My beautiful older sister, Bess — a smart, passionate, popular soccer star — killed herself when she was 17. She took my parents’ gun, drove to a park, and shot herself in the head. The effect on my family was profound. Though I’m generally a warm person, for the next 15 years, I avoided people with big emotions, or people who seemed fragile. For me, they were dangerous, unpredictable, unhelpable. I didn’t want to get too close, for fear of being responsible for them in some way. I limited my range of empathy because I was sure if I went too far, I’d be swallowed whole.

We asked readers what they wanted to see in our affordable housing issue. More than 3,000 of you responded. You wanted to know about community solutions — how cities are stopping gentrification, taking the greed out of development, and innovating ownership and financing models. You also told us that living in community was important — that maybe Americans had lost sight of that — and that multigenerational housing was a solution that could address the needs of an aging population along with those of a new generation of adults. This helped us decide what stories to put in the issue. Something else did, too.