Introduction

When I was eight years old, my family and I moved from a tenement that we shared with extended family members to a low-income housing project in the Lower East Side of New York City. To give you a sense of the place, every day I came home I had to make a potential life or death decision: how to get to my family’s apartment on the twelfth floor. The problem with taking the elevator was that you never knew which drug addict, robber, or homicidal maniac was going to jump on at the last minute, giving you no chance of escape. I could take the stairs and have a better chance of escape, but I would still have to run the gauntlet of homeless people, cat-sized rats, heroin addicts, and assorted violent criminals to get home.

Let me give ...

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