Down and Out in America:
Hayes, Robert M
GIVE ME SHELTER DOWN AND OUT IN AMERICA Peter H. Rossi University of Chicago Press, $15.95 242 pp. Robert M. Hayes Twenty-five years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic...
...But it's a clumsy technique that stands in sharp contrast to two powerful-and eminently readable-books of the last year by Jonathan Kozol (Rachel's Children, Crown, 1988) and Kathleen Hirsch (Songs From the Alley, Ticknor & Fields, 1989) which capture the humanity of homeless people in the process of an intelligent analysis of the cause of, and remedies for, mass homelessness...
...The dim light that does emanate from Professor Rossi's Down and Out is in his description of the forces creating homelessness...
...Nonetheless, to further some academic curiosity, Rossi consumes over one-fifth of his book arguing that $10 million be spent to count the homeless...
...Robert M. Hayes Twenty-five years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act launching the War on Poverty, the United States staggers under the weight of mass homelessness...
...Inexplicably, Professor Rossi begins his book with ten, two-hundred-word vignettes of homeless people-vignettes he later admits are composites...
...The people of America are tired of homelessness...
...Rossi is plain wrong in saying that no one has articulated "a coherent set of programs" or "pressed for specific legislation on social action...
...It's as if the people he describes are marketing props to make an essentially academic tome readable to a wider audience...
...It is this marginally useful book's Waterloo...
...It is perfectly obvious that no accurate census of constantly moving people, who place a life-preserving premium on disguise, can be made...
...He makes the point, a point which is absolutely right but not widely recognized, that homelessness is nothing more than an aggravated state of extreme poverty...
...Orwell, one of the century's keenest social critics, captured the voices of human deprivation, with an emphasis on human, in his work...
...For five years now Congress has been debating portions of the Homeless Persons Survival Act, omnibus legislation that sets forth a series of steps to end homelessness in America...
...Down and Out concludes that because public policy decisions in America "created" the problem of homelessness, they can "solve the problem as well...
...Rossi seems to understand this well, which is why his obsessive consideration of a national census of the homeless is so curious...
...Any rational homeless person worth his or her salt will not look homeless: how else can one spend hours in the warmth of a restaurant for the price of a cup of coffee...
...Rossi is at his best in making the connections among poverty, welfare policy, housing policy, and homelessness...
...Besides, while Rossi argues that any solution to home-lessness must address root causes, he seems not to notice that we already have accurate gauges of the number of people living in extreme poverty and the number of housing units needed to meet the nation's demand...
...To attack homelessness we need to attend to the upstream currents that pull people in...
...s Community for Creative Non-Violence, for its estimates...
...extremely poor, precariously housed Americans are, at any point, indistinguishable from the homeless, he notes...
...Rossi's Down and Out never comes close...
...But this mindless focus bogs the book into a swamp of petty relevance and near-un-readability...
...He castigates (and repeatedly misnames) one of the nation's leading advocacy organizations, Washington, D.C...
...Still, over the past year a consensus has emerged in American public opinion that homelessness must be ended, and that government has a key role to play in that effort...
...Whether help for the homeless poor remains limited to soup kitchens and other Band-Aids, or whether it becomes the starting point for a reasoned assault against systemic poverty, will be one of the great public policy debates of the 1990s...
...Professor Rossi's troubles begin with his title, an expropriation of George Orwell's brilliant diaries of life in the nether worlds of Paris and London in the 1930s...
...They want solutions and they are pressing government to end this national scandal...
...Peter H. Rossi's new book hints at this question, but ultimately offers little to educate either the hearts or the minds of people yearning for solutions to the visible human suffering we call homelessness...
...In fact, significant pieces of the omnibus bill are already law, and additional housing legislation is brewing...
...On that note, at least, Professor Rossi should be heard.si should be heard...
...Homelessness, he says, is a condition of a lack of shelter to be sure...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
