It's a history of the struggle to build and inhabit public housing on the white side of Yonkers, NY, USA in the 1990s. (If that sounds familiar but you're sure you didn't read the book, maybe you saw the HBO miniseries?) It was a pretty interesting, albeit aggravating read. Why aggravating?
Yonkers' NIMBYs were national-news-level notable. In Yonkers, they were very stubborn. Ordered by a judge to build public housing on the east side of town, city politicians got elected by promising to just not build that housing. Faced with fines, they stuck to their guns. When the fines threatened to bankrupt the city, when the city had to fire workers, when… Their appeal went up to the US Supreme Court.
The book isn't written from the NIMBY point of view. I suppose the NIMBYs didn't want to sit down with the author and recount their tales of hurling racist epithets back in the good ol' days. But you feel their presence in every chapter: Voting out the sane politicians; making death threats; hurling those epithets.
Instead we hear about the ousted Yonkers politicians and the outside-Yonkers politicians who were trying to figure out how to make the city comply. Do you fine the city? Seems bad to make city workers lose their jobs just because the city council got taken over by racists. Do you fine the city council members? They can declare bankruptcy, and then get re-elected by pointing out their sacrifices.
And we hear about the people who moved into the new public housing when it was finally built. None of these people thought of Ruby Bridges like Yep, that's the lifestyle I'm looking for. But they had to learn how to get along with their new neighbors, how to stand up for themselves. There are some real moments of inspiration in there.
