The growing number of homeless people over age 50 has reached epidemic proportions. It is important to recognize that this group has special needs and demands from health factors to safety. This book is a resource for professionals training and working with this homeless contingent.

A poignant and absorbing book of prose and poetry, "He Didn't Die Easy" details both the world's suffering and its eternal promise as observed by a journalist during her career.

The reflections in "He Didn't Die Easy" represent a ten-year journey during which author Mary W. Kimani struggles with the questions arising from the physical and psychological consequences of war as well as the pain, anguish and terror that linger long after. Kimani speaks of how perpetrators of violence and their victims live together under conditions of emotional turmoil, daily anxiety, and utter desperation. Yet, in the face of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Kimani's words echo with optimism and the faith that our world will become a better place.

"He Didn't Die Easy" is a personal search for hope and meaning in the face of the haunting and overwhelming realities of pain, poverty, violence, war and genocide that the author has seen, experienced, and written about during the course of her life's work.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08 was triggered by sub-prime mortgage mis-selling in the US and the global sale of these debts as new bonds. Austerity programmes are designed to reduce the borrowing that governments undertook to stabilise failing banking systems but the UK's Coalition government is using 'austerity' as a cover to dismantle the welfare state. Housing is at the forefront of these changes. Mortgages and rental costs are rising as 'the market' dictates them, while people with low incomes now receive substantially less financial help from the welfare state. In this much-needed text by an experienced author with a policy background, current housing finance issues (and their history) are linked with broader social policy and political themes. It covers the finance of building and refurbishment, managing and maintaining property for all the different tenures (owner occupation, council housing, housing association and private renting), and discusses whether current arrangements are sustainable. Written for housing, social policy and politics students and staff, it is also accessible to anyone concerned about housing in Britain today.

The Philosophy of Homelessness is borne out of a five-year ethnographic research project involving being with a group of chronically homeless people in Chester. A small city located in the northwest of the UK, Chester is economically supported by its heritage and the tourism that this attracts. In an obvious sense, the awkwardness of the phrase 'being with a group of chronically homeless people' is regrettable. Nevertheless, this unfortunately self-conscious phrase is significant, with its importance residing in the word and concept of 'being'. Whilst philosophical understandings of being are often thought about in rather abstract terms, The Philosophy of Homelessness explores the daily experience of chronic homelessness from a perspective that renders its ontological impress in ways that are explicitly felt, often in forms that are overtly political and exclusionary in character, especially in terms of identity and belonging within the city. Themes that emerge from the work, which coalesce around living in the margins of the city and experiencing only the shadow of the right to be, include: the economy of chronic addiction and its impact upon the body; the relationship between chronic homelessness and the law; and chronic homelessness and identity and desire. These themes are explored through a number of thinkers, though predominantly: Nietzsche, Lacan, Bourdieu and Kristeva. This work is likely to be of interest to anyone working in the fields of: criminology; sociology, especially those areas concerned with marginalised groups; and philosophy in its socially and politically engaged forms; as well as to those with an interest in homelessness.

Street outreach workers comb public places such as parks, vacant lots, and abandoned waterfronts to search for young people who are living out in public spaces, if not always in the public eye. "Street Kids" opens a window to the largely hidden world of street youth, drawing on their detailed and compelling narratives to give new insight into the experiences of youth homelessness and youth outreach. Kristina Gibson argues that the enforcement of quality of life ordinances in New York City has spurred hyper-mobility amongst the city's street youth population and has serious implications for social work with homeless youth. Youth in motion have become socially invisible and marginalized from public spaces where social workers traditionally contact them, jeopardizing their access to the already limited opportunities to escape street life. The culmination of a multi-year ethnographic investigation into the lives of street outreach workers and 'their kids' on the streets of New York City, "Street Kids" illustrates the critical role that public space regulations and policing play in shaping the experience of youth homelessness and the effectiveness of street outreach.

Like many politicians, reporters, social workers, and others concerned about the homeless, Robert C. Coates lived for a short time on the street. But rather than returning from his mission with yet another set of platitudes about the problem, the experience set him on the road to find answers. The result is "A Street is Not a Home". Coates' involvement with homelessness began as an exploration into judicial ethics, but quickly developed into something far more sweeping.This is not another recapitulation of the problem but a mosaic of workable solutions that Coates has seen evolve in municipalities across the nation. Coates dismisses opinions that the homeless dilemma is one that cannot be resolved. Writing in clear, readable prose, he cuts through the medical, social, legal, and religious jargon that customarily surrounds the issue, approaching homelessness from the perspective of basic strategic planning. He separates the larger problems into manageable components, examines programs that have already been tested and found to be effective, and isolates matters that still require resolution. "A Street is Not a Home" dispels many myths about the homeless crisis and clearly illustrates that the vast majority of America's homeless can be helped.

Property Rights and Climate Change explores the multifarious relationships between different types of climate-driven environmental changes and property rights. This original contribution to the literature examines such climate changes through the lens of property rights, rather than through the lens of land use planning. The inherent assumption pursued is that the different types of environmental changes, with their particular effects and impact on land use, share common issues regarding the relation between the social construction of land via property rights and the dynamics of a changing environment. Making these common issues explicit and discussing the different approaches to them is the central objective of this book. Through examining a variety of cases from the Arctic to the Australian coast, the contributors take a transdisciplinary look at the winners and losers of climate change, discuss approaches to dealing with changing environmental conditions, and stimulate pathways for further research. This book is essential reading for lawyers, planners, property rights experts and environmentalists.

Young Homeless People takes a broad approach to the distressing phenomenon of youth homelessness. While politicians, researchers and the media focus on the more visibly homeless - those sleeping rough in city centres or staying in hostels - this book also considers the young homeless hidden in local communities. It places young people's experiences of homelessness in the context of their biographies as a whole and makes policy and practice recommendations based on the views and preferences of young homeless people themselves.

The issue of homelessness has become extremely important in policy debates during the 1990s. Yet analysis that links the phenomenon of homelessness to wider debates about the changing social and economic environment remains relatively underdeveloped. This important new book brings together contemporary theoretical debates and original empirical research in order to explore the nature, experience and impact of social change in the new 'landscape of precariousness', in which new sets of risks and uncertainties have emerged. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, which is essential in developing a more subtle understanding of both the complex processes leading to, and the experience of, homelessness. Central to contemporary theory and practice is the enhancement of our understanding of how homelessness, disadvantage and social exclusion impact differently on various social groups. Homelessness provides a strong contribution to the academic debate, and is essential reading for students and researchers in a range of subject areas, including housing studies, social policy, socio-legal studies and public administration.

This title was first published in 1986 during a recession much like that faced in recent years, which placed immense pressure on the British planning system and led to social unrest in the inner cities and in many disadvantaged areas. Within this context, Peter Ambrose outlines the features of land development and explores the circumstances of post-war planning. The central section of the book deals with the key forces at work in land development - finance, the construction industry and the local and central state - and explains how they interact. Using a number of case-studies, including the greenfield urban fringe and London's docklands, as well as examples drawn from other countries, Ambrose provides an essential background to the British planning system and the problems still faced by it today.

Housing matters a great deal. The present housing market has worked well for many of us (who have enjoyed the steeply rising values of our homes) which is why change, especially new building, is resisted. But for increasing numbers it now works less well as home ownership is out of reach, and for many years it has been commonly felt that there is a 'housing crisis' in Britain. Reforms are urgently needed to avoid a growing human cost. With so many conflicting views in evidence and a balance to be struck between growth and conservation, what housing market outcomes might be regarded as a success for policymakers? This short book attempts to give at least some answers, concluding with a list of criteria by which success might be judged along with a list of policy recommendations. Along the way a number of 'myths' are identified - either ideas about the UK housing market or possible solutions to the housing issue - that the author argues are mistaken. She argues that we need to be realistic, and not simplistic, about what mix of outcomes can be achieved.There are many national policy aims, including decent homes for all, protection of the green belt, better design of buildings and places, the avoidance of house price volatility, and intergenerational fairness. At the local level, planning provokes conflict and strong feelings. We also have an existing housing stock that is arguably, at least in part, wrongly located, and some of the housing we do have is of poor quality. For anyone with an interest in housing, this is an authoritative, accessible and constructive contribution to a debate that is likely to rumble on until the cows come home.

Rejecting those who urge a bootstrap approach to people living in extreme poverty on the edge of society, sociologist Barbara Arrighi makes an eloquent, compassionate plea for empathy and collective responsibility toward those for whom either the boots or the straps are missing. This book further offers solutions in consciousness raising, community collaboration, and informed, responsible public policy. The book is a critique of a system that purports to serve yet sometimes impedes the welfare of those who are in need of the basic elements for survival, including affordable shelter. It analyzes the structural factors of poverty and the social psychological costs of being poor and lacking a home. Utilizing interview findings from families who have lived in a shelter in northern Kentucky and from staff members, the book examines the degrading effects of shelter life on women's self-respect and children's development. Rather than an examination of individual pathologies leading to lack of shelter, it centers on women and children living in shelters and offers a sociological study of poverty and the family.

Building Communities: The Co-Operative Way, first published in 1988, sets the flourishing of housing co-operatives throughout the 1980s in a theoretical and historical framework that suggests that tenant control is the best way out of the still-problematic issue of housing policy. Before the First World War, co-operative housing was poised to become a potent force in government policy, but instead municipal housing rose to prominence. However, alongside a growing crisis of confidence in state housing and a continued decline in the private rented sector, a new political consensus has emerged that has placed co-ops firmly at the top of the agenda. Setting out the argument for collective dweller-control of housing, Birchall demonstrates that the arguments for co-operatives are strong, based on a broad spectrum of political thought. He charts the early and recent history of co-operative housing, and shows how they provide a flexible and stable means of meeting housing needs.

Quarry Hill Flats, once both the pride and shame of its city of Leeds, was an iconic Modernist symbol of the 1930s. It marked the first use of a prefabricated building system for a large-scale council estate, replacing a notorious slum. But it lasted barely a generation - its complete demolition was announced as Alison Ravetz was finishing this study. First published in 1974, this book is unique in its use of all estate records from conception to destruction, as well as in its comprehensive approach, including aspects usually missing in council housing studies - notably the intimate experience of residents, and a fraught, long-drawn-out building period. Ravetz argues that the Flats' 'failure' was due not to social breakdown, as repeatedly alleged, but rather to a rigidity of design and management unable to accommodate gradual, incremental change. This has continuing implications for the operation of bureaucratically designed and controlled 'social housing' today.

This book, published in 1980, is an iconoclastic account of one of the pillars of the welfare state, British town and country planning, between 1945 and 1975. Always a fine balance between central control and market forces, it was challenged by strains within and between the environmental professions and protest by people dispossessed or alienated by re-shaped urban environments. Remaking Cities critiques the export of western-style planning to the developing world and reviews initiatives rooted in different understandings of 'growth' appearing in those years. Nearly forty years on, many of the same issues beset us, notably the depressingly familiar inner city problem, despite countless reports, funds and 'programmes'. But now our infrastructure and services, once publicly owned, are privatised and fragmented, and local government progressively relegated. The very core of planning, development control, is being pared in a struggle to regain the 'growth' which led to our current crisis. This gives fresh importance to the need for new modes of creating liveable, sustainable environments, emphasised in this important work.

First published in 1976, this book tells of the dramatic struggle between tenants' groups, community associations, students, squatters, intellectuals, political parties, and property developers at Tolmers Square in north London. The author describes how property developers, interested only in maximising profits, attempted to redevelop the Tolmers area for offices, while the local authority, pressurised by local tenants and faced with a housing shortage, tried to redevelop for housing. This book is about the politics of central city redevelopment. Although this text focuses on one particular case study, the same processes operate in all cities where land is used as a commodity for financial speculation. By tracing the Tolmers case in detail, this text demonstrates the forces which operate in city redevelopment, and shows the affect which various forms of opposition can have.

This book analyses the key forces affecting the affordability of rural homes in Britain and the changing shape of housing markets. It takes as its starting point, demographic trends impacting upon rural communities and upon market dynamics. From this point, it explores consequent patterns of housing affordability, examining changing opportunities in the rental and sale markets, at different spatial scales. The book also focuses on how markets are analysed, and how data are selectively used to demonstrate low levels of affordability, or a lack of need for additional housing in small village locations. Building on the demographic theme, the book considers the housing implications of an aging population, before the focus finally shifts to community initiative in the face of housing undersupply and planning's future role in delivering and procuring a more constant and predictable supply of affordable homes. In a speculative conclusion, the book ends by examining the current political trajectory in England, and the prospects for housing in the countryside in the context of localism and neighbourhood planning at a village level. This book was published as a special issue of Planning Practice and Research.

This book is about the phenomenon of transit migration to Europe, and its impact on states and people.This book presets topical subject: the issue is politicized and mediatized. It combines new research data with an originality in approach: both top-down and bottom-up. It focuses inside and outside Europe.Challenging traditional approaches to migration, which see migrants in narrow categories (legal and illegal, newcomer and settler), Transit Migration shows that migrants and refugees live in transit for years, a stage in the migration course profoundly affecting destination countries and the migrants themselves.

Homeless Lives in American Cities explores how the American discourse on homelessness arose from Victorian social and political anxieties about the impacts of immigration and urbanization on the middle class family. It demonstrates how contemporary social work and policy emerge from Victorian cultural attitudes.

Through interviews with homeless people, Bulman provides readers with a unique perspective on homelessness. Conducted in soup kitchens, in homeless shelters, and on the street, the interviews reveal the human face of homelessness, which is often obscured by statistics. Chapter one explores the underreported link between domestic violence and homelessness through interviews with women who became homeless when they fled from their abuser. Homeless teenagers are interviewed in chapter two. Chapter three documents the link between crime and homelessness through interviews with homeless crime victims. In chapter four, people who became homeless because of economic factors, such as the loss of a job or of health insurance, are interviewed. Addicts are interviewed in chapter five, and chapter six covers those who have been homeless for some time. In chapter seven, the author turns to those who have found permanent housing after being homeless.

"This slim, useful book ... is suitable for students ... The fairly tight North American focus allows for great accuracy and detail, and the Canadian material is especially interesting, because Canadian social policy is less well known than that of the United States, and seems far more progressive on homelessness." . The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

" The authors] present key themes from the available literature in a way that affords policy makers and other practitioners access to what it is that anthropology has to offer in thinking about and responding to homelessness on a day-to-day, ground level. In this endeavor, the book] is supremely successful." . American Anthropologist

As homelessness continues to plague North America and also becomes more widespread in Europe, anthropologists turn their attention to solving the puzzle of why people in some of the most advanced technological societies in the world are found huddled in a subway tunnel, squatting in a vacant building, living in a shelter, or camping out in an abandoned field or on a beach. Anthropologists have a long tradition of working in poverty subcultures and have been able to contribute answers to some of the puzzles of homelessness through their ability to enter the culture of the homeless without some of the preconceptions of other disciplines.

The authors, anthropologists from the U.S.A. and Canada, offer us an analysis of homelessness that is grounded in anthropological research in North America and throughout the world. Both have in-depth experience through working in communities of the homeless and present us withthe results of their own work and with that of their colleagues.

Irene Glasser has widely published on homelessness and has been Professor of Anthropology at Eastern Connecticut State University, specializing in urban, applied, and medical anthropology. Since 1994 she has also been Director of Canadian Studies. Rae Bridgman is Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology of York University, Canada."

This useful and clearly written book provides a discussionof the major issues involved in dealing with the homeless, summarizes information available from a number of studies, and draws conclusions about current public policy and future policy alternatives. . . . An important addition to any library dealing with contemporary social concerns. " Choice"

The homeless have become more and more numerous and visible in our society. "Responding to America's HomelesS" presents the most complete, up-to-date scientific evidence concerning the nature, extent, and causes of homelessness. Using an unprecedented survey of 1,000 homeless individuals and families, as well as previous national, local, and scholarly research, the authors draw a vivid portrait of the homeless population and their needs. They challenge the widely held view that most homeless are mentally ill, proposing an original classification of the homeless based on needs for various forms of assistance. On the basis of this empirical research, the authors evaluate current public policies for dealing with the homeless and present alternative plans aimed at returning homeless people to more normal, secure circumstances.

Housing matters, no matter when or where. This volume of collected essays on housing in colonial and postcolonial Africa seeks to elaborate how and why housing is much more than an everyday practice.

The politics of housing unfold in disparate dimensions of time, space and agency. Depending on context, they acquire diverse, often ambivalent, meanings. Housing can be a promise, an unfulfilled dream, a tool of self- and class-assertion, a negotiation process, or a means to achieve other ends. This volume analyzes housing in its multifacetedness, be it a lens to offer insights into complex processes that shape societies; be it a tool of empire to exercise control over private relations of inhabitants; or be it a means to create good, obedient and productive citizens.

Contributions to this volume range from the field of history, to architecture and urban planning, African studies, linguistics, and literature. The individual case studies home in on specific aspects and dimensions of housing and seek to bring them into dialogue with each other. By doing so, the volume aims to add to the debate on studying urban practices and their significance for current social change.

This book is about Bristol's changing face. Written by an author who grew up in the heart of Bristol's ghetto, Palmer sheds light on the supposed 'renovation' that Bristol's poorer quarters have been undergoing. Growing up in Easton's neighbouring Whitehall, he would get into fights, be beaten up, be robbed at the end of a gun barrel, and experience the rough and ready upbringing that youths in these areas face the country over. After returning from university, however, he began to hear that Easton and similarly poor areas like St Pauls and Bedminster were 'up and coming'. To get to the bottom of this claim, Palmer interviews countless people and draws on much research to reveal the shocking reality that faces the type of people he grew up with: rent hikes, snobbery, institutional racism, homelessness, and removal from the communities they once loved.