Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People

From back cover: "David Snow and Leon Anderson show us the wretched face of homelessness in late 20th century America in countless cities across the nation.. Through hundreds of hours of interviews, participant observation, and random tracking of homeless people through social service agencies in Austin, Texas, Snow and Anderson reveal who the homeless are, how they live, and why they have ended up on the streets. Debunking current stereotypes of the homeless, 'Down on Their Luck' sketches a portrait of men and women who are highly adaptive, resourceful, and pragmatic. Their survival is a tale of human resilience and determination, not one of frailty and disability.' From Preface: "This book reports on a cross-section of Americans who found themselves homeless and, thus, in the winter of despair. It is a sociological case study of a subculture of street life among the unattached adults, mainly males, who lived in or passed through Austin, Texas, between the fall of 1984 and the summer of 1986. Our primary concern is neither with their demographics or disabilities, the foci of so much that has been written about them, nor with the structural causes of their plight...We address these issues, to be sure, but we focus our attention primarily on life on the streets as it is experienced by the homeless, that is, on their strategies and struggles to subsist from one moment to the next, materially, socially, and psychologically." ***** Contents Include: PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 - Studying the Homeless 2 - A Grounded Typology of Homeless Street People PART TWO: LIFE ON THE STREETS: DAILY ROUTINES AND SURVIVAL STRATEGIES 3 - The Subculture of Street Life 4 - Wage Labor and Institutionalized Assistance 5 - Shadow Work 6 - Tenuous Ties 7 - Salvaging the Self PART THREE: DYNAMICS OF HOMELESSNESS 8 - Pathways to the Street 9 - Homeless Careers