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Author Austen, Ben, author.

Title High-risers : Cabrini-Green and the fate of American public housing / Ben Austen ; designed by Fritz Metsch ; maps, Robert Philip Gordon.

Publication Info. New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2018]
©2018

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  363.5962 AUSTEN    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description x, 384 pages : maps ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 351-365) and index.
Contents A home over Jordan. Portrait of a Chicago slum ; The reds and the whites ; Catch-as-catch-can ; Warriors ; The mayor's pied-à-terre -- Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson. Cabrini-Green rap ; Concentration effects ; This is my life ; Faith brought us this far ; How horror works ; Dantrell Davis Way -- Rotations on the land. Cabrini mustard and turnip greens ; If not here. . . where? ; Transformations ; Old town, new town ; They came from the projects ; The people's public housing authority ; The Chicago neighborhood of the future.
Summary Braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, America's most iconic public housing project. Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of 20,000--all of it packed onto just seventy acres 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, it was also a much-needed resource--it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, 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 movingly through the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex's demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation's effort to provide affordable housing to the poor--and what we can learn from those mistakes.
Subject Cabrini-Green Homes (Chicago, Ill.) -- History.
Cabrini-Green High Impact Program -- History.
Cabrini-Green High Impact Program. (OCoLC)fst01778008
Cabrini-Green Homes (Chicago, Ill.) (OCoLC)fst01778009
Cabrini-Green Homes (Chicago, Ill.)
Chicago Housing Authority -- History.
Public housing -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History.
Low-income housing -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History.
African Americans -- Housing -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History.
Chicago (Ill.) -- Social conditions.
Chicago (Ill.) -- Race relations.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty & Homelessness.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity.
African Americans -- Housing. (OCoLC)fst00799626
Low-income housing. (OCoLC)fst01003210
Public housing. (OCoLC)fst01082447
Race relations. (OCoLC)fst01086509
Social conditions. (OCoLC)fst01919811
Illinois -- Chicago. (OCoLC)fst01204048
Genre/Form History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
Added Author Gordon, Robert Philip, cartographer.
Added Title Cabrini-Green and the fate of American public housing
ISBN 0062235060 (hardcover)
9780062235060 (hardcover)
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