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[...] for the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They spent little time questioning the wide gulf separating their poverty from Tobin's wealth or asking why rent for a worn-out aluminum-wrapped trailer took such a large chunk of their income. Their focus was on smaller, more ta…

When people began to view their neighborhood as briming with deprivation and vice, full of "all sorts of shipwrecked humanity," they lost confidence in its political capacity. Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma--believing that their neighbors had experienced incarc…

Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience--this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. "For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life," the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, "the social arrangements that are ordinari…

[...] They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed was a rapid rescore coach and a low-income tenant hungry for a shot at the American dream.