Details

Subject(s)

• Homelessness—United States [Browse]
• Homelessness—Canada [Browse]
• Housing—United States [Browse]
• Housing—Canada [Browse]
• Housing policy—United States [Browse]
• Housing policy—Canada [Browse]

Summary note

• Mentally ill people turned out of institutions, crack-cocaine use on the rise, more poverty, public housing a shambles: as attempts to explain homelessness multiply so do the homeless - and we still don't know why. The first full-scale economic analysis of homelessness, Making Room provides answers quite unlike those offered so far by sociologists and pundits. It is a story about markets, not about the bad habits or pathology of individuals.
• One perplexing fact is that, though homelessness in the past occurred during economic depressions, the current wave started in the 1980s, a time of relative prosperity. As Brendan O'Flaherty points out, this trend has been accompanied by others just as unexpected: rising rents for poor people and continued housing abandonment. These are among the many disconcerting facts that O'Flaherty collected and analyzed in order to account for the new homelessness.
• O'Flaherty shows that the conflicting observations begin to make sense when we see the new homelessness as a response to changes in the housing market, linked to a widening gap in the incomes of rich and poor. The resulting shrinkage in the size of the middle class has meant fewer hand-me-downs for the poor and higher rents for the low-quality housing that is available. O'Flaherty's tightly argued theory, along with the wealth of new data he introduces, will put the study of homelessness on a new plane.
• No future student or policymaker will be able to ignore the economic factor presented so convincingly in this plainspoken book.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-341) and index.

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. What Is Homelessness?
• 3. Why Is It Bad?
• 4. Homeless Histories
• 5. Daytime Streetpeople
• 6. How to Think about Housing Markets
• 7. Income Distribution
• 8. Interest Rates and Operating Costs
• 9. Cross-Section Studies
• 10. Government and Housing
• 11. Income Maintenance
• 12. Mental Health
• 13. Substance Abuse
• 14. Criminal Justice
• 15. What We Should Do
• Appendix: Homeless Studies.

Show 13 more Contents items

ISBN

0674543424 (alk. paper)

LCCN

95040146

OCLC

33244332

RCP

C - S

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