Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age

Description

In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, a longtime housingactivist presents a vivid and myth-breaking account of why homelessnessendures in contemporary America…

Millionsof people are affected by homelessness, but media pundits andpoliticians see homelessness as a social work problem, or a matter ofpersonal pathology, or some peculiar subspecies of urban poverty.

Informed by the author’s own front-line experiences frommore than two decades working as an advocate for homeless people in NewYork 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 homelessnessand displacement in New York and elsewhere.

Atour of the geography of homelessness in New York City, where some100,000 people a night sleep in the city’s shelter system, Markee visitscertain city landmarks where homeless New Yorkers struggle to survive:

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

Blendinghistorical analysis, urban theory, and the latest policy research,Markee considers homelessness in America as a tragic yet inevitable consequence ofeconomic shifts inaugurated in the Reagan era, worsening inequality andhousing affordability, systemic racism, and neoliberal governmentpolicies.

Ata moment where tabloids and politicians use homelessness as an excuseto whip up fear, Placeless is a powerful and moving account of a socialproblem whose solution is entirely possible.