Volume 41, Number 8 · April 21, 1994
The Homeless
By Christopher Jencks
Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s
by Martha R. Burt
Russell Sage Foundation, 267 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The Way Home: A New Direction in Social Policy
by the New York City Commission on the Homeless
(unpublished), 118 pages plus appendices pp.
Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness
by Peter H. Rossi
University of Chicago Press, 247 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People
by David A. Snow, by Leon Anderson
University of California Press, 391 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Mole People
by Jennifer Toth
Chicago Review Press, 267 pp., $19.95
Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community
by David Wagner
Westview Press, 200 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us
by Richard W. White Jr.
Institute for Contemporary Studies, 333 pp., $24.95
Late in the 1970s Americans began noticing more people sleeping in public places, wandering the streets with their possessions in shopping bags, rooting through garbage bins in search of food or cans, and asking for handouts. By January 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, a small group of activists led by Robert Hayes and Mitch Snyder had given these people a new name—'the homeless'—and had begun to convince the public that their plight was a serious one. Later that year America entered its worst recession in half a century, and the homeless became far more numerous. At the time, many people saw this as a temporary problem that would vanish once the economy recovered, but they were wrong. Unemployment fell from almost 10 percent in 1983 to just over 5 percent in 1989, but homelessness kept rising.
Review, 6086 words
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