The family moved there after having spent time in crowded public shelters and in hotels through which the city provides rooms to homeless people. The Prospect is strict about letting in outsiders and visitors, thereby reducing the incidence of drug dealing and prostitution, two problems that plague other facilities for the homeless. Children living at the Prospect attend the local public school; each morning they report to the City Board of Education worker in the building, a procedure that ensures a high attendance rate. The boy and his mother keep their homelessness secret from friends and family. Homelessness is a result of many factors: poverty, rising rents, lack of low-income housing, substance abuse, cuts in social programs, and the deinstitutionalization of some mentally ill persons. This book describes the odyssey to homelessness of an ordinary, middle-class American family.