Patrick Marquis

a place to stay.

And the police would just come in and just, you know, take people's belongings, throw them into dump trucks, just throw them away, you know, arrest people, threaten them with arrest.

The neighborhood ended up gentrifying and then hyper-gentrifying in a couple of decades after that.

Well, this was an approach and a philosophy, actually, that, you know, was unfortunately incredibly prevalent and also really had its roots going back to the earliest days of homelessness in New York in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

I describe this as an attempt to kind of pathologize the problem of homelessness, to just sort of describe homeless people as kind of broken people, as not ready for housing or sort of dysfunctional.

And actually, some of the people that, you know, kind of try to describe the homeless people of that period as somehow, you know, really dysfunctional, as really disordered,

were actually some of the architects of the eugenics movement in the United States as well.

So there's just a very deep and unsettling kind of history.

We started to see that reemerge in the 1990s.

Coming out of the 1980s when mass homelessness was kind of a new problem in the United States and in New York, and people were sort of shocked, especially in the early 1980s when you started to see homelessness appear throughout the country.

Going into the 1990s, there was what I call a backlash era.

There was a sort of movement of compassion fatigue, unfortunately.

And, you know, some, you know, unfortunately, some politicians like Rudy Giuliani and others kind of took advantage of that period to kind of demonize and once again pathologize homeless people.

Andrew Cuomo and others of that period tried to kind of create a model of homelessness services, which really relied on that image of homeless people as being sort of broken and unready and needed to be trained, needed to go through therapeutic programs.

And then Cuomo, who at the time was elevated by Bill Clinton to be the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development,

You know, really codify that into a system called the continuum of care, which really just sort of mapped out a model where, you know, homeless people had to first go through therapeutic programs or training programs before they would ever be able to get housing, if there was any, you know, housing assistance that was available to them.

Because keep in mind, remember that this was at a time when there were cutbacks in the federal housing budget.

So, yeah.

So this treatment first approach was really kind of like developed in the 1990s and, you know, just proved to be, frankly, a mistake.

It proved to be absolutely counterproductive because it really just cut against everything that homeless people themselves had been telling us that advocates working on the ground had seen and everything that we started to learn as the models of supportive housing and housing first were really starting to be implemented.