A thoughtful history of affordable housing that establishes the basis for reasoned discussion and well-informed policy.
A history of the “common everyday houses” that have served large numbers of working- and middle-class households in the U.S.
Podemski—author, illustrator, and transportation planner for Los Angeles—dreams of affordable housing that’s light-filled and spacious, connects people to their neighbors, fits seamlessly into mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods, and has “the potential to change and adapt.” He seeks “a diversity of housing at a range of scales that reflect the unique circumstances of individual neighborhoods.” Chronicling his travels in a host of American cities and Vancouver, British Columbia, he focuses on specific housing types in each, including shotgun houses in New Orleans, bungalows in Portland, Oregon, and multifamily triple-deckers in Boston. The L.A. dingbat, built in the 1950s and 1960s, is two floors of wood-framed, stucco-clad apartments hovering over parking spaces, while the Philadelphia row house, constructed when the city industrialized, is a narrow, brick-clad, three-story home meant for the working class. With the exception of Houston, whose anemic land-use controls have given rise to wide, two-story town houses sitting above a two-car garage and crowding their lots, the author praises his examples for serving the needs of owners and renters and encouraging neighborliness. Podemski also offers a brief history of each city’s spatial development and considers the precursors and successors to each housing type. Despite his implicit interest in what can be mass produced, he includes two bespoke examples: Tiny Tower (three levels on a 12-by-20-foot footprint) in Philadelphia and 3106 St. Thomas Street (10.5 by 45 feet, metal clad, one story) in New Orleans. Podemski makes two important points: First, the vibrancy of a neighborhood depends on its type of housing; second, housing affordability is dependent on lot size and housing type. His argument is convincing.
A thoughtful history of affordable housing that establishes the basis for reasoned discussion and well-informed policy.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780807007785
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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