Ella Howard. Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America.

Abstract

In recent decades, scholars such as Joel Blau, Leonard Feldman, Kim Hopper, Christopher Jencks, Kenneth Kusmer, Peter Rossi, Neil Smith, and Alex Vitale have published fascinating studies about homelessness in the United States. These works contradict the “conventional wisdom” that no one cares about poor people in the United States and that the study of the homeless is a thankless undertaking about a marginalized population that seldom matters. Ella Howard's Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America is an excellent addition to these studies of homelessness, providing a much-needed historical perspective on the nation's largest skid row area, the Bowery in New York City. Howard's research is grounded in archival sources from institutions such as the New York State Archives, the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, the Columbia University Archives, the New York Public Library, and the Salvation Army National Archives and Research Center. In the process, Howard shows how a series of institutions during the twentieth century took an interest in the homeless, only to provide half-hearted assistance.