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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Homelessness
Homelessness became a conspicuous facet of Russian cityscapes
only in the 1990s, when the Soviet criminalization of vagrancy and
similar offenses was abolished. In spite of the host of social and
economic problems confronting Russia in the demise of Soviet power,
the social dislocation endured by increasing numbers of people went
largely unrecognized by the state.
Being homeless carries a special burden in Russia, where a
permanent address is the precondition for all civil rights and
social benefits and where homelessness is often regarded as a
result of laziness and drinking, rather than external factors. In
Needed by Nobody, the anthropologist Tova Hojdestrand offers a
nuanced portrait of homelessness in St. Petersburg. Based on
ethnographic work at railway stations, soup kitchens, and other
places where the homeless gather, Hojdestrand describes the
material and mental world of this marginalized population.
They are, she observes, "not needed" in two senses. The state
considers them, in effect, as noncitizens. At the same time they
stand outside the traditionally intimate social networks that are
the real safety net of life in postsocialist Russia. As a result,
they are deprived of the prerequisites for dealing with others in
ways that they themselves value as "decent" and "human."
Hojdestrand investigates processes of social exclusion as well as
the remaining "world of waste": things, tasks, and places that are
wanted by nobody else and on which "human leftovers" are forced to
survive.
In this bleak context, Hojdestrand takes up the intimate worlds
of the homeless their social relationships, dirt and cleanliness,
and physical appearance. Her interviews with homeless people show
that the indigent have a very good idea of what others think of
them and that they are liable to reproduce the stigma that is
attached to them even as they attempt to negotiate it. This unique
and often moving portrait of life on the margins of society in the
new Russia ultimately reveals how human dignity may be retained in
the absence of its very preconditions."
A shortage of affordable new housing, builders choosing to build
larger, more profitable houses, and a diminishing stock of cheap
houses for rent. All this sounds very familiar today, but at the
end of the Great War, scarcely any houses had been built for four
years and there was political pressure to build 'Homes for Heroes',
impelled to a degree by fear of revolution. Council housing,
supported by central government funding, was the chosen solution in
1919, and this study by Malcolm Graham, a leading Oxford local
historian for many years, examines the consequences in Oxford, then
a university city on the cusp of change. Behind the city's Dreaming
Spires image, housing for the working population was already in
short supply, but an economy-minded and largely non-political City
Council had always been reluctant to intervene in the housing
market. In 1919, there was no hint of the city's industrial future,
and the City Council saw the replacement of substandard houses as
its main challenge. The meteoric rise of the local motor industry
in the early 1920s led to rapid population growth and created a
massive new demand for cheap housing. Dr Graham examines the uneasy
partnership between the City Council and Whitehall which led to the
building of over 3,000 council houses in Oxford between the Wars.
The provision of these 'wholesome dwellings' was a substantial, and
lasting, achievement, but private builders were in fact catering
for most housing need in and around the city by the 1930s. The
notorious Cutteslowe Walls, built to exclude council tenants from
an adjoining private estate, reflected the way in which the growing
city was being socially segregated. Dr Graham provides a
fascinating insight into how modern Oxford evolved away from the
university buildings and college quadrangles for which the city is
internationally renowned.
Liverpool was a burgeoning trading centre and rapidly growing town
in the early 18th century, developing into a thriving mercantile
metropolis by the 19th century. The demand for new housing was
high, and court housing largely filled that need. Court housing was
a form of high-density back-to-back housing around courtyards. It
provided homes to nearly half of Liverpool's working-class people
by the mid 19th century. Contemporary descriptions highlight the
cramped, dark and often damp conditions in these houses. This book
uses a range of historical and archaeological evidence about courts
to consider their development, life within them, and the measures
eventually taken to rid Liverpool of them. This book considers
courts and their impact on people's lives in Liverpool for over 250
years. This book features international parallels to courts as well
as some of the people involved in investigating this type of
housing, providing historical context to this fascinating aspect of
Liverpool's past.
As the tragedy of the Grenfell tower fire has slowly revealed a
shadowy background of outsourcing, private finance initiatives and
a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many
questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. He has
worked for the last decade with residents groups in council
regeneration projects across London. As residents have been shifted
out of 60s and 70s social housing to make way for higher rent
paying newcomers, they have been promised a higher quality of
housing. Councils have passed the responsibility for this housing
to private consortia who amazingly have been allowed to
self-regulate on quality and safety. Residents have been ignored
for years on this and only now are we hearing the truth. Stuart
will weave together his research on PFIs, regulation and resident
action to tell the whole story of how Grenfell happened and how
this could easily have happened in multiple locations across the
country. -- .
Blighted is a powerful narrative about the decades-long decay and
remarkable two-year reinvention of Summerdale, an aging apartment
community located in one of Atlanta's grittiest corridors. From
burnt-out, mold-infested buildings to traumatized classrooms,
Blighted unfolds in the voices of ruthless drug dealers, phantom
tenants, fearless landlords, the working poor, educators, and
visionary local leaders. After purchasing the property from an
absentee overseas owner, Marjy Stagmeier and her partners
methodically tackled the crisis festering inside the gated 244-unit
apartment property. Two years of relentless work later, Stagmeier
reveals how the team that she led built community from chaos.
Through on-the-ground, in-the-moment interviews with a wide range
of stakeholders, Stagmeier demonstrates how marginalized housing
perpetuates intergenerational poverty and the collapse of nearby
public schools while showing the multifaceted challenges of
improving dire living conditions. Blighted offers a unique insider
perspective of the political, human, and economic challenges of
delivering equitable housing in a market fueled by inflationary
prices, insatiable demand, and competing and often dubious agendas.
Summerdale's success is a bright model of how affordable housing,
education, healthcare, and social capital can interconnect to build
vibrant, sustainable communities-affordable housing communities,
nearby schools, and the community at large. From there, kids,
families, working people, and neighborhoods can thrive.
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.
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.
When the Corporation of Glasgow undertook a massive programme of
council house construction to replace the city's notorious slums
after the First World War, they wound up reproducing a Victorian
class structure. How did this occur? Scheming traces the issue to
class-based paternalism that caused the reification of the local
class structure in the bricks and mortar of the new council housing
estates. Sean Damer provides a sustained critique of the
Corporation of Glasgow's council housing policy and argues that it
had the unintended consequence of amplifying social segregation and
ghettoisation in the city. By combining archival research of city
records with oral histories, this book lets the locals have their
say about their experience as Glasgow council house tenants for the
first time.
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.
Thoughts and feelings about home traditionally provided people of
all cultures with a firm sense of where they belonged, and why. But
with the world rapidly changing, many of our basic notions are
becoming problematic. Both internationally and within countries,
populations are constantly on the move, seeking better
opportunities and living conditions, or an escape from violence and
war. In spite of, or perhaps even because of these trends, ideas
about home continue to shape the way people everywhere frame an
understanding of their lives. In this Very Short Introduction
Michael Allen Fox considers the complex meaning of home and the
essential importance of place to human psychology. Drawing on a
wide array of international examples he discusses what dwelling is
and the variety of dwellings. Fox also looks at the politics of the
concept of 'home', homelessness, refugeeism and migration, and the
future of home, and argues that home remains a central organizing
concept in human life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short
Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds
of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books
are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our
expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and
enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly
readable.
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.
"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.
The UK housing market is in crisis. House-prices are spiralling out
of control, rents are rising faster than wages, and there is a
serious shortage of new affordable homes. But what caused this
crisis and what can we do about it? In this book, established
housing policy experts Rowland Atkinson and Keith Jacobs expose the
true economic forces behind Britain's housing crisis. Urging
readers to see the crisis as a result of the 'property machine'; a
financial system made up of banks and investors, developers,
landlords, and real estate agencies that prioritises the interests
of capital over social need. An unequal system that has been
routinely protected by the policy decisions of successive
governments. To overcome this troubling system and alleviate the
crisis, the authors outline a series of innovative proposals that
would improve housing conditions and tackle the inequalities
expressed in relation to personal housing wealth. Allowing for the
establishment of a fairer, more equal society, and a more stable
economic future. ABOUT THE SERIES: The 'What Do We Know and What
Should We Do About...?' series offers readers short, up-to-date
overviews of key issues often misrepresented, simplified or
misunderstood in modern society and the media. Each book is written
by a leading social scientist with an established reputation in the
relevant subject area. The Series Editor is Professor Chris Grey,
Royal Holloway, University of London
Homelessness in America's cities remains a growing problem. The
homeless today face the same challenges as in years past: poverty,
tenuous or no ties to family and friends, physical and mental
health issues, and substance abuse. Compared to the 1950s to 1970s,
more homeless are now sleeping on city streets versus in shelters
or single room hotels. Homelessness rates are affected by economic
trends, lack of equitable and inclusive healthcare and housing,
decline in public assistance programs, and natural and man-made
disasters. This collection of essays covers case studies,
innovations, practices and policies of municipalities coping with
homelessness in the 21st century.
A Complex Exile shows that the homelessness sector inadvertently
reinforces the social exclusion of people who are homeless. Over
235,000 people couch-surf, stay in emergency shelters, or live on
the street in Canada every year. However, the very policies,
practices, and funding models that exist to house the homeless,
promote social inclusion, and provide mental health care form a
homelessness industrial complex. These practices emphasize personal
responsibility and individualized responses that ultimately serve
to subtly exclude people. This book goes beyond bio-medical and
psychological perspectives on homelessness, mental illness, and
addiction, to call for a transformation in how we respond to
homelessness in Canada.
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