It would seem hard to imagine a place where children attend more funerals than weddings. A place where a mother—almost certain her children would not reach adulthood—pays $80 a month for burial insurance, even though they have barely reached adolescence.  But this is the case for Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, their mother LaJoe and almost everyone else in their family. Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here” details two years in the lives of the Rivers boys, humanizing the problem of urban poverty by portraying its most helpless victims—the children who are forced to live in it.

Long before Hurricane Katrina had U.S. politicians decrying the problem of urban poverty and lamenting about “Two Americas,” Alex Kotlowitz wrote about Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, two brothers living in the Henry Horner housing project on Chicago’s West Side. Kotlowitz first met the two boys in the summer of 1985, when he was writing the text for a friend’s photo essay on children living in poverty. Kotlowitz returned to Horner two years later to write on a similar topic for the Wall Street Journal. It was then he asked LaJoe, the boys’ mother, to chronicle the lives of her sons.

With his meticulous reporting and apparent empathy, Kotlowitz portrays the struggles of 12-year-old Lafayette and his 9-year-old brother, Pharaoh. The boys live in an apartment with cinder block walls, a tub with a perpetually leaky faucet, and a bathroom toilet whose putrid smells may be the result of at-home abortions performed by the previous tenants. Shootings, between rival gangs and by the police, are part of the reality for Lafayette and Pharaoh. Throughout the book, the boys lose friends and family to gun violence, drugs and prison.

Despite the depression that surrounds them, Lafayette and Pharaoh maintain some of their innocence. They play on railroad tracks and believe they’ll find leprechauns and a pot of gold after they see a rainbow. Though the boys know many people who go to prison, during a school spelling bee Pharaoh is unable to spell the word cellblock, an irony that shows he is still a child and can’t fully comprehend what could await him in the future.

Kotlowitz does a stellar job of linking the problems in Horner to bad public policy and neglect by Chicago city officials. The Chicago Housing Authority had lost control of its housing complexes to street gangs and seemed to have long forgotten about its residents or improving their living conditions.  Some of the police responded to violence in Horner and other projects by treating many of the residents like possible criminals.  As Kotlowitz puts it, “white opposition on the Chicago City Council gummed up most efforts by the administration to do much of anything” to change the city’s public housing.

Throughout the book, it becomes apparent Kotlowitz may have become too involved in the lives of his subjects. He doesn’t impose the same standard of accountability on the residents of public housing or examine why they made certain choices, sometimes even pardoning their mistakes as the inevitable consequences of being black and poor. While some kids did get lost to the neighborhood, as Kotlowitz says, one has to wonder where LaJoe Rivers was when Lafayette and Pharaoh were out late at night watching cars at the Chicago Bears Stadium. Why did LaJoe allow her grown daughter, her three children, her daughter’s boyfriend and his brother, none of whom paid bills, to move into her already cramped apartment? No one is blaming her and other Horner residents for living in poverty, but it seemed as though they were resigned to their fate.

“There Are No Children Here” is timeless in its portrayal of urban poverty. Chicago’s Plan for Transformation has changed Henry Horner into mixed-income, low-rise housing, but that change may be more structural than substantive. Many of the problems that plagued Lafayette and Pharaoh still exist today. No one has created a solution to dealing with persistent poverty in this country, but the answer may start with the children who live in it. Kotlowitz implies it is society’s communal responsibility to give these kids a fighting chance. Educating them and giving them the same opportunities as middle class kids in the suburbs is a starting point. Unlike Lafayette, those children don’t have to worry about what they’ll become if they grow up. For them, as it should be for all children, growing up is never a question of if, but of when.