“The business of housing the poor,” Jacob Riis wrote 125 years ago, “if it is to amount to anything, must be a business, as it was business with our fathers to put them where they are. As charity, pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.”53 And yet, housing is too fundamental a human need, too central to children’s health and development, too important to expanding economic opportunities and stabilizing communities to be treated as simply a business, a crude investment vehicle, something that just “cashes out.”
