lived there for 20 some years. And the shift was dramatic and quickly, even though there was always a homeless problem, it became something much more significant. And of course, it's gotten nationwide and worldwide attention.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This started to become a way to create condos so people would buy what were effectively apartment buildings and say, I'm going to move in. But then they didn't really move in. They flipped them to condos. And so across the city, you started to see the influx of wealth, the wealth that kind of lived on its own. Because if you think about it, the actual number of people who work in tech is still not in San Francisco is still not that high. It's like seven or eight percent or something. But the influence it has on the city and specifically its real estate prices is way outside. I think it's like 40 or 50 percent of the people who buy, who are buying homes in San Francisco are from tech, but the actual employment is not that high. On top of that, the homeless problem, which should be said, has always been a problem, or since the 80s has been a problem in San Francisco, but it just got so, so, so much worse.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened is for starters, it starts to feel much, much, much more like a monoculture. So there was a great article in the San Francisco Chronicle that I think the headline was The Graying of San Francisco. And you can see as people buy these homes, they paint them, I think it's called gentrification gray. And in San Francisco's known for having these lovely colorful homes, and suddenly there are these gray homes on top of that, just the prices go up to levels you cannot imagine. On top of that, there were a number of things, of course, were some very, very public evictions. There was a thing in San Francisco in all of California called Ellis Act evictions, which is when someone buys a place that a tenant lives in and tells them you have to leave because I'm just going to move in.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should say the book kind of follows the arc of the one of the arcs. There's many arcs in the book, follows Sonia and this rise and this Yimbi thing and it became very, very powerful and kind of looks at how it began at that origin, which I was there for. And then by the end, they're running for office and they got tons of money, CZI has given them a lot of money”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hex Gum was stuncled on the place. Yeah. And I think I understand why they were why there was a backlash because it's not fair either.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“San Francisco sounds like a great place, and you read all this romance, and then everyone hates you merely for showing up. And I think. It's hard for people who are. And you have to underscore.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People were very attracted to this idea that here is a group that has absolved us of guilt for merely coming here. And I truly sympathize with some of those people. You're whatever, 22 years old, you go to college for computer science, you work very hard in these mathy classes while all your friends are writing papers about some easy topic and getting high and writing, I'm joking, but I was a STEM major and it is much harder. I was a physical chemistry major. And they moved to San Francisco for a good job wherever they're from I met this one guy. He was from some tiny little town in Kansas and he was like, well.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loved this topic partly because it was true. So I should say the mayor does have a housing prop, I'm not, but also because this was a group of people, a movement, an ideology that was saying this is not your fault. This is the region's fault for having bad public policy. I think we've gotten to a more nuanced conversation, but when we're talking about the origins at the beginning, I really think partly it was people saying”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it has entire blocks of empty property. She said, look, this is a housing problem, not a tech problem. And I think that the tech industry really glummed onto that because her, and we can talk about this because you said you wanted to, Kim Mycutler, a woman at TechCrunch, who's now at initialized capital, she wrote this piece called How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists that was all about the tech bus protests and the essential gist of the piece was, this is not a bus problem, this is a housing problem. So there was all this kind of, let's call it backlash. And I think that a lot of the people in the tech industry liked glommed onto this, partly because these were people saying, this is not your fault. And they got very into history and very into economics, reading about the housing shortage, reading about how the Bay Area has this long history in Nimbyism. And I think what happened was people in the tech industry.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All these people were coming to the Bay Area, and in her mind, because she's from Philadelphia, which if you've ever been to Philadelphia, it's a lovely city, but there are still some pretty depressed parts of it.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a number of studies about this that everywhere they created a tech bus stop, the rents would go up. Now, this is where the YMB thing comes in, yes, in my backyard. Sonia, who is this, who's not from the tech industry. She was a high school teacher, but the tech industry quickly latched onto her. And I don't just mean Jeremy. All the people who trumped the meetings with her were tended to be 25 year old engineers, that sort of thing. She showed up and said, this is not a tech problem. This is a housing problem. You created all these jobs. All these people want to come here. If you recall, I mean, the rest of the country was still recovering from the Great Recession at that time. So I think unemployment was so quite high nationally and good employment was still quite low. That remains low.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, with our better, includ God, yeah. I think they did actually run a couple boats just as a test run a couple times. So transportation is obviously a huge problem and it's a huge problem that everybody in that region is experiencing. And I think that it led to a lot of resentment that they're not trying to solve this problem for the region the way that public Goods are the subway or any other thing. Previous large companies. And they're trying to solve it for themselves only. And I think that became a very on top of that was obviously”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I obviously understand where the company's coming from. They're like, we need people. There up there. We're going to send buses to get them. It's not our fault that this city does not have great, or this region does not have great public transit. And they're growing so fast. I mean, look how many people.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vessel, but they aren't particularly worried about its public systems. They do not have a kind of common good in it. And at the same time, if you recall, there was also this somewhat famous viral video where A bunch of employees of some company, I forget, had reserved a soccer field and got into a big fight with Latino kids in the mission who had used that soccer field for years and years and years. And it became this very intellectual argument where the tech guys were like, we reserved this online. And the young guy was saying, we play here every Saturday. There's no reserving. So I think that there was this fairly or unfairly there was this reckoning over the idea that tech people were coming in, erecting their own systems that existed separately from. Yeah.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Darth Vader tinted windows and you see these lines. You can be in a very kind of quiet neighborhood in San Francisco with just two-lane streets and this giant bus will be on the corner and you will see all these people in their bows, headphones and their backpacks and their casually dressed tech uniforms lined up, ready to go into these buses. And this became a very galvanizing moment for the city because it really looked like a two-tier system. Here was these, you know, the San Francisco public transit is not terribly good. And here are these people. And of course, on top of that, you read all these stories. Oh, they get amazing health care. and free food and childcare at work and all the gyms and all these things and here are these amazing buses and i think that this i talk about this a little bit in the book i think this started created the perception about people is that these people do not have a stake in this city they they come here they use it as a”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“San Francisco for all its history, and I've read a lot of history about the place in California generally, it's always as perfect. People show up and the version that they see when they show up is perfect. And I think that that's certainly part of the place. As you well know, the actual city of San Francisco had started to become much more of a tech hub than it had ever been. Companies like Salesforce and Twitter and other companies and Uber were actually being located in the city of San Francisco. This, of course, led to the tech buses because sort of the opposite, meaning that the companies that were down in the valley were sending buses up to get people who wanted to explain these buses for those. Yes, there are these large double-decker buses with”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what it is is that you don't have enough housing, and then at the same time, you have this combination of very wealthy people wanting to live in cities, and there's a Tranda demographic trend towards young people wanting to stay in cities versus fleeing to the suburbs, which had been happening for years. So it's a return. Essentially, people with lots and lots of money. Then there was the tech money. And we'll get into that in a second. So you had a situation that was sort of ripe for what happened. So explain what happened. So you had these Yimbi people saying, we got to build here. And you have this group of local San Francisco people, often wealthy people, who don't want you to build and keep it as adorable as it is.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't actually know the answer. I do know that California has less per capita housing than any other state besides Utah, and that's actually an anomaly because Utah has much larger families. So it really is the worst.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dry Yes, in my backyard So, the idea is Yimbi is this yes in my backyard, a very famous word is NIMBI, which is not in my backyard. Don't build here, don't do density building. And for those who don't know San Francisco, there is hardly any density building. It's the lowest profile city, one of them that I've ever seen, maybe some European city.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in my mind, I thought, this is a wonderful illustration of this very wonky topic. Here's the first time I've seen someone who is looking for housing and is aware that there's a housing shortage. And in the past, the story had always been much more academic. It was just a very boring, very dry. I latched onto that Yimby story mostly because it was a great way to illustrate basically academic research. And that led me, of course, to a million other things.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought that's odd. So I called Sonia up and then I went and hung out with her for a couple days and watched her kind of go to City Hall and complain about housing. And she had all these followers and all these young people really, when I say young, I obviously mean like 25 to 35, engaged in her thing. And there really was something going on there. As an economics reporter, I was hyper aware, maybe more than most people, that there was a ton of research that this housing thing was a big problem and that it had been a big problem for a long time. Ed Glazer, who is this Harvard economist who's very famous for having called that there was a big housing crisis. I knew all his research was out there. And the Obama administration, right around the same time I met Sonia, had started to release papers on this too.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought that's odd. Here's this guy who obviously had quite a lot of money. If you really wanted to get involved in local politics in a traditional way, he's got more than enough money to do that. You have a publicly traded company. And also, as I'm sure you know, Jeremy, he's not like one of these talking about singularity all the time. He's a very serious guy and straight and narrow kind of guy.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing antitrust enforcement and all that. And at the end of the interview, I often try to leave a couple minutes for some random question to sort of see if I could keep my story ideas going. I asked him, I said, well, I heard you're into housing and you're interested in this horrible housing crisis we have. And he told me, oh, I've given a bunch of money to this woman. Her name is Son Neutral. She's a little cookie. She runs this group called Barf, the Bay Area Renters Federation.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Short origin story, which I think your listeners will like, is that I was covering Google and I was talking to Jeremy Stoppelman about which you know his favorite. Sorry, I'm... About what you know his favorite topic is, which is how much he hates Google and how much the government should be.”
2020-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Conor Dougherty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT