This afternoon, we talked live with homeless advocate, former deputy executive director for advocacy at the Coalition for the Homeless, and author Patrick Markee, who has a brand-new book out this week, Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, which draws on his long experience to tell the story of America’s crisis of homelessness as part of the bigger crisis of neoliberalism. We talked about.
The staggering scale of the homeless crisis — and how Donald Trump’s cuts to housing programs and embrace of failed policies stand to make the problem worse.
How New York City has been the model for both the most effective ways to help the unhoused and the most punitive policies against the poor
Why homelessness skyrocketed during the Reagan administration, and why the current crisis has lasted so much longer and cut so much deeper than the last one — the Great Depression
What links the dehumanization campaigns against homeless people and immigrants
How “treatment first” programs, which force unhoused people to prove they’re ready for housing, won out over more effective and less expensive “housing first” models, which offer support along with what people really need — a place to live
What models are working today in cities across the country, and what’s possible even now
You won’t want to miss any of this conversation. Just click on the video player above.
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