Book Discussions
Books for community discussion
We encourage educators, community groups, and residents to read and discuss the following books. Several of the authors below will be part of the Summit program and related events, and the summit will engage with ideas from these books. Organizers will be providing discussion guides and additional resources to encourage conversations about these books.
We encourage educators, community groups, and residents to read and discuss the following books. Several of the authors below will be part of the Summit program and related events, and the summit will engage with ideas from these books. Organizers will be providing discussion guides and additional resources to encourage conversations about these books.
- A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home by Laura Gottesdiener and Clarence Lusane, 2013, Zuccoti Park Press.
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City By Matthew Desmond, (New York: Crown Publishing, 2015)
- Saving Our Cities: A Progressive Plan to Transform America, William W. Goldsmith (2016, Cornell University Press)
- The People, Place, and Space Reader Edited by Jen Jack Gieseking & William Mangold, with Cindi Katz, Setha Low, & Susan Saegert (Free-Open Access online) This reader contains a chapter by Housing Summit speaker Desiree Fields,"Financialization at Home, in the City"
- Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It by Mindy Fullilove, (2nd Edition, New Village Press, 2016).
- Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities Mindy Thompson Fullilove. New Village Press, 2013 (Read more local news)
- In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. David Madden and Peter Marcuse, 2016 Verso.
- The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement By Jose Orduna, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
- Take Back the Land Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown Max Rameu (2013, AK Press).
For further study
- No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing, By Waverly Duck*, 2015 University of Chicago Press
- Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods, By Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison and Michael R. Glass* 2016 NYU Press
- Planetary Gentrification, By Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto Lopez-Morales, 2016 Polity Press
Bold=Featured speakers at our Housing Summit; *=Housing Summit Steering Committee member
Suggested discussion questions for groups:
- How has this book affected your understanding of home?
- How has this book shaped your understanding of the experiences of people in your community/ in the wider city?
- What do you see as the relationships between housing policies that affect residents' access to housing and the quality of community?
- What would a human rights-based approach to housing look like? What would it take to move existing policies in this direction?
- What factors keep people from achieving housing security?
- How does the lack of decent and affordable housing affect individuals? How does it affect neighborhoods? What are its impacts on the city itself?
- What are the social costs of our society's failure to provide decent and affordable housing?
- How might you define decent housing?
- How does the thinking about housing presented in this book compare/contrast with prevailing public and media assumptions?
