This booklet contains six papers from the National Conference of Social Work, which took place in Washington, DC, in May 1923. Four papers describe developments in particular sections of the United States. Two papers offer a national perspective. Together, the papers bear testimony to the similarity of children’s needs everywhere.

This booklet provides advice on reforming Independence Day celebrations. It includes illustrated descriptions of safe celebrations; a list of state laws and city ordinances regulating the manufacture, sale, and use of explosives; and a collection of programs and suggestions.

LEE F. HANMER was associate director of the Department of Child Hygiene at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Extreme weather is increasing in scale and severity as global warming worsens. While poorer communities are typically most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, even well-resourced communities are increasingly vulnerable as climate-related storms intensify. Yet little is known about how middle-class communities are responding to these storms and the resulting damage. In Soaking the Middle Class, sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris examine how a middle-class community recovers from a climate-related disaster and how this process fosters inequality within these kinds of places.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped record-breaking rainfall in Southeast Texas resulting in more than $125 billion in direct damages. Rhodes and Besbris followed 59 flooded households in Friendswood, Texas, for two years after the storm to better understand the recovery process in a well-resourced, majority-White, middle-class suburban community. As such, Friendswood should have been highly resilient to storms like Harvey, yet Rhodes and Besbris find that the recovery process exacerbated often-invisible economic inequality between neighbors. Two years after Harvey, some households were in better financial positions than they were before the storm, while others still had incomplete repairs, were burdened with large new debts, and possessed few resources to draw on should another disaster occur.

Rhodes and Besbris find that recovery policies were significant drivers of inequality, with flood insurance playing a key role in the divergent recovery outcomes within Friendswood. Households with flood insurance prior to Harvey tended to have higher incomes than those that did not. These households received high insurance payouts, enabling them to replace belongings, hire contractors, and purchase supplies. Households without coverage could apply for FEMA assistance, which offered considerably lower payouts, and for government loans, which would put them into debt. Households without coverage found themselves exhausting their financial resources, including retirement savings, to cover repairs, which put them in even more financially precarious positions than they were before the flood.

The vast majority of Friendswood residents chose to repair and return to their homes after Hurricane Harvey. Even this devastating flood did not alter their plans for long-term residential stability, and the structure of recovery policies only further oriented homeowners towards returning to their homes. Prior to Harvey, many Friendswood households relied on flood damage from previous storms to judge their vulnerability and considered themselves at low risk. After Harvey, many found it difficult to assess their level of risk for future flooding. Without strong guidance from federal agencies or the local government on how to best evaluate risk, many residents ended up returning to potentially unsafe places.

As climate-related disasters become more severe, Soaking the Middle Class illustrates how inequality in the United States will continue to grow if recovery policies are not fundamentally changed.

ANNA RHODES is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rice University

MAX BESBRIS is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“A riveting narrative of how decent people are transformed by conducive structural conditions into malevolent slumlords, Collateral Damages is guaranteed to make you think about the housing crisis in a new light. Meredith J. Greif lays bare how the very regulations meant to protect marginalized tenants stoke landlords’ illegal and immoral behaviors, ensuring even greater precarity in tenants’ lives. If you want to understand housing in America, this book is not to be missed.”
—KATHRYN EDIN, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs,Princeton University

“Collateral Damages provides a critical window into the understudied practices and motivations of small landlords, who collectively provide homes to most of the nation’s poor renters. Meredith J. Greif highlights the financial vulnerability of these housing providers and shows how structural forces can lead some of them to engage in harmful practices. Balanced and engaging, the book sends an important, cautionary note about how well-intentioned local laws can backfire and harm the very low-income renters they are meant to protect.”
—INGRID GOULD ELLEN, Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, New York University

Changes in federal housing policies over the past several decades shifted the primary responsibility for providing low-income renters with affordable housing from the government to private landlords. Federal, state, and local governments have passed laws to ensure that low-income renters are protected from illicit landlording practices. Yet we know little about how private landlords experience local housing regulations. In Collateral Damages, sociologist Meredith Greif examines how local laws affect private landlords and whether tenants are, in fact, being adequately protected.

For three years, Greif followed 60 private landlords serving low- and moderate-income residents in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area to better understand how local regulations, such as criminal activity nuisance ordinances (CANOs) and local water billing regulations, affect their landlording practices. CANOs are intended to protect communities by discouraging criminal activity on private properties. Property owners can face financial and criminal sanctions if they do not abate nuisance activities, which can include littering, noise, drug use, and calls for police assistance, including calls for domestic violence. Local water billing regulations hold landlords responsible for delinquent water bills, even in cases where the account is registered in the tenant’s name. Greif finds that such laws often increase landlords’ sense of “financial precarity” – the real or perceived uncertainty that their business is financially unsustainable – by holding them responsible for behavior they feel is out of their control. Feelings of financial uncertainty led some landlords to use illegitimate business practices against their tenants, including harassment, oversurveillance, poor property upkeep, and illegal evictions. And to avoid to financial penalities associated with CANOs and delinquent water bills, some landlords engage in discriminatory screening of vulnerable potential tenants who are unemployed or have histories of domestic violence or drug use. In this sense, by promoting a sense of financial insecurity among landlords, laws meant to protect renters ultimately had the opposite effect.

While some landlords, particularly those who rented a larger number of units, were able to operate their businesses both lawfully and profitably, the majority could not. Greif offers practical recommendations to address the concerns of small- and mid-sized landlords, such as regular meetings that bring landlords and local authorities together to engage in constructive dialogue about local housing policy, issues, and concerns. She also proposes policy recommendations to protect renters, such as establishing the right to counsel for lower-income tenants in eviction hearings and enacting a federal renter’s tax credit.

Collateral Damages is an enlightening investigation on how local laws and practices perpetuate disadvantage among marginalized populations and communities, in ways that are hidden and often unintended.

MEREDITH GREIF is assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University

This 1925 pamphlet, published by the Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation, gathers suggestions for organizing May Day festivals. An appendix of May Day songs, speeches, and games is included.

Elizabeth Burchenal was inspector of athletics for girls in New York public schools.

This report is about the Community Law Offices (CLO), which operated two neighborhood law offices in Manhattan—in East and Central Harlem—that provided free legal services to individuals and groups who could not afford private attorneys. CLO relied primarily on attorneys in private practice who volunteered part of their time to handle the cases brought to the two offices. Formation and growth, an overview of its operations, and an evaluation of volunteer performance are discussed.

Douglas E. Rosenthal was chief of the Foreign Commerce Section of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Robert A. Kagan is professor of political science and law at the University of California, Berkeley.

With each depression emergency measures are embarked upon—and the results generally forgotten. This study recovers and records significant experience in previous depressions for its bearing upon present and future policies. Published in 1936.

Leah H. Feder was associate professor of applied sociology at Washington University.

The Department of Child Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation completed a detailed study of 151 public institutions for delinquent youth in the United States in 1924, including a few private institutions supported chiefly by public funds. The work of such schools is unique, technical, and vitally important, but up to the time that this study was undertaken no complete and detailed information regarding these institutions was available. The department undertook the study with the goal of informing the public and awakening its interest in these schools, and of assisting trustees and superintendents to improve the methods, standards, and conditions of their work. This book examines academics, physical care, and parole for delinquent girls, as well as building conditions, salaries in training schools, record-keeping, and community aspects of institutional life.

Margaret Reeves was field agent of the Russell Sage Foundation and director of the State Bureau of Child Welfare, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This book aimed to bring about a wider public knowledge of social casework—to examine and report upon the ways in which social caseworkers and social casework agencies go about the task of securing public understanding, and the ways in which the usefulness of casework has grown through good understanding. It is directed particularly to the casework field, but its analysis of how casework is interpreted in one community has importance for all branches of social work.

Viola Paradise was research associate in the Department of Social Work Interpretation of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This 1930 report of a statistical study of 10,000 small loans is part of the Small Loans Series, a general survey of small loans prepared for the Russell Sage Foundation by the Department of Remedial Loans. Topics include the development of the small loan business and the social, economic, and living conditions of borrowers.

Louis N. Robinson was professor of economics at Swarthmore College.