Overview

Bankruptcy and the austerity it represents have become a common solution for struggling American cities. What do the spending cuts and limited resources do to the lives of city residents? In Broke, Jodie Adams Kirshner follows seven Detroiters as they navigate life during and after their city's bankruptcy. Reggie loses his savings trying to make a habitable home for his family. Cindy fights drug use, prostitution, and dumping on her block. Lola commutes two hours a day to her suburban job. For them, financial issues are mired within the larger ramifications of poor urban policies, restorative negligence on the state and federal level and--even before the decision to declare Detroit bankrupt in 2013--the root causes of a city's fiscal demise. Broke looks at what municipal distress means, not just on paper but in practical--and personal--terms. More than 40 percent of Detroit's 700,000 residents fall below the poverty line. Post-bankruptcy, they struggle with a broken real estate market, school system, and job market--and their lives have not improved. Detroit is emblematic. Kirshner makes a powerful argument that cities are never quite given the aid that they need by either the state or federal government for their residents to survive, not to mention flourish. Success for all America's citizens depends on equity of opportunity.

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"Jodie Adams Kirshner is a research professor at New York University. Previously on the law faculty at Cambridge University, she also teaches bankruptcy law at Columbia Law School. She is a member of the American Law Institute, past term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and technical advisor to the Bank for International Settlements. She received a prestigious multi-year grant from the Kresge Foundation to research her book Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises. Teri Schnaubelt is a Chicago-based stage, on-camera, and voice actor as well as oil painter and photographer. An Earphones Award-winning narrator, she has voiced over a hundred books for New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, in addition to helping independent authors get their stories heard. MICHAEL ERIC DYSON--distinguished University Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, College of Arts & Science, and of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, and Centennial Professor at Vanderbilt University--is one of America's premier public intellectuals and the author of seven New York Times bestsellers including JAY-Z, Tears We Cannot Stop, and What Truth Sounds Like. A contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, Dr. Dyson is a recipient of two NAACP Image awards and the 2020 Langston Hughes Festival Medallion. Former president Barack Obama has noted: ""Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison."""

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