Homelessness, Housing, Economic Perspectives, and Harm Reduction
This is by no means an exhaustive or definitive list of resources. Rather, it is meant to simply act as a “jumping-off point” for those interested in learning more about homelessness and how it impacts our community.
Books & Articles:
Note: To best support the authors and as a part of the fight against systemic racism, please consider purchasing these books directly from the author, the publisher, or from the list of Black independently owned bookstores with online stores listed here whenever possible.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
“In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.”
Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
“Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job — any job — can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity — a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a rare view of how “prosperity” looks from the bottom. You will never see anything — from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal — in quite the same way again.”
$2 a Day by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer
“After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before — households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin, whose deep examination of her subjects’ lives has “turned sociology upside down” (Mother Jones), teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor. The two made a surprising discovery: the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American households, including about three million children.
But the fuller story remained to be told. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? What do they do to survive? In search of answers, Edin and Shaefer traveled across the country to speak with families living in this extreme poverty. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. Not just a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.”
Tell Them Who I Am by Elliot Leibow
“Unveiling the problems inherent in the current system of providing for the homeless is only part of the dynamic at work here. Tell Them Who I Am gives real voice to these women and their stories. They are clearly human beings, and Elliot does nothing to strip them of their dignity or humanity. If any criticism could be made I suppose it might be to suggest that Elliot is too close to his subjects. Perhaps this is an apt counter to most of the distancing, impartial-observer accounts of the homeless common to social science texts. There is no feeling of these women as bugs under a microscope. We see their world, as we should, through their eyes.”
Better Must Come by Matthew Marr
“In Better Must Come, Matthew D. Marr reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Marr, who has conducted fieldwork in U.S. and Japanese cities for over two decades, followed the experiences of thirty-four people as they made use of transitional housing services and after they left such programs. This comparative ethnography is groundbreaking in two ways—it is the first book to directly focus on exits from homelessness in American or Japanese cities, and it is the first targeted comparison of homelessness in two global cities.
Marr argues that homelessness should be understood primarily as a socially generated, traumatic, and stigmatizing predicament, rather than as a stable condition, identity, or culture. He pushes for movement away from the study of “homeless people” and “homeless culture” toward an understanding of homelessness as a condition that can be transcended at individual and societal levels. Better Must Come prescribes policy changes to end homelessness that include expanding subsidized housing to persons without disabilities and experiencing homelessness chronically, as well as taking broader measures to address vulnerabilities produced by labor markets and housing markets, as well as the rapid deterioration of social safety nets that often results from neoliberal globalization.”
The Soloist by Steve Lopez
“Journalist Steve Lopez discovered of Nathaniel Ayers, a former classical bass student at Julliard, playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Deeply affected by the beauty of Ayers’s music, Lopez took it upon himself to change the prodigy’s life—only to find that their relationship would have a profound change on his own.”
Project Homeless from the Seattle Times
Without a Home During COVID: A Crisis Within a Crisis from Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Podcasts:
Busted: America’s Poverty Myths. “A series exploring how our understanding of poverty is shaped not by facts, but by private presumptions, media narratives, and the tales of the American Dream. The problem has been addressed countless times since the nation’s founding, but it persists, and for the poorest among us, it gets worse. America has not been able to find its way to a sustainable solution, because most of its citizens see the problem of poverty from a distance, through a distorted lens.”
We The Unhoused by Theo Henderson. “We The Unhoused is a podcast that lifts the voices and struggles of the unhoused in LA and beyond. Host Theo Henderson is currently unhoused and resides in Chinatown, Los Angeles. He tackles issues such as police brutality, harassment, policy, and the survival challenges of unhoused people. Through a series of interviews, we will discuss issues that are germane to unhoused people like the cost of living, gentrification, health struggles, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care. The revolution will be heard on this podcast. Tune in each week to be a part of it.”
Movies & Videos:
The Housing First approach to homelessness | Lloyd Pendleton
The Soloist – Trailer
Time Out of Mind Official Trailer #1 (2015) – Jena Malone, Richard Gere Movie HD
Toolkits and Trainings:
The Illusion of Choice: Evictions and Profit in North Minneapolis by Dr. Brittany Lewis and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA)
Under One Roof: Stories on Minnesota’s Housing Crisis – TPT Originals
MESH Homelessness 101 and 201 trainings and other trainings related to homelessness.
PlaySpent.org – Interactive tool to understand the causes and circumstances that sometimes create homelessness.
Understanding and Confronting Racial Injustice from University of Minnesota Extension