num_pages: 400
description: Joining the ranks of Evicted The Warmth of Other Sons and classic works of literary non-fiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas High-Risers braids personal narratives city politics and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicagos Cabrini-Green Americas 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 20000all of it packed onto just seventy acres a few blocks from Chicagos 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 resourceit 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 Americas public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly though the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complexs 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 nations effort to provide affordable housing to the poorand what we can learn from those mistakes.
language: None
title: High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
publisher: Harper