41 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia EubanksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The coordinated entry system in Los Angeles is “touted as the Match.com of homeless services” (84). However, Eubanks argues that this infrastructural system poses a dangerous erosion of privacy because it “collects, stores, and shares some astonishingly intimate information about unhoused people. It catalogs, classifies, and ranks their traumas, coping mechanisms, feelings, and fears” (85).
First Eubanks goes over the long and difficult history of the poorhouse in downtown Los Angeles. In the early 1920s, Skid Row was incredibly diverse, but after WWII, as white Los Angeles residents protested public housing initiatives, available housing on Skid Row was decimated. During 1980s deindustrialization, many Black residents who lost their jobs moved to Skid Row. South LA has experienced higher rates of homelessness and crowded housing since. For a while, social segregation preserved the neighborhood, but in the past decade, younger and wealthier workers have gentrified the area. The slow decline of housing for the poor has never stopped: “Since 1950, more than 13,000 units of low-income housing have been removed from Skid Row” (90)—enough to house all those currently without a home who live there. Eubanks provides this history in order to draw a connection between poorhouses and the modern equivalent—what used to be flophouses and tenements are now tent cities.
Books on Justice & Injustice
View Collection
Books on U.S. History
View Collection
Business & Economics
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Common Reads: Freshman Year Reading
View Collection
Contemporary Books on Social Justice
View Collection
Equality
View Collection
Political Science Texts
View Collection
Politics & Government
View Collection
Poverty & Homelessness
View Collection
Science & Nature
View Collection
Sociology
View Collection