Download High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing AudioBook Free
Signing up for the ranks of Evicted, THE HEAT of Other Sons, and traditional works of literary nonfiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and nationwide history to inform the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, America's most iconic general public housing job. Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a populace of 20,000 - all of it crammed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Silver Shoreline. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the inability of federal government. For the countless who lived there, it was also a much-needed source - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of dark-colored poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the households dispersed. On this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen says the story of America's general public housing test and the changing fortunes of American towns. It is an account told movingly although lives of residents who battled to produce a home because of their households as powerful causes converged to speed up the real estate complex's demise. Superbly written, abundant with detail, and filled with moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, category, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what proceeded to go wrong in our nation's work to provide affordable real estate to the poor - and what we can learn from those mistakes.
