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Ninety minutes into our four-hour shifts, Derek—who must have been about 40, average height and weight, thin black hair cut short, red face pitted with acne scars—would emerge from the storage closet he called his office, take a drag from his Marlboro, squint his eyes, and scream, “Spin ’em around!…

THE MAN ON THE OTHER END of the line is furious. Last time we came, he says, we left his basement buried in dust. He spent hours cleaning our mess, a process he now describes in detail. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “I’d like to do what I can.” I ask him to go to the basement and look at the furnace,…

Perhaps the first indication that HUD’s issues with real estate speculation and fraud went far beyond local hustlers and “suede-shoe” swindlers came with federal charges against the powerful Dun & Bradstreet credit agency in New York City. In 1972, the agency was charged with twenty-four counts of …

Blaming the poor served a purpose. HUD officials desperately wanted to keep the narrative from becoming one of federal officials signing off on criminally defective houses — a task made much easier by the fact that the story of negligent and lazy poor people failing to perform basic maintenance was…

For decades, federal officials had relied on public housing to shelter poor and low-income people. But by the end of the 1960s, public housing had become politically untenable, with endless jousts over its maintenance, location, and inhabitants. Housing for the poor suffered from a mixture of gover…