| Homelessness poses an enduring and formidable challenge to 21 st century urban America. Supportive housing appears to represent an effective solution. Dissatisfied with quantitative approaches to studying homelessness, the research employs critical hermeneutics and interpretive anthropology not for the purposes of distinguishing and isolating causality but rather, to better understand the role and value of home in contemporary American life.; The focus of the research is Providence House, a supportive housing program for people with AIDS and other physical disabilities in Oakland, California. The participants in the study while significantly diverse have in common the experience of marginalization by way of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, violence, drug addiction, homelessness, etc. All have found home at Providence House and have much to share about the experience of rebuilding broken lives. Their stories are of struggle, endurance and hopefulness.; The narrative rejects as obfuscation the fetishizing of home in popular culture and the reduction of home to real estate value and speculation. Rather, the role of home within community takes precedence and in doing so themes pertaining to freedom, imagination, memory, scale, and privacy emerge. Home is interpreted through social relations as ethical action. Subjective experience gives way to a common cultural imaginary that comprises a rich, multi-faceted and meaningful American home. |
