Here are 93 books that Homelessness Is a Housing Problem fans have personally recommended if you like
Homelessness Is a Housing Problem.
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I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I read this book in its entirety while sitting all day in a hospital waiting room on Christmas Eve after taking my husband to the ER that morning. I was scared and anxious and needed something to take my mind off my worries, and this did the trick.
It grabbed my attention, engaged my mind, and was so well written that it was easy to read despite my distress. The sense of outrage threaded throughout the book, backed up by key facts, propelled the book forward and kept me focused. Thankfully, my husband is fully recovered from his broken rib and is fine.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
“Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”—The New Yorker
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I moved to New York City in 1984 as homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic were crises all too visible to this newcomer. To my good fortune, my post-doctoral training included some of the earliest experts on mental illness and homelessness. This work became a career goal that has sustained me through almost 40 years of research using qualitative (in-depth) methods. Obtaining federal funding to support this work and mentoring many graduate students were extra benefits that I cherished. Along the way, I wrote a textbook on qualitative methods (now in its 3rd edition), co-authored a book about Housing First, and traveled to Delhi, India to study their ‘pavement dwellers’.
The author (Ross) spent years in the vicinity of Disney World, focusing on residents in the hidden encampments and run-down motels where Disney employees and other economic unfortunates live. I was captivated by his descriptions of strip malls, convenience stores, and abject poverty in close proximity to luxury hotels and Disney attractions—places where owning a home is an unattainable dream.
What this book does more than any other I’ve read is sound the alarm about the predatory nature of hedge funds and private equity firms buying up real estate throughout the United States. Housing affordability becomes even more distant as the gap between the haves and have-nots grows ever larger.
An eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban housing crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World's backyard.
Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida.
Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the fifteen-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties…
I moved to New York City in 1984 as homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic were crises all too visible to this newcomer. To my good fortune, my post-doctoral training included some of the earliest experts on mental illness and homelessness. This work became a career goal that has sustained me through almost 40 years of research using qualitative (in-depth) methods. Obtaining federal funding to support this work and mentoring many graduate students were extra benefits that I cherished. Along the way, I wrote a textbook on qualitative methods (now in its 3rd edition), co-authored a book about Housing First, and traveled to Delhi, India to study their ‘pavement dwellers’.
The focus of this intensely experienced and written ethnography is contrasting the public vs. private sectors of services for persons suffering the dual tragedies of serious mental illness and housing precarity. The title reflects this distinction by describing the private world of elite treatment programs costing $10,000 or more per month to treat the troubled sons and daughters of Los Angeles families.
In contrast, the public sector—serving 'sidewalk psychotics’ visible in the city’s Skid Row—is barely able to offer treatment and support to help them survive. Gong writes up-close stories of the lives of impoverished street dwellers and their outreach workers juxtaposed to the experiences of affluent young people navigating strained relationships with their families. The comparison speaks volumes about class privilege and its limitations. This is ethnography at its best.
Sociologist Neil Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between.
In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, sociologist Neil Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment,…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I liked this book immediately, and not just because it is written by someone I know and have worked with for decades and greatly respect. The book includes parts of the author’s early iconic work on homelessness in New York City, which, when published as a report in 1981, first focused public attention on the then-growing crisis.
The book includes stories of homeless New Yorkers that the author encountered when he lived for a period on the streets, in shelters, and flophouses as part of his research—an approach I found fascinating—as well as scholarly analysis. It’s a rich resource I return to again and again for insight, understanding, and, as needed, inspiration.
"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 housing, poorly planned and badly implemented policies of relocation and support, dismal prospects of work, exhausted or alienated kin.... Any outreach worker could tell you that list would be incomplete without one more: how misery can come to prefer its own company."-from the book
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
This book is by an accomplished advocate I know and have worked with, and tells the story of her own experience with homelessness. It’s a detailed and intimate account of her struggle, and it drew me in with the author’s honesty, specificity, and refusal to give up her sense of self.
I read it as I was working on my own book and struggling with whether and how to use my voice in the narrative. Her book is very different from mine, but it inspired me and helped me see how I could use my own experience while also keeping the stories of unhoused people in the fore.
A few days shy of her 55th birthday, DeBorah finds herself living in a homeless women's shelter. Her education and accomplishments to this point say that she should not be there, however, the reality of her lack of income and inability to maintain housing insists otherwise. Attitudes, myths, and perceptions about poverty provide the backdrop for advocacy towards a bill of rights for people experiencing homelessness and call for the right to counsel for people facing eviction. Justice and equity considerations, systematic and institutional dynamics, and the trauma of homelessness frame this personal journey of loss, enlightenment, and empowerment.
I’ve been fascinated by nonfiction since my teens, by the idea of books about things that really happened. Fiction gets all the kudos, all the big prizes, all the respect. But as far as I’m concerned, trying to wrestle the unruly matter of reality onto the page is much more challenging – imaginatively, technically, ethically – than simply making things up! My book The Travel Writing Tribe is all about those challenges – and about the people, the well-known travel writers, who have to confront them every time they put pen to paper.
“Middle-class academic writes nonfiction about homeless substance abuser” – that sounds like a recipe for overweening earnestness at best, or at worst an exploitative catastrophe. But right from the first line of this astonishing book you know that the author isn’t entirely in control, that the subject, his troubled friend Stuart Shorter, has agency in these pages in a way he seldom did elsewhere in life. It’s a gut-crunchingly sad story, but also often very funny – which, you get the feeling, is exactly how Stuart would have wanted it.
A unique biography of a homeless man and a complete portrait of the hidden underclass. 'So here it is, my attempt at the story of Stuart Shorter, thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopath street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of this century: a man with an important life. I wish I could have presented it to Stuart before he stepped in front of the 11.15 train from London to Kings Lynn.' Stuart Shorter's brief life was one of turmoil and chaos. In this remarkable book, a masterful act of…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I began writing The Way I Used to Be back in 2010. For me, it started simply as a place to work through my own private thoughts and feelings about sexual violence. I was writing as a survivor myself, but also as someone who has known, loved, and cared for so many others who have experienced violence and abuse. By the time I finished, I realized my novel had evolved into something much bigger: a story I hoped could contribute something meaningful to the larger dialogue. These powerful books on this list are all a part of that dialogue, each based in a richly diverse, yet shared reality. Readers will learn, grow, heal, and find hope in these pages.
Learning to Breathe tells such an important side of the #MeToo Movement, with sixteen-year-old Indira (Indy), a Black Bahamian girl who struggles to find her place in the aftermath of an assault that leads to an unwanted pregnancy. Set in the Bahamas, a place so often portrayed in Western culture as idyllic, it depicts a very different gritty and authentic lived reality for the main character. This heart-rending, yet empowering novel is enlightening on so many levels. Not only does it offer the unique and all-too-often overlooked point of view of a young person of color, but it also deals with complex family issues, homelessness, and a young woman’s path to claiming power over her own body and future.
A 2019 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection Amelia Bloomer List’s 2019 Top Ten Recommended Feminist Books for Young Readers A Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist A Junior Library Guild Selection A Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize Semifinalist A BC Book Prize Finalist
“A love letter to girls—bittersweet and full of hope.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of National Book Award Finalist American Street “This is a stellar debut.” —Brandy Colbert, award-winning author of Little & Lion and Pointe “A vibrant, essential story of healing, resilience, and finding one’s family.” —Stephanie Kuehn, author of William C. Morris Award winning Charm…
I have always loved children. I love tiny babies just discovering the world around them. I love elementary-age kids who are taking pride in developing new skills and learning how to deal with challenges. I love teens who are questioning and rethinking the things they thought they knew. I also love the science and practice of psychology (my profession for over thirty years) and, I love books. To date, I have written nine books. My audience ranges from preschool to high school and topics include strategies to understand and cope with problems as well as psychology as a topic of study.
Although this picture book has no words, its message of caring and compassion is clear and powerful. A small boy becomes aware of a homeless woman and simply, gently, acknowledges her. This innocent and kind book serves may serve as an opening to talk to children about homelessness. It also may help us all to remember not to ignore those less fortunate.
I See You is a wordless picture book that depicts a homeless woman who is unseen by everyone around her - except for a little boy. Over the course of a year, the boy is witness to all that she endures. Ultimately, in a gesture of compassion, the boy acknowledges her through an exchange in which he sees her and she experiences being seen. This book opens the door for kids and parents to begin a conversation about homelessness. In a "Note for Parents, Educators, and Neighbours", there are discussion questions and additional resources about helping the homeless. Ages 4-8.
I started to experiment at a very early age with alcohol. During my teen years, like so many of my peers, I had low self-esteem. I wanted to fit in so I understand firsthand the effects that peer pressure can have on a teenager. When I think back to those years, I sometimes wonder: what if? There were so many terrible outcomes that could have occurred in my life. These novels show their readers a “what if.” I hope that teens who read these books think twice before following a crowd and stand firmly with what they know is right in their heart as well as hope for healing.
Girl in Pieces is such an important story for anyone who has gone through any addiction or trauma of any kind before.
Charlotte, the protagonist, is in pieces. At seventeen she’s lost more than most people lose in a lifetime and she’s learned how to forget her trauma in order to protect herself. This is a book about Charlotte surviving in a world that has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together.
Although this book tells a story of people being cruel to themselves, it is ultimately a book about learning how to be gentle with yourself.
"A haunting, beautiful, and necessary book."—Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything
Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she’s already lost more than most people do in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don’t have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you.
Every new scar hardens Charlie’s heart just a little more, yet it still hurts…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
In March 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that had all but crippled New York City, my husband and I became homeless advocates. For months, we woke up each morning, made dozens of sandwiches, and walked the deserted city streets trying to feed the homeless, who were struggling to survive. Deserted streets meant no panhandling, which in turn, meant no food. In doing so, we became friends with many of the homeless men and women in our neighborhood. Fear and suspicion were replaced by trust and love, and our eyes and hearts were forever opened to people who had once been objects to be avoided.
This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Hometells the story of the difficulty of finding acceptable housing for the poor in New York City. Sandler follows the story of a young, poor, unwed mother, Camila, for one year as she struggles to find safe and affordable housing for herself and her newborn son. Against all odds, red tape, and never-ending bureaucracy, Camila never gives up. I found this story inspiring as well as educational about the homelessness crisis in New York City, a new found passion after my experience trying to feed the homeless during the first year of the pandemic.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From an award-winning journalist, a poignant and gripping immersion in the life of a young, homeless single mother amid her quest to find stability and shelter in the richest city in America
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • “Riveting . . . a remarkable feat of reporting.”—The New York Times
Camila is twenty-two years old and a new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, the odds are firmly stacked against her. In this extraordinary work of literary reportage, Lauren…
