The organizing premise here treats a family the way analysts treat a firm: it reads its situation, weighs options, and acts on whatever looks like the most efficient route to producing and reproducing its own survival. Fass sets that premise against ten years of material gathered in Port-au-Prince homes, markets, and streets.

What follows is a close account of how relatives earn a living, share out what they have both inside a household and beyond it, convert food and water into life and labor, obtain shelter and schooling, and borrow to pay for all of it. These strands interlock: move one and the rest move.

Aid programs in credit, housing, schooling, health, and jobs often prove beside the point, Fass argues, because the concepts steering them misread how the urban poor actually live. He avoids easy criticism, noting that ideas do shift when new knowledge arrives — only slowly, at a price the poor are the ones to pay.