Sublime

In the early decades of the twentieth century,

The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions. But as Scott and Patrice will tell you, a good home can serve as the sturdiest of footholds. When people have a place to live, they become better parents, workers, and citizens. If Arleen and Vanetta didn’t have to dedicate 70 or 80 percent o

I wanted to try to write a book about poverty that didn’t focus exclusively on poor people or poor places. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence an

Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation.

And families forced from their homes are pushed into undesirable parts of the city, moving from poor neighborhoods into even poorer ones; from…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Concentrated poverty and violence inflict their own wounds, since neighborhoods determine so much about your life, from the kinds of job opportunities you have to…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Families who couldn’t both make rent and keep current with the utility company sometimes paid a cousin or neighbor to reroute the meter.

Men often avoided eviction by laying concrete, patching roofs, or painting rooms for landlords. But women almost never approached their landlord with a similar offer.

Eviction affects the old and the young, the sick and able-bodied. But for poor women of color and their children, it has become ordinary. Walk into just about any urban housing court in America, and you can see them waiting on hard benches for their cases to be called. Among Milwaukee renters, over 1 in 5 black women report having been…

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