Jamie Madden is a community development professional with expertise in housing development, public policy, and finance. He has worked for the affordable housing industry’s leading non-profits, including The Community Builders, Preservation of Affordable Housing, Bridge Housing, and Enterprise Community Partners. Jamie grew up in an affordable apartment at the Bittersweet Lane Apartments in Randolph, MA. His work has directly created more than one-thousand affordable homes in several award winning developments and helped bring hundreds of millions of dollars to support many more affordable homes and early learning centers.

Jamie earned his Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Swarthmore College, but learned the most important lessons at Massachusetts’ most diverse high school, Randolph High. The Truman Scholarship Foundation named Jamie its 2005 Massachusetts scholar. Jamie now lives in Seattle and walks most places. His 3-year-old daughter enjoys walking with him but refuses to contribute to any more Zoom meetings.

I am looking for representation for my memoir / narrative non-fiction manuscript, Bittersweet Lane: How We Create Home.

Bittersweet Lane blends a clear and comprehensive explanation of affordable housing – what it is, how it works, and how we got here as a nation – with memoir exploring my and my family’s experiences with housing insecurity and poverty. Think Color of Law meets Educated. Even as housing makes daily headlines, our nation’s approach to affordable housing remains mysterious. This book should fill that gap. It is a class-crossing insider’s look at an obscure but crucial industry's inner workings and surprisingly deep and cursed history. Bittersweet Lane demands an honest reckoning at the intersections of housing, race, and class. Its tragic, comic, and violent histories move from Ireland to America, from the Bittersweet Lane Apartments to Swarthmore and M.I.T., and into the professional class bearing the scars of intergenerational poverty in order to plant signposts for a path toward housing for all.

My fondest hope for Bittersweet Lane is that it change the conversation on housing affordability as Color of Law did for redlining and Evicted for, well, evictions. Equally, I dream of handing published copies to the families who live in the Bittersweet Lane Apartments today. Every person has a housing story. A generation who has witnessed American suburban poverty – vanishingly rare before the 1980s – will find a housing story to identify with in mine like few others. This manuscript can birth several follow-on projects. An academic press version will add advanced details, lessons, and exercises. The historical research in Bittersweet Lane demands a fuller exploration in a book focused on the shared origins of English poor laws and colonialism in Ireland and America.