Disponible:*
Estado | Reservas de ítem | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Búsqueda… Science | Book | 363.5 W933B | 1 | Stacks | Búsqueda… Desconocido | Búsqueda… No disponible |
Agrupado con estos títulos
En pedido
Resumen
Resumen
James Wright's Address Unknown: The Homeless in America focused on the problem of homelessness during the mid-to-late 1980s, making an important contribution to the then-emerging public debate of a rapidly growing and increasingly visible social problem. Beside the Golden Door updates the story and our knowledge of homelessness through the middle 1990s, advancing the thesis that an emphasis on factors such as mental illness or substance abuse is descriptively accurate but fails as a causal account of the rise of homelessness as a social problem. The authors reject efforts to cast the issue in "either-or" terms, as social structure versus individual deficiencies, arguing that poverty and housing trends have created a situation where some people are destined to be homeless, but personal factors such as mental illness or substance abuse are critical in predicting who those people turn out to be. Beside the Golden Door details numerous dimensions of the homelessness issue: the rise in poverty; the decline of low-income housing; conceptual, measurement, and practical problems of counting the homeless and the Census Bureau's ill-fated 1990 effort to do so; the role of familial estrangement, mental illness, and substance abuse; and health status and behaviors. It concludes with discussions and comparisons of rural versus urban homelessness, street children in North and Latin America, and homelessness in post-industrial societies. The material in Beside the Golden Door will be accessible to undergraduate students and interested lay readers as well as specialists. "Both the content and style of this book make an excellent instructive read for students, practitioners, and scholars, alike."--Social Forces James D. Wright is Charles and Leo Favrot Professor of Human Relations, Department of Sociology, Tulane University and author of over thirteen books including Address Unknown and Crime and Violence in America. Beth A. Rubin is associate professor, Department of Sociology, Tulane University. She is the author of Shifts in the Social Contract: Understanding Change in American Society. Joel A. Devine is professor, Department of Sociology, Tulane University, and coauthor of The Greatest of Evils: Urban Poverty and the American Underclass.
Reseñas (1)
Revisar OPCIONES
Wright et al. have skillfully assembled a competent and readable introduction to the issue of homelessness in the US. Their firsthand involvement with various projects such as the New Orleans Homeless Substance Abusers Program, Health Care for the Homeless, and efforts during the 1990 census to count the homeless will also provide undergraduates with valuable examples of linkages between sociological theory and practice, and demonstrate how both are relevant to the creation of public policy. At one level the book is a sustained attack against the position of Alice Baum and Donald Burnes (A Nation in Denial, CH, Nov'93), who, according to the authors, argue that homelessness is explained by the personal deficiencies (e.g., use of alcohol and/or drugs, mental illness) of the homeless. In contrast, they identify poverty and policy decisions leading to the loss of low-income housing as creating a social context within which "some people are destined to be homeless." Despite the fact that the work is dated (based on materials written between 1989 and the middle 1990s), it represents a solid background resource. Brief discussions of homelessness in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Europe add a valuable, if somewhat arbitrarily selected, international dimension. General readers; upper-division undergraduates. M. A. Olshan; Alfred University
Tabla de contenido
Preface | p. xiii |
Acknowledgments | p. xvii |
1 The Homeless: What Are the Issues? What Are the Controversies? | p. 1 |
Theories about Homelessness | p. 7 |
Who Are the Homeless? Social and Demographic Characteristics | p. 14 |
How Many Homeless? | p. 19 |
Is Homelessness a New Problem? | p. 21 |
Is Homelessness a Growing Problem? | p. 23 |
Is Homelessness a Mental Health or Substance Abuse Problem? | p. 24 |
Do People "Choose to Be Homeless? | p. 26 |
The Political Economy of Homelessness: Poverty and Housing | p. 28 |
2 Counting the Homeless | p. 31 |
Counting the Homeless in Chicago: A Cautionary Tale | p. 32 |
How Many Homeless? | p. 37 |
The 1990 Census | p. 38 |
The S-Night Experiments | p. 40 |
S-Night Results: An Overview | p. 41 |
S-Night in New Orleans | p. 43 |
The Shelter Count in New Orleans | p. 44 |
The Street Count in New Orleans | p. 47 |
3 Why the Homeless Can't Be Counted | p. 53 |
The Uncounted Homeless | p. 54 |
Housing Dynamics and the "Uncountable" Homeless | p. 55 |
Conclusions | p. 62 |
4 Poverty, Housing, and Homelessness | p. 65 |
The Urban Poverty Situation | p. 67 |
Low-Income Housing | p. 79 |
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Programs | p. 79 |
Federal Housing Policy | p. 81 |
If Not Housing, What? | p. 82 |
Skid Row | p. 85 |
Poverty and Low-Income Housing: The Legacy of the 1980's | p. 86 |
Final Thoughts on Povery and Housing | p. 91 |
5 Families and Family Estrangement | p. 93 |
Homeless Families | p. 93 |
Family Backgrounds and Familial Estrangement | p. 98 |
6 Mental Illness and Substance Abuse | p. 105 |
Mental Illness | p. 105 |
Substance Abuse | p. 110 |
The New Orleans Homeless Substance Abusers Program (NOHSAP) | p. 112 |
Characteristics of NOHSAP Clients | p. 112 |
Education | p. 113 |
Employment | p. 115 |
Income | p. 116 |
Substance Abuse and Housing Outcomes | p. 123 |
Conclusions | p. 124 |
7 Why Alcohol and Drug Treatment Is Not the Solution | p. 127 |
Program Design | p. 128 |
Treatment Issues | p. 129 |
Evaluation Design | p. 130 |
Randomization | p. 132 |
Attrition | p. 134 |
Process Evaluation | p. 137 |
Outcome Evaluation | p. 140 |
Conclusion | p. 142 |
8 Health and Health Status | p. 147 |
Introduction | p. 147 |
Prior Research | p. 149 |
Research Design and Precedures | p. 150 |
Poor Health as a Cause of Homelessness | p. 152 |
Homelessness as a Cause of Poor Health | p. 154 |
Homelessness as a Complicating Factor in the Delivery of Health Care | p. 168 |
Health, Health Policy, and the Homeless | p. 171 |
Conclusions | p. 174 |
9 Outside American Cities: Rural and European Homelessness | p. 177 |
Rural Poverty | p. 178 |
Rural Homelesness | p. 182 |
Homelessness in Europe | p. 184 |
On Definitions and Numbers | p. 185 |
Characteristics of the European Homeless | p. 187 |
Causes of Homelesness | p. 189 |
Social Policy | p. 190 |
Conclusions | p. 193 |
10 Street Children in North and Latin America | p. 195 |
The Honduran Context | p. 196 |
Proyecto Alternativos | p. 198 |
Children in and of the Streets of Tegucigalpa | p. 200 |
Poverty, Homelessness, and Child Health in the United States | p. 205 |
Conclusion | p. 207 |
11 Homelessness in the Twenty-First Century | p. 209 |
References | p. 217 |
Index | p. 233 |