The National Alliance to End Homelessness states that there are 564,708 people experiencing homelessness on any given night in the U.S. The primary source writings in this anthology have been selected to provide your readers with a broad range of viewpoints on poverty and homelessness, including whether government assistance is working or making things worse. The essays in each chapter of this book represent contrasting viewpoints on government social assistance programs and income inequality. Students are encouraged to see the validity of divergent opinions, crucial to the development of critical thinking skills. An important question about the topic is presented in each chapter, and the viewpoints that follow are organized based on their response to the question. Fact boxes summarize important information for researchers, and an extensive bibliography is included.

Taking an in-depth look at the causes of homelessness in the United States, Joel Blau disproves the convenient myths that most homeless are crazy, drug addicts, or lazy misfits who brought their suffering upon themselves. He shows that the current crisis was an inevitable result of economic and political changes in recent decades, systematically reviewing the explanations offered by researchers, politicians and pundits, from the deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the 1960s to the gentrification of urban neighborhoods in the 1970s to the evisceration of federal spending on social welfare in the 1980s. Blau argues that current government policies at every level are mired in pointless headcounting and quick-fix solutions that only push the homeless out of sight without touching the underlying causes. He advocates social reforms ranging form a national standard for welfare benefits, a higher minimum wage, and establishment of a social sector for non-profit, affordable housing. A powerful contribution to public debate on homelessness, The Visible Poor must be read by concerned citizens as well as by policy-makers and advocates.

Poverty and homelessness are sadly evident in America's cities-and even in some of the nation's rural areas. Contributors examine the root causes of poverty and what should be done to help the poor and the homeless.

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.

The homeless have the legal right to exist in modern American cities, yet antihomeless ordinances deny them access to many public spaces. How did previous generations of urban dwellers deal with the tensions between the rights of the homeless and those of other city residents? Ella Howard answers this question by tracing the history of skid rows from their rise in the late nineteenth century to their eradication in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on New York's infamous Bowery, Homeless analyzes the efforts of politicians, charity administrators, social workers, urban planners, and social scientists as they grappled with the problem of homelessness. The development of the Bowery from a respectable entertainment district to the nation's most infamous skid row offers a lens through which to understand national trends of homelessness and the complex relationship between poverty and place. Maintained by cities across the country as a type of informal urban welfare, skid rows anchored the homeless to a specific neighborhood, offering inhabitants places to eat, drink, sleep, and find work while keeping them comfortably removed from the urban middle classes. This separation of the homeless from the core of city life fostered simplistic and often inaccurate understandings of their plight. Most efforts to assist them centered on reforming their behavior rather than addressing structural economic concerns. By midcentury, as city centers became more valuable, urban renewal projects and waves of gentrification destroyed skid rows and with them the public housing and social services they offered. With nowhere to go, the poor scattered across the urban landscape into public spaces, only to confront laws that effectively criminalized behavior associated with abject poverty. Richly detailed, Homeless lends insight into the meaning of homelessness and poverty in twentieth-century America and offers us a new perspective on the modern welfare system.

A half-century after the "War on Poverty" of Lyndon Johnson, poverty rates remain unchanged. Scholars have advanced polarized theories about the causes of poverty, as politicians have debated how (or if) to fund welfare programs. Yet little research has been conducted where the poor are provided a platform to speak on their own behalf. While it is important to understand how economic systems affect the homeless, it is equally important to learn about the day-to-day realities faced by those who rely on public policies for survival. Drawing on the author's experience working in the homeless community, this book presents some of their stories of loss, abuse, addiction, and marginalization through interviews, observations, and ethnographic research.

Whose fault is homelessness? Thirty years ago the problem exploded as a national crisis, drawing the attention of activists, the media, and policymakers at all levels, yet the homeless population endures to this day, and arguably has grown. In this book the author offers a major reconsideration of homelessness in the U.S., casting a critical eye on how we as a society respond to crises of inequality and stratification. Incorporating local studies into a national narrative, he probes how homelessness shifted from being the subject of a politically charged controversy over poverty and social class to posing a functional question of social service delivery. At the heart of his analysis is insight into why we accept highly symbolic policies that dampen public outrage, but fail to address the fundamental structural problems that would allow real change.

Homelessness had become a social problem that was primarily not about solving the nation's housing crisis. The pressing question becomes: How (and why) did homelessness become the social problem in its own right, one that was only tangentially related to the problem of inappropriate or insufficient housing? Why, when people demanded that something be done about homelessness, did they get specific policies and unintended outcomes? Cynthia Bogard is not content with the shorthand answers that rested on bias and ideology, such as "conservative politics bred conservative policies" or "American individualism precludes government investment in housing." This did not explain homelessness sufficiently, especially given all the advocacy and research that had occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Examining these "claimsmaking activities," as constructionists call them, however, is a daunting task because the activities engaged in by people in the attempt to persuade others are fluid, subtle, and complicated as are the responses to these social actions. This raised a second set of issues that the author is concerned with: How can we adequately represent and sociologically examine this very complicated human activity of social problems construction? Who does the construction, and to what effect? Bogard's answer to these questions is a book that can be read in two ways and on multiple levels. For those who are interested in the story of the career of homelessness as a social problem in America's two "national" cities, the book should be read from the beginning through the conclusion as a straight narrative. The technical matter in the appendix can be ignored. But for those readers with an interest in social problems constructionism, however, this book is meant as a "cook-book" of sorts. Each chapter emphasizes a feature of constructionism, such as an important group of claims makers or an important aspect of the claims making process. The work highlights a major feature in advanced societies: the intersection of interests and claims. Social constructions may be real, but they are comprised of no less real social interests. The work marks a real departure and advance over the original formulations of construction theory in social research. Cynthia J. Bogard is associate professor of sociology at Hofstra University.