High-Risers

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Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of twenty thousand—all of it packed onto just seventy acres situated a few blocks from Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, though, it was also a much-needed resource—it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, this island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, and the families dispersed.In this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen tells the story of America’s public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told affectingly through the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of indelible portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics that considers what went wrong in our nation’s effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes.