Western Regional Advocacy Project

• Publications
  • Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures 
  • Without Housing 2010 Update
  • Cruel, Inhuman, and degrading: Homelessness in the United States by  National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty  

Books

• At Home on the Street: People, Poverty, and a Hidden Culture of Homelessness
• Left Out in America: The State of Homelessness in the United States
• Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives
• Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages
  • Companion Website: The Village Collaborative
• The Poverty Industry - The Exploitation of America's Most Vulnerable Citizens
• Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
• The Poor Among Us - A History of Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City
• Down & out, on the Road - The Homeless in American History

Inspirational Articles

• Newspaper Stories about Steve Gruetzmacher​​​​
  • New Smyrna Beach woman has no illusions about homeless brother, just love
  • A homeless soul who was loved to the end
• Reaching Out to the Homeless Woman Sleeping on Your Doorstep​
• The Nouveau Poor and the Homeless Elderly

Documentaries

• Frontline: Poor Kids -  In 2012, FRONTLINE spent months following four young children as their families struggled with financial ruin. This documentary revisits the families to see what their lives are like now, offering a powerful, firsthand look at what poverty means to children.
• Frontline: Left Behind in America - Intimate stories of one Rust Belt city’s struggle to recover in the post-recession economy. FRONTLINE and ProPublica report on the economic and social forces shaping Dayton, Ohio, a once-booming city where nearly 35 percent of people now live in poverty.

eCourse

• Faces of Homelessness eCourse (This link is currently broken. Great course, hope it is not permanently down). 

Opinion Editorials

Cardboard Stories

• CNN: The Poor Kids of Silicon Valley
• NYT: Invisible Child - A five part New York Times series about homeless children in New York City
• Million Dollar Murray - Malcolm Gladwell writes about a homeless former Marine who ran up nearly one million dollars in public costs over a ten year period in his hometown of Reno, NV.  In this essay, Gladwell argues that problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than they are to manage.
• What Homelessness is Really Like - One student's experience taking the Homeless Challenge
• The Guardian: 'I am well-spoken and not an addict': how homelessness can happen to anyone
• Washington Post: The best way to reach homeless kids is rarely used

Orlando homeless reveal facts about themselves... More videos at ​rethinkhomelessness.org

Essays on Homelessness

• Stray Dogs and Homeless Persons — In Brazil and in the United States;  J.M. Jordan
• University of Oregon's Narratives of Homelessness

Criminalization of Homelessness 

• No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities - The Definitive report on homelessness in America prepared by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty
• Searching Out Solutions: Constructive Alternatives to the Criminalization of Homelessness
• Justice Department Brief to Address the Criminalization of Homelessness
• Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness
• Huffington Post stories on the criminalization of homelessness
• Justice Department Blog:  Poverty is Not a Crime
• Justice Department Fact Sheet:  A Cycle of Incarceration: Prison, Debt and Bail Practices
• SB-867: The Push to Decriminalize Homelessness in California
• Homeless Advocates Fight For Right to Rest in Denver 

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Housing First

• What is Housing First?
• Mother Jones Magazine article about how Utah has decreased homelessness by 72% in the past nine years
• Jon Stewart and The Daily Show takes on Housing First
• Pat LaMarche Blog: Housing First Doesn't Work: The Homeless Need Community Support
• LA Times Editorial: A new plan to end California’s sad state of homelessness
• Eugene, Oregon's Radical Solution to Homelessness: A Bare-Bones Shed Village

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Continuum of Care Model

The image to the right illustrates a Continuum of Care (CoC) model (also referred to as a staircase or linear model) for homeless intervention.

Where the Housing First model seeks to place homeless persons into permanent housing immediately without first requiring treatment for substance addiction or mental illness, the CoC model requires some sort of stabilization and treatment before permanent housing is be provided.

The following paper compare the Housing First and CoC housing models:

• Staircases, Elevators and Cycles of Change: ‘Housing First’ and Other Housing Models for Homeless People with Complex Support Needs

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​Effective Services for Substance Misuse and Homelessness in Scotland 

• Introduction
• The Links between Homelessness and Substance Misuse
• Service responses to substance misuse and homelessness​

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Other

Documentary: Life in a Florida Homeless Camp

• Inocente Documentary - an intensely personal and vibrant coming of age documentary about a young artist’s fierce determination to never surrender to the bleakness of her surroundings.
• Facing Homelessness in Seattle​
• The Eugene, Oregon, Homeless Action Coalition Facebook Page
• National Coalition for the Homeless: Hate Crimes and Violence against People Experiencing Homelessness
• International, 2016 Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Design Excellence
  • Sheltering Those in Need: Architects Confront Homelessness  - An essay contest for undergraduate architectural students. Their website contains some very moving slide shows depicting homelessness with a global perspective.
  • Read the winning essays from previous year's competitions 
    • ​2015
    • 2014

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​TED Talk: How architectural innovations migrate across borders

"As the world's cities undergo explosive growth, inequality is intensifying. Wealthy neighborhoods and impoverished slums grow side by side, the gap between them widening. In this eye-opening talk, architect Teddy Cruz asks us to rethink urban development from the bottom up. Sharing lessons from the slums of Tijuana, Cruz explores the creative intelligence of the city's residents and offers a fresh perspective on what we can learn from places of scarcity."