Though New York’s Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan.
 
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

Homelessness is usually discusses in terms of its origins or in terms of its amelioration. Media accounts focus on poverty, drug use, lack of shelter, the social safety net, or attempts by the homeless, social service agencies, and government to end homelessness by policy and direct action. Yet we never seem to get a clear picture of who the homeless are. We are exposed to them as a social problem, but we learn little about their daily existence.

In Something Left to Lose, Gwendolyn A. Dordick gives us a dramatic portrait of the social and personal lives of the homeless. Through her extensive "hanging out" with homeless people, Dordick came to a profound understanding of the web of relationships that provides complex social structure in situations where, to the casual eye, there appears to be only chaos and paralysis.

The author shows us that improvising shelter means working hard to co-exist with others. Lacking conventional private dwellings, the homeless find or create shelter in unconventional places -- on street corners adjoining bus stations, on empty lots of land, or in shelters, public or private -- and negotiate the rules of these places with authorities, passersby, and fellow homeless.

The different environments lead to quite different social relations. The Armory, for example, is a frightening place, thanks to the authoritarian attitudes of the employees and cliques of homeless people in charge. In the Shanty, on the other hand, the difficult issues are those of a self-governing community concerned about safety -- controlling the drug use of some residents, deciding who is allowed to tap into the electricity, and worrying about intruders.

In all settings, daily life for people without  homes, like daily life for people with homes, if full of the concerns of personal relationships. How will we share our goods and emotions, speak respectfully to each other, love and joke and work out our disputes, and act in a trustworthy fashion?

This book is also a miniature research odyssey, complete with moments of fear, frustration, blunders, distrust, and trust. In order to gather these interviews, Dordick had to not only win the the confidence of the homeless people she visited (the women at the Station thought she was interested in their boyfriends) but also negotiate with unsympathetic police and shelters employees or defy them.