Paths to Homelessness: Extreme Poverty and the Urban Housing Crisis

This book is the first to combine a cogent explanation of the economic and historical causes of homelessness with accounts of individuals and families on the streets, in soup lines, and in shelters. The human side of the story, told from ethnographies conducted in three diverse cities—Chicago, Denver, and Tampa—shows that there is no “culture of poverty” that makes people poor, just as there is no “culture of homelessness” that leaves people without shelter. Instead, the authors show that large numbers of people became homeless through the processes of urban and industrial decline.Homelessness is largely an urban phenomenon. It increased dramatically when cities witnessed the simultaneous loss of low-income housing and good-paying industrial jobs. However, the increase in the number of homeless people does not suggest a special social problem—arising from the character of individuals—but is the result of social and economic transformations in American cities since the late 1970s.In this book the words of the homeless tell the stories of people who were “making it” before but eventually fell into circumstances of extreme poverty. The many paths taken to homelessness, revealed in their stories, speak to the changing conditions of inequality in the United States today and the need for new public policies.