High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing Audiobook (Free)

Joining the rates 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, town politics, and national history to show the timely and epic tale 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 about High-Risers: Cabrini-Green as well as the Fate of American Public Housing Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coastline. Cabrini-Green became associated with crime, squalor, as well as the failing of authorities. For the many who lived there, it had been also a much-needed resource-it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the isle of dark poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the family members 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 really is an account told movingly although lives of residents who struggled to make a home because of their families as powerful causes converged to accelerate the housing complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in details, and filled with moving portraits, High-Risers can be a sweeping exploration of competition, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation’s work to provide inexpensive housing towards the poor-and what we can learn from those mistakes.