Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
Housing the Homeless
By Christopher Jencks
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s
by Martha R. Burt
Russell Sage Foundation and the Urban Institute Press, 267 pp., $16.95 (paper)
A Place to Call Home: The Low Income Housing Crisis Continues Information Service
by Edward Lazere, by Paul Leonard, by Cushing Dolbeare, by Barry Zigas
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Low Income Housing, 83 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women
by Elliot Liebow
Free Press, 339 pp., $24.95
The Way Home: A New Direction in Social Policy
by the New York City Commission on the Homeless (Andrew Cuomo, chair)
(unpublished), 118 and appendices pp.
Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness
by Peter H. Rossi
University of Chicago Press, 247 pp., $9.95 (paper)
New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel
by Charles Hoch, by Robert Slayton
Temple University Press, 299 pp., $19.95 (paper)
When the numbers of homeless people began to increase in the early 1980s, their advocates often blamed the housing market for what was happening. In those years, the homeless were mostly poor single adults, many of whom had traditionally lived in 'single room occupancy' (SRO) hotels and rooming houses. Since these SROs had been disappearing, it seemed natural to suppose that many of their former tenants were now homeless. Later in the decade, when the number of homeless families increased, many people who worked with the homeless blamed the growing shortage of cheap apartments—a shortage that they often attributed to cutbacks in federal housing programs.
Review, 7009 words
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