Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age

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. (Dec.)