Crisis Of Homelessness Research Articles

Crisis at christmas

Although best known for the Christmas shelters, Crisis, the national charity for solitary homeless people, works year-round to help vulnerable and marginalised people get through the crisis of homelessness, fulfil their potential and transform their lives.

Shelterization Revisited: Some Methodological Dangers of Institutional Studies of the Homeless

This article revisits one of the key discussions that emerged during the homeless crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, that of shelterization, or the potentially demoralizing and desocializing effects of congregate emergency housing. Many of the fundamental assumptions underlying Goffman's total institution model that drove the shelterization discussion continue to influence research and policy. This model's tendency to abstract shelter life from the surrounding environment, overemphasize the impact of shelters on the behavior of residents, and explain the persistence of homelessness through reference to the psychosocial effects of shelter norms is examined and situated within the confluence of the growth of a shelter system in New York City in the 1980s, the expansion of federal funding through the 1987 McKinney Act, and the shared experience of researchers projecting and generalizing on their own experiences working in shelters. Examination of some of the methodological, theoretical, and political p...

Fitting the bill: Developing a floating support service

Floating support can provide a flexible peripatetic service to people in their own homes, with the aim of developing or maintaining independence. It is based on individually assessed need and support plans that promote time‐limited self‐help and links to other local services. The shortage of properly structured low‐medium support leaves people vulnerable to a crisis of homelessness or in expensive residential services. Mainstream housing providers may lack the time or experience to offer the right help. This paper shows how an effective service can be designed and managed.

The homeless crisis and health care

The homeless crisis and health care

Checkerboard square: culture and resistance in a homeless community

During the past decade, homelessness became a widespread phenomenon in the United States for the first time since the Great Depression. The public frequently blamed the poor for their plight. Journalistic and academic accounts, in contrast, often evoked pathos and pity, regarding the homeless primarily as objects of treatment and rehabilitation. David Wagner challenges both of these dominant images, offering an ethnographic portrait of the poor that reveals their struggle not only to survive but also to create communities on the streets and to develop social movements on their own behalf. Definitely not passive victims, the homeless of Checkerboard Square survive within an alternative street culture, with its own norms and social organization, in a world often hidden from the view of researchers, journalists, and social workers. Checkerboard Square reveals the daily struggle of street people to organize their lives in the face of rejection by employers, government, landlords, and even their own families. Looking beyond the well-documented causes of homelessness such as lack of affordable housing or unemployment, Wagner shows how the poor often become homeless through resistance to the discipline of the workplace, authoritarian families, and the bureaucratic social welfare system. He explains why the crisis of homelessness is not only about the lack of services, housing, and jobs but a result of the very structure of the dominant institutions of work, family, and public social welfare.

Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us. Richard W. White Jr.

<i>Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us</i>. Richard W. White Jr.

Parenting in homeless families: the double crisis.

The same factors that impede a mother's ability to maintain a stable residence are likely to impair her capacity to nurture children. This double crisis of homelessness and child rearing confronts caregivers with a special set of ethical and practical dilemmas. Psychosocial characteristics of homeless mothers and children are reviewed, and the need to support these mothers is underscored.

Rude awakenings: what the homeless crisis tells us

Rude awakenings: what the homeless crisis tells us

Representing the Homeless

task of representing homelessness in America is a complex one. In each case, whether the medium of communication is the photographic essay, the statistical analysis, the case study, or the documentary film, an effort is made to demonstrate the seriousness of the crisis of homelessness, to explain its origins and development, and to foster the political will necessary to effect long-term solutions. These works all tend to depict the experience of being homeless through the story of particular individuals, yet there is considerable variation in their portrayals. In these views the homeless range from exhausted, troubled, and dispossessed people deserving of our sympathy and care to intelligent, socially aware, self-critical agents asserting and fighting for their rights and dignity. The way these texts, photographs, and films represent homelessness finally effects a kind of reversal, allowing us to become aware of the complex discourse of charity that pervades our way of perceiving social relations and our attempts to accomplish political change. Jim Hubbard's photographs of the homeless in American Refugees bring what is usually at the periphery of vision to the center of attention. A young woman sunk down on a plastic milk crate on a bustling sidewalk holding her baby seems confused, imploring, and helpless. A ragged man with an overgrown beard and a dirty blanket clutched across his shoulders strides across a city park. At first view he appears half crazed. Bundled up against the cold, old men hunch outside a public building. A family turned out of their apartment huddles with mattresses and scant possessions. They seem grief-stricken, lost, and beaten. Passersby appear to gawk at recumbent lumpish bundles coated in snow. Hugging his chest, a young black boy stands by while his family is evicted. His stare conveys a concentrated, silent anger. Hubbard's pictures remind us of news accounts and television clips, and of scenes many of us witness every day. While each photograph is an isolated image, in their accumuAmerican Refugees By Jim Hubbard University of Minnesota Press, 1991

A Street Is Not A Home: Solving America's Homeless Dilemma, by Robert C. Coates

Like many politicians, reporters, social workers, and others concerned about the homeless, Robert C. Coates lived for a short time on the street. But rather than returning from his mission with yet another set of platitudes about the problem, the experience set him on the road to find answers. The result is A Street is Not a Home. Coates' involvement with homelessness began as an exploration into judicial ethics, but quickly developed into something far more sweeping.This is not another recapitulation of the problem but a mosaic of workable solutions that Coates has seen evolve in municipalities across the nation. Coates dismisses opinions that the homeless dilemma is one that cannot be resolved. Writing in clear, readable prose, he cuts through the medical, social, legal, and religious jargon that customarily surrounds the issue, approaching homelessness from the perspective of basic strategic planning. He separates the larger problems into manageable components, examines programs that have already been tested and found to be effective, and isolates matters that still require resolution. A Street is Not a Home dispels many myths about the homeless crisis and clearly illustrates that the vast majority of America's homeless can be helped.

Housing Famine and Homelessness: How the Low-Income Housing Crisis Affects Families with Inadequate Supports

A famine paradigm of low-income housing deficit in the USA first introduced by recent studies of homelessness in New York City is extended to understand how impacts of that deficit may be structured according to the social network length of low-income families. A simplified mathematical model suggests that poor families with truncated social support networks are most vulnerable to housing famine, and explores how the famine may synergistically interact with inadequacy of support, leading to their becoming homeless. This view contrasts with currently popular ideologically driven explanations of homelessness. On the one hand is the assertion that vulnerability to the housing deficit is the ‘cause’ of homelessness. On the other is the claim that simplistic housing strategies, in which the interaction of housing loss with the structure of vulnerability to that loss is not recognized, can end the US crisis of homelessness. The paper is concluded with a discussion of needed empirical studies and of policy implications.

New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel.

Blending detailed historical perspective with contemporary survey research, Charles Hoch and Robert Slayton argue that the answers to one of the most pressing problems of our time come from the poor themselves. Their examination of the Skid Row single room occupancy hotel (SRO) reveals how communities formed by low-income single-person households have for decades offered the security, personal autonomy, and privacy for the old homeless that the homeless lack. And they show how public urban renewal efforts, which destroyed the bulk of these hotels with the intent to rid the inner city of the Skid Row homeless, actually laid the foundation for today's urban homeless crisis. Focusing on Chicago from 1870 to the present, but including case studies in other cities, Hoch and Slayton analyze how these SRO hotels operated in the past and claim that the term flop house really described a wide range of shelter types available to the poor according to their economic conditions. Based on their research, the authors conclude that policies for solving the homeless problem should focus mainly not on the homeless people, but on the institutional actors who benefit directly and indirectly from their predicament. This means changing public policies that encourage the destruction of affordable housing, especially SRO hotels, and implementing preservation, rehabilitation, and new construction policies instead. Author note: Charles Hoch is Associate Professor in the School of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Robert A. Slayton is Assistant Professor of History at Chapman College and author of Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy.

THE FEDERAL RESPONSE TO HOMELESSNESS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICAN CITIES

The beginning of a dramatic rise in homelessness in American cities coincided with the election of a Republican administration under the leadership of Ronald Reagan. This paper examines the response of the Reagan Administration to the crisis of homelessness. The ideology of the Administration, its broad social-expenditure priorities, and its programs for health, housing, income maintenance, and human services which affect the homeless are investigated. The paper argues that the federal government, guided by conservative and individualist ideology, has (1 ) sought broad social-spending reductions and macroeconomic policies that have increased the risk of homelessness and (2) made minimal efforts toward directly ameliorating the situation of the homeless. The implications for American cities and their homeless populations include growth in the numbers of homeless, local fiscal stress, the expulsion of the homeless from skid-row districts, dispersion of the homeless from downtown zones, suburban exclusionary backlash, reinstitutionalization, and urban violence.

Explaining Homelessness

Abstract As the problem of homelessness intensifies in the United States, the search for solutions becomes increasingly urgent. This article presents an explanation of the origins of the current crisis of homelessness. It examines the preconditions of homelessness, as well as events that tend to perpetuate the deprivations of the homeless. We argue that planners need a comprehensive account of the problem to guide us in our choice of intervention strategies that will be appropriate at various stages in the cycle of homelessness.

Landscapes of Despair: The Homelessness Crisis in US Cities

Landscapes of Despair: The Homelessness Crisis in US Cities