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This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to present a ‘contextual’ study of the implementation of Britain's homelessness legislation, legislation which was initially enacted as the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, and is now contained in Part III of the Housing Act 1985. The book's central theme is that law operates not in a context, but in a variety of interdependent contexts. Consequently, the purpose and effect of legal change can only be properly understood if one makes an attempt to discern the interactive effect of as many as possible of the influences bearing upon it. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter focuses on the women's benevolent institutions. They were in place in 1880 dispensing aid on a regular basis. By ministering the poor, benevolent ladies understood the degree of dependency that was created through increased industrialization and growth. Catholic women's religious orders were the first to build benevolent institutions in Galveston. Ursuline nuns accompanied Bishop John Mary Odin to Galveston and formed the Ursuline Academy and convent. They acted as nurses. They converted their convent to a military hospital during the Civil War. Galveston's middle- and upper-class women sought to capitalize on the wave of pride and donation to build institutions of their own — for children and old women. Lasker Home for Homeless Children and the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten pulled women toward a greater sense of civic and community responsibility. These institutions were temporary shelters for children whose family was unable to offer an education.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed analysis of the emergence and content of the homeless strategies in Denmark, Finland and Ireland. While all three countries had various homelessness policy statements and strategies prior to 2008, in all three cases, their 2008/09 strategies were the most ambitious, aiming to end long-term homelessness and the need to sleep rough. This chapter reviews the sequence of events that led to the radical shift in policy that aimed to end homelessness and the assumptions about the causes of homelessness in each strategy.

This chapter analyzes the interpretation and application of two of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977's discretion-laden components: priority need and homelessness. It identifies a few threads which might begin to offer tentative explanations of why each authority exhibits differential awareness of and conformity to lawful decision-making procedures and outcomes. Eastern's limited housing supply appears, for example, to be a dominant influence on the HPU's generally restrictive implementation of s.58 and s.59.Since Western was not suffering an acute housing shortage, one would have to look elsewhere to explain its equally rigid insistence that women applicants pursue legal remedies.

This chapter focuses on the three councils' implementation of a provision of the Act in respect of which there is widespread agreement that local authorities do suffer ‘particular difficulty’: the concept of intentional homelessness. The data presented strengthens the impression that many of Midland's decisions were clearly ultra vires. It also suggests that, while Western's officers were most unlikely to make basic legal mistakes, they might on occasion produce unlawful decisions when faced with unusual situations. While Eastern's implementation of s.60 was less legally ‘correct’ than Western's, in the sense that officers did not refer to case law to justify their conclusions, there was little indication that the HPU systemically made substantively indefensible decisions. In contrast, Midland's more regular and fundamental legal errors produced a substantively more restrictive (and overtly ultra vires) interpretation of intentionality.

The 1977 bill's Conservative opponents attacked the proposal that the permanent rehousing duty should automatically fall on the authority which applicants first approached. Many councils feared they would be besieged by homeless ‘strangers’. Conservative MPs' apparent victory in amending the bill was undermined by the Act's final form. While this initially escaped the attention of the bill's opponents, subsequent case law soon provided a rude awakening.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the public response to homelessness was local. In some communities, voluntarism surged, and charitable organizations provided food, clothing, and blankets to people living in public spaces. Church basements and unused public buildings were hastily transformed to house the throngs of people seeking shelter. With the numbers of street dwellers increasing, and no organized effort by governmental agencies to address the problem of homelessness, the concerns of ordinary citizens spurred the transformation from voluntarism to advocacy. This chapter describes the homeless advocacy that developed in 1980 in Washington, D.C., and New York City to shelter the street homeless, advocacy for federal legislation for homeless shelters and support services in the mid-1980s, and the development of national advocacy organizations, establishing advocacy as an abiding factor in the quest to end homelessness.

This chapter reviews the book Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (2016), by Monique R. Balbuena. Homeless Tongues is the first in-depth analysis of contemporary Sephardic poetry, focusing on three relatively unknown authors: Sadia Lévy, Margalit Matitiahu, and Juan Gelman. According to Balbuena, Sephardic writers have often been marginalized even within the field of Jewish studies. Seeking to “observe the contours” of the multiplicity of Jewish literature, she presents Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman as examples par excellence of cultural, literary, and linguistic multiplicity. She argues that translation and the trope of linguistic dialogue between languages is the primary means by which the three Sephardic poets interact with majority languages and cultures.

The context of forced displacement in chapter 7 is what we know as chronic homelessness in the United States. Here we explore the risk to interhuman relationship that is its result. Published narratives of persons without home and those in a transitional housing facility put a practical face on homelessness and help shed light on some of its most complicating factors.These elements, not surprisingly, include the state of affordable housing, addiction, mental illness, incarceration, and other “nontraditional” circumstances. Forced displacement in the form of homelessness most often results in the objectification—whether as objects of need or objects of distain—that leads to overwhelming social exclusion. This threatens relationship in the form of a just community and rejects the moral obligation to care for the displaced other.

Chapter Five looks at the special problems that accompanied poverty, problems made worse by the near total lack of buffers when special difficulties arose. It begins with those who hit rock bottom, particularly the homeless and juvenile beggars (kojiki kozō). Next, it takes up illnesses that attacked the poor with special frequency and force, including STDs, tuberculosis and cholera. There also is a discussion of the isolation hospitals (actually, dying dumps) to which poor people with contagious diseases often were sent. Then come disasters such as floods and fires, which ravaged hinmin areas more often than other parts of the cities. A section on crime examines police data to show that while petty crimes like pickpocketing were high, other types of crime were no higher in hinmin areas than elsewhere. The chapter concludes with the psychic issues that accompanied poverty, including the tendency toward self-blame and the frequency of suicide.

This chapter describes the fire in early January 1960 that destroyed the Lincoln Institute gymnasium and forced the Tigers to play the remainder of their games on the road. As one player recalled: “The coaches didn't want the program to skip a beat. The basketball team was the catalyst for the whole campus, everything revolved around it. The basketball program could not shut down because of a fire.” Dubbed the “Homeless Tigers” by a local newspaperman, the team continued its torrid pace until it traveled to Campbellsville Durham, where future NBA star Clem Haskins sent them home with their second defeat and the realization that “we are not unbeatable.” Still, the Tigers entered the Thirtieth District tournament as the favorite.

Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which Wharton’s prolific, if short-lived, output of World War I writing changed in reaction to external forces. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort and French Ways and their Meaning were influenced by the military authorities, while The Book of the Homeless was spurred on by the need to raise funds for Wharton’s charities. A comparison between The Marne and A Son at the Front, however, reveals that, after the war, Wharton’s perspective shifted, as she came to doubt the moral efficacy of the war effort that she had so intently supported in her writing and philanthropic work.

This chapter is a close reading of Wendy and Lucy, a film loosely based on the depictions of disaster victims and the perceived governmental failing to provide and protect those affected by Hurricane Katrina. It is Reichardt’s political statement about being homeless and female in America. Highlighting distribution details, the chapter explores the necessity of a micro-budget that dictate and contribute to many independent filmmakers’ aesthetics. The chapter discusses her use of “slow cinema,” ecofeminism, and the rejection of a capitalistic and patriarchal “American Dream.” Reichardt highlights the overlooked or marginalized in America: women, the working classes, and the poverty stricken. Influenced by the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, the film addresses current issues of poverty juxtaposed with consumerism in America. Finally building on work of Anita Harris and Sherry Ortner’s analysis of lower class women’s representation in independent film, the chapter situates Wendy and Lucy in relation to post-feminist and third wave feminist concerns.

People with severe mental illness have the types of psychiatric disorders that would have typically placed them in a state mental institution in the era of the asylum. Despite the burden of illness associated with these disorders, opening the doors of the asylum has given many an opportunity to develop productive lives in the community. For others, however, life in the community has posed insurmountable challenges, among which homelessness looms large. This chapter provides an overview of what is known about homeless people with severe mental illness, including prevalence, demographic, clinical, and social characteristics, and risk factors. Three case examples are included to illustrate how multiple dimensions of risk are manifested in the lives of individuals.

The lack of prevention and early intervention services can result in a constant influx of newly homeless people with severe mental illness whose homelessness may eventually become long-term and chronic. Ending homelessness requires opening the “back door” of the homeless services system to housing opportunities for people already homeless, but also closing the “front door” with effective interventions to prevent people from experiencing a first homeless episode. This chapter presents population-level prevention efforts, such as the Federal Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program (HPRP) and the Homelessness Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act (HEARTH), and high-risk prevention efforts such as New York City’s Homebase Program and the Massachusetts Tenancy Preservation Program (TPP). A future strategy for homelessness prevention is discussed.

This chapter takes a look at San Francisco’s homeless men living under the shelter system to assess their experience in more service-rich environments. Here, social workers and counselors tried to help men and women by providing a safe island for therapeutic intervention, but their successes were fragile and often transitory. The homelessness discourse on sickness struggled to hold its own, sliding back toward the magnetic binaries of sin, further compromised by the paucity of long-term funding for the more healthy men exiting transitional programs. The chapter examines the ways that homeless men experienced and understood the ostensibly therapeutic approach within the transitional shelters and related institutions. In particular, it describes the implementation in San Francisco of the Continuum of Care plan, conceived by the 1994 Interagency Council on the Homeless as a holistic safety net encompassing three phases of support to homeless individuals.