Excitement is building for the 6th Annual NHPF Symposium One Paycheck Away from Homelessness: Building Popular Support for Affordable Housing this October 19 in Washington, DC.
Our Top 4 Picks in this Quarter Make this summer an informed one! Check out these important books, fascinating listens, and a must-see art exhibit covering affordable housing, homelessness, and social justice. 1. In White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality , Sheryll Cashin, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University, demonstrates how durable and pervasive anti-Black rhetoric has been in American thought from the days of Thomas Jefferson to the era of Donald Trump. The ill-begotten notion of Black inferiority, she argues, led to segregation: White and Black space, an idea made iconic by the urban ghetto, an island of inopportunity defined largely by race. 2. Now available as an audiobook, Los Angeles Times’ affordable housing writer Conor Dougherty’s Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream looks at the acute shortage of affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area—a topic you might expect to read about dutifully, not for pleasure. But Dougherty has a gift for making complex policy problems both clear and compellingly readable, and for rendering his characters with unsentimental sympathy. 3. Invisible Words is an exhibition of homeless signs, curated as simple, compelling art that showcases a range of emotions from embarrassment and shame, desperation and anger, to humor and political insight. The words are raw, emotional and some, magnificently poetic. The presentation of the signs in a gallery setting is in stark contrast to the sidewalks and underpasses across the United States where the signs were purchased. The exhibition is intended to be “an exercise in empathy,” an opportunity for the viewer to study the words in a new light, void of the often awkward interaction when their author is present. 4. Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem by senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, Stephen Eide, digs into why the same cities with the worst homelessness crises rank among America’s most successful. One of the crisis’ more perplexing features is how cities that have met with so much success with respect to economic development, crime, and public education have failed to even ease their homelessness crisis, much less end it. In Homelessness in America, Eide examines the history, governmental and private responses, and future prospects of this intractable challenge.
THE NHPF QUARTERLY JULY 2022
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