Conor Dougherty

Conor Dougherty is an economics and housing reporter at The New York Times, based in San Francisco. He is originally from the Bay Area and grew up in San Francisco and Napa. Dougherty took a circuitous route to journalism, majoring in chemistry at U.C. San Diego and teaching high school math in Berkeley before getting a job as a researcher at the Los Angeles Business Journal in 2000. He made his way up to reporter and worked for the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Wall Street Journal before joining The Times in 2014.

Over a two-decade career he has covered a range of topics including banking, entertainment and sports, but has mostly focused on economics and housing. In 2017 Dougherty’s “Cramped and Costly” series won the Deadline Club award for beat reporting. Those stories inspired his first book, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, which was reported over a three year-period from 2015 to 2018, and will be published by Penguin Press in 2020.

Dougherty continues to cover California and the west, and lives in Oakland, Calif., with his wife and two children.