My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:
“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
Emeryville, California, where I live, is a little city wedged up against the San Francisco Bay on its West and further hemmed in by Berkeley to its North and Oakland to its East and South. Though considerably smaller than Oakland, Emeryville actually has a higher population density, thanks to its healthy mix of rowhouses and larger apartment buildings alongside the usual single-family homes. When talking to friends back east, I sometimes compare Emeryville to Hoboken, New Jersey: another modestly sized but surprisingly dense city within a much larger and far more dysfunctional metropolitan area.
Like Hoboken, Emeryville is also uncommonly well governed, especially when compared to some of its neighbors (looking at you, San Francisco). Both Hoboken and Emeryville have remarkably good transportation infrastructure, making it safe and easy to get around without a car. And while neither city is really cheap when considered in a national context, both have managed to stay more affordable than the central cities they orbit.
When Emeryville makes its way into the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s usually because of the city’s relatively low housing costs, and the paper’s most recent Emeryville-centric article is no exception. Bizarrely, though, the latest Chronicle piece on Emeryville treats the city’s relatively decent record on housing affordability as if it’s a bad thing. Why, the Chronicle’s Christian Leonard asks, when Emeryville has so much going for it, “are its home values in a tailspin?”
Leonard ends up pointing the finger at the fact that so much of Emeryville’s housing stock consists of condos, not single-family homes. This appears to be the consensus among the realtors he interviewed for the piece:
But the main reason condos have lost so much of their value is that many middle-income buyers no longer seem to consider them a worthwhile way to gain a foothold in the housing market. In recent years, condo owners have faced high homeowners association dues, maintenance issues and even “blacklists” preventing buyers from getting mortgages, said East Bay real estate agent Nikki Lui. She estimates that condo dues have increased about 40% to 60% over the past decade, giving many first-time buyers pause.
“It’s not Emeryville,” agreed Andrea Gordon, another East Bay Realtor. “It’s the nature of the property itself.”
But I’m not so sure that’s the best way to interpret Leonard’s own data. Here’s what Leonard came up with when he attempted to break out Zillow’s home value data to differentiate between condos and single-family homes:
Indisputably, Emeryville’s condos are dropping in price faster than the city’s single-family homes. But both are dropping. It takes until the article’s penultimate paragraph for Leonard to note why that is the case: Emeryville “has long encouraged housing construction, making it a bit easier for buyers to shop for deals.” In other words, Emeryville is a YIMBY success story; by building a lot of housing, including condos, the city has stayed more affordable than neighboring jurisdictions. Notably, all this homebuilding has also been effective in preventing displacement; as Darrell Owens noted in 2021, Emeryville is the rare Bay Area city that did not experience a net loss in its Black population between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses.
Naturally, a more affordable housing market isn’t going to benefit everyone. Good housing policy is, I believe, positive sum, but certain aspects of housing policy are inherently zero sum: if homebuyers gain leverage in the market, then sellers must necessarily lose leverage, and vice versa. For decades, sellers and landlords have been accumulating more and more leverage over buyers and renters, and the social and economic consequences for the United States as a whole—mass homelessness and displacement, environmental despoliation and throttled economic growth among them—have been grim.
But the housing crisis has been pretty good to realtors, which is why I’m not surprised to see them bemoaning Emeryville’s supposed overabundance of condos. After all, higher home prices mean bigger commissions. Little wonder that the California Association of Realtors has been a central player in the NIMBY alliance that tries to block pro-housing bills from making it out of the legislature. (Realtors, it should be noted, have directed considerable firepower against California legislation intended to make it easier to build condos.)
The fact that realtors are apparently unhappy with Emeryville’s housing market is a reason to celebrate. It’s further confirmation that the city’s efforts to preserve affordable, integrated neighborhoods are bearing fruit.