High-Risers

Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing

By: Ben Austen

Narrated by: Ron Butler

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 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 Chicago’s 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 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.

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 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 complex’s 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 nation’s effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes.

Very well written and performed

This book does a great job of weaving story through educational and historical informafion. The narrator is one of the best.

Fascinating story with difficult chronology

The research, writing, and story all are fantastic. As an audiobook, it jumps around chronologically and across storylines frequently/without a clear delineation. Made the story harder to follow, but still definitely worth the listen.

Overtly melodramatic, but necessarily so.

Can't really articulate the situation of these populations using rational academic language. Reading something like this is the only way to "get it", and decipher the motivations and mind sets of the disadvantaged African American population.

Very informative

I didn't know that much about Cabrini Green and the other housing projects that were demolished. Now I know now where there is so many vacant lots where most of the public housing building once stood

Wow!!!!

I have learned so much from this book. I am from Chicago and I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about the projects here, but wow!!!! It was like it’s own society and how unfair they were treated in the end.