Showing titles in Poverty & Homelessness

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the US welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society.

In Poor, Caleb Femi explores the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in 21st-century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.

This is the gripping, autobiographical true story of Richard Arsenault, television editor for Ellen and American Idol, and his wife Eva, as they faced this very nightmare. Despite his work making millions for others and helping create profitable popular television series, Richard and Eva found themselves homeless after reporting fraud. “You’ve got to have faith, not fear.” These reality television creators experienced "reality" firsthand as their new job in Florida evaporated, forcing them to survive with no money, no support, and no roof.

Growing up gifted and working-class in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of learning as they navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives - broken marriages, shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for university and fulfilled her dreams. Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.

Drawing on twenty-five years of research, programming, and advocacy efforts, Mariana Chilton compellingly demonstrates that food insecurity is created and maintained by people in power. Taking the listener back to the original wounds in the United States caused by its history of colonization, genocide, and enslavement, she forces us to reckon with hard questions about why people in the US allow hunger to persist. The Painful Truth about Hunger in America reinvigorates our commitment to uprooting the causes of poverty and discrimination, and points to a more generative and humane world.

This book will finally give a face and a voice to those we so easily forget in our society. It will tell the highly personal, human and sometimes surprisingly uplifting stories of real people struggling in a crumbling system. By telling their stories, we will come to know these people; to know their hopes and fears, their complexities and their contradictions. We will learn a little more about human relationships, in all their messiness.

In prose that sparkles with humour and warmth, Yates charts the heartbreaks and joys of a life spent navigating the chaos of the housing system. She exposes the issues underpinning the crisis, from the state’s neglect of social housing to the rental rat race, and the disproportionate toll these take on the most marginalized in society. Drawing on interviews with tenants across the country and the stories behind our interiors, she explores the unexpected ways we can fight back.

While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor. It is a plague of everyday violence. Beneath the surface of the world’s poorest communities, common violence—like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality—has become routine and relentless. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts development.

Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming worsens over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world, fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.

Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. Twenty years later, Kerry’s life is unrecognisable. She’s a prize-winning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books..

Anti-Social is the diary of a council worker whose job is to keep his community happy, or at least away from each other’s throats. That’s hard enough at the best of times but when government cuts mean that hospitals, social services and police are all at breaking point, the possibility of complete chaos is never far away. This is an urgent, timely but, most of all, hysterically funny true story of a life spent working with the people society wants to forget and the problems that nobody else can resolve.

In her powerful memoir His Bright Light, number-one New York Times best-selling author Danielle Steel opened her heart to share the devastating story of the loss of her beloved son. In A Gift of Hope, she shows us how she transformed that pain into a campaign of service that enriched her life beyond what she could imagine. For 11 years, Danielle Steel took to the streets with a small team to help the homeless of San Francisco. She worked anonymously, visiting the "cribs" of the city's most vulnerable citizens under cover of darkness, distributing food, clothing, bedding, tools, and toiletries.

There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Michelle Clark has loved animals all her life, filling her home with a menagerie of stray cats and abandoned dogs. But when her outreach work with London's homeless community leads to a chance meeting with a desperate man, and a quest to find a missing Staffie named Poppy, she has no idea that her life will be transformed forever.

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America". The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the 20th century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents.

His name was Antonio, but they would call him Nem. From the infamous favela of Rocinha in Rio, he was a hardworking young father forced to make a decision that would turn his world upside down. Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and perhaps Brazil’s most wanted criminal. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang culture and destitution while everyone around him drew guns and partied.

In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities.

De meeste experts zijn het erover eens dat de Great Divergence ergens in de 18de en 19de eeuw ontstond, toen voor het eerst in de geschiedenis van de wereld in Groot-Brittannië en in een aantal andere Europese landen moderne economische groei optrad. Tot op dat moment was het verschil tussen arme en rijke samenlevingen altijd relatief gering geweest, aangezien wereldwijd armoede normaal was. Met de Great Divergence werd het westen veel rijker dan de rest van de wereld, met uitzondering van Japan.

From the impoverished districts of Paris to the streets of London, Orwell recounts his experiences on the bottom rung in some of Paris’ most famous kitchens, his time on the streets of London with a colourful cast of characters and offers biting social commentary on everything from accommodation and privilege to diet and language. Part memoir, part social commentary, Down and Out in Paris and London is a sobering analysis of poverty and society in two of the world’s wealthiest cities.

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.