Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders ─ Homeless in San Francisco

Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders is spectacular ethnography, fearlessly conducted by a 'small, white English woman' among homeless men in San Francisco's roughest neighborhoods. Teresa Gowan's respect for her subjects and her willingness to pitch in with the dirtiest of workudumpster diving, for example-make this a gripping read as well as a powerful call to reassess how America treats its most despised and marginal people.uBarbara Ehrenreich

This elegantly written and clearly analyzed long-term ethnography of homelessness takes off where Righteous Dopefiend ends. Teresa Gowan offers the reader a comprehensive analysis of the full range of survival strategies found on the streets of San Francisco at the turn of the twenty-first century: from dumpsters, divers, recyclers, panhandlers, and triumphantly oppositional petty thieves who pursue heroin and/or crack by all means necessary, to self-blaming addicts bemoaning their failure to adhere to self-help sobriety regimens.uPhilippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect and Righteous Dopefiend

When homelessness reemerged in American cities during the 1980's at levels not seen since the Great Depression, it initially provoked shock and outrage. Within a few years; however, what had been perceived as a national crisis came to be seen as a nuisance, with early sympathies for the plight of the homeless giving way to compassion fatigue and then condemnation Debates around the problem of homelessnessuoften set in terms of sin, sickness, and the failure of the social systemuhave come to profoundly shape: how homeless people survive and make sense of their plights. In Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, Teresa Gowan vividly depicts the lives of homeless men in San Francisco and analyzes the influence of the homelessness industry on the streets, in the shelters, and on public policy.

Teresa Gowan is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota