Contract cities aren’t the first thing that come to mind for most people when they think of the affordable housing crisis that many American cities now face—these suburban communities tend not to have many homeless people or renters at risk of eviction. But in desirable regions like coastal California, contract cities have played a huge role in exacerbating housing problems outside their borders. For over half a century, they’ve been all too successful at implementing their founding mandates: preserving their physical and demographic character, and delivering consistently rising home values to homeowners. [...]
Golden Gates is at its best as a history, whose breadth demonstrates the impossibility of silver-bullet housing solutions. One of many counterintuitive origin points for California’s current crisis was San Francisco’s freeway revolts that began in the 1950s, when grassroots neighborhood activists successfully prevented highways from being constructed throughout most (but not all) of the city. The revolts marked the beginning of the state’s anti-growth movement, which challenged California’s longstanding growth-for-growth’s sake philosophy. That doctrine had brought “urban renewal” projects that transformed minority neighborhoods into bombed-out shells of their former selves and inspired proposals to fill in nearly the entire San Francisco Bay.
Anti-growth activism began as a close cousin of the state’s environmentalism, but as time went on, “the good intention of stopping sprawl soon became cover for stopping everything,” Dougherty writes. The broad language of the California Environmental Quality Act enabled this conceptual fudging, granting ordinary citizens the power to halt coastal subdivisions and green urban infill projects alike. As land use and planning power devolved to neighborhood groups, city governments followed their lead by “downzoning” large swaths of their land to preserve the existing urban landscape, as if it were a pristine old-growth forest.
