Overview

In Better Must Come, Matthew D. Marr reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Marr, who has conducted fieldwork in U.S. and Japanese cities for over two decades, followed the experiences of thirty-four people as they made use of transitional housing services and after they left such programs. This comparative ethnography is groundbreaking in two ways-it is the first book to directly focus on exits from homelessness in American or Japanese cities, and it is the first targeted comparison of homelessness in two global cities. Marr argues that homelessness should be understood primarily as a socially generated, traumatic, and stigmatizing predicament, rather than as a stable condition, identity, or culture. He pushes for movement away from the study of ""homeless people"" and ""homeless culture"" toward an understanding of homelessness as a condition that can be transcended at individual and societal levels. Better Must Come prescribes policy changes to end homelessness that include expanding subsidized housing to persons without disabilities and experiencing homelessness chronically, as well as taking broader measures to address vulnerabilities produced by labor markets, housing markets, and the rapid deterioration of social safety nets that often results from neoliberal globalization.

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9780801453380

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Reviews

Tracking the exiting process among the homeless ethnographically, longitudinally, and comparatively in Los Angeles and Tokyo, Matthew D. Marr advances a more holistic understanding of how homelessness is created, sustained, and alleviated by focusing on how the different contexts in which homelessness is embedded interact locally, nationally, and globally. This contextual, multilevel approach challenges popular neoliberal, individual-deficits, and medical-model approaches to homelessness. In doing so, it constitutes a big step forward in understanding the dynamics of homelessness, particularly the exiting process. Better Must Come provides a penetrating and most welcome addition to the social science and policy literature on homelessness and is a must-read for those interested in how and why some homeless transition out of the condition and others do not. -David A. Snow, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, coauthor of Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People In Better Must Come, Matthew D. Marr fashions a useful corrective to much contemporary work on homelessness, and he does so in a readable, well-organized, and approachable way. His originality, thoroughness, and commitment to getting his account right and doing justice to a multilevel analysis are impressive. -Kim J. Hopper, Columbia University, author of Reckoning with Homelessness

Author Information

Matthew D. Marr is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida International University.

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