The book focuses on the homeless mothers and children in the 'temporary' shelters of welfare hotels. It documents the large amount of money spent by the city to maintain these housing substitutes. The author's conversations with the homeless about the reasons for their homelessness reveal a large populace with obsolete job skills who currently qualify for only low-paying jobs that do not pay nearly enough for housing in New York City or most other places. The book argues that the cause of homelessness is the lack of housing that low-income families can afford. There are 8 million American families paying half or more of their income for housing. An additional 3 million 'hidden homeless' have been forced to double up with others. In all, over 10 million families may be living near the edge of homelessness in the United States. Some suggestions for a Federal policy to address the problem are immediate allocations to restore existing public housing and to rehabilitate substandard city-owned apartments, revision of rules that now restrict emergency shelter funds to self-repeating waste in payments to such institutions as welfare hotels, the redirection of such funds to meeting rents for ordinary housing, and a vast expansion of Federal subsidies to bridge the gap between prevailing market rents and 25 percent of monthly income for all families in need of homes. Appended supplementary data, chapter notes, 45-item bibliography.