Public Housing

Joining the ranks of Evicted, The Warmth of Other Sons, and classic works of literary non-fiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, America’s most...

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.

As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects, Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight.

There was no single, dramatic event that set the current financial crisis off. A whole series of very questionable decisions by many people, in many places, over a period of years, built up the pressures that led to a sudden collapse of the housing market and of financial institutions that began to fall like dominoes as a result of investing in securities based on housing prices. This book is designed to unravel the tangled threads of that story.

Modern cities are the most complex and fragile structures ever built. A single power failure can cascade into chaos. A single pandemic can turn density into a death sentence. A single metre of sea-level rise can displace hundreds of millions. But for the first time in ten thousand years, there is an alternative. THE LAST CITY describes a civilisation in which every home generates its own energy, harvests its own water, grows a portion of its own food, recycles its own waste, monitors its own health, and connects to the world by satellite.

Have you ever felt like you had a gift to share with the world, but only needed the perfect opportunity to make that dream a reality? Do you ever feel stuck on your path because you feel your race, gender, social class, etc., is hindering you from making the necessary strides to get ahead in your education or career? As a first-generation low-income student, Crystal received over $670,000 in scholarship funding, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholarship and the Army ROTC merit award.

This uplifting story of a boys' football team shines light on the under-appreciated virtues that can bloom in impoverished neighborhoods, even as nearby communities exclude them from economic progress. Never Ran, Never Will tells the story of the working-class, mostly black neighborhood of...

Bloomsbury presents Reimagining Britain by Justin Welby, read by Jonathan Oliver. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby sets out a radical vision for 21st century Britain. It is now three years since Justin Welby first published his Reimagining Britain. The fundamental message of that book...

In London, only those with vast cash deposits can get on the property ladder, private rents have spiralled out of control and the wait for social housing is measured in decades. Once vibrant communities are being uprooted, schools are closing down and homelessness is rampant. It was not always like this. Tracing the last forty years of housing policy, Peter Apps examines this transformation, following a diverse group of Londoners as their fortunes rise and fall across the decades amid the economic forces sweeping through the city.

La crisis de vivienda existe y no podemos seguir ignorándola. Nuestras ciudades son cada vez más inhabitables: cada vez más caras, más distantes, más precarizadas y con menos servicios. Miles de personas están preocupadas por su imposibilidad de adquirir unavivienda en propiedad o, incluso, en arrendamiento. Sin embargo, esta problemática sigue siendo percibida como una preocupación individualizada y no como el problema estructural que realmente es.

What if the answers to our housing crisis weren’t locked in government policy or developer margins—but already being built, quietly, by communities across the world? In Our Homes, eco-builder and broadcaster Harrison Gardner explores inspiring, practical responses to the housing crisis—rooted not in a single solution, but in a diversity of approaches.

What if there were one single way we could significantly improve the American economy, public health, and offer attractive investment opportunities, while also providing more homes for American families and workers? The American Dream has always been built on the notion that no matter where you come from, you can be successful. For the past century, housing has played a major role in making the American Dream a reality for millions of individuals. In short, the availability of affordable housing stands at the crossroads of capitalism and compassion.