Download Oprah's Angels: 65 Families, One Big Storm, and the American Dream AudioBook Free
At the advantage of Houston rests a community like no other: 65 petite, pastel houses inhabited by survivors of Hurricane Katrina and built by one of the most famous people on the globe, Oprah Winfrey. The community, funded with $10 million of Oprah's money only a few months after Katrina, comprises of 65 families selected by nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. All pay around $400 a month in mortgage to live there. The houses are nearly similar. Their fixtures were decided on by Nate Berkus, and paid for by Oprah's tv set sponsors. Angel Street isn't only a place, but an idea. It is the idea that individuals like Lynell McFarland, a 54-year-old nursing assistant, could find better work and a much better life on her behalf little girl outside New Orleans; that individuals like Coleen Walters could get over the increased loss of her hubby and home through the development of a new one. Angel Street is the embodiment of an theory that tragedy - like the systemic urban poverty of New Orleans, and the devastation brought on by Hurricane Katrina - can converted into opportunity, that lemons can be made into lemonade. For the last 10 years, the 65 families of Angel Street have been living proof of this notion, and proof of its severe constraints. In Oprah's Angels, on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, reporter Peter Moskowitz brings us in to the homes of the residents of Angel's Street who have settled in Houston to find better careers, less offense, and a new sense of identity. However the people living here also live with Katrina's continued wake - they have mental anguish, resentment over the way the US government treated them, and questions in what life might have been like were it not for the man-made failures that allowed Katrina to take action much damage. Largely, they just miss home. Peter Moskowitz is a article writer and journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. He's written for Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, Vice, Gawker, The New Republic, and many more. He's writing a book about gentrification if four US locations: NY, SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, Detroit and New Orleans.
