Books like High-risers by Ben Austen

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

In *Evicted*, Matthew Desmond documents how the 2008 financial crisis amplified eviction in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, revealing the link between housing insecurity, extreme poverty, and economic exploitation.

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration has become a contemporary system of racial control, striking disproportionately at African‑American men and other disadvantaged groups while perpetuating a new form of Jim Crow.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a non‑fiction study of the Great Migration, tracing the journey of nearly six million African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970.

A reflection on race, Barack Obama's presidency, and the election of Donald Trump by the National Book Award-winning author of 'Between the World and Me'.

Douglas A. Blackmon exposes a hidden chapter of American history—an "Age of Neoslavery" that subjected African Americans to forced labor and debt slavery from the late 19th century through the 1940s.

An eye‑opening look at how historic segregation still shapes life on Chicago’s South Side, blending sociological insight with personal stories of residents affected by housing discrimination and urban policy.

For almost two centuries Americans have been moving to the suburbs in search of affordable family housing, unspoiled nature, and small-town sociability--only to find that their leafy new neighborhoods are part of the growing metropolitan sprawl. It is to this contested cultural landscape, where most Americans now live, that Dolores Hayden draws our attention.From nineteenth-century utopian communities and elite picturesque enclaves to early twentieth-century streetcar subdivisions and owner-built tracts to the vast postwar sitcom suburbs and the subsidized malls and office parks that followed (on a scale that earlier builders could never have imagined), Hayden reveals the cultural and economic patterns that have brought us to the present. She explores the interplay of natural and built environments, the complex antagonisms between real-estate developers and suburban residents, the hidden role of federal government, and the religious and ideological overtones of the "American dream" embedded in the suburbs. Hayden asks hard questions about who has benefited from the suburban building process and about "smart" growth and "green" building. And she makes a strong case for the revitalization of existing neighborhoods in place of unchecked new growth on rural fringes. Few readers will see our ubiquitous suburbs in the same way again.From the Hardcover edition.