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D. Bradford Hunt, Daniel R. Kerr. Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio., The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 5, December 2012, Pages 1618–1619, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1618
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Like most Rust Belt cities in the United States, Cleveland staggered under the combined blows of racially driven redevelopment, deindustrialization, and depopulation after 1950. While the outlines of urban decline are familiar, Daniel R. Kerr approaches Cleveland's struggles from the vantage point of the city's homeless, a new perspective that offers a significant contribution to urban history.
This book seeks to restore agency to Cleveland's homeless in the twentieth century, defined as the “marginalized working class” (p. 8) who were (and still are) “unhoused” due to a lack of steady income and access to affordable housing. They looked to private agencies and the state for assistance but experienced humiliations which they resisted at every turn. Kerr rejects the commonly held idea that mental illness, deinstitutionalization, and addiction played significant roles in homelessness, and instead he points to a long history of demeaning social welfare policies, unfair labor practices, and misguided slum clearance programs. This history has striking continuities through the twentieth century; Kerr connects efforts to control the working poor in the 1920s with homeless policies that re-emerged in the 1980s.
