The American Dream of homeownership is becoming an American Delusion. As renters seek an escape from record-breaking rent hikes, first-time buyers find that skyrocketing interest rates and historically low inventory leave them with scant options for an affordable place to live. With home valued more than ever as a commodity, even social housing programs meant to insulate families from cut-throat markets are under threat--sometimes by residents themselves.

In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.

With a deft hand for mapping personal histories atop the greater housing crisis, Tarleton explores housing as a public good, movements for tenant rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and questions of race and class to lay bare competing visions of what ownership means, what homes are for, and what neighbors owe each other.

Jonathan Tarleton is a writer, an urban planner, and an oral historian. He previously served as the chief researcher on Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas and as the editor in chief of the online magazine Urban Omnibus. His essays have appeared in Orion, Jacobin, Hell Gate, Dirt, and beyond .

Tarleton will be in conversation with Amanda Huron. Huron was born and raised in Washington D.C. She attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she majored in urban studies and geography. She worked for several years in community radio before earning a masters of city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, after which she worked on local affordable housing policy and advocacy in Washington, D.C. She received a Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences/geography from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and taught for a year at CUNY's Hunter College. She is an associate professor of interdisciplinary social sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia. Her research interests are in D.C. history, urban geography, and housing justice. Her first book, Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C., is out now from the University of Minnesota Press. She has played music in punk and experimental bands since 1991. Her current musical projects are Weed Tree and Sensor Ghost.

This event is free with first come, first served seating.