Learn About Housing Inequality Franco Vitella Housing insecurity, homelessness, wealth, and all those things tied to money, social mobility, and the American dream all come back to one thing: the structures we live in (or don’t live in), who owns those structures, and how we leverage our ability to live with some comfort to further ourselves. Of course, many in the United States do not receive the basic comfort of having a safe place to call home. According to endhomelessness. org, there were 580,466 people experiencing homelessness in the United States in January 2020. The books listed here, all available from the Toledo Lucas County Public Library explore some of the causes of homelessness and home insecurity. Evicted: Poverty and Profi t in the American City by Matthew Desmond Sociologist Matthew Desmond explores how evictions – many of them wrongful – place millions of people at an economic disadvantage and is often a direct cause of poverty. Following eight Milwaukee families struggling with their housing situation, Desmond reveals how for anybody without stable housing, many other parts of life begin to unravel. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Katheryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer Do Something for Nothing: Seeing Beneath the Surface of Homelessness, Through the Simple Act of a Haircut by Joshua Coombes In 2015, Joshua Coombes was working in a London salon and decided to take to the streets and offer free haircuts to people experiencing homelessness that he encountered. This book chronicles his use of social media to amplify those people’s stories and the simple acts of kindness that can generate acceptance and end the shame stigma associated with homelessness. The 2021 poverty line for a family of four is $26,500, according to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That’s an income of slightly more than $72 per day. However, many people in poverty survive on incomes far less than that. Edin and Shaefer document the struggles of people living in extreme, almost unimaginable poverty. Toxic Inequality: How America’s Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future by Thomas M. Shapiro In Toxic Inequality Thomas Shapiro explores how since the Great Recession the standard of living for most Americans has either stagnated or decline. A widening wealth gap, inequality in access to housing, the structure of neighborhoods, and more, has created an Page 9 inequality crisis causing damage to health, opportunity, and the futures of those living with a lack of assets. The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans – and How We Can Fix It by Dorothy A. Brown Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What To Do About It by Richard V. Reeves Dream Hoarders explores the American progression into a class based society where a select top 1% of earners concentrate the majority of wealth while the rest of Americans have seen their incomes stagnate. The book documents how access to money impacts all aspects of living: education, housing, health care, and how generational wealth (or lack of it) is setting up a perpetual system of inequality. Many of the inequalities in housing are tied to the tax system, and Dorothy Brown’s book exposes how the poor and working class often pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than wealthy counterparts and how in many instances, this impacts Black Americans more than white.
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