TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today, Patrick Markee, 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, Markee 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 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 Markee 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 Markee, welcome to FRESH AIR.
PATRICK MARKEE: Thank you so much for having me on the program.
MOSLEY: 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 used this term that many of us have never heard before, placeless. Can you say more about that word?
MARKEE: Yes. 'Cause 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, like, 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, you know, 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, kind of the worst symptom of this age, of this age of displacement.
MOSLEY: 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?
MARKEE: 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, 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 a 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.
MOSLEY: 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?
MARKEE: Well, you know, 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 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, you know, a sort of urban elite of industrialists and capitalists who had sort of, you know, controlled city governments, controlled the economy. And then this incredible population of poor people, many of them immigrants, and I think, you know, there's a parallel there to the current age that we're in now of just waves of immigration, of 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 city's demographic and, frankly, you know, the reaction to that, in 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 - 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.
MOSLEY: 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 blamed 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?
MARKEE: 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 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. 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 Riis and other immigrants who actually came and said, you know, we need to be improving the health conditions in this housing. So they improve 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 a control on the affordability of rents, which I think is going to resonate, you know, 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 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, you know, the worst threats of eviction.
MOSLEY: OK, 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. Whole blocks are abandoned. You described this as the birth of modern mass homelessness. What was happening economically that made this moment the breaking point?
MARKEE: Well, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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 health care 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.
MOSLEY: Right.
MARKEE: 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.
MOSLEY: One of the things you really point out is the approach. The approach really changes and shifts based on party lines. 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?
MARKEE: 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, in city streets, in 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 and 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. You know, I worked very closely with a group of homeless people sleeping in the Madison Square Park neighborhood, 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 Giuliani made that sort of one of the epicenters of his homelessness crackdown, his police crackdown on homelessness.
You know, I worked with, you know, these poor folks who, you know, were just trying to find a place to sleep at night. You know, 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 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.
MOSLEY: Move the - right.
MARKEE: The neighborhood ended up gentrifying and then hyper gentrifying in the couple of decades after that.
MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, I'm talking with homelessness advocate Patrick Markee about his new book, "Placeless: Homelessness In The New Gilded Age." It's a sweeping look at how inequality, policy and displacement have shaped modern homelessness. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I'm talking to Patrick Markee, a longtime advocate and policy analyst whose new book "Placeless" traces the roots and realities of mass homelessness in America. 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 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?
MARKEE: 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 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 tried 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, you know, mass homelessness was kind of a new problem in the United States and in New York. And, you know, people had kind of - 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. And, you know, unfortunately, some politicians like Rudy Giuliani and others, kind of took advantage of that period to kind of demonize and, once again, pathologize homeless people. Andrew Cuomo and others of that period tried to kind of create a model of homelessness services, which really relied on that image of homeless people as being sort of broken and unready and needed to be trained, needed to go through therapeutic programs.
And then Cuomo, who, you know, at the time, was elevated by Bill Clinton to be the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, you know, really codified that into a system called the Continuum of Care, which really just sort of mapped out a model where you know, homeless people had to first go through therapeutic programs or training programs before they would ever be able to get housing - if there was any you know, housing assistance that was available to them, 'cause keep in mind, remember that this was at a time when there were cutbacks in the federal housing budget.
So this treatment-first approach was really kind of, like, developed in the 1990s and, you know, just proved to be, frankly, a mistake. It proved to be absolutely counterproductive because it really just cut against everything that homeless people themselves had been telling us, that advocates working on the ground had seen and everything that we started to learn as the models of supportive housing and housing-first were really starting to be implemented. We started to see that you don't need to do treatment first. You actually need to do housing first.
MOSLEY: If this approach doesn't work, why does the idea keep coming back? You've been fighting this argument for 30 years.
MARKEE: Exactly. And it's just the most frustrating thing in the world. I mean, we're really starting to see it come back with a vengeance now. You know, Donald Trump and the sort of MAGA movement have really been pushing this idea of treatment first again and waging some just incredible attacks on the housing-first approach. Once again, it's this idea of trying to sort of demonize and pathologize homeless people, to try and claim that the problem is a problem of personal dysfunction or, you know, people, you know, homeless people are either lazy or they're dysfunctional or they're pathological, that the problem is you've got to fix those people first, and that's how you solve the problem of homelessness, instead of looking at it as a systemic problem.
And what we really learned through the housing-first approach, you know, is that, you know, if your goal - your end goal is to help somebody who's, say, living with mental illness, to kind of get stability, to get treatment for their mental illness, or somebody who's recovering from addiction to be able to, you know, recover from drugs or alcohol, that you need that person to be in a home. It's so much easier to engage in that kind of treatment, to take medication, to get into recovery programs. It's so much easier to do that when you have a home to instead say, Well, we want that person to do that while they're sleeping rough on the streets or while they're sleeping in a shelter, you know, crowded with hundreds of other people is just counterproductive. It doesn't make sense.
MOSLEY: My guest today is Patrick Markee, author of "Placeless: Homelessness In The New Gilded Age." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and today, my guest is homelessness advocate Patrick Markee, whose new book "Placeless" examines how the United States, one of the wealthiest nations in the history, arrived at a decades-long crisis of mass homelessness. He tells this story through New York City, blending history and urban theory with his experiences on the front lines. He also blends the voices of unhoused people and argues that homelessness has become the most visible symptom of a larger culture of displacement. Markee is the former deputy executive director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York and a former board member of directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He's authored numerous research studies on homelessness and housing policy and has written for The Nation and The New York Times Book Review.
I want to talk a little bit more about housing first and how it worked in practical terms. But I want to go back to something that you mentioned around the eugenics movement because I think it's important to talk about race because we can't really separate race from this crisis. Today, Black and Latino New Yorkers make up nearly 90% of the homeless population.
MARKEE: Yes. It's just stunning. I mean, they make up 90% of the homeless population. Black New Yorkers make up nearly 60% of the homeless population. Latinos make up around 30%. You know, when you look at their - in comparison, you know, Black New Yorkers now are, I think, less than a quarter of New York City's total population. Latinos are about a quarter of the population. It's just stunning, the sort of disproportionate impact that homelessness has had on Black and Latino communities across the United States, but in New York City in particular.
I did an analysis when I was at Coalition for the Homeless, looking at some data we were able to get from the municipal government. And I found remarkably - and the most stunning statistic I found was that 1 out of every 17 Black children in New York City had spent some time in a homeless shelter over the course of a year. I mean, 1 out of every 17. I mean, for Black and Latino kids in New York City and in other large cities, and particularly for low-income kids, you know, homelessness is like a common experience. It's not even, like, a bizarre thing. It's not even something that's just kind of out of the imagination. It's absolutely, like, a part of almost an expected experience for a significant percentage of our Black and Latino kids.
MOSLEY: And for you, Patrick, I just wonder how you untangle everything with this because if - you know, if administrations are really pushing that homelessness is a moral failing. It's a moral defect. There's a reason why you're out on the streets, that you have done something wrong in your life. And then the majority - you layer on that race, and the majority of those people are Black and brown. You can't really separate some of the systemic issues that go along with that, but then there are so many challenges on whether those systemic issues even exist.
MARKEE: Well, I think there's just no mistake that these problems result from some clear policy choices and acts of sort of government and politics that were made throughout this period. The really signature moment comes in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. Reagan instituted the most draconian cutbacks in federal housing programs that have been seen in U.S. history. A nearly 80% cut in the budget authority of the Department of Housing and Urban Development occurred under the eight years of the Reagan administration, just devastating cutbacks that have really never been - we've never sort of recovered from them ever since. In many ways, the federal government sort of got out of the business of significantly providing - creating affordable housing and providing affordable housing assistance, beginning in the '80s and then continuing to now. I mean, right now, only 1 out of 5 eligible low-income households in the United States is receiving federal housing assistance. That means 4 out of 5 that need that housing assistance and qualify for it are actually not getting federal housing aid.
MOSLEY: The number of homeless kids of color was really staggering. But overall, there are thousands of children, you note, who sleep in New York City shelters every night. It's about 1 in 8 public school students experiencing homelessness last year. Has the system - assistance programs, the way shelters operate - caught up with that reality?
MARKEE: I mean, the short answer is no because the problem has gotten so much worse. I mean, right now in New York City, we have more than 100,000 people sleeping each night in our shelter system. Two-thirds of that is families. Of that 100,000 people in shelter each night, 35,000 of them are children, and half of those kids are really young kids, like 5 years of age or...
MOSLEY: Slow down on that because sometimes when we throw out numbers, they can just almost become abstract.
MARKEE: Oh, sure. OK.
MOSLEY: I mean, 35,000, that is significant. That's astounding.
MARKEE: No, it's stunning. I mean, it's stunning to think that we've got 35,000 kids sleeping in shelters each night. And then, as I think you mentioned, the Federal Department of Education uses a broader definition of homelessness, which doesn't include just homeless kids sleeping in shelter, but also includes homeless kids who are living doubled up - right? - so who are, you know, sleeping maybe on the sofa or on the living room floor, you know, of a relative or a friend. So that broader definition then accounts for 150,000 homeless students in our public school system. So that's, again, 1 of every 8 kids in the New York City public school system is homeless.
There's a - you know, there's an elementary school in my neighborhood, in East Village, where half of the kids in that school are homeless. And there are other schools around the city that - you know, that are in sort of the same boat where you've just got an extraordinary number of homeless kids. At the same time, we also know that homelessness just creates incredible negative impacts on kids. Study after study has shown that homeless kids, even compared to other low-income kids, have much higher rates of physical health problems, particularly respiratory health problems, much higher rates of emotional and mental health problems. They do much more poorly in school. They miss school at a much higher rate.
I used to see this firsthand in working with, you know, kids who are in the shelter system, you know, who would sometimes, particularly at the point when they were - their families were applying for shelter and trying to kind of enter the shelter system would get bounced sometimes night to night from one shelter to another or from one sort of grim intake office, you know, to another or to a single-night placement, you know, in a hotel or in a shelter and then back to the intake office the next day. Kids would miss just incredible amounts of school. Their parents would miss work. You know, all of these families - adults and the kids - you know, would suffer, you know, all sorts of health problems, you know, contagious diseases, all of this stuff. And it just - you know, again, there's an extraordinary cost to homelessness for children. So having such, you know, just an enormous number of kids who are homeless each night is really setting those kids back in an incredible way.
MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, I'm talking with homelessness advocate Patrick Markee about his new book, "Placeless: Homelessness In The New Gilded Age." It's a sweeping look at how inequality, policy and displacement have shaped modern homelessness. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I'm talking to Patrick Markee, a longtime advocate and policy analyst whose new book, "Placeless," traces the roots and realities of mass homelessness in America.
In the book, you take us to this train tunnel that ran for nearly 3 miles under Manhattan's West Side beneath Riverside Park. Dozens of homeless people live there, some for over a decade. There have been documentaries about it. They built plywood shacks and slept on mattresses propped on milk crates, made communities in that space. When they were finally able to move out in the mid-'90s, you were part of this effort to help them go directly into apartments. So no shelter stay, no rehab program first. At the time, that was considered radical. What did that experience teach you?
MARKEE: Well, I learned so many things from working with those folks sleeping in the Riverside Park tunnel. I mean, first of all, one of the things I learned is that these were people who were just incredible survivors, you know, who could really live under the most kind of, like, grim and difficult conditions. I mean, the conditions in that tunnel - and I started working there in the sort of late autumn through the winter, the last winter before the tunnel was completely shut off by Amtrak, which was going to sort of restart train service through the tunnel.
You know, it was cold, obviously filthy. You know, it was dangerous. There were rats in the tunnel, all of these things. And yet these people had managed to persist and survive and endure in some just really, really difficult conditions. And so what I really learned, and I write this in the book, is I learned that these are people who could make a home anywhere. And we were able to move some of these folks directly into apartments in the community. Almost none of them ever experienced homelessness again after that. I mean, it was an incredible, incredible experience to see these folks be able to move from such grim conditions into their own homes.
MOSLEY: That's pretty remarkable. I mean, I know there's so many, as you've laid out, I mean, the issue of actual places, affordable places, though, is a real issue in this housing first idea, this approach. I mean, those who are against this idea believe that the housing first experiment is a failed experiment. What is the success rate? Like, that sounds like a very successful endeavor that you all were able to do. But, like, is that replicable? Have you seen that on scale across the country where housing first has really worked?
MARKEE: Absolutely. I mean, if anything, what we did was just sort of, you know, one very small example of an incredibly successful approach that's worked all across the country. And when I'm saying that this is an approach that, you know, has worked everywhere, I really mean everywhere. It's worked in Salt Lake City. It's worked in Houston, Texas. It's worked in, you know, New York City. And it has been incredibly successful in reducing homelessness, street homelessness, in many of those cities because this is a model that really, really works for some of our most vulnerable folks, our unsheltered homeless population, folks sleeping on the streets or in parks or in subways.
This approach gets them, you know, out of street homelessness, into housing and keeps them in housing. The other thing is that we've seen now multiple studies of this approach over decades that have shown that the sort of incidence of homelessness among this group, so after they've been provided with housing first, very few if any end up going back into homelessness. Their physical and mental health improves dramatically. Especially when you compare all of these sorts of outcomes with the treatment first approach, you see how successful housing first is.
Housing first leads to better health outcomes, leads to better housing stability, leads to lower rates of homelessness. All of that is true when you compare it to the treatment first approach. And then to make matters - you know, it's almost like, you know, the exclamation point is that it turns out that it's actually cheaper. So one of the remarkable things that we learned about supportive housing and the housing first approach is that if you analyze the total cost sort of to taxpayers of providing this subsidized housing apartment, with support services, and then you compare it to the cost of leaving the person homeless, it's actually cheaper to provide supportive housing and a housing first apartment.
MOSLEY: Talk to me about the people that you met, that you've helped out on the street. I'm thinking back to the folks beneath Riverside Park that you were able to find housing for. And none of them went back to homelessness. Can you share a story of one of them?
MARKEE: Well, actually, I'll just tell the story of the memorial service for one of them. There was a guy, Jose, that had lived in the, you know, had lived in the tunnel. I got to know him only briefly because he had just started to move out of the tunnel when I was beginning my work there. And then, you know, he had been somebody who had worked in a factory in Manhattan. And then the factory closed down. I think, actually, they moved a few of their jobs over to New Jersey.
So he, you know, lost his work, just, you know, ended up on hard times, ended up on the streets, found his way to the tunnel and was in the tunnel for a long period of time. And then he was able to obtain one of these federal housing vouchers that allowed him to rent an apartment in the Bronx. And then, you know, he lived in that apartment until he passed away in the late 1990s. And I remember going to the memorial service with him. And there were some other folks from the tunnel who were there.
There was a remarkable woman named Margaret Morton, who was a photographer who did a book of photos of the people living in the tunnel. She had gotten to know the folks there really well. And the photos are just really, like, stunning. So many black-and-white photos, but you actually really see the kind of - the incredible light in the tunnel. I mean, it's kind of a strange thing to say, but the tunnel was actually a very beautiful place in many ways.
MOSLEY: Really?
MARKEE: Yeah. I mean, it was - you know, the train tunnel was actually sort of a human-made creation. It wasn't, like, excavated under the park. It was -actually, the park was built over the rail line by Robert Moses. And so there were these ventilation shafts, and sometimes you would just see shafts of light coming through in the middle of the tunnel, and it was just kind of, in some ways, a beautiful place, although a grim place, and obviously not a place where anybody should be living.
You know, when I was at that memorial service, you know, I got to talking to some of these folks, and, you know, they - I think they - you know, they remembered their time, you know, in the tunnel as something that they had survived. And obviously, you know, it was a place that they had lived. So in some ways, they missed it because they had sort of been displaced from it. They were forced to leave it when Amtrak ended up closing down the tunnel. But they were just also so much sort of healthier and more settled, you know, being in homes. I mean, it was just so clear. I mean, they just looked - you know, some of them had looked so kind of gaunt and unhealthy when they were living in the tunnel, for obvious reasons, 'cause it was just such a difficult place to live. But, you know, by the time they'd been, you know, living in their own homes for such a - for so many years afterwards, I mean, they were just in such a sort of healthier and sort of calmer place.
MOSLEY: You know, I'm thinking about with all of your experience, when you walk down the street and you see a homeless person, an unhoused person, what are you seeing that maybe the rest of us might be missing?
MARKEE: I mean, I think what I try and do, and I think really everybody can do this, is try and just kind of see that person for who they are at that moment, you know, and try and just kind of - you know, it's a little bit of a cliche statement, but just sort of meet them where they're at, and appreciate, you know, that what they're going through in that moment is - you know, is just incredibly difficult. And try and have some compassion and empathy. I mean, again, it's just sometimes these encounters are momentary encounters, right? You might just go up and talk to them for a moment, just kind of see how they're doing. You know, maybe they need - you know, they need some money to get some food, you know, maybe just offer them a few dollars to, you know, kind of help them out in that moment, but try and do it in a way that's, you know, just almost, you know - again, just be a human being about it.
I mean, I think that's what I try and do as much as possible. I mean, there's no - I don't think there's any, like, one answer, any sort of magic answer, but just kind of try and actually be there on a human-to-human level with people. I mean, one of the things that I learned, you know, over more than 20 years working with homeless people is they're just people, like, people like the rest of us, you know? Like, they're - everybody's - you know, they're just going through some terrible times and they've kind of been dropped out of the bottom of systems that are broken and are not working, and, you know, they've been kind of left there. But they're just people, like the rest of us. And it's not up to us to be, like, judging them. You know, we should be just offering compassion and helping them out.
MOSLEY: Patrick Markee, thank you so much for this book, and thank you for talking with us.
MARKEE: Oh, thank you, Tonya. It's been such a pleasure to be here.
MOSLEY: Patrick Markee's new book is "Placeless: Homelessness In The New Gilded Age." Coming up, our book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her top 10 books of the year. This is FRESH AIR.
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