TRP's Winter Reading List

If you want to understand homelessness, poverty, and housing injustice beyond headlines and stereotypes, start here. Books by those with lived experience. Books by those who have loved ones living it. Books by those who have been in the trenches for years or decades.

These books challenge myths, expose policy failures, and remind us that homelessness is not a personal failure, it is a structural one, and is part of a term project from one of our amazing interns from the fall term, Emma Gambo. Emma created a student advocacy toolkit, collecting information (both quantitative and qualitative) on how students might consider advocating for change - change for a person, or change in a system.

You can check out the whole toolkit here, which includes the following book recommendations from Emma.

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Invisible Child, by Andrea Elliott: A child’s-eye view of homelessness in New York City. Follows Dasani and her family through the child welfare system, poverty, racism, and parental addiction. Reading this changes how you understand homelessness forever.

Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond: Explains why poverty persists in the wealthiest country in the world. Shows how exploitation and policy choices actively create and maintain inequality.

The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein: A definitive history of government-sponsored housing segregation. Explains how redlining and zoning laws shaped today’s racial and economic divides in housing.

There Is No Place for Us, by Brian Goldstone: Focuses on the working homeless. Shows how rising rents, stagnant wages, and gentrification push employed families into homelessness.

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander: Exposes how the criminal legal system continues racial control through mass incarceration, deeply connected to housing instability and poverty.

Evicted, by Matthew Desmond: Follows eight families facing eviction in Milwaukee. Demonstrates how eviction is both a cause and consequence of poverty.

The Big Fix, by Tracey Helton Mitchell: A firsthand account of addiction, homelessness, and recovery. Highlights harm reduction and the failures of punitive drug policy.

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These books have great (and varied) perspectives on the issue of homelessness nationally, and here at home in New England. If you want to learn more about:

• Homelessness as a systemic, not individual, failure

• Housing policy as racial policy

• Poverty as produced by decisions, not destiny

• Stability coming from housing first (and not alone), not punishment

Have a recommendation? Please comment here or when you share!