Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area

Paul G. Lewis is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. His previous books include Shaping Suburbia: How Political Institutions Organize Urban Development, Custodians of Place: Governing the Growth and Development of Cities, and Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines.Nicholas J. Marantz is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.

"This book is a tightly argued addition to the conversation on land use and housing and adds a governance dimension that has been missing. It has value to researchers seeking to understand governance as part of the housing policy arena and is especially valuable to those in the San Francisco Bay Area, since it focuses on that region with very specific policy recommendations. With a slender 83 pages of narrative and a straightforward writing style, this book can be useful to scholars and practitioners."-Journal of Urban Affairs "In this short, well-written, and lucid book, Paul Lewis and Nicholas Marantz address the question of why American metropolitan areas fail to deliver housing, thereby precipitating the crisis of homelessness that now prevails so widely. The exemplary case that they use is the San Francisco Bay Area (CA). They address only that case, but their message applies more widely."-Journal of the American Planning Assocation “Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area does an excellent job of articulating the connection between local government fragmentation and an undersupply of housing. Lewis and Marantz synthesize past findings about regional governance and usefully situate their discussion of governance options in this existing literature. This is a concise, clear, and comprehensive primer on regionalism and what’s at stake in the discussion about regional governance.”-Juliet F. Gainsborough, Professor of Political Science at Bentley University, and author of Fenced Off: The Suburbanization of American Politics “Unlike some other books on regional planning and governance, Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area adopts a realist rather than a normative stance by assessing the potential for meaningful reform. The authors evaluate pragmatic, detailed proposals to address housing unaffordability and the jobs-housing mismatch, drawing on their extensive knowledge of the case and presenting nuanced qualitative and well-designed quantitative evidence.”-Zack Taylor, Associate Professor of Political Science at Western University, and author of Shaping the Metropolis: Institutions and Urbanization in the United States and Canada "[A] valuable model of urban policy scholarship.... [T]he book’s biggest strength might be its second act, in which the authors turn to regional policy and the prospect of governmental reforms. This is because Lewis and Marantz give unflinchingly serious consideration to all the myriad (mostly frustratingly unrealistic) changes it might take to turn the situation around."-Contemporary Sociology