The Unequal Homeless

This text focuses on the ways that the life chances of homeless people are very much determined by their positions in race, gender and "family values" hierarchies. The author traces the social and spatial consequences of valuing some kinds of people over others. The Unequal Homeless explores the persistence, as opposed to the occurrence, of homelessness. With this focus, which is absent in most of the contemporary homelessness literature, the author shows how cultural expressions of beliefs about gender difference help to perpetuate the homelessness of particular groups of people in New York City. The people who are persistently homeless in New York are, overwhelmingly, black men. The reason, Passaro contends, is that homelessness is not simply an economic predicament, but a cultural and moral location as well.