Summary of Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 The Planning Commission in San Francisco was bombarded with comments from an angry young woman named Sonja Trauss who supported every project under consideration, as well as more housing in general.

#2 Sonja Trauss, a high school math teacher, spoke at a city meeting in favor of housing, claiming to be just a member of the public. She was actually a grad school dropout who had moved to the Bay Area because she was too embarrassed to go back home and explain why she didn’t have a PhD.

#3 Sonja had never had a stable career, having graduated from law school and then dropping out. She’d been a bike messenger, a window washer, and a legal aide. She’d spent a year organizing friends and sewing spandex costumes as part of the founding of a thirty-person comedy troupe.

#4 In San Francisco, Sonja lived in a house with cheap artist and musician roommates, who turned the place into a subcultural melting pot. The Bay Area’s tech boom in the 1990s was defined by political activism and the struggle of just being there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669352716

IRB Media

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Book preview

Insights on Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Planning Commission in San Francisco was bombarded with comments from an angry young woman named Sonja Trauss who supported every project under consideration, as well as more housing in general.

#2

Sonja Trauss, a high school math teacher, spoke at a city meeting in favor of housing, claiming to be just a member of the public. She was actually a grad school dropout who had moved to the Bay Area because she was too embarrassed to go back home and explain why she didn’t have a PhD.

#3

Sonja had never had a stable career, having graduated from law school and then dropping out. She’d been a bike messenger, a window washer, and a legal aide. She’d spent a year organizing friends and sewing spandex costumes as part of the founding of a thirty-person comedy troupe.

#4

In San Francisco, Sonja lived in a house with cheap artist and musician roommates, who turned the place into a subcultural melting pot. The Bay Area’s tech boom in the 1990s was defined by political activism and the struggle of just being there.

#5

The problem was not too many jobs, but too little housing. Sonja grew up in a three-story house in Germantown with enough rooms to test your vocabulary, and she found it shocking how flat Bay Area cities seemed given how much it cost to live there.

#6

American cities are shaped by zoning and land-use rules, which were designed to separate what can be built where. These rules are so central to how American cities look and operate that they have become a sort of geographic DNA that forms our opinion of what is proper and right.

#7

The Fairfax was a stately brick building