Bittersweet Lane

Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis

Jamie Madden

$55

Hardback

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English

100 Block by Row House
18 November 2025

Society & culture: general; Poverty & unemployment; Homelessness; Social classes; Central government policies

The Bitter Reality. The Sweet Solutions. The Lane Forward.

Housing dominates headlines, yet few truly understand how affordable housing works—or why it’s failing. Bittersweet Lane is the first book to demystify America’s housing crisis from both a professional and deeply personal perspective.

Spanning from Ireland to America, from the Bittersweet Lane Apartments to M.I.T., Bittersweet Lane also carries the stories and deep scars of intergenerational poverty while offering a bold vision for change.

Written by a community development professional with expertise in housing development and public policy, Madden blends gripping memoir with sharp policy insights to expose the brutal history of housing in the U.S.—and the tools we already have to fix it.

A raw, eye-opening journey through class, race, and urban development, Bittersweet Lane offers:

A class-crossing insider's perspective from housing insecurity to shaping policy.

A clear breakdown of affordable housing without the jargon.

Real solution to the crisis and why we haven't implemented them.

Though the barriers to housing justice seem insurmountable, the solutions are within reach. Bittersweet Lane doesn’t just explain the crisis—it shows how we can all find home.

By: Jamie Madden
Imprint: 100 Block by Row House
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 41mm
Weight: 544g
ISBN: 9798991642897
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 18 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jamie Madden is a dad and community development professional with expertise in housing development, public policy, and real estate finance. Jamie grew up in affordable housing at the Bittersweet Lane Apartments in Randolph, MA and went on to work for the housing industry’s leading national non-profits. His work has directly created more than one-thousand affordable homes. Jamie earned his Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his BA in Political Science and Chinese from Swarthmore College, but he learned his most important lessons inside Massachusetts’ most diverse high school, Randolph Jr/Sr High.

Reviews for Bittersweet Lane: Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis

This is one of the most original, provocative, and timely assessments yet produced about America’s housing affordability crisis and what to do about it. For far too long, it has been a quiet crisis, as Madden shows—riddled with moral denial, bad assumptions, kick-the-can politics, and forceful resistance to change at any meaningful scale. The author’s remarkable family story, combined with long experience producing homes people can actually afford, gives us an account as searing and blunt as it is practical and inspiring. Jamie Madden’s wisdom should be widely read and—most importantly—heard -- Xavier ‘Xav’ de Souza Briggs, senior fellow, Brookings Institution; author of Democracy as Problem Solving and The Geography of Opportunity A stunning portrait of policy, personal struggles, and the pervasive problem of a nation that fails to care for its people. In a beautifully written and rigorously researched examination of why housing matters, Jamie brings us inside his family and his passion for housing justice in a painful and illuminating story. Every voter, every community member, and every person who claims to care about others needs to read this heartbreaking and critically important book. -- Marcia Chatelain, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America