http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1088280860

Confronting homelessness : poverty, politics, and the failure of social policy

Whose fault is homelessness? Thirty years ago the problem exploded as a national crisis, drawing the attention of activists, the media, and policymakers at all levels, yet the homeless population endures to this day, and arguably has grown. In this book the author offers a major reconsideration of homelessness in the U.S., casting a critical eye on how we as a society respond to crises of inequality and stratification. Incorporating local studies into a national narrative, he probes how homelessness shifted from being the subject of a politically charged controversy over poverty and social class to posing a functional question of social service delivery. At the heart of his analysis is insight into why we accept highly symbolic policies that dampen public outrage, but fail to address the fundamental structural problems that would allow real change.

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