Word: kozol
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...growing ranks of panhandlers, many experts agree, is the desperate shortage of affordable housing. In eight years the federal housing budget has plunged from $33 billion to about $13 billion. "Forced to choose between housing and food, many of these families were soon driven to the streets," explains Writer Kozol. Six million households now pay at least half of their incomes for rent; for many of them, homelessness is just one paycheck away. Says Joe Carreras, a senior housing planner with the Southern California Association of Governments: "Once you fall out of the housing market, you're sliding down...
...Jonathan Kozol does his best to keep cool while writing about homeless children. He tries to keep cool while reporting that there are some 500,000 of them in this wealthy land, a number slightly greater than the population of Atlanta, Denver or St. Louis. He tries to keep cool while reporting that federal support for low-income housing dropped from $28 billion to $9 billion between 1981 and 1986 and that legal evictions in New York City during one recent year totaled nearly half a million. He tries to keep cool while reporting that although New York owns more...
...Kozol has greater trouble keeping cool when he actually goes into the Martinique Hotel, once a fashionable establishment on Manhattan's Herald Square, and starts talking with some of the 1,400 children (400 families) crammed in there. Like the girl he calls Angie, who is twelve and already skilled at fending off the men who want to buy her. "I may be little but I have a brain," she tells Kozol. He likes her. "She's alert and funny and . . . I enjoy her skipping moods," he writes. One day he learns that after her mother's welfare check failed...
...walkin' in the street. It was rainin', as a matter of fact. Not a warm night." Several ( days later Holly was still wandering around with her dying baby, being sent from hotel to hotel. "The place the shunt went in, his wound had gotten bad," she tells Kozol. "It was sunk in and you could see his skull. His eyes was sinkin...
...sense, Kozol is not being fair in his passionate presentation of these tragedies. Even the word homeless is a bit misleading in that it implies people sleeping on the streets in the snow, while Kozol is really writing about welfare cases, about the poor, whom ye have with you always. And all those he interviews are invariably the virtuous and the innocent -- the others presumably do not give interviews. But Kozol is not really trying to be fair. An award-winning gadfly of the Boston schools where he once taught (Death at an Early Age, Illiterate America), he is trying...