This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
In a moment, we’re going to go to the Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Aram Roston, who wrote the piece, “’They’re trying to get rich off it’: US contractors vie to rebuild Gaza, with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ team in the lead.” We lost our connection with him. As soon as we’re able to remake it, we’ll go to him.
But right now we’re going to turn to the freezing winter temperatures that have brought heavy snowstorms and ice to New York City and across much of the northeastern United States, laying bare the nation’s inability or refusal to provide dignified shelter for unhoused people, who are left with no warm or safe place to sleep.
Zohran Mamdani is set to be sworn in as New York mayor on January 1st. Addressing the city’s housing and affordability crises have been central to his campaign. This is Mayor-elect Mamdani speaking earlier this month.
MAYOR–ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are just one rent hike, one medical emergency, one layoff from joining the ranks of the homeless in our city, which have swelled to the greatest numbers since the Great Depression. … And what I spoke about with leaders within the real estate industry was the importance of us reducing the timeline of getting New Yorkers into affordable housing, because we cannot actually disentangle the question that we are speaking about right now with the 252 days that it takes to fill one of those units, because the quicker we can fill those units, the fewer New Yorkers we will have living outside.
AMY GOODMAN: New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has also vowed to end the widely criticized practice of clearing homeless encampments, prioritizing efforts to freeze rents and permanently house those in need. This all comes as last month a coalition of states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued the Trump administration over policy changes that threatened to cut funding for permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness.
We’re joined now by Patrick Markee, longtime housing advocate. He’s just written a book called Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age. He’s the former deputy executive director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless and former member of the board of directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Patrick. It’s great to have you with us. While there’s a lot of discussion about affordability and housing, we don’t hear as much in the national discussion of homelessness. Talk about why you called your book Placeless, and talk about the crisis, not only in New York City, but across this country.
PATRICK MARKEE: Well, I’m glad you asked that, because it’s true that I think homelessness often gets discussed in the wrong terms, in distorted terms. It gets discussed as a social work problem. It gets discussed as a problem of personal dysfunction. It gets discussed as a sort of subspecies of urban poverty, when, really, as you said earlier, what it is at its root is a housing affordability problem.
And we’re experiencing right now in the United States and in New York City, you know, the worst homelessness crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. There are more than 3 million Americans who experience literal homelessness, meaning sleeping in shelters or on the streets every year. Three-and-a-half million experience what I call hidden homelessness. This is living in sort of double-up or overcrowded conditions. And right now in New York City, we have more than 100,000 people sleeping in our homeless shelters each night, and that includes 35,000 children.
So, contrary to what the kind of stereotypes are of who experiences homelessness, what we’re really seeing is a problem that affects families. And this is really why I wrote the book, was kind of to talk about this problem that goes now back a few decades and that has roots in structural economic changes, right-wing economic policies and systemic racism, which has shaped the problem of mass homelessness that we’re experiencing now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Patrick, could you talk a little bit more about those structural policies? Clearly, this — why has housing become so expensive, especially in the major cities? You can go outside in rural areas or in the South, and housing is a lot cheaper, but in the cities especially.
PATRICK MARKEE: Well, it’s as you said, Juan. It is really an urban problem. I mean, the majority, the mass majority — the large majority of homelessness that we see in the United States, particularly among families, is in cities. And it’s cities where there are extremely high housing costs, so really what we would call a housing affordability gap. And we’ve seen over the last several decades just an increasing sort of breach between the incomes of low-income and working-class people in this country, which have really stagnated or even fallen in real terms, and housing costs increasing year to year.
And part of that’s exacerbated by dramatic cutbacks in federal housing assistance that began in the Reagan years. You know, some people forget that during the Reagan administration, 80% of the housing — of the budget authority of the federal housing agency was cut under the eight years of Reagan, and we’ve really never recuperated from that. So, we’re at a situation now where only one in five low-income households in this country that qualifies for federal housing aid is actually receiving it. Four out of five who actually qualify, who are in need of housing assistance, are not getting that assistance now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of — public housing used to be a huge place of last resort for many people, but then there were cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, others, not so much New York, that essentially destroyed their public housing. Tens of thousands of units were demolished. Your sense of how this federal policy of pulling out even of owning housing has affected the homeless crisis?
PATRICK MARKEE: Yeah, I mean, again, one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was to kind of get into the historical roots of this problem. There were actually, you know, really progressive and important housing movements that began here in New York City, in the Lower East Side especially, that addressed, you know, the sort of unhealthy, substandard housing conditions in tenements, that created the first public housing in this country in the 1930s on the Lower East Side, that created the rent control system that, you know, we have still in New York City and that at one point was actually around the country in the 1940s.
And the problem is that attacks by Republicans and attacks by real estate and finance interests over the decades have really led to, as you said, the destruction of much of the public housing, but really to just a sustained inadequate level of public investment and public creation of housing. There’s a reason that other advanced capitalist countries in this world, in Western Europe, in Canada and Japan, don’t have the levels of homelessness that we have, and that’s because, there, government plays a much larger role in creating and even owning affordable housing, but also providing affordable housing assistance to needy families and individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: The title of your book is Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age. Talk about this analogy between 19th-century Gilded Age and now. When do you think this New Gilded Age started? And when you talk about a New Gilded Age, we’re also talking about, just here in New York City, it is astounding to know that 35,000 children sleep in shelters every night. And talk about the racial dimensions, that you referred to, in New York City alone, when we’re talking about Blacks and Latinos disproportionately affected, and why.
PATRICK MARKEE: Yeah, I mean, I found enormous historical echoes between the current era that we’re in now and the first Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century: radical inequality, economic elites that are in control of — you know, of the economy and have enormous political power, xenophobia and racism against immigrants, and, you know, the racism we saw in the late 19th century in the wake of the end of slavery and Reconstruction. Now we’re seeing many of those same kinds of problems now, with structural economic changes, another wave of immigration.
You know, you spoke about kind of the racism that we’re seeing now. Systemic racism is one of the primary causes of modern homelessness. Ninety percent of homeless New Yorkers are Black or Latino, and that’s compared to only 50% of the city’s population. And that’s a result of the fact that, you know, Blacks and Latinos have much higher housing — higher rates of housing problems, higher rent burdens, where they pay a larger portion of their income towards rent, housing quality problems, overcrowding, but also, really specifically, racist government policies that we saw, for instance, in the Giuliani and Bloomberg years. You know, the criminalization of homelessness, which really ramped up under Giuliani, really targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers. We obviously saw a federal court declare that the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policing strategies was racist. We saw the same things happening to homeless New Yorkers. And that’s, again, one of these sort of historical echoes that we saw going back to the period of the late 19th century.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Patrick, I wanted to ask you to get back to this issue of being able to build affordable — more affordable housing. We often hear people saying, “Well, it’s the construction costs of housing keep going up.” But I’ve looked at many, many projects that have been — had had government subsidy, and what I find astounding is the rise of not so much construction costs, but what is commonly called soft costs — developer fees, financing fees and architectural and professional fees — to the point where, basically, there’s been a financialization of the building of affordable housing, with a lot of investors getting tax credits from the government, but still not producing housing that is truly affordable to the lowest-income groups. Wondering your thoughts.
PATRICK MARKEE: I mean, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s no mistake that we’re now seeing private equity and other, you know, investment entities now controlling much of the private housing market, particularly the rental housing market. In some cities, 20% of the rental housing stock is actually owned by private equity firms. We saw the same thing happen in New York City coming out of the ’90s and in the early part of this century, when the rent laws had been weakened by Republican administrations. We saw that private equity firms bought up 10% of all the rent-regulated apartments in New York City, because they thought this is going to be an opportunity to kind of push out long-standing tenants, gentrify these neighborhoods and get more profit.
At the end of the day, we know that to solve housing affordability problems, government has to play the essential role. And that’s one of the reasons — you know, we know what works to solve this problem. I mean, there was a period, from the end of World War II until the 1970s, when we didn’t have mass homelessness in this country. We didn’t have zero homelessness, but we certainly didn’t have hundreds of thousands of families experiencing homelessness each year. There’s a way we can get back to doing that, if we have the right government investments and government policies in place.
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick, are you one of the advisers to the mayor, who will become mayor, Mamdani, on January 1st, one of the hundreds of people who he is consulting in all different areas?
PATRICK MARKEE: No, I’m actually not on the transition committee, but I have colleagues who are.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you this, and our final question to you: What would you recommend to Mayor Mamdani? I mean, yesterday, he held a listening session out in Queens for something like 12 — it was over the weekend — 12 hours talking to New Yorkers, what they recommend. What exactly do you recommend? What is your prescription, as we end this conversation?
PATRICK MARKEE: Well, first and most important, he needs to create — and this is through, you know, the city — the city budget of New York is larger than the state budgets of 35 state budgets — states in this country. So we have the resources in New York to make a serious reduction in our homeless population, even given the fact that we’re going to see cutbacks from the federal government. So, first and foremost, he needs to invest in deeply affordable housing for homeless families and individuals, for the poorest families in the city. No more of this sort of so-called affordable housing, which is really built for families making as much as $100,000 a year. It’s not that there’s not housing need, you know, across the board, but we need to be targeting our resources towards the most — you know, the most deeply affordable housing that we can.
Secondly, he needs to preserve and protect the right to shelter. That’s a legal protection that we have in New York, that the Adams administration tried to undo, that Giuliani and Bloomberg also tried to attack. We need to be preserving the right to shelter, which protects lives on the street, particularly in this winter cold that you spoke of earlier, where it’s literally a matter of life and death to be out on the streets.
And then, finally, I think we need to be, you know, looking at changes in the way that we — you know, that we deal with rents. And I think one of the positive things we’ve seen the mayor-elect say is that he wants to freeze rents for the 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the city. That’ll help preserve some affordable housing. And that’s really the housing stock that is the base of housing for working-class and low-income New Yorkers.
AMY GOODMAN: And where does Mamdani get the money for this affordable housing, truly affordable housing?
PATRICK MARKEE: Well, you know, the money is there. I mean, the city has, as I said, an enormously large budget. The state can also be helping, too. And we need the state of New York to be stepping in. But, you know, we’re spending that money now. It’s just a matter of making sure we spend it right. We’re spending, you know, literally, a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars a year, on homeless shelters. We should be spending that money on housing instead.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Patrick. Patrick Markee is a longtime housing advocate. He’s just written the book Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, former deputy executive director for advocacy at Coalition for the Homeless, former member of the board of directors of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
