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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Homelessness
The expectation for fathers to be more involved with parenting their children and pitching in at home are higher than ever, yet broad social, political, and economic changes have made it more difficult for low-income men to be fathers. In It's a Setup, Timothy Black and Sky Keyes ground a moving and intimate narrative in the political and economic circumstances that shape the lives of low-income fathers. Based on 138 life history interviews, they expose the contradiction that while the norms and expectations of father involvement have changed rapidly within a generation, labor force and state support for fathering on the margins has deteriorated. Tracking these life histories, they move us through the lived experiences of job precarity, welfare cuts, punitive child support courts, public housing neglect, and the criminalization of poverty to demonstrate that without transformative systemic change, individual determination is not enough. Fathers on the social and economic margins are setup to fail.
In an effort to explain why housing remains among the United States' most enduring social problems, Housing America explores five of the U.S.'s most fundamental, recurrent issues in housing its population: affordability of housing, homelessness, segregation and discrimination in the housing market, homeownership and home financing, and planning. It describes these issues in detail, why they should be considered problems, the history and fundamental social debates surrounding them, and the past, current, and possible policy solutions to address them. While this book focuses on the major problems we face as a society in housing our population, it is also about the choices we make about what is valued in our society in our attempts to solve them. Housing America is appropriate for courses in urban studies, urban planning, and housing policy.
For fans of Humans Of New York and The Pursuit of Happyness. 'A big-hearted and world-shaking idea' - Nick Cave 'Turn a common, everyday act into something potentially transformative.' - Michael Sheen 'Moving and inspiring' - Johann Hari 'Small acts of love can make a big impact.' - Morgan Freeman When you're on the fringes of society, being recognised can mean everything. In 2015, while working at a London hair salon, Joshua Coombes took to the streets with his scissors to build relationships with people sleeping rough in the capital, and began posting transformative images on social media to amplify their voices. These stories resonated and thousands of people got involved in their own way. From this, #DoSomethingForNothing was born - a movement that encourages people to contribute their skills and time to those who need it. This book explores themes of love, acceptance, shame and perseverance, while inviting us to see ourselves in one another and challenge the negative stigmas surrounding homelessness. Through the simple act of a haircut, Joshua takes you on a journey into the lives of people experiencing homelessness in different cities across the world. Featuring before-and-after photographs, street art and stories, this book is an inspiring and uplifting account of one man's experiences with people who have more in common with all of us than you might imagine. A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to organisations dedicated to assisting unsheltered people, as well as supporting future not-for-profit art projects.
Since the start of the twenty-first century, urban communities have faced increasing challenges in housing affordability, with environmental issues causing additional concern. It is clear that changes to urban housing are needed to enhance the resilience of cities and improve the economic, social and physical well-being of residents. This book provides a comparative cross-national perspective on urban housing and sustainability in Europe, exploring the key barriers and drivers associated with sustainable urban development and community regeneration. Country-specific chapters allow for easy comparison, with each summarizing how sustainable housing operates in the country in question, before going on to discuss the key barriers and drivers at play. This book brings a sustainability perspective to the comparative housing literature which frequently fails to integrate the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. The book outlines many of the changes that professionals and residents will need to make to their practices and cultures in order to enhance housing resilience. Students, researchers and professionals with an interest in sustainable housing creation and regeneration will find this book an invaluable reference.
In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest. * Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city * Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the right to the city and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanisms * Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation * Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake * Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany
The definitive edition of Catholic Worker cofounder Peter Maurin's Easy Essays, including 74 previously unpublished works Although Peter Maurin is well known among people connected to the Catholic Worker movement, his Catholic Worker co-founder and mentee Dorothy Day largely overshadowed him. Maurin was never the charismatic leader that Day was, and some Workers found his idiosyncrasies challenging. Reticent to write or even speak much about his personal life, Maurin preferred to present his beliefs and ideas in the form of Easy Essays, published in the New York Catholic Worker. Featuring 482 of his essays, as well as 87 previously unpublished ones, this text offers a great contribution to the corpus of twentieth-century Catholic life. At first glance, Maurin's Easy Essays appear overly simplistic and preposterous. But upon further investigation, his essays are much more complex and nuanced. Packed with demanding ideas meant to convey dense information and encourage the listener to ponder different ways to understand and interact with reality, his short poetic phrases became his modus operandi for communicating his vision and became a hallmark of his public theology. Each essay contained anywhere from one to ten or more stanzas and were part of a larger arrangement, often titled. Within the larger arrangements were individual essays, which were also titled and arranged in such a manner as to support the overall thesis. Many individual essays were later repeated in slightly altered forms in new arrangements. Previous arrangements were also repeated that omitted or added an essay. Providing scholarly and contextual information for the modern reader, this annotated collection includes more than 350 footnotes which offer a layer of intelligibility that explains Maurin's use of obscure references to historical people and events that would have been common knowledge for readers during the 1930s. When appropriate, the footnotes explain why Maurin chose to cite a person or event. A scholarly Introduction offers a robust synthesis of contemporary scholarship on Maurin and the Catholic Worker that considers radical Catholicism and questions regarding race, ethnicity, religious difference, and gender, because many of Maurin's essays take up these themes. This book shapes the ways Maurin is read in the present day and the ways leftist Catholicism is understood as part of twentieth-century history.
Using the case study of a Seattle school, this text describes a working model for the education of homeless children in America's public schools.
The homeless have the legal right to exist in modern American cities, yet antihomeless ordinances deny them access to many public spaces. How did previous generations of urban dwellers deal with the tensions between the rights of the homeless and those of other city residents? Ella Howard answers this question by tracing the history of skid rows from their rise in the late nineteenth century to their eradication in the mid-twentieth century.Focusing on New York's infamous Bowery, "Homeless" analyzes the efforts of politicians, charity administrators, social workers, urban planners, and social scientists as they grappled with the problem of homelessness. The development of the Bowery from a respectable entertainment district to the nation's most infamous skid row offers a lens through which to understand national trends of homelessness and the complex relationship between poverty and place. Maintained by cities across the country as a type of informal urban welfare, skid rows anchored the homeless to a specific neighborhood, offering inhabitants places to eat, drink, sleep, and find work while keeping them comfortably removed from the urban middle classes. This separation of the homeless from the core of city life fostered simplistic and often inaccurate understandings of their plight. Most efforts to assist them centered on reforming their behavior rather than addressing structural economic concerns.By midcentury, as city centers became more valuable, urban renewal projects and waves of gentrification destroyed skid rows and with them the public housing and social services they offered. With nowhere to go, the poor scattered across the urban landscape into public spaces, only to confront laws that effectively criminalized behavior associated with abject poverty. Richly detailed, "Homeless" lends insight into the meaning of homelessness and poverty in twentieth-century America and offers us a new perspective on the modern welfare system.
In Housing the New Russia, Jane R. Zavisca examines Russia's attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of home ownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. The vision of an American-style market guided housing policy over the next two decades. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants, creating a nation of homeowners overnight. New financial institutions, modeled on the American mortgage system, laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages and reverse the declining birth rate, another major concern by subsidizing loans for young families. Imported housing institutions, however, failed to resonate with local conceptions of ownership, property, and rights. Most Russians reject mortgages, which they call "debt bondage," as an unjust "overpayment" for a good they consider to be a basic right. Instead of stimulating homeownership, privatization, combined with high prices and limited credit, created a system of property without markets. Frustrated aspirations and unjustified inequality led most Russians to call for a government-controlled housing market. Under the Soviet system, residents retained lifelong tenancy rights, perceiving the apartments they inhabited as their own. In the wake of privatization, young Russians can no longer count on the state to provide their house, nor can they afford to buy a home with wages, forcing many to live with extended family well into adulthood. Zavisca shows that the contradictions of housing policy are a significant factor in Russia's falling birth rates and the apparent failure of its pronatalist policies. These consequences further stack the deck against the likelihood that an affordable housing market will take off in the near future."
Over 30 years ago, the United Nations developed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), heralding the importance of protecting children from a range of human rights violations. Among these are the right to be free from abuse and neglect at the hands of parents or other caregivers, and the responsibility of states to devise a protective response. How nations conceptualize harm and even how they define childhood varies markedly across the globe. This Handbook describes and analyzes the ways in which 50 countries from every continent, except Antarctica, have devised measures for child protection emphasized in the UNCRC. The Handbook discusses the legislative responses, public administrative systems, and the social service networks that governments have put in place to secure the protection of children against maltreatment and exploitation. Synthesizing data from across the world, the authors suggest a global typology of child protection systems for understanding the diversity of service responses. The typology consists of five ideal types that have as their emphasis protection against an array of risks to childhood and that represent the focal point for government intervention in the lives of families. They include child exploitation protective systems, child deprivation protective systems, child maltreatment protective systems, child well-being protective systems, and child rights protective systems. The Handbook is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and policymakers attempting to craft thoughtful state responses to children's needs
Does small mean less? Not necessarily. In an era of housing crises, environmental unsustainability and social fragmentation, the need for more sociable, affordable and sustainable housing is vital. The answer? Shared living - from joint households to land-sharing, cohousing and ecovillages. Using successful examples from a range of countries, Anitra Nelson shows how 'eco-collaborative housing' - resident-driven low impact living with shared facilities and activities - can address the great social, economic and sustainability challenges that householders and capitalist societies face today. Sharing living spaces and facilities results in householders having more amenities and opportunities for neighbourly interaction. Small is Necessary places contemporary models of 'alternative' housing and living at centre stage arguing that they are outward-looking, culturally rich, with low ecological footprints and offer governance techniques for a more equitable and sustainable future.
Desjarlais shows us not anonymous faces of the homeless but real people. While it is estimated that 25 percent or more of America's homeless are mentally ill, their lives are largely unknown to us. What must life be like for those who, in addition to living on the street, hear voices, suffer paranoid delusions, or have trouble thinking clearly or talking to others. Shelter Blues is an innovative portrait of people residing in Boston's Station Street Shelter. It examines the everyday lives of more than 40 homeless men and women, both white and African-American, ranging in age from early 20s to mid-60s. Based on a sixteen-month study, it draws readers into the personal worlds of these individuals and, by addressing the intimacies of homelessness, illness, and abjection, picks up where most scholarship and journalism stops. Robert Desjarlais works against the grain of media representations of homelessness by showing us not anonymous stereotypes but individuals. He draws on conversations as well as observations, talking with and listening to shelter residents to understand how they relate to their environment, to one another, and to those entrusted with their care. His book considers their lives in terms of a complex range of forces and helps us comprehend the linkages between culture, illness, personhood, and political agency on the margins of contemporary American society. Shelter Blues is unlike anything else ever written about homelessness. It challenges social scientists and mental health professionals to rethink their approaches to human subjectivity and helps us all to better understand one of the most pressing problems of our time.
The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants - consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves - populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called "vagrants," arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.
Through a series of remarkable events, Sarah de Carvalho left her glittering career in film promotion and TV production to join a missionary organization in Brazil. There she met children from the age of seven living on the streets, taking drugs, stealing to survive, and vulnerable to prostitution and gang warfare. This is the remarkable true story of a life transformed. It tells of the incredible work that Sarah founded in the Happy Child Mission. It is a story of immense faith, suffering, and love. The children whose stories are revealed in this exceptional book will change the heart of every reader. This new fully updated edition of "The Street Children of Brazil" brings the story up to date. 12 years on, Sarah celebrates the anniversary of the founding of Happy Child, revisits some of the first children she worked with, and reflects on all that God has done.
By the late 19th century and the early 20th century, there were at least nineteen large and small areas, streets or neighbourhoods that were declared or labelled slums in Toronto. By the 1960s, almost all the slums had been cleared and were replaced by institutional, governmental and residential modern buildings. However, the foot prints of these slums, their boundaries and characteristics of their residents had been lost. This book intends to trace the development of these slums and outline their lifecycles. Although the book deals with all major Toronto slums, the emphasis focuses on Regent Park, which replaced the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North America named Cabbagetown. Regent Park was also the first large housing project that received the approval from Toronto electors, which partially replaced Cabbagetown. In order to comprehend why Toronto ratepayers approved the project, we are considering the movement to implement the project (that had been recommended by the Curtis Report) as a social movement for affordable housing and utilising the Resource Mobilization Approach (RMA) to analyse and evaluate the success and/or failure of the project. In this book, the authors want to challenge the widely held assumption that policy making in Canada was an elite process primarily involving Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants by bringing the citizens participation back in and highlighting their critical role in challenging the governments housing policy and the building of Regent Park. This book has two parts: the first part examines the fate of the slum dwellers. Now that slums are gone, what happened to the poor working classes that used to live in these slums? The second part argues that when all the slums in the old city dissolve and are replaced by luxury condominiums and expensive gentrified homes, where will the recent immigrants go for accommodation? The recent information indicates that the majority of the low-income immigrants are seeking accommodations in the high-rise apartments of St. James Town or in the inner suburb communities in Scarborough, North York and Etobicocke. As these high-rise apartment buildings (mainly built in the 1980s and 1990s) age and deteriorate while overcrowding continues, there is a possibility that what happened in the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century will be repeated, causing the development of new slums. This alone should draw the attention of the municipal government and is one of the goals of the authors of this book.
Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on several years of Melissa Garcia-Lamarca's engagement with activist research in Barcelona's housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH). What Garcia-Lamarca learned from fellow activists and the movement in Barcelona pushed her to rethink how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt. The book is also inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, Garcia-Lamarca's research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.
Chronically homeless individuals are those who spend long periods of time living on the street or other places not meant for human habitation, and who have one or more disabilities, frequently including mental illnesses and substance use disorders. In the 2014 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness, over 84,000 individuals met the definition of chronically homeless, down from more than 120,000 in 2008. In part the decline is due to the federal governments plan, announced in 2002, to end chronic homelessness within 10 years. The target date has since been extended to 2017. Among the federal programs focused on ending chronic homelessness are the HUD Homelessness Assistance Grants, the HUD and Veterans Affairs Supported Housing Program (HUD-VASH), and several HUD demonstration programs. One of the reasons that federal programs have devoted resources to ending chronic homelessness is studies finding that individuals who experience it, particularly those with serious mental illness, use many expensive services often paid through public sources, including emergency room visits, inpatient hospitalisations, and law enforcement and jail time. Even emergency shelter resources can be costly. In addition to potential ethical reasons for ending chronic homelessness, doing so could reduce costs in providing assistance to this population. This book summarises the research surrounding permanent supportive housing (PSH) for chronically homeless individuals. In doing so, it attempts to examine the nuance in the research to determine where PSH could be considered successful and where gaps may remain. The book discusses what it means to be chronically homeless, the way in which assistance for chronically homeless individuals has evolved, and how federal programs target assistance to individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. In addition, it summarises the research regarding chronically homeless individuals who move into PSH.
Trauma-Informed Care for Women Veterans Experiencing Homelessness was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Women's Bureau (WB) as one of its many efforts to help women veterans who are experiencing homelessness find jobs and successfully reintegrate back to civilian life. This guide was created to address the psychological and mental health needs of women veterans. The guide is also a compilation of best practices aimed at improving effectiveness in engaging female veterans. Written for service providers, the guide offers observational knowledge, concrete guidelines, and resources for modifying practices aimed at improving reintegration outcomes. Furthermore, it defines the term "homeless veteran", discusses attempts to estimate the number of veterans who are homeless, and presents the results of studies regarding the demographic characteristics of homeless veterans as well as those surveyed as part of HUD's Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Finally, the book summarises research regarding the overrepresentation of both male and female veterans, who have been found to be present in greater percentages in the homeless population than their percentages in the general population.
In 1987 a massive snowstorm hits New York as Peter Kaldheim flees the city, owing drug debts to a dealer who is no stranger to casual violence. Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living hand-to-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling with his fellow itinerants. As he makes his way across America in search of a new life, the harsh reality of vagrancy forces him to face up to his past, from his time in Rikers prison, to relationships lost and lamented. Kaldheim hikes and buses through an America rarely seen, and his encounters with a disparate collection of characters instils in him a new empathy and wisdom, as he journeys on a road less travelled.
For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches Well-known through hit movies like Spirited Away, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, anime has a long history spanning a wide range of directors, genres, and styles. Christopher Bolton's Interpreting Anime is a thoughtful, carefully organized introduction to Japanese animation for anyone eager to see why this genre has remained a vital, adaptable art form for decades. Interpreting Anime is easily accessible and structured around individual films and a broad array of critical approaches. Each chapter centers on a different feature-length anime film, juxtaposing it with a particular medium-like literary fiction, classical Japanese theater, and contemporary stage drama-to reveal what is unique about anime's way of representing the world. This analysis is abetted by a suite of questions provoked by each film, along with Bolton's incisive responses. Throughout, Interpreting Anime applies multiple frames, such as queer theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of postmodernism, giving readers a thorough understanding of both the cultural underpinnings and critical significance of each film. What emerges from the sweep of Interpreting Anime is Bolton's original, articulate case for what makes anime unique as a medium: how it at once engages profound social and political realities while also drawing attention to the very challenges of representing reality in animation's imaginative and compelling visual forms.
In the topic's first synthetic historical treatment, Kenneth Kusmer looks at the treatment of the homeless in America, tracing the phenomenon from the poorhouse in the nation's early years, to its growth during the Civil War, to the building of a welfare system during the Progressive Era, to the rise of the skid row in cities and hobo camps during the Great Progressive Era, to the rise of the skid row during the Great Depression, to the relatively low level of homelessness during the period after the end of World War II, to the late 1970s, and finally to the visible phenomenon of homelessness at the end of the twentieth century. Kusmer argues that throughout history the homeless have been stereotyped as a deviant group but have always had much in common with the rest of the American population.
"NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE
YEAR BY "THE GUARDIAN "AND" PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"
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.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an active political movement emerged on the streets of Iran's largest cities. Poor people began to construct their own communities on unused urban lands, creating an infrastructure----roads, electricity, running water, garbage collection, and shelters----all their own. As the Iranian government attempted to evict these illegal settlers, they resisted----fiercely and ultimately successfully. This is the story of their economic and political strategies. |
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