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Reviewed by:
  • Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco
  • Bill O’Grady
Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010)

Since the late 1970s homelessness in North America has grown substantially. Over this period research has not only documented the extent to which homelessness has increased, but has offered a range of explanations that purport how to make sense of the phenomenon. According to Gowan, these explanations can be categorized into three categories – “sin talk,” “sick talk” and “system talk” – which will be further explained below. In many respects her rich and extremely well written ethnography is organized around these particular constructions.

Grounded in an astonishing 1,700 hours of fieldwork carried out in San Francisco between the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, Gowan’s book follows the lives of a group of homeless men, mainly African American. The book is comprised of three parts, contains seven chapters, and is informed by an ethnographic discourse analysis. Cowan adopts discourse analysis because it “opens a path around social science’s interminable tussle between the concept of a self-reproducing culture of poverty and the nearly as old counter argument that deviant practices among the poor represent common sense adaptations to difficult circumstances.” As a way of by-passing this apparent worn out debate, Gowan’s text is intended to reveal how “competing discourses on poverty and homelessness affect poor people themselves, organizing and defining their existence and leading them to present themselves in archetypal terms upon the stage of the street” (xx).

Chapter 1 is an excellent review of the key shifts that have taken place in responses to poverty and homelessness in the United States, mainly from the New Deal to today. Most interesting about [End Page 212] this chapter is the claim that the anti-homelessness movement is now a victim of its own success. The growth of emergency shelters and drug rehabilitations programs, within a context of little government intervention and a charity ideology, has_institutionalized_the problem of homelessness, doing little to prevent it. Gowan goes so far as to say that even in more professionalized, non-secular shelters, the homeless are treated in patronizing and disrespectful ways. Moreover, the growth of the emergency shelter system movement has not, contrary to expectations, given rise to affordable housing. This claim applies equally well to the situation in Canada.

It is now well known that the homeless are a heterogeneous population, and the homeless in San Francisco are no exception. The street people that Gowan spent a considerable amount of time with were recyclers. Perhaps the most interesting and perceptive parts of the book focus on men who walk the streets of San Francisco daily with shopping carts in tow, collecting various recyclable materials which are then taken to depots in exchange for small amounts of cash. Interestingly, Gowan argues that this was the group of homeless men who were the most likely to adopt a ‘system analysis’ to explain their poverty, pointing to lack of affordable housing and decent employment opportunities. After all, the recyclers came to define their lives in terms of the work they did. Being engaged in physically demanding work which resulted in modest financial rewards led to the creation of occupational identity, as opposed to a homeless identity. Thus, unlike other homeless people in the city who were caught up in the shelter/drug rehabilitation system and came to understand their homelessness in terms of sick talk, blaming mental health problems and employing addiction language, or through sin talk, blaming the hustlers (drug dealers and petty criminals) for their lack of homes, the recyclers believed that it was not their fault that they were homeless. At the same time, however, they also felt that there were zero credible options available to them in order to get off the streets. Such findings will be of interest to readers familiar with the literature on class consciousness.

In other sections of the book the author does a fine job linking together the lived experiences of homeless men in San Francisco with a number of important issues that have been associated with urban poverty and homelessness, including policing, incarceration...

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