Jamie Madden w/ Maiko Winkler-Chin, BITTERSWEET LANE: HOW WE CREATE HOMES

Local affordable housing developer and policy maker Jamie Madden visits the store to discuss his new memoir Bittersweet Lane: How We Create Homes, demystifying America’s housing crisis from both a professional and deeply personal perspective. Bittersweet Lane doesn’t just explain the crisis—it shows how we can all find home. He is joined in conversation by Maiko Winkler-Chin, Director of Seattle’s Office of Housing

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 (he/sé) is the author of Bittersweet Lane: Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis. Jamie is a Seattle-based dad and community development professional with expertise in housing development, public policy, and real estate finance. Jamie earned his Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his BA in Political Science and Chinese from Swarthmore College, and a Truman Scholarship, but he learned his most important lessons inside Massachusetts’s most diverse high school, Randolph Junior/Senior High. Jamie grew up in affordable housing at the Bittersweet Lane Apartments, and he went on to work for the affordable housing industry’s leading nonprofits. His work has contributed to creating more than one thousand affordable homes. If this housing crisis were fixed, sé would spend his days writing, parenting, playing music, and learning an cúpla focail as Gaeilge.

Maiko Winkler-Chin is a longtime advocate for community-driven development and currently serves as the Director of Seattle’s Office of Housing. She’s spent her career working to make neighborhoods more equitable, inclusive, and rooted in the people who call them home. Before joining the City, Maiko led the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda), where she learned that community development is as much about listening as it is about building. She brings that same spirit to her work today—along with a healthy respect for spreadsheets, storytelling, and snacks at meetings. She’s thrilled to be part of this conversation, especially since the author is someone she knows and respects deeply.

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