Patrick Marquis

Kids would miss just incredible amounts of school.

Their parents would miss work.

You know, all of these families, adults and the kids, you know, would suffer, you know, all sorts of health problems, you know, contagious diseases, all of this stuff.

And it just, you know, again, there's an extraordinary cost to homelessness for children.

So having such an, you know, just an enormous number of kids who are homeless each night is really setting those kids back in an incredible way.

Well, I learned so many things from working with those folks sleeping in the Riverside Park tunnel.

I mean, first of all, one of the things I learned is that these were people who were just incredible survivors, you know, who could really live under the most kind of like grim and difficult conditions.

I mean, the conditions in that tunnel, and I started working there in the sort of late autumn through the winter, the last winter before the tunnel was completely shut off by Amtrak, which was going to sort of restart train service through the tunnel.

It was cold, obviously filthy.

It was dangerous.

There were rats in the tunnel, all of these things.

And yet these people had managed to persist and survive and endure in some just really, really difficult conditions.

And so what I really learned, and I write this in the book, is I learned that these are people who could make a home anywhere.

And we were able to move some of these folks directly into apartments in the community.

Almost none of them ever experienced homelessness again after that.

I mean, it was an incredible, incredible experience to see these folks be able to move from such grim conditions into their own homes.

Absolutely.

I mean, if anything, what we did was just sort of one very small example of an incredibly successful approach that's worked all across the country.

And when I'm saying that this is an approach that has worked everywhere, I really mean everywhere.

It's worked in Salt Lake City.