This paper compares two scholarly perspectives on urban homelessness in America: Mitchell Duneier's ethnographic Sidewalk, which focuses on book vendors in New York City's Greenwich Village, and Christopher Jencks' sociological study The Homeless, which analyzes statistical trends across decades. The paper examines how both authors treat crack cocaine, affordable housing shortages, and racial and economic disenfranchisement as contributing factors to homelessness. It contrasts Duneier's view that homeless individuals develop functional moral cultures and communities with Jencks' argument that homelessness reflects individual estrangement from mainstream social structures, ultimately highlighting the tension between structural and individual explanations for urban poverty.
The paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis across two non-fiction scholarly works. Rather than summarizing each book in isolation, the author weaves the two arguments together thematically — on crack cocaine, moral agency, community formation, and housing costs — allowing the contrast to build argumentative momentum. This technique is especially effective in humanities and social science writing when the goal is to reveal underlying theoretical disagreements between scholars.
The paper opens by framing the shared subject (urban homelessness) and immediately distinguishing the two authors' methodologies. It then moves through Duneier's key claims — participant observation, vendor community, moral order, and the limits of his focus — before pivoting to Jencks' comparative statistical approach and his conclusions about crack cocaine, marriage decline, and housing costs. The conclusion synthesizes the structural versus individual tension that runs throughout.
To be homeless in urban America is to live in a state of extreme danger, poverty, and physical precariousness. Both Mitchell Duneier and Christopher Jencks portray a so-called urban underclass, laid low by the legacy of crack cocaine and other corresponding social factors — including depression, disillusionment with societal and conventional familial structures, and the dearth of affordable housing in the urban locations the authors study. While Jencks' book The Homeless takes a more sociological and statistical point of view, arguing that crack cocaine was one of the measurable contributing factors that led to the rise in homelessness, Duneier's book Sidewalk focuses more on street culture in general and relies heavily on anecdotes drawn from the street sellers of books in Greenwich Village, New York City.
Books were one of the few things that could be sold legally without a license in New York City, owing to First Amendment protections. During his anecdotal sociology, Duneier became very much a part of this environment as a participant rather than as a tabulator of data like Jencks. He eventually taught a course with one of the vendors and returned to work there as a "general assistant" and "magazine vendor and scavenger" for approximately 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. Duneier likened the seller's role to the function of the ghetto "old head" of an earlier era, 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 must be a drug addict, even if one finds oneself in poor circumstances and surrounded by drugs. Given the extremity of homelessness and addiction to cheap, potent substances such as crack cocaine, Duneier asked himself and his readers how 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 their acts "intersect with a city's mechanisms to regulate its public spaces." (Duneier, p. 9)
Duneier asserts that the homeless have their own unique culture and moral order. This stands in contrast to Jencks, who argues they do not and cannot, given their physical and psychological circumstances — circumstances that flow from their addiction and societal estrangement, even as Jencks openly acknowledges that many people choose their homeless state.
Duneier suggests that homelessness and drug addiction are symptoms of the poverty, despair, and alienation these men feel — perhaps an almost rational response to mechanisms of social oppression. Choosing to sell books on the street in a legally protected manner allows one to live within a subculture with its own rules and dignity. By contrast, Jencks sees addiction as a cause of the alienation and despair of the men chronicled in Sidewalk, and does not regard the subculture produced by homeless men as a truly functional one.
In defense of his thesis, Duneier chronicles patterns of both cooperation and competition among sellers, suggesting that the men form a genuine community and can even serve mentoring roles beyond the immediate world of the street. He challenges the policing campaigns that later drove many of these once-protected individuals from their spaces, arguing that the book sellers offered rich and poor customers alike 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)
Jencks sees the phenomenon of increasing homelessness not as a symptom of a sick society, but of increasingly maladaptive individual estrangement from a once-healthy society — when individuals lack social and familial connections, they are more apt to fall through the system's cracks. This perspective stands in sharp contrast to Duneier's view, which locates the roots of homelessness in structural forces such as racism, economic exclusion, and the policing of public space. Together, the two works illuminate an enduring tension in the study of urban poverty: whether homelessness is best understood as a failure of individuals to adapt or as the predictable outcome of a society that has failed them.
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