My Amazon Review of Conor Dougherty's "Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America"

Housing Wars

New York Times economics reporter Conor Dougherty has written an important book on the California housing crisis in general and the locus of that crisis in the San Francisco Bay area. Normally when I review books I do so through the lens of an educated reader. In this case, if I am not an expert, I am close to it. From my vantage point of being Senior Economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate I have looked at reams of data on California housing and before that I ran real estate research at Salomon Brothers. Further I served on Governor Jerry Brown’s first housing task force in 1979. Yes it is a long standing problem and it was there that I met developer Dennis O’Brien who is featured in the Lafayette controversy discussed in the book.

What Dougherty gets right is the need for fundamental zoning reform in California that would allow for substantially increased densification in the major urban areas of the state. He is a full-throated proponent of the legislation offered by California State Senator Scott Wiener as am I. He also understands that there has to be a substantial limitation on the lawsuits filed under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that can delay projects for years and ultimately stop them altogether. Thus the real enemy of increasing housing supply in California are an elite group of people who I have identified in the past as “enviro-liberals.” In California, a state that is oh so anti-Trump, the enviro-liberals use zoning to accomplish the same thing as what Trump’s Wall is trying to do. What he doesn’t say is that building trade unions use CEQA to force project labor agreements on developers and that California’s prevailing wage laws substantially increase the cost of housing.

Where Dougherty is squishy it is on the topics of rent control and suburban development. On rent control his liberal heart seems to over power is economics head. He uses the pejorative term “rent gouging landlords.”  The problem here is that out-sized rent increases cannot be sustained without market support. It is tenant competition for scarce space that triggers big rent increases thus making rent control counter-productive. I know that all too well as I was the expert witness for the Santa Monica Rent Control Board in case called Baker v. Santa Monica that upheld the constitutionality of Santa Monica’s 1979 rent control law.

With respect to suburban development Dougherty is concerned about the climate impacts of low density housing on the urban periphery. However many people prefer that lifestyle and if one is serious about solving California’s housing problem, part of the solution is suburban housing.

What makes Dougherty’s book a great read is he brings real people into the dialogue. We see Hispanic families being displaced and we see a fighting Catholic nun in Redwood City protecting tenants and putting together donors and financing to buy up apartment buildings to turn them into affordable units. We see a young and very spunky Sonja Trauss creating a YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) organization in San Francisco called BARF (Bay Area Renters Federation) to advocate for developers to increase housing supply. She reminds me of my much younger self where I was a leader in group that successfully advocated for an affordable housing component in of Santa Monica’s redevelopment projects.

Dougherty has written a very readable and timely book on California’s housing crisis. It should be read by every legislator, county supervisor and city council member in the state and his zoning recommendations be acted upon.

For the full Amazon Review see:https://www.amazon.com/review/RIMCO9JQBR67C/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv 

My Amazon Review of David Rubinstein's "The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians"

History Comes Alive

Private equity mogul and patriotic philanthropist David Rubinstein truly loves the history of our country and has lovingly written up a series of interviews/conversations with America’s great historians. The interviews took place at the Library of Congress with representatives and senators present where he discussed the lives of such great Americans as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon. The historians he interviewed included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ron Chernow, Walter Isaacson and Bob Woodward among others. He also interviews Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

We get into the lives of the great personages who made our country. He asks the historians about their great strengths and foibles. It all comes across as a great series of conversations. There is much to learn here. The conversations really flow and the book is very hard to put down in the middle of any of the interviews.

I got sense as to how good David Rubinstein is when he interviewed Fed Chairman Jay Powell that was shown on CNBC.  Rubinstein knows his subject matter and his subjects. Given that most high school and college students don’t know history, I would highly recommend that this book be made required reading in every high school in America!

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/RAHM7T2XGLKFJ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Judy Shelton at the Fed? NOT!

President Trump is at it again. After failing to appoint such losers as Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, he is trying again with Judy Shelton. Similar to the other two failed appointees, Shelton is a Trump sycophant. Long a hard money supporter of the gold standard, Shelton pilloried the Fed's easy money policies during the early recovery from the Great Financial Crisis. Why? Obama was president.

Now with the economy at full employment she as an advocate of easy money. To her the very accommodative Fed has been too tight and further she supports devaluing the dollar. Why? She is sucking up to Trump. What's worse if she is appointed she would likely work to spy on the Fed for Trump. She would hardly be a person "who plays well with others." 

Shelton is a far cry from Trump's other proposed appointee, Christopher Waller, a long time research official at the St. Louis Fed. Waller should sail through, while it would behoove the Senate Banking Committee to stop the Shelton appointment in its tracks. 

My Amazon Review of Andrew Nagorski's "1941: The Year Germany Lost the War"

The Hitler- Stalin Duel

Journalist and historian Andrew Nagorski’s highly readable book places 1941 as the pivotal year of World War II. Although the actual tide of the war turned in 1943, the die was cast in 1941. His book is very much in the tradition of Ian Kershaw’s broader “Fateful Choices” which focuses on both 1940 and 1941 as the two years that determined the outcome of the war. Although Nagorski discusses the roles of Churchill, Roosevelt and the Japanese he mostly focuses on Hitler and Stalin. 

To Nagorski it is Hitler’s failure to understand that Germany did not have the resources to simultaneously fight the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union that led him into the trap that Russia became. Yet it was a very close run thing during the 1940 battle of Moscow. The Soviets won that battle because Stalin finally relented in giving battlefield control to General Zhukov. Prior to that Stalin failed to heed his generals and more importantly refused to accept intelligence from multiple sources, especially Richard Sorge in Tokyo, that Hitler was about to invade Russia. It was Japan’s decision to move south in 1941, instead of supporting Hitler in Russia, that enabled Zhukov’s army to be transferred from Siberia to the Moscow front.

Hitler’s tactical mistake on the Russian front was his maltreatment of captured POWs and the civilian population. Initially the long suffering Russian people welcomed the German Army, but it was the harsh treatment by the German occupiers that soon made enemies of them. It was also in 1941 Russia that the horrible outlines of Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was actualized.

Nagorski’s Roosevelt and Hopkins are all in to aid Britain prior to Pearl Harbor. In fact it was with the introduction of the lend-lease program that Hitler believed that war with the United States would be inevitable.

Nagorski is very good in developing his thesis that Stalin from the get go was thinking beyond the alliance with the U.S. and Britain towards a postwar era that would enable him to capture the gains he made in the Ribbentrop- Molotov Pact of 1939. Thus to Nagorski the Cold War begins in 1941 and further he sees both Roosevelt and Hopkins being taken in by the wily Stalin against the wishes of the far more experienced diplomat George Kennan.

I have only scratched the surface of Nagorski’s magnificent book. He brings real drama to the personalities and the events of that very critical time when, in very real sense, civilization was held in the balance.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1X6BGF00YCXTZ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv