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In restaurants, why do all the white people work in the front and the brown people in the back? What keeps these workers apart, consigned to highly unequal types of jobs? Drawing on six years of ethnographic research within three Los Angeles–based restaurants, Wilson details how managers and workers jointly divide service workplaces by race, class, and gender. While managers frame social inequality through discriminatory hiring and supervisory policies that grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions and relegate foreign-born Latino men with low levels of education to the marginal jobs, interactions between members of each group end up sealing distinct "worlds of work" off from one another. While these processes bind the most vulnerable Latinx workers to low-level service jobs, it can also foster unexpected opportunities for others. Through Wilson's extensive behind-the-scenes research, we learn how what happens in everyday service establishments exacerbates but also gives new dimension to social inequalities in our society at large.

Are the unemployed more likely to commit crimes? Does having a job make one less likely to commit a crime? Criminologists have found that individuals who are marginalized from the labor market are more likely to commit crimes, and communities with more members who are marginal to the labor market have higher rates of crime. Yet, as this book explains, contrary to popular expectations, unemployment has been found to be an inconsistent predictor of either individual criminality or collective crime rates. The book offers a carefully nuanced understanding of the links among work, unemployment, and crime, and explains how people's positioning in the labor market affects their participation in all kinds of crimes, from violent acts to profit-motivated offenses such as theft and drug trafficking. The author draws on his first-hand knowledge of growing up in a poor, black neighborhood in Pittsburgh and later working on the streets as a parole officer, enabling him to develop a more complete understanding of how work and crime are related and both contribute to, and are a result of, social inequalities and disadvantage. The book tells a powerful story of one of the most troubling side effects of economic disparities in America.

Early June begins the Southern Hemisphere hurricane season. Stretching into November, it can often be a time of weary waiting and cautious optimism for coastal residents. Clear skies and calm seas can quickly give way to disaster. On August 27, 2017, a Category 4 hurricane (Harvey), targeting the Texas Gulf Coast and packing winds of over 130 miles per hour, wreaked havoc and created a path of destruction with bands of rain that seemingly went on forever. Lives were lost, neighborhoods devastated, resiliency cracked; yet people continued helping each other, and the recovery process began. Fitzpatrick and Spialek tell a complicated story of heartache, destruction, resiliency, recovery, and hope. Through over 300 interviews from Hurricane Harvey survivors living along the Texas Gulf Coast, their stories tell an all-too-familiar tale. Interviewing survivors with diverse displacement experiences, the authors create a narrative around who, what, where, and why residents sought refuge in shelters, hotels, and other alternative locations. Some residents have since moved back. Others have been rebuilding for months and even years. And there are some residents who will never return home. Their stories, circumstances, and insight into the recovery processes are all very different, yet intimately tied together through an understanding of how race and place come to define their experiences. This book tells survivors’ stories while emphasizing that who those survivors were and where they lived had a major impact on these tales of destruction, resiliency, and recovery.

On an average morning in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town housing development, birds chirp as early risers dash off to work, elderly residents enjoy a peaceful morning stroll, and flocks of parents usher their children to school. It seems an unlikely location for conflict and strife, yet this eighteen-block area, initially planned as middle-class affordable housing, is the site of an ongoing struggle between long-term, rent-regulated residents and newer, market-rate tenants instigated by new owners seeking to turn the middle-class community into a luxury commodity. Priced Out takes readers into this heated battle as a transitioning neighborhood wrestles with contemporary capitalist strategies and the struggle to preserve renters’ rights. Attempting to replace longtime residents with younger, more affluent tenants, Stuyvesant Town’s owners have disrupted native residents’ sense of place and community, and their perceived quality of life. Through resident interviews, the authors offer an intimate view into the lives of different groups of tenants, neighbors all, involved in this struggle for prime real estate in New York, from students experiencing the city for the first time to baby boomers hanging on to the vestiges of middle-class urban life to older residents who have resided in Stuyvesant Town since it opened in 1947. A compelling account of changing urban landscapes and the struggle for security, Priced Out offers a comprehensive perspective on a community that, to some, is becoming unrecognizable as it is upgraded and altered.

Social Poverty draws on 192 interviews with young, low-income, unmarried parents to investigate the concept of social poverty, using the setting of a government-funded relationship education program. While commentators and academics have excoriated such programs for the value system they imply and their intervention results, participants are huge fans of them. Although critics view participants’ financial needs as dominating their social concerns, participants themselves are acutely aware of their relational needs. These needs drive their participation in and enthusiasm for the program. This study illustrates the fundamental importance to policy and poverty studies of properly understanding social poverty. Social poverty means not having adequate high-quality, trusting social relationships to meet core socioemotional needs. Poverty scholars typically focus on the economic use value of social ties—how relationships enable access to job leads, informal loans, or a spare bedroom. While such resources can be essential, this focus ignores the fundamental place of socioemotional needs in our lives and the extent to which avoiding or alleviating social poverty is a central motivation for many. As one young mother says, without her boyfriend she would “probably be the loneliest person on Earth.” Therefore, to accurately assess policy impacts and comprehend individuals’ behaviors, we must pay attention to both material and social hardships.