By Teresa Gowan. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, xxiv, 368 pp., $24.95 paper)

Reviewed by William Issel, Professor of History Emeritus, San Francisco State University; editor of The Contemporary USA book series, and author of the forthcoming San Francisco Liberal: Politics and Society in "The City" from the Great Depression through the Cold War.

Teresa Gowan, an English sociologist who graduated in American Studies at Manchester University, completed graduate work at UC Berkeley, and now teaches at the University of Minnesota tackles one of San Francisco’s most controversial public policy issues in this well-informed and thought-provoking study. The book is not an abstract academic dissection of "the homeless problem" but is instead a close empathetic narrative account of the daily lives of a sample of the city’s homeless population from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Gowan devoted some 1700 hours to sustained personal interaction (and in some cases friendship) with (mostly) homeless men in the city’s Tenderloin and Dogpatch neighborhoods. Collecting aluminum cans with "pro recyclers" in Dogpatch and hanging out with "hustlers" in the Tenderloin, Gowan developed personal relationships that allowed her, a self-described "small, white English woman" to gain the trust of the people whose stories fill the pages of this marvelous book. The collective biographical portrait that emerges is a complex one, reflecting both the individuality and the variety that Gowan found on the streets of San Francisco.

Compassionate engagement with the city’s homeless population pervades the book, and Gowan identifies a spectrum of behaviors among her informants, from cynical thievery and boastful drug addiction at one extreme to pride in hard work and determined self improvement at the other. One of the many strengths of this illuminating work is Gowan’s determination to acknowledge the self-awareness and rational decision-making capability of those among her informants who themselves attributed their marginal social existence to personal weaknesses. She also gives voice to others among her informants who while admitting that they chose to remain petty criminals (and heroin or crack addicts) also realized the degree to which their African American, Asian American (or Mexican or lower class White) personae had made them targets for stereotyping and discrimination that originated outside their control and limited their options in society.

Gowan analyzes these complexities in the course of developing a critique of local and national attitudes toward, and institutions designed to serve, the homeless. If her approach to fieldwork comes out of the venerable tradition of sympathetic "participant observation" dating to the nineteenth century, her unsympathetic assessment of San Francisco’s (and the nation’s) response to homelessness partakes of a more recent, three-decades old Neo-Marxist tradition of assigning responsibility for a whole litany of urban problems, including homelessness, to an international system of post-industrial capitalist globalization. That argument is developed here with close attention to urban studies theorizing, but it is not analyzed with the attention to historical specificity and social complexity of her compelling ethnographic descriptions. The thesis that the policy reformers and paid workers who operate San Francisco’s homeless "industry" are engaged in (lower) "class cleansing" of the city remains an assertion – provocative but unproven. This criticism does not, however, detract from the overall excellence of this insightful work, which is a highly original contribution to the literature of San Francisco history and is a "must read" for anyone interested in the city’s future.