A City Foreclosed

What happens to a city when people loose their homes in staggering numbers? Alex Kotlowitz, who we all remember from There Are No Children Here, takes us on a mind-numbing tour of Cleveland's Slavic Village where block after block of vacant homes give way to urban apocalypse.. It's not an uplifting story. Cleveland has to ward off predatory lending, evil real-estate speculators, squatters setting houses on fire, a decline in a tax-base that would blow your mind, and so much more. And here's the thing, there's not too much they can do except razing the homes, and even that, even home demolitions are damn near prohibitively expensive.


Read it.

For more brilliance on Kotlowitz, read his love letter to Chicago. A truly great book and probably my second favorite book ever written about the city after the historical triumph of American Pharaoh. For more on Cleveland, go here.