Patrick Markee Discusses Placeless with Andrea Elliott
BPL Presents is pleased to welcome housing activist and author Patrick Markee to discuss Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age in conversation with New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott.
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 Markee'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 Park
- a grim intake center where infants, children, and families were forced to sleep on office floors
- a former psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital now sheltering hundreds of homeless men each night
- a 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.
After the discussion, there will be an opportunity for Q&A with the audience. Books will be available for sale by Word Bookstore. Please RSVP in advance.
PARTICIPANTS
Patrick Markee is the former deputy executive director for Advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless, New York’s premier homeless advocacy organization, and a member of the board of directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He has authored numerous research studies on homelessness and housing policy, and has written for The Nation and the New York Times Book Review. He lives in New York City.
Andrea Elliott is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and was chosen by President Barack Obama as a favorite book of the year. Elliott is also the recipient of a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, a George Polk Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, Columbia University's Medal for Excellence and other honors.
