University of Bucharest Review  Vol. V)/ʹͲͳ6, no. ʹ ȋnew seriesȌ Cultural Representations of the City 180    Raluca Andreescu  NOT IN MY BACKYARD: THE ROAD TO HOUSING DESEGREGATION IN YONKERS, NEW YORK, FROM LISA BELKIN’S SHOW ME A HERO TO ITS ADAPTATION FOR TELEVISION Keywords: public housing (de)segregation; racial discrimination; court-ordered integration; defensible space. Abstract: Almost twenty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, whose goal was to prevent housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender or national origin, the city of Yonkers, New York occupied central stage in a landmark civil-rights suit (1983). In it, City officials were accused of having intentionally followed a systematic pattern of selecting sites for subsidized housing projects that perpetuated racial segregation. My paper discusses the manner in which the ensuing battle to desegregate Yonkers was portrayed in Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption (1999), the nonfiction narrative by former New York Times writer Lisa Belkin, as well as in its subsequent adaptation to screen in a six-part HBO miniseries by the same name (2015). It seeks to reveal the dysfunctional politics of urban America in a city paralyzed by fear, corruption, and racial ignorance, which was nonetheless to become the birth place of scattered-site low-income and affordable housing. “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” (W.E.B du Bois) “Money and fear are sufficient to make men and women stupid everywhere else in the world, but we’re Americans, goddammit.” (David Simon) Introduction In 1987, the city of Yonkers, NY, went through great turmoil when a federal judge imposed the building of low income housing in the city’s mainly white upscale neighborhoods, in an effort to end the willful desegregation of the city by its government. My paper discusses the manner in which the ensuing battle to desegregate Yonkers was portrayed in Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption (1999), the nonfiction narrative by former New York Times writer Lisa Belkin, as well as in its subsequent adaptation to screen in a six-part HBO miniseries by the same name (2015) written by David Simon and William  University of Bucharest, Romania.