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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.

As I write this book, statistics show that there is an increasing housing shortage that has been projected, by 2025, to leave a third of the global urban population living in substandard housing or going without essentials to pay for their housing. Homelessness is an increasing problem worldwide. In Britain, where the fieldwork drawn on throughout this book was conducted, the latest available statistics show that rough sleeping rose by 31 per cent between autumn 2014 and autumn 2015. In the United States, the number of people living in severely overcrowded households has risen by 67 per cent since the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis triggered the recession of 2007. If we add to this data the rising number of people who are being forcibly displaced from their homes by war and other violence, the need to study how homelessness materializes and shapes the world around us becomes more urgent. As a child growing up by the sea in Devon, a rural county in the south-west of England, I initially encountered homelessness in two ways: the first was while on a rare shopping trip to Plymouth to buy school uniform in 1986. I was 8 years old. It was raining and the post-war architecture loomed greyer than usual. A man sitting on the pavement huddled his dog close to him, their heads down. I asked my mum what he was doing. ‘He’s homeless. Poor man! Don’t stare,’ she said. Her words rang in my ears as I tried, but failed, to conceive of having no home. The second encounter was more cheerful. I grew up in a house by the River Avon.5 When the tide is out, the riverbed becomes a mudflat, and in July and August it is green with samphire. A tramp called Albert, his yellow oilskins and bushy white beard making him seem to me a real-life Captain Birdseye, could be seen collecting samphire from the riverbed every summer until he died. A bench has since been erected in his memory. Albert was homeless too, but in a different, older way than the man I remember from Plymouth.

At the start of this book I offered examples of how archaeological knowledge and skills are being applied in ways that are socially useful and relevant to contemporary society. Building on what Holtorf and Fairclough (2013) term the ‘New Heritage’, I want to go further to suggest that some participatory cultural heritage work might explicitly set out to function as a therapeutic social intervention with marginalized communities. I will call this Applied Heritage. Before I outline what Applied Heritage could conceivably comprise I want to look more closely at the findings and results of the Homeless Heritage project. In the first part of this chapter I unpack how material culture relates to and stimulates memories which shape perceptions and may be useful in aiding the reconstruction of identities following experiences of marginalization or trauma. Following this, I will look at the negative impact that memories can have for populations who feel ‘out of place’ in the physical environments in which they are forced to exist. I examine several ways in which a cultural heritage lens can be shown to have been useful in addressing some of the challenges first experienced in engaging people on the Homeless Heritage project. The second part of this chapter looks at how an archaeological approach to contemporary homelessness was useful in identifying how historic attitudes to homelessness, which were enshrined in policies intended to deal with vagrancy, continue to haunt current homeless legislation. Archaeologist Michael Shanks has observed that ‘a key component of archaeological thinking is . . . personal standpoint, in a context of sometimes considerable state investment in heritage and stewardship of the remains of the past’. The Homeless Heritage project sought to document multiple ‘personal standpoints’ which often directly contravened those memories of the past preferred and pushed by the state. As we saw in the brief history of the development of homelessness as a social status offered in Chapter 4, states have increasingly conflated homelessness and associated social deprivation with criminality.

From primary prevention to end-of-life care, AIDS psychiatry can make significant contributions to preventing risk behaviors and HIV transmission, mitigating suffering, and improving adherence to risk reduction and medical care. Early in the epidemic, stigma and discrimination magnified suffering and excluded persons known to have HIV and AIDS from many settings in the United States and throughout the world. Such treatment of persons with AIDS was described (Cohen, 1989) as a new form of discrimination called “AIDSism.” As we approach the end of the third decade of the HIV pandemic, in most countries education, training, and experience have mitigated AIDSism, and persons with HIV and AIDS are now seen in varieties of medical and nonmedical settings. The multimorbid medical and psychiatric illnesses associated with HIV infection have complicated the care of persons with HIV and AIDS. A primary care guideline for the care of persons with HIV is available in print (Aberg et al., 2009) and online and is updated regularly at: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/page/cid/IDSAguidelines.html. AIDS psychiatrists, psychosomatic medicine psychiatrists, as well as child, adult, and geriatric psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are in a unique position to intervene and provide both preventive and treatment interventions for children, adolescents, and adults who are vulnerable to, infected with, or affected by HIV infection. Psychiatrists generally make long-term and trusting relationships with their patients and take complete histories including sexual histories and substance use histories. Primary physicians, pediatricians, obstetricians, and HIV specialists as well as parents and teachers may also have unique opportunities to intervene throughout the life cycle. In this chapter, we provide a list of settings where educational opportunities abound and can lead to an improved understanding of how to prevent HIV transmission. These settings are summarized in Table 1.1. Since a full description of every setting with potential for intervention is beyond the scope of this chapter, we provide more specific descriptions of settings where providing education and easy access to testing, condoms, and drug and alcohol treatment can be therapeutic and lifesaving.

We have defined and discussed the nature of various notions of recovery, grappled with the implications of a recovery vision for mental health system transformation, and begun to draw the outlines of a transformed system. Now we can turn to the question of how such services and supports can actually be offered to people who need them. Here we propose what we call the recovery guide model. Analogous to the role currently played by case management, the recovery guide model is an organizing vehicle by which practitioners can offer a range of services and supports to people, either directly or through others. As with case management, the intensity, scope, focus, and duration of a recovery guide’s work with a person will depend on that person’s needs, preferences, life circumstances, and goals at a given point in his or her unique recovery journey. In this chapter we describe the basic aims, tenets, and tools of this approach. First, though, we offer a brief review of advances in mental health case management that preceded and led up to the concept of recovery guides, including the present recognition that, in a recovery-oriented system of care, people with serious mental illness can no longer be considered “cases” that others manage (Everett & Nelson, 1992). With the failure of a combination of Thorazine and psychotherapy to achieve the aims of deinstitutionalization (Johnson, 1992), case management became the predominant service that mental health systems offered their clients with serious mental illness (Sledge, Astrachan, Thompson, Rakfeldt, & Leaf, 1995). In addition to being inadequately funded, community-based systems of care that were developed to enable people with serious mental illness to leave state hospitals were fragmented and uncoordinated “non-systems” of care (Hoge, Davidson, Griffith, & Jacobs, 1998). As it was practically impossible for people seeking care to navigate these complex and unintegrated health and social service systems on their own, the case manager role was created to identify and coordinate the provision of services to meet their multiple needs in the community (Hoge, Davidson, Griffith, Sledge, & Howenstine, 1994; Sledge et al., 1995). Case managers’ primary responsibility was to assess people’s needs, link them to services, and monitor their service use and outcomes.

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.