Books, Arts & Manners: Homeless on the Range

Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us, by Richard W. White Jr. (ICS Press, 333 pp., $24.95)

HERE IS homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, during a 1984 appearance on Nightline, explaining how he came up with his estimate that between two and three million Americans were homeless, a number that would go on to become media gospel and is still cited today: “Everybody demanded it, everybody said we want a number. . . . We got on the phone, made lots of calls, we talked to lots of people, and we said, ‘Okay, here are some numbers.’ They have no meaning, no value.”

RV

About the Author

Richard Vigilante

Featured Tags

Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us, by Richard W. White Jr. (ICS Press, 333 pp., $24.95)

HERE IS homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, during a 1984 appearance on Nightline, explaining how he came up with his estimate that between two and three million Americans were homeless, a number that would go on to become media gospel and is still cited today: “Everybody demanded it, everybody said we want a number. . . . We got on the phone, made lots of calls, we talked to lots of people, and we said, ‘Okay, here are some numbers.’ They have no meaning, no value.”