Placeless
Homelessness in the New Gilded Age
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 Parka grim intake center where infants, children, and families were forced to sleep on office floorsa former psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital now sheltering hundreds of homeless men each nighta 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Markee, a longtime advocate for unhoused people in New York City, debuts with an eye-opening analysis of the structural causes of mass homelessness. The "pathologizing of homelessness," he argues, began during the Gilded Age, when the "global economic crisis" of the 1870s, along with the concurrent expansion of the railroads, led to "large groups of itinerant poor laborers" riding the rails from town to town in search of work. These "tramps" were considered "unwilling to work and desirous of handouts"—stereotypes that Markee contends retrenched during the "New Gilded Age" at the turn of the 21st century, when prominent officials, particularly New York mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, likewise insisted that homelessness is caused by unwillingness to work. As spending on subsidized affordable housing decreased under the era's neoliberal austerity measures, homeless populations swelled in direct proportion, but the newly unhoused were stigmatized as undeserving of help. The result was fiscally nonsensical, Markee demonstrates; by the 2020s, sheltering an unhoused family in temporary housing cost $6,000 per month—"far more than it would have" to provide them with subsidized affordable housing. In addition to this economic deep dive, Markee also profiles unhoused communities throughout present-day N.Y.C., from men living in train tunnels to women and children sleeping on the floors of city-run intake centers. This empathetic and common-sense account underscores that homelessness is an affordability issue, not a moral failing.
