Homes for Living

Praise

“Around the country, residents are rising up and fighting for social housing. With Homes for Living, Jonathan Tarleton deepens our understanding of what that struggle entails: what it takes to win, and how to defend against the pull of privatization.”
—Samuel Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State

“Jonathan Tarleton’s account of the battle for Southbridge Towers is an engrossing feat of reporting and a New York City tragedy. The protagonists of Homes for Living are engaged in nothing less than a contest of two opposing visions of the American Dream, and everyone who wants to understand the challenges of creating affordable housing in this country needs to read their story.”
—Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“Sometimes the general is best understood through the particular, and the particular in this book is a wild roller-coaster ride through two New York City co-ops deciding something all of us are deciding all the time: how to weigh individual versus collective benefit, the private versus the public good. Jonathan Tarleton unpacks this drama with both vivid detail and brilliant context.”
—Rebecca Solnit, coauthor of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas

“A masterwork of urban analysis and storytelling . . . Tarleton brings us, with humane wisdom and deep expertise, the lives and dilemmas of people struggling to define, in New York and beyond, what will become of our best attempts to create—and defend—forms of housing built not for profit but for people. A must-read for every citizen and policymaker who understands, as we all must, that what befalls our cities befalls us all.”
—Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, author of Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names

“There can be no racial justice without housing justice. And while so much of our country’s public policy has deepened racial and socioeconomic disparities, Homes for Living prompts us to learn from a fast-fading history of New Yorkers who once redefined property ownership to foster greater social solidarity. With generosity and insight, Tarleton brings us into a dramatic story of neighbors struggling to choose between private gain and public good. A new classic of American urban and oral history.”
—Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together