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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Homelessness
Two decades punctuated by the financial crisis of the Great
Recession and the public health crisis of COVID-19 have powerfully
reshaped housing in America. By integrating social, economic,
intellectual, and cultural histories, this illuminating work shows
how powerful forces have both reflected and catalyzed shifts in the
way Americans conceptualize what a house is for, in an era that has
laid bare the larger structures and inequities of the economy.
Daniel Horowitz casts an expansive net over a wide range of
materials and sources. He shows how journalists and anthropologists
have explored the impact of global economic forces on housing,
while filmmakers have depicted the home as a theater where danger
lurks as elites gamble with the fates of the less fortunate. Real
estate workshops and popular TV networks like HGTV teach home
buyers how to flip-or flop-while online platforms like Airbnb make
it possible to play house in someone else's home. And as the COVID
pandemic took hold, many who had never imagined living out every
moment at home found themselves cocooned there thanks to
corporations like Amazon, Zoom, and Netflix.
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 book is about residents of Dhaka: migrant and non-migrant, poor
and non-poor, men and women, young and old. It is about how they
have experienced the city's rapid transition for the two decades
between 1991 and 2010 in terms of quality of life and livelihoods,
and their prospects for a shared future. It is not so common to
come across urban studies based on longitudinal data largely due to
the high mobility of urban households. Over the 20-year period, the
city's population more than doubled and reached double digit
figures at 15 million. At the same time, its contribution to the
national economy almost trebled from 13 per cent to 36 per cent. An
unmistakable trend of economic growth is evidenced along with the
rapid decline of urban poverty and a downward trend in inequality
in the country during the same reference period. At the other end
of the spectrum are the environmental challenges in the context of
high density and Dhaka's worst livability ranking. The book answers
some of the doubts generated by these contradictory signals of
rapid urbanization: is the poorer segment of urban population that
migrates with dreams for better lives and livelihoods benefitting
from positive economic trends? Are these benefits sustainable in
the long run? Have these benefits brought qualitative changes
creating scope for this group to have a stake in the city's growing
prosperity like their non-poor counterparts?
"By the second or third day that you're homeless, in the car with
all your clothes, your pots and pans, everything, having to wash
yourself in a public rest room, you logically start to feel dirty.
You prefer to use the drive-through [at fast-food restaurants]
where no one will see you. You begin to hide your family."
(Invisible Nation). More than 2.5 million children are homeless in
the United States every year. In every state, children are living
packed in with relatives, or in cars, or motel rooms, or emergency
shelters, the only constant being too many people in too little
space. In a vividly-written narrative, experienced journalist
Richard Schweid takes us on a spirited journey through this
"invisible nation," giving us front-row dispatches. Based on
in-depth reporting from five major cities, Invisible Nation looks
backward at the historical context of family homelessness, as well
as forward at what needs to be done to alleviate this widespread,
although often hidden, poverty. Invisible Nation is a riveting
must-read for anyone who wants to know what is happening to the
millions of families living at the bottom of the economy.
This book consists of a single essay that speculates on the
question what is housing?, and its opposite question, what is not
housing? The essay is organised around two distinct discourses
around which housing can be framed. The first, which is the
dominant discourse, is what I term policy thinking. This is where
housing is seen solely in terms of policy formulation and action.
The second discourse is private dwelling, which describes housing
in terms of a private space used by households. Private dwelling
might be seen as a product of policy, but, in actuality, it
precedes policy thinking in being the very purpose of policy.
Having made this distinction between policy thinking and private
dwelling, and so stated in principle what housing is, the
subsequent sections of the essay explore the nature of private
dwelling in more detail and so substantiate the distinction between
the two forms of discourse.
There are over a half million people experiencing homelessness in
the United States, nearly 160,000 of them are children, and nearly
38,000 are veterans. This book reports on the national homelessness
crisis.
Designing Future Cities for Wellbeing draws on original research
that brings together dimensions of cities we know have a bearing on
our health and wellbeing - including transportation, housing,
energy, and foodways - and illustrates the role of design in
delivering cities in the future that can enhance our health and
wellbeing. It aims to demonstrate that cities are a complex
interplay of these various dimensions that both shape and are
shaped by existing and emerging city structures, governance,
design, and planning. Explaining how to consider these
interconnecting dimensions in the way in which professionals and
citizens think about and design the city for future generations'
health and wellbeing, therefore, is key. The chapters draw on UK
case and research examples and make comparison to international
cities and examples. This book will be of great interest to
researchers and students in planning, public policy, public health,
and design.
The problem of homelessness in America underpins the definition of
an American city: what it is, who it is for, what it does, and why
it matters. And the problem of the American city is epitomized in
public space. Mean Streets offers, in a single, sustained argument,
a theory of the social and economic logic behind the historical
development, evolution, and especially the persistence of
homelessness in the contemporary American city. By updating and
revisiting thirty years of research and thinking on this subject,
Don Mitchell explores the conditions that produce and sustain
homelessness and how its persistence relates to the way capital
works in the urban built environment. He also addresses the
historical and social origins that created the boundary between
public and private. Consequently, he unpacks the structure,
meaning, and governance of urban public space and its uses.
Mitchell traces his argument through two sections: a broadly
historical overview of how homelessness has been managed in public
spaces, followed by an exploration of recent Supreme Court
jurisprudence that expands our national discussion. Beyond the mere
regulation of the homeless and the poor, homelessness has
metastasized more recently, Mitchell argues, to become a general
issue that affects all urbanites.
The One-Way Street of Integration examines two contrasting housing
policy approaches to achieving racial justice. Integration
initiatives and community development efforts have been for decades
contrasting means of achieving racial equity through housing
policy. Goetz traces the tensions involved in housing integration
and policy to show why he doesn't see the solution to racial
injustice as the government moving poor and nonwhite people out of
their communities. The One-Way Street of Integration critiques fair
housing integration policies for targeting settlement patterns
while ignoring underlying racism and issues of economic and
political power. Goetz challenges liberal orthodoxy, determining
that the standard efforts toward integration are unlikely to lead
to racial equity or racial justice in American cities. In fact, in
this pursuit it is the community development movement rather that
has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and
social justice efforts.
From Britain's 'Generation Rent' to Hong Kong's notorious 'cage
homes', societies around the world are facing a housing crisis of
unprecedented proportions. The social consequences have been
profound, with a lack of affordable housing resulting in
overcrowding, homelessness, broken families and, in many countries,
a sharp decline in fertility. In Broken Cities, Deborah Potts
offers a provocative new perspective on the global housing crisis
arguing that the problem lies mainly with demand rather than
supply. Potts shows how market-set rates of pay and incomes for
vast numbers of households in the world's largest cities in the
global South and North are simply too low to rent or buy any
housing that is legal, planned and decent. As the influence of free
market economics has increased, the situation has worsened. Potts
argues that the crisis needs radical solutions. With the world
becoming increasingly urbanized, this book provides a timely and
urgent account of one of the most pressing social challenges of the
21st century. Exploring the effects of the housing crisis across
the global North and South, Broken Cities is a warning of the
greater crises to come if these issues are not addressed.
This open access book focuses on the formation and later
socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in the Baltic
countries-Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also explores claims
that a distinctly "westward-looking orientation" in their design
produced housing estates that were superior in design to those
produced elsewhere in the Soviet Union (between 1944 and 1991,
Estonia was a member republic of the USSR). The first two parts of
the book provide contextual material to help readers understand the
vision behind housing estates in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
These sections present the background of housing estates in the
Baltic Republics as well as challenges and debates concerning their
formation, evolution, and present condition and importance.
Subsequent parts of the book consist of: demographic analyses of
the socioeconomic characteristics and ethnicity of housing estate
residents (past and present) in the three Baltic capital cities,
case studies of people and places related to housing estates in the
Baltic countries, and chapters exploring relevant special topics
and themes. This book will be of interest to students, scholars,
and advocates interested in understanding the past, present, and
future importance of housing estates in the Baltic countries.
In this book, Brian Lund builds on contemporary housing crisis
narratives, which tend to focus on the growth of a younger
'generation rent,' to include the differential effects of class,
age, gender, ethnicity and place, across the United Kingdom.
Current differences reflect long-established cleavages in UK
society, and help to explain why housing crises persist. Placing
the UK crises in their global contexts, Lund provides a critical
examination of proposed solutions according to their impacts on
different pathways through the housing system. As the first
detailed analysis of the multifaceted origins, impact and potential
solutions of the housing crisis, this book will be of vital
interest to policy practitioners, professionals and academics
across a wide range of areas, including housing studies, urban
studies, geography, social policy, sociology, planning and
politics.
For nearly four decades, China's manufacturing boom has been
powered by the labor of 287 million rural migrant workers, who
travel seasonally between villages where they farm for subsistence
and cities where they work. Yet recently local governments have
moved away from manufacturing and toward urban expansion and
construction as a development strategy. As a result, at least 88
million rural people to date have lost rights to village land. In
Beneath the China Boom, Julia Chuang follows the trajectories of
rural workers, who were once supported by a village welfare state
and are now landless. This book provides a view of the undertow of
China's economic success, and the periodic crises-a rural fiscal
crisis, a runaway urbanization-that it first created and now must
resolve.
What if you just trusted the whisper of calling placed on your
heart? Kathy Izard was volunteering at Charlotte's Urban Ministry
Center when an unlikely meeting with a homeless man changed the
course of her life. She realized that serving at the soup kitchen
was feeding her soul, but not actually solving the needs of the
homeless population. Rather than brush it off and avoid what she
now felt called to take on, she quit her job and took on what
seemed like an insurmountable task-building housing for Charlotte's
homeless. Woven together with this uplifting story of social action
is Kathy's personal struggle with faith, forgiveness and
fulfillment. In telling her story, Kathy invites you to consider
rewriting your own. What's calling you? As crazy at it seems, it
may be crazier not to try. This book will push you to do so much
more than you ever thought possible.
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