Homelessness in Urban America --

Homelessness in Urban America -- and the corresponding legacy of crack cocaine, the high rents, and social disenfranchisement of minorities

To be homeless in urban America is to live in a state of extreme danger, poverty, and physical precariousness. Both the authors Mitchell Duneier and Christopher Jencks portray a so-called urban underclass, laid low by the legacy of the drug crack cocaine, and other corresponding social factors such as depression, disillusionment with societal and conventional familiar structures, and the dearth of affordable housing in the urban locations the authors study. However, while Jencks' book the Homeless has a more sociological and statistical point-of-view, stating that crack was on of the contributing measurable factors that led to the rise in homelessness Duneier's book focuses more on street culture in general, and relies many on anecdotes of the street sellers of books in Greenwich Village.

Books were one of the few things that can be sold -- legally -- without a license in New York City, because of first amendment protections. During his anecdotal sociology, Duneier became very much a part of this environment as a participant, not as a tabulator of data like Jencks, and Duneier even taught a course with one of the sellers later on, and returned to work there as a "general assistant" and "magazine vendor and scavenger" for about one year, while finishing his own manuscript. (Duneier, p. 8) He also observed how many of the sellers developed almost fatherly relationships "with many young black men" from the poor boroughs of New York City who stopped by the stalls to browse and chat, likening the seller's role to the function of the ghetto "old head" of yesteryear but one "located squarely in the new economy," whose "presence emphasizes that gang leaders and drug dealers are not the only alternative" ways of life. (Duneier, pp. 37, 33, 40)

In other words, simply because one lives homeless on the street does not mean that one has to be a drug addict, even if one may find one's self in poor circumstances and surrounded by drugs. Given the extremity of their situation of homelessness and drug addition to cheap and potent substances such as crack, Duneier asked his reader and himself, how do vendors "have the ingenuity" to "live in a moral order" in "the face of exclusion and stigmatization on the basis of race and class?" And how did their acts "intersect with a city's mechanisms to regulate its public spaces?" (SW, p. 9). Duneier asserts that the homeless have their own unique culture and moral order, in contrast to Jencks who says they do not and cannot, given their physical and psychological circumstances, disseminating from their addiction and societal estrangement, even while Jencks acknowledges openly many people to chose their homeless state.

Duneier suggests that homelessness and drug addiction is a symptom of the poverty, despair, and alienation these men feel. Perhaps an almost rational response to such social mechanisms of oppression. Choosing to sell books on the street in a way that is protected by law and the police allows one to live within a subculture -- while Jencks sees addiction as a cause of the alienation and despair of the men chronicled in Sidewalk, and does not see the subculture produced by homeless men as a truly functional one.

In defense of his thesis, Duneier chronicles what he calls the patterns of cooperation as well as of competition among sellers, suggesting that the men form a community and can even serve mentoring roles for the larger community, outside of the immediate world of the street. He challenges the later policing campaigns that drove many of these once-protected individuals from their spaces, stating that the sellers of books offer rich and poor customers, the "expectation of continued discussion," and "a symbol of those values necessary to live in accordance to ideals of self-worth" (Duneier, pp. 19, 38, 34).

All but one of the sellers were once drug addicts -- former drug addicts, they stress to the author. Some say they "made a choice to live on the streets," rather than go back to a society that brutalized them with the demands of war, poverty, and racism -- and eventually, drug addiction and prison time. (Duneier, pp. 23, 49, 54) Rather than an assumption of control by a drug or by 'the man' they see selling books on the street as an assumption of control over their own lives. Rejected by society, they create their own tenuous economic and social negotiation of homelessness and a certain moral rigor, in eschewing the drugs that once enslaved them.

There is a sad presence of those who are still addicted to crack in the book, but they do not work as vendors, rather they have a more peripheral presence as assistants. (Duneier, p.80) Duneier also attempts to downplay other discomforting aspects of the life he chronicles, such as its all-male composition, and the threatening behavior of homeless men towards women in the neighborhood. The eschewing of females shows the limits of focusing only on one 'slice' of a population, in mistaking a small, specific pool for the entirely.