Sociology 498: Homelessness

Homelessness readings

• Rossi, Peter. 1989. Down and out in America: The Origins of Homelessness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Rossi's is the earliest book we will read. The others often refer to it. There are a couple of different research strategies Rossi uses, but we will concentrate on the survey he did of the Chicago homeless. Trying to apply standard survey methods to a population as amorphous as the homeless may seem like an attempt to count and interview the birds in the air. But Rossi's efforts pay off with some comparisons that can only be made with systematic observations. How are the homeless different from the housed? from people who are also very poor but not homeless? How are the long-term homeless different from the short term? See reading questions.

• Interagency Council on the Homeless. 1999. "Homelessness: Program and the People They Serve" You can order this directly from HUD at the above link.

  This is a report of a national survey of the homeless done for the federal department of Housing and Urban Development by the Urban Institute. It has lots of good tables and data. The data are more recent (1996 survey) than Rossi's book, and they cover the entire United States. The issues are not presented quite as attractively as Rossi is able to do, but the tables are a good comparison with Rossi's Chicago survey. (No reading questions yet.)

• Liebow, Elliot. 1993. Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. New York: Viking Penguin.

  This well-known book describes real people with real problems. Observational studies like this seem simple to do because they don't require the statistical and technical skills that we'll see in the later books. But to do observational studies well is even harder than to do statistical studies well, because statistics have well accepted rules and models -- once you learn those rules, anybody can do them. But observational studies have more ambiguous guidelines (read Liebow's appendix E) so to do them well requires great talent. Liebow is a master. Even if we sometimes disagree with his conclusions, you will learn to respect the patient empathy of the listener and the skill of the writer in describing what it means to be homeless. See reading questions.

• Jencks, Christopher. 1994. The Homeless. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Jencks's book began as a book review (of Burt and Rossi) for the New York Review of Books. By the time he had finished writing that review, he had enough information (and interest) to write his own book. His book is short but full. He reviews all the major explanations that have been given for homelessness and sorts out the evidence for and against each. Jencks is especially good at cautioning us not to conclude too much from any one study or one piece of evidence, and yet not to avoid drawing some conclusions, however tentative. Jencks's research strategy is also different from the others. Like Burt, he concentrates on macro-level questions but instead of comparing cities, Jencks compares years . Why was there more homelessness in the 1980s than in the 1970s? What changed about the country that gave rise to this new phenomenon? See reading questions.

• O'Flaherty, Brendan. 1996. Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  This is the most recent book we will read, and in some ways the most difficult. O'Flaherty is an economist so his "way of knowing" is quite different from the others. He starts out not unlike the others, but in chapter 4 it becomes clear that the author is not a sociologist but an economist. Here he develops a mathematical model to describe how housing becomes available for poor people. Everything else -- data analysis, policy recommendations -- derives from that model, so we will spend a good deal of time trying to understand how that model works. Then we will see how O'Flaherty derives policy recommendations based on that model and compare those recommendations to the policies advocated by our other authors. See reading questions.