Wearing a black wool cap pulled down against the biting chill of a Chicago winter morning, Vallas bounds up to the doors of tenements on the city's gritty South Side.

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No one in my mother's family--growing up in the tenements of Brownsville, Brooklyn--even considered homeownership an achievable goal.

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It's their home, even if the neighborhoods of prefabricated high-rise tenements seem bleak, the list of free-time activities is limited, and several of their friends have already had problems with the skinhead groups that are gaining in popularity.

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