The expensive neglect: How America Pays More to Maintain Its Crises Than It Would Cost to Solve Them

About This BookAmerica spends more than eight billion dollars a year to keep people homeless. It wastes enough food to feed every hungry family twice over. It incarcerates more of its citizens than any nation on earth — and then wonders why poverty persists. The Expensive Neglect is the book that names what we are actually doing.Written from Washington, D.C. — the city with the highest rate of homelessness in the United States, in the shadow of the most powerful government in the world — Tefera Tessema's unflinching debut takes readers from the open-air drug markets of Kensington, Philadelphia, to the Housing First revolution in Helsinki, Finland; from the school funding gaps carved by redlining to the prison pipelines that feed them; from the food deserts of the American South to the food rescue networks of Berlin.This is not a book about helplessness. It is a book about choices — the policies we have chosen, the costs we refuse to calculate, and the solutions we already know work but have not had the political will to implement.The Expensive Neglect asks a single, uncomfortable question: What if the crisis is not a failure of resources, but a failure of priorities? Read more