Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age - Hardcover

Markee, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1685891675 ISBN 13: 9781685891671

Verlag: Melville House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In the tradition of Matthew Desmond's Evicted, a longtime housing activist presents a vivid and myth-breaking account of why homelessness endures in contemporary America...

Millions of people are affected by homelessness, but media pundits and politicians see homelessness as a social work problem, or a matter of personal pathology, or some peculiar subspecies of urban poverty.

Informed by the author’s own front-line experiences from more than two decades working as an advocate for homeless people in New York City and his work with housing activists across the country. Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age presents an alternative and innovative, wide-angle view of homelessness and displacement in New York and elsewhere.

A tour of the geography of homelessness in New York City, where some 100,000 people a night sleep in the city’s shelter system, Markee visits certain city landmarks where homeless New Yorkers struggle to survive:

• armories once built to quarter militias who put down worker uprisings
• a train tunnel underneath Riverside Park
• a grim intake center where infants, children, and families were forced to sleep on office floors
• a former psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital now sheltering hundreds of homeless men each night
• a Manhattan park surrounded by luxury condos where the police routinely harassed homeless street-dwellers

Blending historical analysis, urban theory, and the latest policy research, Markee considers homelessness in America as a tragic yet inevitable consequence of economic shifts inaugurated in the Reagan era, worsening inequality and housing affordability, systemic racism, and neoliberal government policies.

At a moment where tabloids and politicians use homelessness as an excuse to whip up fear, Placeless is a powerful and moving account of a social problem whose solution is entirely possible.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Markee is the former deputy executive director for Advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless, New York’s premier homeless advocacy organization, and a member of the board of directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He has authored numerous research studies on homelessness and housing policy, and has written for The Nation and the New York Times Book Review. He lives in New York City.

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The New Gilded Age

It was an era marked by rampant inequality and urban poverty. Industrial tycoons owned more than half the nation’s wealth, wielded monopoly power, and corrupted the political system. Municipal leaders deployed militias and police on behalf of moneyed elites, brutally suppressing the revolts of restive laborers. A white backlash, often violent, grew amid even minimal signs of Black progress. Immigrants flooded into teeming cities, crowding tenements while landlords demanded ever higher rents. Underlying it all, massive shifts were transforming an economy in which manufacturing and industry prevailed.

This was the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, and its echoes and reverberations have grown louder and more insistent over a century later. Unaccountably, we’ve arrived at another Gilded Age, but this one brought with it something new—a decades-long crisis of mass homelessness.

With this book, I’ve set out to explore the phenomenon of modern mass homelessness in our New Gilded Age, an era defined, like its late nineteenth-century namesake, by exploding inequality and seismic shifts in the economic and urban landscape. In these pages, I have attempted to offer a wide view of mass homelessness and displacement informed by historical analysis, urban theory, the latest policy research, and my own frontline experiences from more than two decades working as a homeless advocate. In short, I have tried to show that modern homelessness is both antecedent and symptom of the neoliberal era—and that far from being yet another urban malady, it has been instead a harbinger of wider forms of displacement in this New Gilded Age.

Too many accounts of homelessness have treated it as a special case—a social work problem, a matter of personal pathology and dysfunction, or some peculiar subspecies of urban poverty. Worse still, homelessness has too often been portrayed as an intractable problem that will “always be with us.” I’ve chosen instead to consider modern homelessness as the inevitable consequence of structural shifts in the capitalist economy, worsening inequality, systemic racism, and neoliberal government policies. What emerged was a loss of place—not only the loss of home and shelter, but also the loss of identity and security, as well as community and a role in our economic and civic life. I’ve then analyzed how the historical and economic forces of this unequal era accelerated the widening problem of displacement, with homelessness being only the most visible and tragic symptom.

In tracing the history of mass homelessness, I’ve also relied on the experiences of countless homeless people whom I have met over the years—people who struggled against overwhelming odds, facing government hostility and harassment, to survive day after day and ultimately escape homelessness and find a home. In this book, I’ve tried to tell some of their stories—above all, to show that the enormity of the crisis was, in the end, about real individuals.

Writing about modern mass homelessness, I knew I could never do justice to those who have lived through the crisis, nor those lost to it. So I’ve chosen to root the story in some historical, visible urban landmarks—places that offered refuge to homeless people but were also sites of displacement. In one chapter, I examine the harsh crackdowns on homeless people in Madison Square Park, part of the ruthless and racist policing tactics that helped fuel the lucrative hypergentrification of the surrounding neighborhood. In another chapter, I tell the story of the threatened eviction of dozens of homeless people from a train tunnel beneath Riverside Park, and how politicians, the news media, and others sought to pathologize the tunnel dwellers as well as other homeless people. In a later chapter, I explore the history of armories, the vast, fortresslike buildings used to shelter tens of thousands of homeless New Yorkers, many of whom were low-wage laborers—the same armories that were built in the first Gilded Age to quarter militias deployed by wealthy elites to suppress worker uprisings.

Modern homelessness was also a consequence of harsh, deliberate policies crafted and implemented by a series of New York mayors and public officials, and by their counterparts in DC and nationwide. It was impossible to understand the modern homelessness crisis in places like Boston, San Diego, Austin, and Washington, DC, without grappling with the history of the crisis in the nation’s largest city. I’ve therefore tried to show how the recent history of New York’s experience with homelessness and displacement could both explain the national phenomenon and illuminate the debate about how to handle the crisis.

Modern Mass Homelessness

While homelessness has existed in various ways throughout American history, the past century has seen just two extended periods of mass displacement: the Great Depression of the 1930s and the contemporary period of modern mass homelessness, which began in the late 1970s and has not ended after more than four decades. Historians have estimated that, on any given night during the worst years of the 1930s, there were well over a million homeless Americans, and millions of people experienced homelessness annually. The mass homelessness of the Great Depression, when the nation’s total population was about a third of what it became in the early twenty-first century, was undoubtedly more acute on a night-to-night basis than in the modern era. But it was also of far shorter duration, lasting for only a decade or so.

It has become nearly impossible to reckon with the scale of modern mass homelessness. In 2024, the federal government estimated that some 771,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night—that is, they slept in shelters, on the streets, or in other public spaces. This estimate was almost certainly an undercount, and it obscured the fact that, over the course of a year, as many as 3.5 million different people actually experienced homelessness. These measures also overlooked the much larger “hidden homeless” population of people living in doubled-up arrangements or severely overcrowded dwellings. One study found that, during the same period, there were 3.7 million people living in doubled-up housing—meaning that, by the 2020s, more than two in every hundred people in the United States was without a stable home.

The scale of the modern homelessness crisis in New York, the nation’s largest city, was almost harder to fathom. By the year 2025, more than 130,000 people were homeless each night in New York City, an astounding figure, and the highest ever recorded in the forty-plus years of modern mass homelessness. This was five times greater than the size of the nightly homeless population at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and eleven times larger than that in the early 1980s, during the first years of the modern crisis.

The large majority of New York City’s homeless population slept in shelters, thanks to legal “right to shelter” protections. Among the 130,000 people homeless in New York City each night, around three-quarters of those in shelters were in families, including some forty-five thousand children. Thousands more individuals slept rough each night on the streets, in the subway system, in parks, or in other outdoor places. Because of the legacy of systemic racism and inequality, Black and Latino New Yorkers made up nearly 90 percent of the homeless population, despite constituting only half of New York City’s total population. Indeed, according to a 2015 research study I wrote, one in every seventeen Black children in New York City had experienced homelessness over the course of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Melville House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1685891675
• ISBN 13: 9781685891671
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland