Podcast
Pivot
Andrea Elliott's book chronicles the life of Desani Coates, a homeless child in Brooklyn, and her family's struggles with poverty, shelters, and boarding schools, from 2013 to the present. The book highlights Desani's resilience and her family's strength in the face of hardship.
She introduced herself to me as Desani, like the water.
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Andrea Elliott's book chronicles the life of Desani Coates, a homeless child in Brooklyn, and her family's struggles with poverty, shelters, and boarding schools, from 2013 to the present. The book highlights Desani's resilience and her family's strength in the face of hardship.
She introduced herself to me as Desani, like the water.
She's not, she's a gifted and amazing girl but she's quite representative of the problems that she was surviving at the time that I met her.
It's not just about creating enough shelter or enough affordable housing. It's also about creating greater opportunities in the neighborhoods that the vast majority of New York's homeless come from.
She's most recently, I think she would say that she is not escaping poverty per se. She remains with her mom and Brooklyn and her sister and her brother. She doesn't want to escape the neighborhood that to her feels like home even though she has been in and out of homelessness.
The hope is really a personal thing for this family. When it comes to policy prescriptions, my hope is that people read this book and can potentially get some kind of new window into seeing how these policies play out on the ground and also perhaps challenge their own notions of what it means to be successful, what it means to be happy.