And Housing for All

“Spanning the 40 years that straddled the start of the new millennium, Maria Foscarinis’ account of contemporary homelessness and the advocacy movement that has taken shape to contest it is the most complete view from the national perspective we are likely ever to get. In her hands, it acquires thematic continuity, historical depth, backstage political maneuvering, and a steady bassline of casual cruelty masked as rabble management. Animating her own stance is an abiding faith in the corrective power of law allied with organized dissent. Pointedly, she never lets the reader forget that both the wound and efforts to bind it are (as Harold Pinter once said) “peopled.” Source material and academic expertise are consigned to endnotes; the narrative work is event-driven, featuring named plaintiffs and their variable cast of tormenters. Threaded throughout and capping off is a spirited - and, notably, far from fanciful - defense of a social right to housing.

This warhorse of a book is a testament to movement lawyering with heart, head, and stamina.”

–Kim Hopper, Professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and author of Reckoning with Homelessness

“The book’s legislative history is interwoven with personal stories, allowing the neglect to unfold as a slow burn that readers will want resolution to. Examples from Finland, Austria, Kansas City, and Houston showcase what is and isn’t working to solve homelessness. Each and every example within this analysis supports Foscarinis’s command of the subject, while her compassionate approach will spur change. Foscarinis presents a fresh and comprehensive view of housing as a human right.”

– “Library Journal”“And Housing for All is a reminder that housing should not be a commodity, but is a human right. The disdain, judgement, lack of empathy, and criminalization many experience due to housing status, especially people surviving on the streets, needs to be called out, and replaced with deeper awareness, education, and advocacy to prevent and end homelessness. This book does exactly that. As someone with the lived experience of homelessness, I remain hopeful.”–DeBorah Gilbert White, PhD, Homelessness Advocate, Author of Beyond Charity: A Sojourner’s Reflections on Homelessness, Advocacy, Empowerment and Hope“This book is for every American who has walked past another human being sleeping outside and wondered, how did this happen? And Housing for All shows you, by guiding you down the long road of bad policy, blind neglect and outright hostility that brought us to where we are today, a nation with more than half a million people who have nowhere to stay on a given night. And where their mere existence has been criminalized. The stories recounted by Foscarinis, who spent decades on the front lines in the fight for housing as a human right, will enrage you. They might also spur you to act to help eliminate this shameful, self-inflicted societal wound. As Foscarinis notes, homelessness is “not an accident. It’s the result of deliberate policy choices made by people. We can make different ones.”–Pam Fessler, former NPR poverty correspondent“Maria Foscarinis has been a leader in the fight to end homelessness since the mid-1980s. The issue in America reaches back to before 1929’s Hoovervilles, but Maria’s advocacy beginning in the Reagan years had led the way for countless other advocates. From her work on the 1987 McKinney-Vento Act, to her founding of the National Homelessness Law Center in 1989, all the way through to today, Maria has been tireless in her pursuit of justice for the most vulnerable Americans. And Housing for All is an important and inspiring book about an urgent social problem from a true authority.”–Peter Edelman, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown Law Center and author of Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America and So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America“A vivid and sobering overview of the ongoing homelessness crisis in America, by one of the key activists leading the charge to end it. Maria Foscarinis’ And Housing for All makes an impassioned argument that the right to housing should be–and in fact is–a fundamental human right. An important and eye-opening book.”–Gary Krist, New York Times bestselling author of The Mirage Factory, Empire of Sin, City of Scoundrels, and The White Cascade

Maria Foscarinis founded the National Homelessness Law Center (formerly known as the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty) in 1985 to mount a campaign for a federal response to the crisis which was just beginning to explode across the country. The Law Center won legal victories including the only major federal legislation addressing homelessness–now known and the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act–, upholding education rights for homeless children, converting vacant properties to housing, and combatting the criminalization of homelessness, while also laying the groundwork for the recognition of housing as a human right.

She has been named a Human Rights Hero by the American Bar Association, and is a recipient of the Katharine and George Alexander Law Prize from Santa Clara University School of Law, the John Macy Award from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the Public Interest Law Award from the Public Interest Foundation at Columbia Law School, and a Rockefeller Foundation Practitioner Residency in Bellagio, Italy.

Foscarinis has been regularly quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC, CCTV, and Al-Jazeera, among many others, and has contributed opinion pieces to influential publications including USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, and The Hill. She teaches a seminar on Homelessness Law and Policy at Columbia Law School.