Linda Martin’s Reviews > Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco > Status Update

I'm in the middle of chapter 7 - "The Old Runaround: Class Cleansing in San Francisco" ...

Just finished reading Chapter 6, "The Homeless Archipelago" - about the system of services provided to homeless people, and why these services are often useless as they don't fit the situations of the people they are trying to serve. Only 68 more pages in the readable sections of the book (excluding notes and index).

I'm reading chapter 5, "The New Hobos," which is mainly about recycling and possibly other means of self-support. The author became an expert on recycling from a sociological standpoint, observing the types of homeless people who are drawn to this industry. Very few were women, and she profiled them. I was touched by her life story of Willie showing his lifelong struggles to stay employed and housed.

Still reading chapter 4 - "Word on the Street" - it is pretty interesting. I'm reading 10+ pages daily. Today I read about how the homeless view the trope of the homeless Vietnam veteran and "sick talk" as a reason for being on the streets, ie: addicted, mentally ill. She includes details of conversations she had with homeless men while collecting information for this ethnography.

I finished the chapter on Moorings (locations in the city where the homeless men congregated) and now am in a chapter called Word on the Street. As I understand it this is about how the homeless men feel about their reasons for being homeless. I just started the chapter today. This is chapter 4 out of 7 and I'm 1/3 of the way through the book. (Some pages at the back are notes and index. The text ends at 290.)

Things are going well with this reading project I've taken on. It is a scholarly ethnography and out of the range of nonfiction I'd normally choose to read, but since it is about homeless in San Francisco, I really wanted to know what it says. Right now I'm reading a chapter on places the SF homeless chose to sleep... notably, the Tenderloin district where a lot of homeless shelters and soup kitches exist.

I stumbled through the first two scholarly chapters of this ethnography and am now in chapter three, reading about "moorings," in other words, the SF neighborhoods the homeless are commonly found. Right now I'm reading about the Tenderloin, a place I've had a little experience with. I never lived in that section of SF but I do remember it, too well.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through chapter two. Ten pages a day of this is about all I can take. This is an interesting chapter about the history of poverty in Europe and the USA... still it is written in a scholarly style, so not easy reading. Methods and philosophies on helping the poor and homeless have changed over the last 6 centuries though there's never been a really good solution.

Chapter one kept my interest fairly well while it combined information about the author's project, her personal life and the men she studied in her ethnographic efforts to understand them better. Toward the end of the chapter, however, she started discussing the Moynihan Report re: dysfunctional black family structures and comparing with the work of other sociologists. That was TMI for me... good for scholars though.

This book is 290 pages of text and the rest consists of notes and index. It is scholarly, written by a sociologist, and detailed, with small print. I intend to read ten pages each day I read from it. There are occasionally words I need to look up. Overall I think I'm getting a good education from the book and I'm impressed by the sociologist's relationships with the 38 homeless men she studied and worked with.