These last couple of weeks I read a book that had a very interesting view about how there is more to homelessness than just these people having a hard time living and surviving in absolute poverty. The book I read was Derelict Paradise and it explained how there are people in higher up positions in society who are benefitting off the people who are struggling. The author Daniel Kerr has conducted interviews with close to 200 homeless individuals and researched through the city’s local archives to find research on charities, politicians, newspapers, etc. to find out about how the city of Cleveland works and has changed. His informational study looks back from the last 130 years of the 1870s to present day.

Back in the day the city of Cleveland there was a “time [where] downtown Cleveland was a haven, almost a utopia, for lower income people” (Karr pg. 5). Back then housing was more affordable and available for the low-income population. But throughout the years the city was growing and wanting to look good to tourists and for its citizens, so this housing was destroyed and resulting in slums popping up. The slums were also eventually taken down and the homeless now were displaced.

There were a variety of people who benefited off the homeless with examples of the law enforcement, landlords, and the social shelters. They did not care for the homeless and were getting paid to “help” them live in these horrible conditions. When the migrant workers that came in to work for low labor threatened employer’s jobs, they banded together to remove the public services that helped out these workers.

There was a lot of work done to make sure that the homeless problem never improved so that profits were still able to be made off the homeless. There were a number of riots that occurred because of this, but nothing ever change. This seemed to occur every twenty to thirty years up until the present.