Patrick Marquis

Thank you so much for having me on the program.

Yes, because I think when I started to really think deeply about the modern homelessness crisis, what we're really looking at is a crisis of displacement.

I think so many of us have come to think of homelessness as kind of a special form of urban poverty, a kind of almost like subspecies of urban poverty.

Too often it gets discussed really as a social work problem or as a problem of individual dysfunction, when in fact it has systemic causes.

And the problem of homelessness, as bad as it is, kind of the scale of the problem being as huge as it is, is really only the tip of the iceberg of a larger wave of displacement that we've seen in American society in this period that I call the New Gilded Age that really sort of extends from the 1980s to now, this kind of 50-year period.

where what we've seen is economic dislocation, neighborhood dislocation via gentrification and other forms of kind of sort of home displacement.

We've seen mass migration.

And we've seen, frankly, homelessness as being, I think, in many ways, the kind of the worst symptom of this age of displacement.

Well, the word homeless itself actually dates back to around the first Gilded Age of the late 19th century, early 20th century.

But obviously, there have been some unfortunately very derogatory terms used to describe homeless people over the years, you know, hobos, bums, you know, vagrants.

These are, you know, some of these terms have come in and out of fashion.

Many of them have always been, you know, offensive and derogatory.

The term homelessness actually

you know, I think describes kind of the state of the crisis that we're talking about.

I mean, you know, whether we use the term homeless or unhoused, we're really talking about people who lack a permanent residence.

And it can be everything from people sleeping out on the streets to people sleeping in shelters to often what we see and what I describe in the book is kind of the hidden homeless population, people living in doubled up or severely overcrowded housing.

And that's increasingly a bigger and bigger share of the problem of homelessness that we're seeing across the country.

Well, the first Gilded Age was marked by, more than anything, by just radical inequality.

We just had incredible concentrations of sort of wealth and then economic and political power kind of among the sort of the

The plutocrats, the sort of oligarchy of that age, the kind of industrial elite of what was then a sort of urbanizing and industrializing United States and a sort of urban elite of industrialists and capitalists who had sort of controlled city governments, controlled the economy.