Homing Devices: The Poor as Targets of Public Housing Policy and Practice

by Marilyn M. Thomas-Houston, Mark Schuller Northern Illinois University, Elizabeth Beaton, Rae Bridgman, Ernest Chui

Overview

Homing Devices is a collection of ethnographies that address the central problem affecting not only the United States but also other developed and developing nations around the globe-affordable housing. These ethnographies cut across national and cultural borders, offering a diverse look at housing policies and practices as well as addressing the problems associated with providing or obtaining affordable housing. The studies incorporate perspectives of both policymakers and recipients and as such provide comparative insight into public housing policy programs and practices based on qualitative research. The collected experts provide an analysis of such problems as displacement, resettlement, policy implementation, collaborative planning, exclusionary practices, environmental racism, and silencing the voices of dissent. Editors Schuller and thomas-houston have assembled a strong volume that offers a fresh approach to discussing policy while bringing the particular problem of housing to the forefront in a way that will appeal to scholars of anthropology and social science, governmental policy departments, and activists from the general public across the nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739114605
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	04/27/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

marilyn m. thomas-houston is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies and former Interim Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Florida. Mark Schuller was formerly the organizer for the St. Paul Tenants Union. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology Department at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Zeroing (in on) the Powerless: Human Rights and Housing Chapter 3 Re-Envisioning Public Housing: HOPE VI and the U.S. Federal Government's Role in Public Housing Provision Chapter 4 Lead, Arsenic, PAHs, and the Relocation of Home Part 5 Devices of Power: Governing Through Housing Chapter 6 Separate and Unequal: Housing Policy in Action on the Periphery of Our Nation's Capital Chapter 7 "We Came With Truth": Black Women's Struggles Against Public Housing Policy Part 8 Homing In: Power of the State to Define Reality Chapter 9 Building the Glass Box: Developing Public Housing in Suburban Areas Chapter 10 The Emporer's New Clothes: The Rhetoric of Empowerment and the Reality of Relocation Part 11 More than Targets: Marginal People Changing Policy Chapter 12 'We are the First Youth': Participatory Planning in Transitional Housing from Suburban Homeless Youth Chapter 13 Jamming the Meatgrinder World: Lessons Learned from the Tenants Organizing in St. Paul Chapter 14 Expansion and Exclusion in Hong Kong's Squatter Resettlement Program: The Ratchet of Exclusion into Temporary and Interim Housing

Editorial Reviews

An excellent synthesis of detailed ethnographic research and social critique of current housing policy in the U.S. and globally.... Demonstrates how an ethnographic understanding of the lives of those who live in public housing can generate (produce) better and more equitable policy decisions.

Setha Low

This book is a useful toolkit for anyone concerned about the human right to housing, the current war on the poor, and organizing/empowering low income people. Readers will gain new insights into action strategies at the local level.

Michael Stoops