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Homelessness and New Urban Poverty

Homelessness and New Urban Poverty. A Brief History of Homelessness in North America. Skid Row mid 19 th century Hooverville The Great Depression 193os Service Dependent Ghetto 1970 - present. Causes of Homelessness. Social disaffiliation Shortages of low cost housing

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Homelessness and New Urban Poverty

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  1. Homelessness and New Urban Poverty

  2. A Brief History of Homelessness in North America • Skid Row mid 19th century • Hooverville The Great Depression 193os • Service Dependent Ghetto 1970 - present

  3. Causes of Homelessness • Social disaffiliation • Shortages of low cost housing • Economic downturn and lack of employment opportunities

  4. Kondratieff Waves

  5. Hoovervilles 1930s Civil War hobos 1870 Service Dependent Ghettos 1970s-present Skid Row Logging mid 19th century

  6. Skid Row mid-19th Century This word arose in the U.S. lumber industry of the early- to mid-19th century.  A skid row was a track made of peeled logs half buried in the ground.  Freshly cut logs were hauled or slid down this "road" as part of the process of transporting them out of the forest.  By the 1920s, skid row, referred to the seedy part of a town where cheap hotels and taverns could be found.  The word still has that sense, along with a figurative one, today. The term was heavily associated with loggers, -- the part of a town where loggers spent a lot of their free time came to be known as skid road.  Loggers were hard-working and hard-living men, and the skid road in most towns was where bars and brothels abounded.

  7. The Hooverville in Seattle, shown here in 1937, was one of many such communities for the homeless created by unemployed workers during the Depression. (Special Collections Division, University of Washington Libraries.)

  8. 1930’S Hooverville’s

  9. Hooverville, Seattle 1937

  10. Donald Francis Roy "Hooverville, a Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle." Roy writes of Hooverville: "From the sandy waste of an abandoned shipyard site, … was swiftly hammered and wired to flower a conglomerate of grotesque dwellings, a Christmas-mix assortment of American junk that stuck together in congested disarray like sea-soaked jetsam spewed on the beach. To honor a distinguished engineer and designer, this unblueprinted , tincanesque, archtecturaloid was named Hooverville." (Herbert Hoover, U. S. president from 1929-1933, was an engineer by profession.)

  11. Skid Row Los Angeles 1980s

  12. Homelessness 1970s-present Tokyo Subway station 1990s New York City 1990s

  13. Factors contributing to homelessness among young black males in Los Angeles 1980s: Loss of low and medium skilled job opportunities 1. De-industrialization and loss of manufacturing jobs 2. Union busting in janitorialservices – switch from hiring blacks to Latinos 3. Cuts to public sector employment

  14. Homelessness: Los Angeles 1990s Photo: Jim Hies

  15. Compared to homeless in the past century, contemporary homeless people… • Have fewer resources • Are more diverse [include young people, single women, consumer survivors, refugees] • Live in more densely built up areas [inner city as opposed to urban fringe] • Concentrate in different part of the city, depending on socio-economic background

  16. Service Dependent Ghetto • Spatial concentration of service dependent populations and the agencies and facilities designed to serve them • groups homes, counselling services, shelters, soup kitchens, job placement and training, drug rehabilitation, drop in centers • Typically located in inner city neighbourhoods • Over the long term contribute to a geography of uneven-ness [underserved poorer suburbs

  17. Rise of the service dependent ghetto • mid 1970s de-institutionalization • support from conservatives who believe large scale institutions are too costly • support from rights advocates who believe • consumer survivors should not be locked up w/o consent • juveniles who are status offenders should not be locked up with juvenile criminals

  18. Suburbanization Inner city decay Availability of Cheap Rental Housing Rise of the Service Dependent Ghetto

  19. Toronto: Shelters and Services

  20. Filtering Strategies of service dependent people • Cheap rental accomodation • availability of squats or ‘marginal’ spaces or prime spaces at marginal times • proximity to services • within range of prime spaces for panhandling/day labour

  21. Responses to Homelessness • The U.S. model: The Revanchist City • The Canadian model: • Supporting Community Partnerships Initiative

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