Joining the ranks of Evicted, THE HEAT of Other Sons, and classic works of literary nonfiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and nationwide history to show the timely and epic story of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, America’s most iconic community housing project.

Built-in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a human population of 20,000-all from it packed onto simply seventy acres several blocks from on the subject of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of authorities. For the countless who resided 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.

Within this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen tells the story of America’s public housing test as well as the changing fortunes of American cities. It really is an account informed movingly although lives of occupants who struggled to produce a home for his or her families as powerful makes converged to accelerate the casing complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers can be a sweeping exploration of competition, class, popular lifestyle, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong inside our nation’s effort to provide affordable housing towards the poor-and what we can learn from those mistakes.