And instead of us thinking that we are going into the unwinding, to me this is the greatest economic explosion that’s ever going to hit in our lifetimes, because all that money that’s being concentrated at the top, with food, fuel, clothing—what else do they control? banking—it might go back to little towns.

were known as “straw buyers”—might not exist, or might be victims of identity theft. Or they might be Sonny Kim’s partners in mortgage fraud. So might the brokers, appraisers, notaries, title agents, and ultimately the bankers who were in on the deals, some of them showing up again and again. Everyone was making money on Sonny Kim’s business, and

From the 1920s until 1977, twenty-five uninterrupted miles of steel mills ran northwest to southeast along the Mahoning River: from the Republic Steel plants around Warren and Niles, through the U.S. Steel plant in McDonald and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube blast furnaces on Brier Hill, to U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works right in the middle of Youngstown,

Florida drew the transient and rootless on the eternal promise of a second chance, with more than its share of scammers and con men. So who was to say the guy living next door wasn’t one of them? A subdivision like Carriage Pointe was Jane Jacobs’s vision of hell.

He was seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses—always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones that

Life was richest and most creative where people of different backgrounds could meet face-to-face and exchange ideas. And that happened in cities—cities of a particular kind.

Edward Hopper),

floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and

back to where we were before, but yet we will