Homelessness
Rates of homelessness have been rising since the 1980s due to factors including the loss of psychiatric hospital beds and the shortage of affordable housing (e.g., elimination of many public housing units, forced closure of most Single Room Occupancies). This is a housing crisis intersecting with mental health problems and other vulnerabilities.
Surviving Extreme Heat Without A Home
The Alliance to End Homelessness publishes a State of Homelessness with an interactive state map. In 2023, over 3,000 CT residents slept outside (unsheltered) on any given night.
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State of Homelessness: 2024 Edition"Record-High Homeless Counts. A record-high 653,104 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2023. This is more than a 12.1 percent increase over the previous year."
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Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR)The AHAR is a HUD report to the U.S. Congress that provides nationwide estimates of homelessness, including information about the demographic characteristics of homeless persons, service use patterns, and the capacity to house homeless persons.
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Where Then Shall We Go? | A Backyard Neighborhood for the Unhoused in New HavenDocumentary about a backyard community of people experiencing homelessness that forms in New Haven in 2022.
Beyond the Numbers: Most people who are homeless move in and out of housing, while some people are chronically homeless. What is it like to experience homelessness? Deep ethnographic dives help to understand.
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Housing Justice Oral History ProjectThe Picture the Homeless Oral History Project documents an organizing approach that supported the collective political leadership of homeless New Yorkers over a twenty year period. The interviews and archive combine to reveal the impact of that work on members, staff, allies, and the social justice movement and it places the struggles of homeless New Yorkers within a broader movement history.
Podcasts
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Braving the street : the anthropology of homelessness (Print Book)
The authors, anthropologists from the U.S.A. and Canada, offer us an analysis of homelessness that is grounded in anthropological research in North America and throughout the world. Book can be ordered through interlibrary loan. -
Cities and Homelessness: Essays and Case Studies on Practices, Innovations and Challenges (Ebook)
This collection of essays covers case studies, innovations, practices and policies of municipalities coping with homelessness in the 21st century. -
Reckoning with Homelessness (Print Book)
"Part ethnography, part memoir; part chronicle, part social analysis; and reversing the author s own characterization decidedly more poetry than plumbing, Reckoning with Homelessness weaves scholarship, fieldwork, and advocacy into an elegant accounting of the unhoused. Book can be ordered through interlibrary loan. -
Shelter blues: sanity and selfhood among the homeless (Print Book)
Desjarlais shows us not anonymous faces of the homeless but real people. Shelter Blues is an innovative portrait of people residing in Boston's Station Street Shelter. Book can be ordered through interlibrary loan. -
Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness (Ebook)
Combining institutional ethnography and community-based research, Youth Work is an examination of the troubling experiences of young people living outside the care of parents or guardians, as well as of the difficulties of the frontline workers who assist them.
