Street Homelessness Redux

Abstract

Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco, by Teresa Gowan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 340pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780816669677. There is one kind of homelessness, so deeply embedded in the slippages of work, family, and state aid as to have become a routine, unremarkable part of what it means to be poor in America today. This is the low-visi bility, serial displacement that plagues uncertain lives and patchworked liveli hoods, chronicled by journalists Adrien LeB lanc, David Shipler, Jason DeParle, and the occasional social scientist. There is another, more flagrant homelessness, lurid and alien, making its wretched way plain as life, here among right-thinking, god-fearing folks. Seemingly without shame or cover, its metier is what Mill called the spectacle of pain. This latter type is the subject of the two books under review here: Righteous Dopefiend, by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, and Hobos, Hustlers, and Back sliders, by Teresa Gowan. Both are set in the present-day San Francisco. Both are lumi nous and unsettling—and for strikingly dif ferent reasons.