Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond  

Poverty, By America investigates why the United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy.    

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond   

Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems.  

Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis by Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer

This book examines how local participatory land use institutions amplify the power of entrenched interests and privileged homeowners. The book draws on sweeping data to examine the dominance of land use politics by 'neighborhood defenders' - individuals who oppose new housing projects far more strongly than their broader communities and who are likely to be privileged on a variety of dimensions. Neighborhood defenders participate disproportionately and take advantage of land use regulations to restrict the construction of multifamily housing. The result is diminished housing stock and higher housing costs, with participatory institutions perversely reproducing inequality.

Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern

In this book (and corresponding website), housing scholar Gregg Colburn and data journalist Clayton Aldern seek to explain the substantial variation in rates of homelessness apparent in cities across the United States. Using accessible statistics, the researchers test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain why, for example, rates are so much higher in Seattle than in Chicago. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a more convincing explanation.