Citizens without Shelter PDF Download

Author: Leonard C. Feldman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
One of the most troubling aspects of the politics of homelessness, Leonard C. Feldman contends, is the reduction of the homeless to what Hannah Arendt calls "the abstract nakedness of humanity" and what Giorgio Agamben terms "bare life." Feldman argues that the politics of alleged compassion and the politics of those interested in ridding public spaces of the homeless are linked fundamentally in their assumption that homeless people are something less than citizens. Feldman's book brings political theories together (including theories of sovereign power, justice, and pluralism) with discussions of real-world struggles and close analyses of legal cases concerning the rights of the homeless.In Feldman's view, the "bare life predicament" is a product not simply of poverty or inequality but of an inability to commit to democratic pluralism. Challenging this reduction of the homeless, Citizens without Shelter examines opportunities for contesting such a fundamental political exclusion, in the service of homeless citizenship and a more robust form of democratic pluralism. Feldman has in mind a truly democratic pluralism that would include a pluralization of the category of "home" to enable multiple forms of dwelling; a recognition of the common dwelling activities of homeless and non-homeless persons; and a resistance to laws that punish or confine the homeless.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309038324
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
There have always been homeless people in the United States, but their plight has only recently stirred widespread public reaction and concern. Part of this new recognition stems from the problem's prevalence: the number of homeless individuals, while hard to pin down exactly, is rising. In light of this, Congress asked the Institute of Medicine to find out whether existing health care programs were ignoring the homeless or delivering care to them inefficiently. This book is the report prepared by a committee of experts who examined these problems through visits to city slums and impoverished rural areas, and through an analysis of papers written by leading scholars in the field.

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309477042
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Chronic homelessness is a highly complex social problem of national importance. The problem has elicited a variety of societal and public policy responses over the years, concomitant with fluctuations in the economy and changes in the demographics of and attitudes toward poor and disenfranchised citizens. In recent decades, federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the philanthropic community have worked hard to develop and implement programs to solve the challenges of homelessness, and progress has been made. However, much more remains to be done. Importantly, the results of various efforts, and especially the efforts to reduce homelessness among veterans in recent years, have shown that the problem of homelessness can be successfully addressed. Although a number of programs have been developed to meet the needs of persons experiencing homelessness, this report focuses on one particular type of intervention: permanent supportive housing (PSH). Permanent Supportive Housing focuses on the impact of PSH on health care outcomes and its cost-effectiveness. The report also addresses policy and program barriers that affect the ability to bring the PSH and other housing models to scale to address housing and health care needs.

Author: Melanie Loehwing
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271083069
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Homeless assistance has frequently adhered to the “three hots and a cot” model, which prioritizes immediate material needs but may fail to address the political and social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness. In this study, Loehwing reconsiders typical characterizations of homelessness, citizenship, and democratic community through unconventional approaches to homeless advocacy and assistance. While conventional homeless advocacy rhetoric establishes the urgency of homeless suffering, it also implicitly invites housed publics to understand homelessness as a state of abnormality that destines the individuals suffering it to life outside the civic body. In contrast, Loehwing focuses on atypical models of homeless advocacy: the meal-sharing initiatives of Food Not Bombs, the international competition of the Homeless World Cup, and the annual Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day campaign. She argues that these modes of unconventional homeless advocacy provide rhetorical exemplars of a type of inclusive and empowering civic discourse that is missing from conventional homeless advocacy and may be indispensable for overcoming homeless marginalization and exclusion in contemporary democratic culture. Loehwing’s interrogation of homeless advocacy rhetorics demonstrates how discursive practices shape democratic culture and how they may provide a potential civic remedy to the harms of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and displacement. This book will be welcomed by scholars whose work focuses on the intersections of democratic theory and rhetorical and civic studies, as well as by homelessness advocacy groups.

Author: Kathleen R. Arnold
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027107356X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Today’s political controversy over immigration highlights the plight of the working class in this country as perhaps no other issue has recently done. The political status of immigrants exposes the power dynamics of the “new working class,” which includes the former labor aristocracy, women, and people of color. This new working class suffers exploitation in advanced industrial countries as the social cost of capitalism’s success in a neoliberal and globalized political economy. Paradoxically, as borders become more open, they are also increasingly fortified, subjecting many workers to the suspension of law. In this book, Kathleen Arnold analyzes the role of the state’s “prerogative power” in creating and sustaining this condition of severe inequality for the most marginalized sectors of our population in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical literature from Locke to Marx and Agamben (whose notion of “bare life” features prominently in her construal of this as a “biopolitical” era), she focuses attention especially on the values of asceticism derived from the Protestant work ethic to explain how they function as ideological justification for the exercise of prerogative power by the state. As a counter to this repressive set of values, she develops the notion of “authentic love” borrowed from Simone de Beauvoir as a possible approach for dealing with the complex issues of exploitation in liberal democracy today.

Author: Peter Marcuse
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1804294942
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In every major city in the world there is a housing crisis. How did this happen and what can we do about it? Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement on this crisis from leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They look at the causes and consequences of the housing problem and detail the need for progressive alternatives. The housing crisis cannot be solved by minor policy shifts, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots—and therefore requires a radical response.

Author: Amy Lynne Howard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816665815
Category : Public housing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
By looking closely at three public housing projects in San Francisco, Amy L. Howard brings to light the dramatic measures tenants have taken to create communities that mattered to them. These stories challenge assumptions about public housing and its tenants - and make way for a broader, more productive and inclusive vision of the public housing program in the United States.

Author: Anthony Marcus
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450502
Category : Homeless persons
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
For a decade, from 1983 to 1993, homelessness was a major concern in the United States. In 1994, this public concern suddenly disappeared, without any significant reduction in the number of people without proper housing. By examining the making and unmaking of a homeless crisis, this book explores how public understandings of what constitutes a social crisis are shaped. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research in New York City with African Americans and Latinos living in poverty, Where Have All the Homeless Gone? reveals that the homeless "crisis" was driven as much by political misrepresentations of poverty, race, and social difference, as the housing, unemployment, and healthcare problems that caused homelessness and continue to plague American cities.

Author: Gwendolyn Dordick
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781566395137
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Homelessness is usually discusses in terms of its origins or in terms of its amelioration. Media accounts focus on poverty, drug use, lack of shelter, the social safety net, or attempts by the homeless, social service agencies, and government to end homelessness by policy and direct action. Yet we never seem to get a clear picture of who the homeless are. We are exposed to them as a social problem, but we learn little about their daily existence. In Something Left to Lose, Gwendolyn A. Dordick gives us a dramatic portrait of the social and personal lives of the homeless. Through her extensive "hanging out" with homeless people, Dordick came to a profound understanding of the web of relationships that provides complex social structure in situations where, to the casual eye, there appears to be only chaos and paralysis. The author shows us that improvising shelter means working hard to co-exist with others. Lacking conventional private dwellings, the homeless find or create shelter in unconventional places -- on street corners adjoining bus stations, on empty lots of land, or in shelters, public or private -- and negotiate the rules of these places with authorities, passersby, and fellow homeless. The different environments lead to quite different social relations. The Armory, for example, is a frightening place, thanks to the authoritarian attitudes of the employees and cliques of homeless people in charge. In the Shanty, on the other hand, the difficult issues are those of a self-governing community concerned about safety -- controlling the drug use of some residents, deciding who is allowed to tap into the electricity, and worrying about intruders. In all settings, daily life for people without homes, like daily life for people with homes, if full of the concerns of personal relationships. How will we share our goods and emotions, speak respectfully to each other, love and joke and work out our disputes, and act in a trustworthy fashion? This book is also a miniature research odyssey, complete with moments of fear, frustration, blunders, distrust, and trust. In order to gather these interviews, Dordick had to not only win the the confidence of the homeless people she visited (the women at the Station thought she was interested in their boyfriends) but also negotiate with unsympathetic police and shelters employees or defy them.

Author: Marybeth Shinn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119104750
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Foreword by Nan Roman, President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness This book explains how to end the U.S. homelessness crisis by bringing together the best scholarship on the subject and sharing solutions that both local communities and national policy-makers can apply now. In the Midst of Plenty shifts understanding of homelessness away from individual disability to larger contexts of poverty, income inequality, housing affordability, and social exclusion. Homelessness experts Shinn and Khadduri provide guidance on how to end homelessness for people who experience it and how to prevent so many people from reaching the point where they have no alternative to sleeping on the street or in emergency shelters. The authors show that we know how to end homelessness—if we devote the necessary resources to doing so. In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to Do About It is an excellent resource for policy-makers, professionals in the homeless services system, and anyone else who wants to end homelessness. It also can serve as a text in undergraduate or masters courses in public policy, sociology, psychology, social work, urban studies, or housing policy. "The knowledgeable and thoughtful authors of this book—two brilliant women who know as much as anyone in the country about the nature of homelessness and its solutions—have done a great service by taking us on a journey through the history of homelessness, how our responses have changed, and how we can end it." —Nan Roman, President and CEO National Alliance to End Homelessness. "Shinn and Khadduri's new book is a thorough yet concise examination of what we know about the nature and causes of homelessness, and the crucial lessons learned. This critically important work provides a roadmap to restoring basic housing and income security as viable policy options, in the face of our daunting inequality divide that otherwise threatens millions with destitution and homelessness." —Dennis Culhane, Dana and Andrew Stone Professor of Social Policy, University of Pennsylvania "Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri have combined their significant expertise to create an essential guide about the history of modern homelessness and to offer a clear path forward to end this American tragedy. Their policy recommendations on ending homelessness are culled from the best about what we know works." —Barbara Poppe, Executive Director US Interagency Council on Homeless, 2009-2014