Philadelphia is synonymous with liberty and possibility. It is the city where the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed.

But there is a lesser-known side to Philadelphia. It is the poorest large city in America. Kensington is its poorest neighborhood, a place where “18th-birthday celebrations are not rites of passage but miracles,” writes sociologist Nikhil Goyal. Goyal was a senior policy advisor on education and children to Senator Bernie Sanders.

Goyal has a new book, “Live to See The Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” in which he follows three Puerto Rican children growing up in Kensington. This coming of age story is marked by violence, drugs, homelessness and the fallout from wrenching poverty. Environmental activist Bill McKibben has called the book “an instant classic.”

As an aide to Bernie Sanders, Goyal helped develop education, child care and child tax credit legislation as well as a tuition-free college program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in Vermont. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Goyal is a graduate of Goddard College in Plainfield and received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Goyal will be a lecturer in sociology at the University of Vermont starting this fall.

Goyal attributes the urban decay that he saw in Kensington partly to disinvestment and also to neoliberalism, the notion that social problems can be solved by privatization and deregulation. Neoliberalism “has produced a great level of inequality and suffering. And I think Kensington is one of the greatest physical manifestations of that in America today,” he said.



Goyal also reflected on his time with Sen. Bernie Sanders. He said that Sanders’ ideas such as canceling student debt and tuition-free community college have become part of the mainstream due to “the power of social movements. I don't think you would have seen Build Back Better … if it weren't for Occupy Wall Street, if it weren't for Fight for 15, the Black Lives Matter movement. I think social movements gave us the language to talk about exploitation and poverty and inequality in ways that hadn't been discussed in America for many decades.”