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This book combines a critique of more than a century of housing
reform policies, including public and other subsidized housing as
well as exclusionary zoning, with the idea that simple low-cost
housing-a poor side of town-helps those of modest means build
financial assets and join in the local democratic process. It is
more of a historical narrative than a straight policy book,
however-telling stories of Jacob Riis, zoning reformer Lawrence
Veiller, anti-reformer Jane Jacobs, housing developer William
Levitt, and African American small homes advocate Rev. Johnny Ray
Youngblood, as well as first-person accounts of onetime residents
of neighborhoods such as Detroit's Black Bottom who lost their
homes and businesses to housing reform and urban renewal. This is a
book with important policy implications-built on powerful, personal
stories.
Billions of American tax dollars go into a vast array of programs
targeting various social issues: the opioid epidemic, criminal
violence, chronic unemployment, and so on. Yet the problems persist
and even grow. Howard Husock argues that we have lost sight of a
more powerful strategy-a preventive strategy, based on positive
social norms. In the past, individuals and institutions of civil
society actively promoted what may be called "bourgeois norms," to
nurture healthy habits so that social problems wouldn't emerge in
the first place. It was a formative effort. Today, a massive social
service state instead takes a reformative approach to problems that
have already become vexing. It offers counseling along with
material support, but struggling communities have been more harmed
than helped by government's embrace. And social service agencies
have a vested interest in the continuance of problems. Government
can provide a financial safety net for citizens, but it cannot
effectively create or promote healthy norms. Nor should it try.
That formative work is best done by civil society. This book
focuses on six key figures in the history of social welfare to
illuminate how a norm-promoting culture was built, then lost, and
how it can be revived. We read about Charles Loring Brace, founder
of the Children's Aid Society; Jane Addams, founder of Hull House;
Mary Richmond, a social work pioneer; Grace Abbott of the federal
Children's Bureau; Wilbur Cohen of the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare; and Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem
Children's Zone-a model for bringing real benefit to a poor
community through positive social norms. We need more like it.
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Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
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R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
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