Patrick Marquis

So there was just, you know, incredible abandonment of housing as the population dropped so significantly.

And that contributed to a housing affordability crisis, which would only grow worse in the 1980s.

Well, sadly, in the early days of the modern mass homelessness crisis, you know, this is in the sort of late 1970s, early 1980s, the city government of New York did choose to have one of its primary responses be the police.

And we saw this, you know, under the administration of Ed Koch, who was the mayor through most of the 80s.

We saw it a little bit continuing under David Dinkins, his successor in the late 80s, early 90s.

But it was really the Giuliani administration that...

sort of like intensified and perfected this sort of like wholesale criminalization of street homelessness.

You know, Giuliani had sort of run for mayor on this campaign of cleaning up New York City, and it became very clear early on that among the kind of things that he thought needed to be cleaned up were homeless people.

So there were just mass arrests of homeless people in parks and city streets and transportation terminals throughout the subway system.

Giuliani's first police commissioner sort of had actually been the head of the unit of the police department that polices the subway system.

And he had talked about flushing homeless people out of the subway system and talked sort of proudly about this.

Giuliani himself used some just really inflammatory words.

an offensive language to describe homeless people sleeping out on the streets.

And there was just a real period of kind of demonization and then wholesale criminalization of the problem of homelessness, which of course was incredibly counterproductive.

You know, I worked very closely with a group of homeless people sleeping in the Madison Square Park

which is an area of kind of downtown Manhattan, which, you know, in the 1980s and 90s had fallen a little bit on hard times.

I mean, it was still sort of a, you know, middle class type neighborhood, but, you know, was beginning to gentrify and gentrify.

Giuliani made that sort of one of the epicenters of his homelessness crackdown, his police crackdown on homelessness.

I worked with these poor folks who were just trying to find a place to sleep at night.

Madison Square Park was considered kind of one of the less dangerous kind of places to sleep outdoors if you didn't have a place to sleep.