Silent Struggles: How Policy Reinforces Homelessness and Political Exclusion
by Anna Kopec
Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2026.
ISBN: 9781487567415
I’m drawn to books that challenge how I think about familiar policy problems, and this one seems to do exactly that. Its focus on homeless in Melbourne and Toronto makes it feel especially relevant. Living in Toronto, I see many of the dynamics it describes, and I’m curious how they compare to Melbourne, particularly as I’ve been getting more interested in comparative housing policy. What stands out is its attention to the “silent” work of governance—eligibility rules, service systems, and everyday administrative decisions—that can end up stabilizing homelessness rather than resolving it. It feels like a grounded but quietly unsettling lens on something I encounter all the time, hopefully including some spaces of hope. (Prentiss Dantzler)
More Weight: A Salem Story
by Ben Wickey
Sherman Oaks: Top Shelf Productions, 2025.
ISBN: 9781603095600
What does a city do with its founding atrocity? Salem’s answer—witches on police cars, a Witch City Mall, millions of Halloween tourists annually—is the subject of Ben Wickey’s extraordinary graphic novel, a decade in the making. Moving across three centuries, Wickey renders the 1692 trials in stark black-and-white, then shifts to sepia for Hawthorne and Longfellow walking Salem’s haunted streets in the 1860s—Hawthorne himself a descendant of the trials’ judge, who added a letter to his own name to bury the family shame. The archival precision here is remarkable, placing Wickey in the company of Spiegelman, Bechdel, and Miller. A book about how cities are built on what they cannot forgive themselves for. (Lisa Jean Moore)
Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy
by Neil Gray
Philadelphia: Common Notions Press, 2026.
ISBN: 9781945335631
Amid urbanization and deindustrialization across Italy’s economic North in the ’60s and ’70s, militant intellectual workers developed novel concepts, categories, and modes of struggle under the banners of operaismo and autonomia. In this book, Gray offers English-language readers a rigorous introduction to the theoretical contributions of the operaist milieu and the contexts through which they emerged. I’m particularly excited to read this book because there’s been a resurgence in interest in workers’ inquiry, a method from this time and place, for doing research with workers in and beyond the workplace. Gray sets out to provide a spatial re‑reading of operaismo and its tools, arguing for their continued relevance to urban and housing struggles today. (Miranda Strominger)
Generación Inquilina: Un nuevo paradigma de vivienda para acabar con la desigualdad
by Javier Gil
Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2026.
ISBN: 9791399105988
As we reach the limits of global growth, housing has become a battlefield between capital accumulation and the human right to exist that requires a shelter, a home. This book walks along that line. It analyzes rentier capitalism’s recent strategies and practices, conceptualizing rentier planning as a capital-led framework that has spread across European public policies to roll out the red carpet for real estate. In countries like Spain, with a greater dependence on foreign investment, the impact has been deeper. The process has thrown a whole generation of young people into tenancy, breaking the culturally established dream of homeownership. Facing this new situation, the book focuses on shifting the common sense around housing, so that evicting a 75-year-old woman or owning more than three houses is no longer seen as socially legitimate. Beyond the analysis, informed by the author’s role in the Madrid Tenants’ Union, the book concludes with a handbook of organizing tools and an optimistic exercise towards a new housing paradigm. (Jaime Jover)
The Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit
by Sharon Cornelissen
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.
ISBN: 9780226844718
It seems summers have become my season for reading ethnographies about Detroit. Following last year’s Plundered, I spent this summer reading The Last House on the Block, which I recommend as we head into the new academic year. The book examines “failed” gentrification in the depopulated Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit, rife with empty lots and houses. The author, a white researcher, bought one of those houses for $7,000 and lived there for three years. From Brooklyn, where I live, gentrification often seems like a tidal wave that can’t be stopped, but it doesn’t gather speed in neighborhoods like Brightmoor. I struggle with how to teach about gentrification with the complexity that it demands, and I hope that The Last House on the Block will offer some instructive examples. (Hilary Botein)
Livonia Chow Mein
by Abigail Savitch-Lew
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026.
ISBN: 9781668075234
Although I aspire to read “good-for-me” nonfiction books at night, I have come to terms with the fact that my brain is usually mush by then. So, I’m quite excited to have the novel Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch‑Lew, an urban-policy journalist, on my nightstand. The book revolves around a Chinese family’s restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a mysterious fire on Livonia Avenue in 1978, four generations’ worth of family characters, and a century of changing dynamics in the neighborhood (especially its Black and Ashkenazi Jewish residents)—including displacement, gentrification, and organizing for a community land trust. Informed reporting on urban issues, grappling with individual subjectivities and identities, and plot and feelings?! I’m here for it. (Celina Su)
This beautiful first novel follows the adventures of a journalist uncovering the layers of history that have shaped the Brooklyn neighborhood she has been assigned to cover—a neighborhood that, in a distressingly familiar way, is simultaneously suffering the effects of racialized disinvestment and experiencing “rediscovery” by capital. Savitch‑Lew’s complicated, richly drawn characters (some of them long dead) navigate worlds of family, work, and politics that even at their most painful and unsparing offer unexpected openings for love and connection. (Laura Wolf‑Powers)
The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981
by Daniel Wortel-London
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.
ISBN: 9780226841090
While taxing the rich is absolutely necessary, is it possible to forward alternatives to elite-driven approaches, especially those fixated on luring and relying on the rich in the first place? After all, as Mayor Mamdani keeps pointing out, our city has seen an exodus of the working class more than that of the rich. I look forward to reading The Menace of Prosperity for a longer view into ideas and struggles around economic development in the city. I am especially curious about Wortel-London’s discussion of what he calls the “fiscal imagination,” entire sets of ideas around the economy and not just specific policies, and how changing our ruling fiscal imagination requires democratic work as well. (Celina Su)
Podcast: Organized Money
by Matt Stoller and David Dayen
Washington, DC: Rock Creek Sound, 2024–2026.
This is perfect late summer and early fall listening, a good companion on afternoons spent walking in the woods or staring at clouds. Co‑hosted by iconoclast/provocateur Matt Stoller and the more down-to-earth David Dayen (who also edits the excellent American Prospect), the show is dedicated to chronicling people and organizations standing up to corporate power. It isn’t always uplifting, but it is always fierce, and relevant to many policy issues being negotiated on the urban level (such as regulation of ride-hailing and food-delivery apps, challenging the stranglehold investor-owned utilities have on renewable energy development, and the evisceration of local news). (Laura Wolf‑Powers)
The Bylaw State: Encampment Evictions and the Struggle for Public Space
by Alexandra Flynn and Joe Hermer
Halifax (Nova Scotia): Fernwood Publishing, 2026.
ISBN: 9781773638027
It’s been three decades since Neil Smith gave us the language of “revanchism” to discuss the punitive politics of public space accompanying the gentrification of our cities. And while academic debates about broken windows and Giuliani Time now feel distant, the issues they named remain pressing. I look forward to reading Flynn and Hermer’s recently published Bylaw State: Encampment Evictions and the Struggle for Public Space, which turns its attention to the seemingly mundane, innocuous, and often overlooked bylaws (ordinances) that govern the lives of homeless people in Canada’s cities. Grounded in empirical research in Vancouver and Prince George, British Columbia, the authors bring together legal studies and urban sociology to show not only the sheer expansion of bylaws, but also how municipalities are increasingly managing the burdens of Canada’s housing crisis in ways that produce dehumanizing effects for their most vulnerable inhabitants. (Ahmed Allahwala)
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
Philadelphia: Common Notions Press, 2022.
ISBN: 9781942173588
O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 is a rather dark and unromantic piece of speculative fiction that nevertheless manages to capture the beauty of a future New York in which people take care of each other. Published in 2022, the book is built around a series of linked “oral histories.” While some of the accounts can feel a little too on the nose, they are ultimately rescued by genuine feeling. These oral histories paint a picture of a New York torn apart by war, pandemic, and repression, where people are left to depend on each other both to fight against the repression and to deal with the very messy aftermath of these struggles. Four years after its publication, New York is generally more positive, with an anti-establishment, democratic socialist mayor (and a champion basketball team), but also reflects a world more torn by war, repression and police violence, racism and xenophobia, genocide, recurring pandemics, enforced gender and sex conformity, and the breakdown of the institutional norms, which, however incompletely and hypocritically, still anchored some social cohesion. It’s a sobering and half-hopeful look at our current moment when, as Gramsci put it, “the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born.” It focuses us on the question of how we might build a city of genuine care without living through complete hell. (John Krinsky)
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
by Bench Ansfield
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.
ISBN: 9781324134336
Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames, recently reviewed in this journal revisits the Bronx’s “decade of fire” in the 1970s but also answers a question that has long been obscured behind common-sense, but incomplete, explanation. Why did so many landlords torch their buildings or pay local youth to commit arson? A conventional explanation has been that, in the face of the industrial transformation of New York City in the 1960s and 1970s—a period in which the city lost 600,000 jobs, concentrated in manufacturing and transportation—declining incomes, rising unemployment, continued migration from Puerto Rico and the last gasps of the Great Migration of Black people from the South combined to make neighborhoods of color more economically depressed than the city was, on average. This economic vulnerability mixed, as well, with a long history of redlining in many of these same neighborhoods to cut into landlords’ ability to finance repairs and even to meet expected rent rolls. Caught in a moment of declining returns, many landlords found that insurance policies on their buildings were worth more than the foreseeable value of the rent rolls. The choice was clear. And yet, there’s a catch, and it’s to Ansfield’s credit that they catch it: Why were insurance policies so valuable? And why, if the areas had been redlined, were insurance policies so readily available in the first place? Ansfield uncovers the story of federal reinsurance, meant to shield insurance companies from risk and encourage lending in previously redlined areas. The public took on the risk, and, in a classic case of predatory moral hazard, insurance companies proceeded to sell policies worth many times the value of the properties they were insuring. When they went bad—as they would in a case of arson—it mattered little, as long as other policies were able to sell; and, as Ansfield points out, insurance companies were making their profits from investments more than from these policies, in any case. It wasn’t, therefore, just that the insurance policies were worth more than the buildings the landlords torched; they were worth a lot more, and were so because of a poorly supervised policy of inclusion during the Civil Rights era. Ansfield’s book contains a great deal more, too, including the story about how the fires stopped, and some choice lessons for the future. This is history that matters and shows that the devil is indeed in the details. (John Krinsky)
Lido Land: How Britain Learned to Make a Splash
by Tom Fort
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026.
ISBN: 9781035911646
This summer, I’ve read Lido Land: How Britain Learned to Make a Splash by British journalist Tom Fort. This book corresponds to my abiding interest in public swimming and bathing, with a historical angle in a different national context. I was particularly keen to learn from Chapter 6, “Let the People Swim,” about the political history of municipal swimming pools in the UK, as well as Chapter 14, “When Concrete Was King,” about the material history of the lido. Particularly as our summers heat up in cities around the globe, it is useful to be reminded of the potential of collective goods to support human thriving. (Naomi Adiv)
