Homegoing

Across Philadelphia, especially in neighborhoods shaped by decades of disinvestment and redlining, abandoned houses stand as monuments to loss. Factories closed, jobs disappeared, and property values fell; mortgages went underwater, and families who had lived on the same blocks for generations were forced to leave. Homes emptied, then decayed—windows boarded, roofs collapsing, rooms filling with dust, mold, and memory. What was once shelter and inheritance became vacancy and quiet ruin. These structures hold the traces of birthdays, arguments, meals, music, and ordinary days now gone; an architecture of absence that mirrors the slow erosion of community stability.

In Homegoing, JEFFREY STOCKBRIDGE turns his attention to these houses, attending to what remains when the people are gone: not just abandonment, but history, rupture, and the lingering question of what it means to lose a home, street by street.