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In Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco’s Housing Wars, James Tracy speaks to the heart of the long-heralded American Dream: a home. This, along with other basic economic necessities, was articulated in the founding creed of this country in the expression of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that is, the human right to a house, not a shack, not a shelter, not a street corner. This notion has evolved over history and has become internationally recognized in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly in its article 25, which affirms the right to a decent standard of living and health.

The matter of housing is very close to me, as I have lived a life of poverty and have spent time on the streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, homeless. Moreover, my involvement in the National Organizing Drive of the National Union of the Homeless in the late 1980s and early 1990s made me ever more sensitive to this critical issue. Currently, as a coordinator and educator of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, I have reflected analytically on the injustices of poverty and homelessness as the defining problems of our times. To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, poverty is the worst form of violence and a violation of human rights. The worldwide housing and homelessness crises are particularly cruel and extreme manifestations of poverty, especially when we are living in a time of plenty. Indeed, poverty today is unnecessarily expanding and mass abandonment of homes is inhumanely and insanely existing next to an unprecedented and accumulating abundance for the very few. So I have come to understand the absolute urgency and necessity for this problem to be further studied and the solution to be found and fought for.

Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco’s Housing Wars contributes to this central and indispensable discussion and fight.

Importantly, and as expressed in the insightful Herbert Marcuse quote that opens this book: “The housing crisis doesn’t exist because the system isn’t working. It exists because that’s the way the system works.” Mr. Tracy goes on to describe some of the features of the newly globalizing and urbanizing economic system that is at the same time an exploitative system for the many that concentrates wealth and resources for the few. This poverty-producing system is both life-threatening and life-taking, and it is turning the American Dream into a globalized nightmare with increasing mass evictions and homelessness. Today, the continuing stagnation and devastation of the 2007–8 economic crisis clearly reveals that this globalized crisis is more than cyclical. It is chronic and it is now displacing and pushing sections of the so-called “middle class” into impoverishment.

This book speaks to the fact that these worsening conditions are multiplying the ranks of the poor and dispossessed, compelling them to unite and fight for their very survival around a common basis of unity: the demand for the human right to housing and other basic economic necessities of life. It also raises to the fore some of the specific means by which the rich and power-wielding few manipulate the historically evolved racial divisions, particularly in the United States, as well as neoliberal and “Neo-Keynesian” policies to pre-empt and prevent this unity.

Mr. Tracy not only speaks of the plight but also the fight to abolish all poverty and homelessness, a growing global fight of the poor and evicted, which he has joined and to which he is himself committed. He writes about his organizing experiences and, along with his analysis of those experiences, he draws from the wisdom of other leaders of the housing and anti-poverty struggles, offering a number of strategic and tactical lessons for today’s struggle. Tracy provides timely insight into the inescapable reality that looms ahead as the current global housing crisis and the worldwide economic crisis continue to worsen. It is important reading for anyone committed to fighting today’s crises and building a new possibility of life, liberty, and happiness.