{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025711662075298437, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005509641873278237, 'mean_word_length': 5.4851190476190474, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Subsidizing housing insecurity

F or over a century, a critical point raised in urban scholarship has been the importance of place. Whether scholars are talking about a large metropolitan region, a neighborhood or a city block, place structures the lived experiences of people. From the earlier work of prominent urban scholars, from Du Bois (1899) Philadelphia Negro to the Chicago School of urban sociology (Korver-Glenn, Dantzler, and Howell 2021), urban studies has numerous examples of scholars drawing connections between housing, community and place. Eva Rosen’s (2020) book, The Voucher Promise, falls into this category. Yet, instead of relying solely on neighborhood conditions or residential mobility to illustrate how communities change over time, Rosen focuses on an obvious, yet elusive domain of urban sociology – urban policy. Through her ethnography of urban housing policy, Rosen illuminates how the search for an affordable housing unit is also a search for home in already regulated political, social, economic and cultural environments. Using a mix of ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews consisting of tenants and landlords, Rosen highlights the nuances of public policy goals and their (un) expected effects. The story of housing vouchers reveals a deeper story of the link between personhood and property – a relationship that limits the ability of households to achieve upward mobility through precarious forms of ownership. As a work of urban sociology, it builds off the work of others by focusing on the actual material conditions of public policymaking. As a salient contribution to urban studies, it highlights the potentialities and limitations of addressing the national housing crisis. Stories of low-income, urban communities have been fraught with narratives surrounding segregation, suburbanization, redlining, concentrations of poverty and affluence, exclusionary zoning and even more contemporarily, gentrification. Urban processes, like these, produce and reproduce unequal places, often resulting in unequal outcomes for communities. While often seen as the culmination of the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, it