Rachel and Her Children.

• Author: Torrey, E. Fuller

Rachel and Her Children

Homelessness in America has become the issue of the 1980s. Hollywood celebrities lead sleep-ins on heating grates, bag-lady-chic is the latest in clothing, and Lily Tomlin has added an impersonation of a street person to her comedy routine. And at upscale dinner parties only AIDS challenges homelessness as the issue of discussion between the couscous and chicken cordon bleu.

Kozol's purpose is to describe the "sad realities" of homeless families and insofar as this is his only purpose, he succeeds. The visual images evoked by Kozol include the young boy who slept in a Goodwill box from age 9 to 14 until he was no longer small enough to fit through the box's deposit slot; the man, woman, and child asleep in a single telephone booth in New York City; a little girl reporting how "Mr. Rat came in my baby sister's crib and bit her;" and Rachel herself, a homeless mother in New York, who pleads with Kozol: "Can you get the government to know that we exist?" Such imaages remain with the reader long after the book is put down.

Kozol is unable, however, to move beyond these images. He states categorically that, "the cause of homelessness is lack of housing." Nobody will dispute that gentrification and urban redevelopment of inner cities have produced a dramatic decline in low-cost housing. The policies of the Reagan administration, determined to get the federal government out of the housing business, have further exacerbated this crisis. But the problem of homelessness is more than simply lack of housing. It is also inextricably intertwined with a lack of job training, with an extraordinarily bureaucratized welfare system, and with national policies which have left 21 percent of our nation's children living below the poverty level. (Among major industrialized nations, only Australia rivals the United States in the number of its children who live in poverty.)

Because Kozol does not address broader issues than the...