Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies that Transformed a City, edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, Princeton University Press, November 2015, 336 pages, $39.95.

This is a superb history of the numerous ways that New York has provided subsidized housing for low-, moderate-, and middle-income residents from around 1900 to the present. As such, it provides a model to other cities—consider, for example, that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the largest public housing agency in the country, overseeing 178,000 low-income apartments, with an official—probably underestimated— population of 403,000. That would qualify as a good-sized city in most places in this country.