Reckoning with Homelessness

By Kim Hopper,

Book cover of Reckoning with Homelessness

Book description

"It must be some kind of experiment or something, to see how long people can live without food, without shelter, without security."-homeless woman, Grand Central Station, winter

"Homelessness is a routine fact of life on the margins. Materially, it emerges out of a tangled but unmysterious mix of factors: scarce…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Reckoning with Homelessness as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is admittedly old (published in 2003), but I find myself returning to it time and again as an important touchstone to understanding the origins and consequences of homelessness in America. Hopper is an anthropologist and activist, one of the first to study the ‘new’ epidemic of homelessness that appeared in the 1980s in cities like New York.

Hopper’s book traces the historical roots and consequences of the epidemic and is prescient in foretelling points of contention, such as the African-American racism underlying housing precarity. Far from the stilted reporting style of academic reporting, this book reads like a…

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