Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in their Place

The Unequal Homeless explores the persistence, as opposed to the occurrence, of homelessness. With this focus, which is absent in most of the contemporary homelessness literature, the author shows how cultural expressions of beliefs about gender difference help to perpetuate the homelessness of particular groups of people in New York City. The people who are persistently homeless in New York are, overwhelmingly, black men. The reason, Passaro contends, is that homelessness is not simply an economic predicament, but a cultural and moral location as well.