Bittersweet Lane

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.

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.