Chapter 1: What is the current state of homelessness in New York City?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, Patrick Marquis, has spent more than two decades advocating for the homeless, going to places that most people avoid, tunnels, parks, abandoned buildings, and makeshift encampments where unhoused people live.
In his new book, Placeless, Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, he argues the surge in people living on the streets didn't happen overnight. It has been shaped through policy choices, economic shifts, and a profound erosion of our social fabric.
Centering on New York City to tell the larger story, Marquis takes us from the abandoned rail tunnels under Riverside Park, where residents carved out entire communities in the 90s, to the streets of the Lower East Side, shelter armories, psychiatric wards.
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Chapter 2: How does Patrick Marquis define 'placeless' in relation to homelessness?
and family intake centers. He describes the housing crisis as a game of musical chairs and argues that New York City doesn't just tell us the story of homelessness, but about America itself, its values, and its inequities.
Patrick Marquis is the former Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City and a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He's authored several research studies on homelessness and housing policy and has written for The Nation and The New York Times Book Review. Patrick Marquis, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me on the program.
Yes, I think it's great for us to actually start with the title of this book because you didn't call it homelessness in the Gilded Age. You specifically use this term that many of us have never heard before, placeless. Can you say more about that word?
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.
And you use the term homeless throughout the book. You make a point to say you're sticking with that, even though through time we've used different terms to describe people who are living out on the street. Is there a particular reason to use other terms that aren't derogatory, like homeless or unhoused? What is your take on the word usage?
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Chapter 3: What historical events contributed to the rise of homelessness?
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.
This idea that we are in the new Gilded Age, what is the most striking parallel you see between that time period and this one?
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. 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,
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Chapter 4: How did economic shifts in the 1970s impact homelessness?
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.
Let's slow down and go back a bit because I find it really fascinating the way you chart that time from the Gilded Age to then a period where actually we didn't experience the level of homelessness that we see now. And then towards the 70s, we start to see that rise again. But 1874, that is really at the heart of the Gilded Age.
You write about how thousands of unemployed workers gathered in Tompkins Square Park in New York City. Police charged them on horseback and clubs. The mayor celebrated it. You write that the elites blame the poor for their poverty. They called them lazy and immoral. They cut off aid. It really does sound very similar to what we see today. But take me to that time period after the Gilded Age.
There was a bit of improvement that we saw. We saw less folks out on the street. There was a decline in homelessness. What was happening during that time period before we get to the 1970s?
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.
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Chapter 5: What policies have been implemented to address homelessness in NYC?
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. So we actually saw control on the affordability of rents, which I think is going to resonate very much with what's going on right now. And then a sort of third important movement was the creation of public housing. It wasn't perfect.
You know, I'm not trying to sort of romanticize what was going on, but we actually had a system in place where through public housing and other federal housing programs like the housing voucher programs, which were created in the early 1970s, ironically under the Nixon administration. So this was a sort of a bipartisan project for many decades.
We have federal housing programs which were aiming to ensure that the poorest Americans could actually, you know, have decent, safe housing. And that, you know, people, working-class people, low-income folks were going to be sort of buffeted from, you know, the worst excesses of rent increases and the worst, you know, the worst threats of eviction.
Okay, so the 70s arrive. Everything accelerates. New York loses a significant amount of jobs. I think you write about 600,000. The population drops significantly.
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Chapter 6: How does the 'Housing First' approach differ from traditional methods?
Whole blocks are abandoned. You describe this as the birth of modern mass homelessness. What was happening economically that made this moment the breaking point?
Well, there was an economic crisis in the early 1970s, which triggered in New York City an extraordinary loss of employment and of population, but particularly of manufacturing employment. And New York City had actually already begun to lose some manufacturing jobs from the 1950s and accelerating through the 60s, but there was just a sharp drop off of it in the 1970s. And
New York City, which had been in many ways, whose economy had been fairly balanced in many ways. I mean, you had manufacturing, you had, you know, the sort of more traditional industries of, you know, sort of finance and banking, which we're familiar with from the sort of Wall Street era. You had service sector jobs.
We really lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs in those years and just an enormous number of jobs in total. So that created economic shifts, which then put real pressures on the city government. There was a fiscal crisis in the 1970s.
New York City came close to going bankrupt, frankly, and under pressure from creditor banks and from conservative politicians and with zero help coming from Washington, D.C., There were enormous cutbacks in government programs which had been helping working-class and low-income New Yorkers.
And we saw just huge cuts in healthcare programs and education programs, but also in public assistance, income assistance programs, and in housing programs. New York City in that period also lost an enormous amount of housing. 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.
One of the things you really point out is the approach. The approach really changes and shifts based on party lines.
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Chapter 7: What role does race play in the homelessness crisis?
I mean, there's nuance there. But by and large, when you look at the big picture, that seems to be the case. You point out how, if we fast forward to 99, when Rudy Giuliani was then mayor, there started to be sort of this idea of criminalizing homelessness. He ordered police to arrest people sleeping on the streets. Bloomberg continued those kinds of sweeps.
And then last year, as you note in the book, the Supreme Court ruled cities can criminalize sleeping outdoors. How prevalent is that particular approach when we think about the ways that New York City and then other cities throughout the country began to try to deal with this growing problem.
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.
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Chapter 8: What personal stories illustrate the impact of homelessness?
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. 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.
I want to delve into some of the ways that cities like New York have tried to solve or combat or lessen the homelessness population. Let's stay with the 90s for a minute because this was an important moment in which some of the modern day approaches we have come to know were implemented. There was this idea of
championed by Andrew Cuomo, among others, that many homeless people weren't housing ready, that they needed to go through treatment, rehabilitation, training programs before they could be trusted with a home. What was the thinking behind that? And from your view, what's wrong with it?
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.
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