Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America, with a New Preface

by Randy Shaw

Generation Priced Out is a call to action on one of the most talked-about issues of our time: how skyrocketing rents and home values are pricing the working and middle classes out of urban America. Randy Shaw tells the powerful stories of tenants, politicians, homeowner groups, developers, and activists in over a dozen cities impacted by the national housing crisis. From San Francisco to New York, Seattle to Denver, and Los Angeles to Austin, Generation Priced Out challenges progressive cities to reverse rising economic and racial inequality.
 
Shaw exposes how boomer homeowners restrict millennials’ access to housing in big cities, a generational divide that increasingly dominates city politics. Shaw also demonstrates that neighborhood gentrification is not inevitable and presents proven measures for cities to preserve and expand their working- and middle-class populations and achieve more equitable and inclusive outcomes. Generation Priced Out is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of urban America.

 

Genres: Urbanism, Nonfiction, Politics, Urban Planning, Economics, Cities, Business

328 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2020

Reviews

[D. St. Germain · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of housing in foundational to understanding both the literal and prospective fortunes of people in America, as housing is the primary way (white) people have accumulated wealth. Yet, there is little out there these days in terms of comprehensive analysis of the problems of affordable housing.

Randy Shaw takes his decades of experience in the Bay area and weaves it together with housing issues on the ground across a number of progressive American cities to look at why, at the local level, it can be so hard to adopt inclusive housing rules.

Shaw's answer as to this difficulty? Mostly Boomers, whose organized NIMBYism (not in my backyard-ism) has worked to preserve the financial gains they've accrued through drastic increase in property values. Through many examples, Shaw shows how housing restrictions are used to keep out the young, and in the case of Boulder, Colorado, with a side benefit of suppressing voters as well.

Zoning restrictions have transformed affordable communities into luxury neighborhoods, and promote racial and economic segregation. Single-family-home zoning, minimum lot sizes, restrictive height and density limits, and strict occupancy restrictions work together to keep new people out and maintain property prices.

While Shaw hits these issues on the head, a conversation is missing about the financialization of housing and the growth of housing as an asset class, which creates a larger set of problems and different policy cures. That being said though there are a lot of interesting policy points in this book. See my longer review if you'd like a bigger discussion of housing policy ideas.

[Ellen Matheson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shaw packs this book with tons of great information, but I found it to be disorganized overall. In my humble opinion, it would’ve made more sense to organize the book by housing affordability issues/solutions rather than by city (pattern along the lines of Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”). He covers San Francisco, then LA, then Austin, then back to San Francisco, etc, in the process repeating discussion points that apply to each of the cities.
Shaw does a great job covering the hypocrisy of “progressive” homeowners rejecting low-income and middle-income housing in their own communities. These boomer voters support affordable housing on the ballot, but when it comes time to build an affordable complex down the street, these boomers pack into local government forums to reject housing that “just doesn’t fit” with the “character” of the community. Yikes.
Again, Shaw unearths fascinating statistics and tells several powerful anecdotes about the housing affordability crisis in America’s big cities, but this book could have benefited from significant organizational overhaul.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the first (if not the first) non-scholarly books focusing on the problem of high housing costs in expensive cities. Shaw explains how cities such as San Francisco have refused to allow enough new housing to keep up with job and population costs, causing rents to soar. For example, Los Angeles added 160,000 new residents from 2010 to 2015 but only 25,000 housing units. Similarly, the San Francisco Bay area added 546,000 new jobs but only 76,000 new housing units.

He skillfully rebuts anti-housing arguments. For example, one argument against new housing is that it displaces affordable older housing. But Shaw cites numerous examples of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) homeowners opposing apartment buildings built on parking lots and vacant lots. For example, in Venice, California, NIMBYs opposed "building 136 supportive housing units for low-income people on an unsightly city-owned parking lot."

Another anti-housing argument is that new housing will always be for the rich. But Shaw shows that NIMBYs oppose public housing for the poor as well as market-rate housing for the middle and upper classes.

A third anti-housing argument is that communities should be protected against skyscrapers. But Shaw shows that NIMBYs have fought even the smallest apartment buildings. For example, in Berkeley, NIMBYs persuaded the city to reject a developer's plan to add only three houses to a lot.

Shaw is a progressive who works at a nonprofit housing organization, so his point of view is less market-oriented than mine. In particular, he favors a wide range of government policies designed to protect tenants from landlords, including (for example) rent control. It seems to me, however, that any policy that makes being a landlord difficult and/or less profitable is likely to discourage people from becoming landlords, thus reducing housing supply in the long run. Shaw writes that San Francisco has "the strongest tenant protections of any major city." It seems to me no coincidence that it has the highest housing costs as well.

[Justin F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall Shaw writes on an important topic, but his final product does not do the topic justice. The overall structure of the books leads to redundancy, especially as he reiterates that the same factors plague cities (at least the progressive, mostly coastal, cities he writes about) and doesn’t shy from reusing the examples when talking about SF. He seems less critical of SF than other cities and often attributes its flaws to external factors (Silicon Valley, Oakland’s laws) while deeming other cities’ leadership incompetent or malicious. Good read but could have just been a single article in the Atlantic or other liberal leaning publication.

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative work, Generation Priced Out offers a lot of food for thought and ideas of how we as a society can make housing more affordable throughout the urban areas of the United States, where prices are squeezing and forcing out working and middle class citizens, especially among the young.

Randy Shaw, the director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic compiles an interesting, and sobering, account of the trends and policies that have lead to this state of affairs. It’s a pretty comprehensive account of how US cities are working, and failing, to combat the rampant housing crises, especially for millennials and younger generations and especially in the places where jobs are being created and people desire to live. Among other topics, Shaw discusses gentrification, race, homelessness, and neighborhood opposition to “development,” along with the policies that encourage this displacement.

Whether in Shaw’s San Francisco (seen as the epicenter of the housing crisis) or New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, Denver, and my own Minneapolis, among others, Shaw describes the breadth and severity of the problem. He deftly explains why these “progressive” and desirable cities are following policies that lead to great disparities in who can afford to live in them. Arranged mainly by city, Shaw shares a lot of statistics and citations that back up his claims, though he also relies on interviews and personal experiences he collected to illustrate how people are affected. This structure can make some of the points a little repetitive as the same elements are present across the cities, which can make the flow of the text a little jarring.

However, in addition to this wealth of details, Shaw provides a lot of concrete steps in the conclusion that cities can take to rectify the problem through various political and infrastructural solutions, which makes it feel, as a whole, quite hopeful for the future. All in all, a great, accessible resource into the issue with a lot of sources to continue looking into these matters and a lot of practical advice, as well.

[Luigib]

Randy Shaw is left of Bernie Sanders.

Page 6, "The Tenderloin remains primarily working class and low income to this day. Its resistance is a lesson for activists in other cities who are battling the pricing out of the working and middle class is futile." Really? First, I would like to congratulate Shaw on preserving the Tenderloin as the highest crime area in the city that earned the highest per capita property crime rate of any city in the US. Thanks Randy!!! By the way, absolutely no middle class reside in the Tenderloin. Zero!

My God. On page 1, Shaw complains that rents doubled between 2000 and 2016. All of about 4.5% per year. Is that hyperinflation? Cars have inflated, food has inflated, but Shaw thinks rents should stay fixed. Beer at Giants games has quadrupled during the same period!! Ticket prices have tripled. Storm the Giants' ballpark!!!

Loved page 37. Shaw cites the increased rent on a fictitious television character, Issa Rae, from the series The Misadventures of An Awkward Black Girl as a knock on property owners improving their property. This book is based totally on antidotes, but to quote a fictitious person telling her boyfriend before leaving, "it's gonna make some young white couple real happy one day" to justify what point Shaw? Why not just write Superman into your book?

The other part I don't get is that Shaw laments the Latinos moving out of the Mission, while showing no sorrow for the German, Italian, and Irish immigrants getting pushed out the Mission first. At one point, Shaw blames mass transit (BART) for making it easier for whites to commute versus Latinos. Then a couple chapters later, Shaw argues for more housing along mass transit. Had a little trouble following that one.

But after the quote from Issa Rae, WHO DOES NOT EXIST, I knew Shaw was peddling socialist theories.

[Zack Subin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a much-needed book telling the story of the urban housing crisis across the US with historical context and solutions. Randy fills the book with stories from the long history of both intentional and unwitting exclusion of renters and lower income housing from increasingly wealthy cities. He brings his perspective from decades as a journalist and affordable housing advocate, and he bridges the rhetorical and sometimes political gap between the affordable housing / tenants’ rights movements and the nascent YIMBY movement by showing the broad overlap in potential solutions. Meanwhile, he spares no ire nor fails to point out the irony of the hypocrisy of wealthy progressives stopping housing development in their neighborhood, or that of Baby Boomer homeowners blaming the housing crisis on Millennials who are forced to pay $3000/rent to live near their jobs.

I also found it really refreshing to hear from these stories (in addition to various economic studies) demonstrating that positive change is possible, that some cities have done better than others (for instance, the comparisons between Seattle and San Francisco), and that the current crisis was not inevitable but was the result of a history of political decisions.

I sometimes found the organizing a bit rambling and the text a bit in need of tightening. However, the informal writing style makes the book highly accessible.

[Paul Keister · Rating 4 out of 5]

Housing affordability is without question a foundational problem for most US cities. While it's easy to lament, pursuing solutions is challenging and, Shaw shows us, uncomfortable for many with progressive views, especially those of us in the boomer generation. This book explores the obvious but somehow controversial need to build more housing, and the various forces allied against the effort. The level of detail is at times overwhelming, but it serves to make a very persuasive case for the agenda that Shaw proposes; it also shows how many housing battles are local and have as much distinctive character as the neighborhoods in which they are fought. If you care about the future of US cities, this book will show you an informed and optimistic way forward.

[Jerry Dee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very long feeling book disguised as an average sized book. Somehow feels both too dry/statistical and too anecdote heavy. The conclusion in the back gives 10 great takeaways. I'd recommend looking at that first and then choosing a chapter to read based on that. The chapters can feel a bit repetitive. So reading them out of order shouldn't be a problem.

[Russell Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never really thought about gentrification until I read this book. In fact, it was not until well after I read it that I discovered the experiences presented in California cities were exactly what was happening in manufactured home parks in Florida. Great read for anyone interested in the erosion occurring in affordable housing.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone interested in understanding gentrification better.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book on the housing crisis faced by major cities, most notably in CA. Shaw has a background as a tenant advocate and rent control is one solution he poses for the housing crisis. Unlike most in that camp, however, he sees many causes, focusing most specifically on the lack of housing at all levels, particularly in major cities such and Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, where yearly employment increases have not been matched by housing unit development. Shaw shows how zoning requirements, regulations and neighborhood preservation movements have stopped housing development. Most telling is the resistance of otherwise progressive boomer housing owners to the construction of new housing around them, particularly if it is multi unit and even if it is grouped around transit centers. The most encouraging chapter was about the attempts of millennials to build infill housing around transit centers in San Francisco but the bleak part of that story is that it’s only a drop in the bucket. I saw Mr. Shaw speak at the LA Times book festival. He was a great speaker also.

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Randy Shaw’s Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America analyzes the growing housing crisis that a growing number of cities are grappling with. While there are a multitude of causes, he argues against the boogeyman of the tech industry. Instead the cause ultimately comes down to the failure to build sufficient housing to keep up with growth.

Can anything be done? Shaw believes there is, though he notes that it is imperfect world—the days many people have a nostalgia for, when everything was affordable, are probably gone for good. Nonetheless, Shaw argues that the housing crisis many cities are facing does not have to be as dire as it is now.

Generation Priced Out is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in housing or planning policy and should serve as a cautionary tale, especially for up and coming cities like Denver that are facing a housing crisis that they had not faced before.

[JCC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read but does not do a solid job convincing me that building any type of housing everywhere including more market rate/ lux housing- which Los Angeles is currently approving these type of new develops in blighted area causing displacement and turbo charging gentrification- will indirectly help the housing crisis. The problem initially started by speculators and investors driving the market up by buying affordable homes for cash and then flipping them or demolishing them to build or sell them to developers for more. This frenzy to make a profit pushed the values of the homes to skyrocket. This simultaneously drove the rents to go higher as the new investors/ landlords paid higher prices for multiple unit properties on the market and demanded an immediate return to their investments. The low/ middle income tenants suffered as they could not keep up with the rents hikes. The trickle down economy is not as robust and as forgiving, as the rich get richer while the low and middle class struggle to stay a float during the housing crisis.

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Randy Shaw does an excellent job of laying out the basic problem of failure to build enough housing in American cities leading to high housing costs for everyone, including longtime working class and middle class residents who then get priced out of their neighborhoods. I was initially put off by the boomers vs millenials description on the flyleaf but it's true that neighborhood preservation efforts that grew out of urban renewal now are used by homeowners to block new housing being built not only in their neighborhood but anywhere in their city. I see this in Atlanta and we need to call it out and demand that city leaders use the tools in their toolbox to make more housing available. And, as Shaw notes, city leaders have a lot of tools in their toolbox. This should be required reading for everyone who cares about current housing issues in cities.

[Syb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Racial and socioeconomic diversity and equity is deeply tied to the housing stock, job creation, and zoning laws of cities. NIMBY’s and largely boomers become richer as they sit in their single-family home while the population grows and young people are forced to pay ridiculous housing costs (or face homelessness).

Cities need to start taking big active steps to reverse decades of damage, which has just widened the socioeconomic disparity. Both affordable/subsidized housing and market-rate housing are important to be built.

Though sometimes repetitive, this book gives a great insight into people’s personal stories around different cities of the US. The author’s years of experience on the ground are an inspiration and he offers realistic steps for cities moving forward.

HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched, which is both good and bad. The content is very dense. It is hard to take it all in with one pass through the book - I feel I should really read it again so that I absorb more. Also, there are some real estate and zoning terms I was not familiar with and had to look up. And, the landlord perspective gets short shrift.

However, the book is quite clear on actions cities have taken that contribute to homelessness and unaffordability, and provides guidance on what to do (policies, individual actions, etc.) going forward. Making cities affordable is like steering the Titanic - it is slow and whatever is done today will take at least a decade to make a demonstrable impact.

I learned a lot from reading this book and recommend it to anyone who cares about American cities.

[Harper Gene · Rating 3 out of 5]

The meat is in the intro and a couple of the later chapters on San Francisco, the author's home base. It's a book that orbits case studies, and don't delve much into the mechanisms of displacement. The parts of the book are he looks at the generational relationship to displacement as it concerns older property owners who have controlled zoning, vs. the younger generations who are advocating for more urban density. It really comes together in the later chapters on San Francisco, but not the earlier chapters which are more focused on cultural and racial inequality as the mechanism for displacement.

[Karan Shukla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an educational read. Provides perspective on the housing crisis in several cities across America (San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, New York). It also debunks some housing crisis "myths" (such as the tech boom causing the housing crisis) while exposing policy failures (primarily a nation-wide failure to build urban housing) that have led to the state of American cities today. The target audience is housing activists, but it's a useful read even if you just want to educate yourself on the recent history of US urban housing.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains numerous anecdotes from individuals and groups fighting displacement across the United States. If you're steeped in the housing policy literature, you aren't likely to find much new here. Likewise, there are probably better books to start with for those who haven't read a housing book yet.

That said, it was an easy-read, and is still worth your time, especially because it covers a range of cities.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a troubling look at the future of rental housing in America. I can’t believe how “less” of house people get when spending several thousands of dollars to pay rent. I honestly don’t know why or how people are paying so much just to sleep, shower and eat.

[Anneliese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent research throughout showing clearly how politicians can be both pro growth and pro tenant. I appreciated the detailed policy reviews of what works and doesn't across cities. It's a bit too focused on San Francisco but a lot can be learned from that test case.

[Joe Lachoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lame Goodreads labels this as an ebook for some reason... whatever.

[Robert Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great information & moving anecdotes about the urban housing crisis.
Slow, difficult read for me & got somewhat repetitive.

[Michael Rancic · Rating 4 out of 5]

the best analysis of the current housing crisis in the united states. plenty of context here with some key case studies, and written in a clear way that's well argued.

[Karl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was hoping for a nuanced discussion of the economics and politics of housing and the complex trade-offs and choices people have to make. Didn't get it; this was heavy on anecdote and light on data. He made every choice seem simple and framed almost as good vs evil. Some of the arguments were logically inconsistent with themselves. As another reviewer noted, organizing by city made it feel scatterbrained. I would have organized by the ten policy recommendations he makes in the final chapter (by far the best chapter, I also agree with all his recommendations). As a native of Denver with friends in Seattle, I would say he either under researched or misrepresented the challenges and successes of those cities. This is a book for a person angry about gentrification who just wants to get more riled up.