Patrick Marquis

And then this incredible population of poor people, many of them immigrants.

And I think there's a parallel there to the current age that we're in now of just waves of immigration, people crowding into cities.

And then really also, I think, radical changes in the structure of the economy.

At that time, it was industrialization, what we've seen over the last several decades.

right now is deindustrialization and kind of a move towards a more precarious services-based economy.

And those, that sort of mixture of structural economic change, you know, changes in our cities, demographic, and frankly, you know, the reaction to that in the terms of systemic racism and xenophobia, all of those things are kind of a recipe for this age that we're seeing now.

And then on top of that,

And I think you spoke about this earlier.

We're seeing political and policy choices made, the rise of sort of neoliberal and right-wing economic policies over the last several decades that have contributed to and shaped and, frankly, sustained the crisis of homelessness that we're experiencing now.

Well, I think there are really two key historical moments there that we're talking about.

Beginning in the early part of the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s and then even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were extraordinary housing movements alongside housing.

sort of labor and community movements that pushed for addressing not only the crisis of inequality and poverty and sort of issues around labor, but also housing problems.

In New York City, on the Lower East Side, we saw extraordinary movements that addressed the incredibly unhealthy conditions in tenement housing.

The Lower East Side at that time was one of the most densely populated places on the planet.

There were enormous problems with just incredibly hazardous and unsafe housing.

There were movements led by Jacob Rees and other immigrants who actually came and said, you know, we need to be improving the health conditions in this housing.

So they improved those housing conditions in terms of health and safety.

Then they started to fight increases in rents, which were being imposed by landlords.

in the 1920s and then in the Great Depression as well.

So that led to the policies of rent regulation and rent control in New York City, which at one point actually went national.