The homeless men and women represented in this book speak candidly about their plight, its origins, and the many obstacles to escaping it. They discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that Las Vegas’s focus on tourism, indulgence, and diversion offers its homeless residents. This compelling and emotionally charged ethnography counters many of the stereotypes of homeless men and women, revealing the remarkable diversity of their circumstances. It also offers their perspectives on social services and civic attitudes toward homelessness.

What images come to mind when you think of Las Vegas? Mobsters and showgirls, magicians and tigers, multimillion-dollar poker games and prizefights; towering signboards that light up the night in front of ever more spectacular casino hotels. But real people live here, too--over a million today, two million tomorrow. Greater Las Vegas has long been the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. And almost every aspect of its citizens' lives is influenced by the almighty power of the gambling industry. A team of fifteen reporters led by David Littlejohn, together with prize winning photo-journalist Eric Gran, studied the "real" Las Vegas--the city beyond the Strip and Downtown--for the better part of a year. They talked to teenagers (whose suicide and dropout rates frighten parents), senior citizens (many of whom spend their days playing bingo and the slots), Mexican immigrants (who build the new houses and clean the hotels), homeless people and angry blacks, as well as local police, active Christians, city officials, and prostitutes. They looked into the local churches, the powerful labor unions, pawn shops, the real estate boom, defiant ranchers to the north, and dire predictions that the city is about to run out of water. Proud Las Vegans claim that theirs is just a friendly southwestern boomtown--"the finest community I have ever lived in," says Bishop Daniel Walsh, who comes from San Francisco. But their picture of Las Vegas as a vibrant, civic-minded metropolis conflicts with evidence of transiency, rootlessness, political impotence, and social dysfunction. In this close-up investigation of the real lives being led in America's most tourist-jammed, gambling-driven city, readers will discover a Las Vegas very different from the one they may have seen or imagined.

Describes the nature of homelessness, its multiple causes, and its demographic, economic, sociological, and social policy antecedents. Finding the origins of the problem to be social and political rather than economic, Wright (human relations, Tulane) outlines remedies based on existing and modified

Homelessness is a visible problem in big cities, and a largely invisible one in small towns and rural areas. This issue involves serious consequences for those living on the streets, in tent cities, or in their cars. Homeless people deal with unsanitary conditions, crimes inflicted against them, and an array of mental, emotional, and physical health problems. Homelessness affects young and old, single people and entire families, veterans, and LGBTQ+ individuals, among others. This incisive collection of articles examines the myriad issues faced by communities, activists, governments, and private charities when addressing this vulnerable population. Media literacy questions and terms are included to help readers further analyze news coverage and reporting styles.

Provides a sense of the breadth of the emerging trend toward the criminalization of poverty and of its variety of manifestations. Focuses almost exclusively on developments that have occurred in 1994. Includes an appendix on 1994 case law.

Stoner's new book examines the collaboration between the human services and legal professions, as both deal with the complex and interrelated problems of homeless people. In surveying numerous class action lawsuits tried on behalf of the homeless, the author takes up such client-centered issues as rights to housing, minimum standards of health and welfare, education, family preservation, education, and voting. Her book will assist practitioners in their advocacy on behalf of homeless clients, while serving as a text for courses in social policy formulation and implementation.

This edited volume illuminates critical research issues through the particular lens of homelessness, bringing together some of the leading scholars in the field, from an array of disciplines and perspectives, to explore this condition of marginalization and the ethical dilemmas that arise within it. The authors provide insights into the realities and challenges of social research that will guide students, activists, practitioners, policymakers, and service providers, as well as both novice and seasoned researchers in fields of inquiry ranging from anthropology and sociology to geography and cultural studies. Although many texts have explored the subject of homelessness, few have attempted to encapsulate and examine the complex process of researching the issue as a phenomenon unto itself. Professional Lives, Personal Struggles examines the many challenges of conducting ethical research on homelessness, as well as the potential for positive change and transformation, through the deeply personal accounts of scholars and advocates with extensive experience working in the field.

NOW A BROADWAY PLAY STARRING DANIEL RADCLIFFE 'Provocative, maddening and compulsively readable' Maggie Nelson In 2003, American essayist John D'Agata wrote a piece for Harper's about Las Vegas's alarmingly high suicide rate, after a sixteen-year-old boy had thrown himself from the top of the Stratosphere Tower. The article he delivered, 'What Happens There', was rejected by the magazine for inaccuracies. But it was soon picked up by another, who assigned it a fact checker: their fresh-faced intern, and recent Harvard graduate, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment, and beyond the essay's eventual publication in the magazine, was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D'Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction. This book includes an early draft of D'Agata's essay, along with D'Agata and Fingal's extensive discussion around the text. The Lifespan of a Fact is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between 'truth' and 'accuracy', and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. 'A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be' Lydia Davis

"Mean Streets offers, in a single, sustained argument, a theory of the social and economic logic behind the historical development, evolution, and especially persistence of homelessness in the contemporary city. By updating and revisiting thirty years of research and thinking, Don Mitchell explores the conditions that produce and sustain homelessness, and how its persistence relates to the way capital works in the urban built environment. Consequently, he unpacks the structure, meaning, uses, and governance of urban public space. As one reviewer commented, "thinking about the histories under which the homeless have been produced and regulated is vital." Mitchell traces his argument through two sections: a broadly historical overview, followed by an exploration of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence that also expands the discussion beyond the regulation of the homeless and the poor, arguing that this has 'metastasized' to become more general issue, affecting all urbanites"--

Just beyond Las Vegas’s neon and fantasy live thousands of homeless people, most of them men. To the millions of visitors who come to Las Vegas each year to enjoy its gambling and entertainment, the city’s homeless people are largely invisible, segregated from tourist areas because it’s “good business.” Now, through candid discussions with homeless men, analysis of news reports, and years of fieldwork, Kurt Borchard reveals the lives and desperation of men without shelter in Las Vegas. Borchard’s account offers a graphic, disturbing, and profoundly moving picture of life on Las Vegas’s streets, depicting the strategies that homeless men employ in order to survive, from the search for a safe place to sleep at night to the challenges of finding food, maintaining personal hygiene, and finding an acceptable place to rest during a long day on the street. That such misery and desperation exist in the midst of Las Vegas’s hedonistic tourist economy and booming urban development is a cruel irony, according to the author, and it threatens the city’s future as a prime tourist destination. The book will be of interest to social workers, sociologists, anthropologists, politicians, and all those concerned about changing the misery on the street.