The Voucher Promise, Eva Rosen
The Voucher Promise, Eva Rosen
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The Voucher Promise
"Section 8" and the Fate of an American Neighborhood

Author: Eva Rosen

Narrator: Xe Sands

Unabridged: 9 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/14/2020


Synopsis

The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as "Section 8," and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. While vouchers are a powerful tool with great promise, she demonstrates how the housing policy can replicate the very inequalities it has the power to solve.

Rosen spent more than a year living in Park Heights, getting to know families and learning about the neighborhood's history. Voucher holders disproportionately end up in this area despite rampant unemployment, drugs, crime, and abandoned housing. Exploring why they are unable to relocate to other neighborhoods, Rosen illustrates the challenges in obtaining vouchers and the difficulties faced by recipients in using them when and where they want to. Yet, despite the program's real shortcomings, she argues that vouchers offer basic stability for families and should remain integral to solutions for the nation's housing crisis.

Delving into the connections between safe, affordable housing and social mobility, The Voucher Promise investigates the profound benefits and formidable obstacles involved in housing America's poor.

About Eva Rosen

Eva Rosen is assistant professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, DC.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sylvan

This book is fantastic. It unveils the complexity of providing affordable housing in deeply disadvantaged populations. While it focuses on a housing voucher program, the book is about much more. It is about people. A struggling city. And the politics around housing and poverty in America. The book is......more

I don’t know much about housing policy and did not know anything about the voucher system. Rosen’s analysis is both technical and personal. It synthesizes the complexities of housing voucher policy while featuring the literal human face of these complex policy outcomes.......more

Goodreads review by dB

A pet peeve of mine in nonfiction books is excessive repetition. And this one had even more than most. I could've read the final chapter and gleaned everything I wanted from this book. And as for ethnographies, Eviction does a better job at expressing the personal struggles of poor people in securin......more

Goodreads review by Hindley

As a native of the Baltimore suburbs, this book perfectly articulated my feelings about the city I grew up near: resilient yet fragile with gaping wounds that will continue to fester without policy and social change. Rosen’s writing is rich with anecdotal and statistical detail that extol the streng......more