Anna Lou Dehavenon

Anna Lou Dehavenon (November 24, 1926 – February 28, 2012) was an urban anthropologist.[1]

She was born in Bellingham, Washington as Rebecca Ann Lou Melson, and originally studied piano; she was a student of Sergei Tarnowsky, the teacher of Vladimir Horowitz.[1] She earned her doctorate degree in anthropology in 1978 from Columbia University, and taught at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.[1] Dehavenon produced annual studies on hunger for the East Harlem Interfaith Welfare Committee, and founded the Action Research Project on Hunger.[1]

Dehavenon's research influenced a 1979 landmark ruling that affirmed a right to shelter in New York City.[1] She wrote a 1985 report on hunger called The Tyranny of Indifference, which contributed to the litigation in the Yvonne McCain case.[1] She wrote Superordinate behavior in urban homes : a video analysis of request-compliance and food control behavior in two black and two white families living in New York City (1978), The tyranny of indifference and the re-institutionalization of hunger, homelessness and poor health : a study of the causes and conditions of the food emergencies in 1708 households with children in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx in 1986 (1987), The tyranny of indifference : a study of hunger, homelessness, poor health and family dismemberment in 818 New York City households with children in 1988-89 (1989), Out of sight! Out of mind : or, how New York City and New York State tried to abandon the City's homeless families in 1993 (1993), No room at the inn: Or how New York abandoned homeless families to public places (1994), There's no place like home : anthropological perspectives on housing and homelessness in the United States (1996), and From bad to worse at the Emergency Assistance Unit : how New York City tried to stop sheltering homeless families in 1996 (1996).[2]

In the 1980s and 1990s she served as an expert witness for the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless.[3] The Community Service Society presented Dehavenon with its highest award in 1990.[1]

Dehavenon died in 2012 in Greenport, Suffolk County, New York, and her obituary was included in The Socialite who Killed a Nazi with Her Bare Hands: And 144 Other Fascinating People who Died this Year, a collection of New York Times obituaries published in 2012.[4]

She was the wife of pianist William Kapell, who died in 1953; she later married Gaston T. de Havenon.[5] She undertook a career as an expert on homelessness in New York in part as a result, she said, of her own experience of suddenly becoming a single mother with no income when Kapell died.[1] She helped to publish Kapell's diaries and issue new recordings of his music after his death.[1]