Sublime

When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of “all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,” they lost confidence in its political capacity.8 Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma—believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing eve

Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head. This is among the most urgent and pressing issues facing America today, and acknowledging the breadth and depth of the problem changes the way we look at poverty. For decades, we’ve focused mainly on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration. No one can deny the importance

Focus on food insecurity and slum housing, they said. And create a patient-centered medical home to deal with people’s medical and social issues.

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

The projects that today most urgently need salvaging are low-income housing projects. Their failures drastically affect the everyday lives of many people, especially children. Moreover, because they are too dangerous, demoralizing and unstable within themselves, they make it too hard in many cases to maintain tolerable civilization in their vicinit

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

The United States was founded on the noble idea that people have “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Each of these three unalienable rights—so essential to the American character that the founders saw them as God-given—requires a stable home.

As Brazier documents, city housing authorities and real-estate developers collude to interrupt Black childhood by designing spaces and building barriers within and around neighborhoods that make it hard to play freely. “Black children’s physical and creative movements threaten the hierarchical social order that requires passivity and resignation,”

In Milwaukee, renters with housing vouchers were charged an average of $55 more each month, compared to unassisted renters who lived in similar apartments in similar neighborhoods. Overcharging voucher holders cost taxpayers an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee alone—the equivalent of supplying 588 more needy families with housing assi